PAINTING HELEN BAKER
DRAWING AND FILM GARY ROUGH Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, until Sat 6
May coo
We are told that the pristine sheet of paper is the most daunting prospect for the writer, but as the minimalist ’5 dream and the conceptualist's ground zero. the blank page will always beckon artists. like origami ships floundering on papier-mache rocks.
Gary Rough’s new exhibition of drawings continues the tradition of avant-gardist assaults on the sketchpad. It is hard to shake the similarities between these new untitled scraps with Louise Hopkins' work shown earlier this year at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket. But maybe this comparison makes all comparisons within art history seem ridiculous. a sheet of paper with marks on it with any other drawing. etc. Whether this is the artist '3 intention or not. we are forced to ask what makes these lines different. special. ‘art' — a reactionary question that always produces interesting answers.
In the second gallery space Rough exhibits two films. In one an Icarus figure falls with his skis flapping and falling beside him. on the neighbouring monitor a flame enters and exits the screen. Rough dwells on the bland middle bit where all the supposed action happens. with birth and death bracketing the continual chaos of life. Yet. with very clear beginnings and endings. these actions. lines and flames appear temporarily infinite. (Alexander Kennedy)
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The Singing Posters
INSTALLATION ALLEN RUPPERSBERG Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Sun 28 Apr
‘Art should be familiar and enigmatic, just as human beings themselves,’ Allen Ruppersberg once declared. And in his latest retrospective, it’s the art that makes him appear so deliciously inscrutable. The man is nowhere to be seen, but his touch and taste is everywhere.
Pulling together a menagerie of press clippings, posters, slides and comic strips, collected over a period of decades, One of Many - Origins and Variants uses the ephemera to toss up little narratives to be discovered or puzzled upon. ‘Ephemera’ is just a polite way of saying ‘junk’, perhaps. But the oddity of his amassed works is not only suffused with that very human fondness for collecting rubbish, but also the obsessive propensity to order, quantify and justify exactly why this all matters. The wild hoarder has had plenty years to accumulate and refine his collection, and this forthcoming retrospective might well show Ruppersberg becoming his very own curator in the process of assemblage.
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Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh, until Thu 4 May on
Building an almost ambient quality. Helen Baker's rich oul paintings explore the medium with great sensitivity, rich veins of nuanced colour, texture and light. Essential to the success of most of the w0rks is a rich under-painting. literally demonstrated in her smaller works. such as ‘Blue on Orange'. which act like preludes. preparing the viewer as much as the artist for the more complex symphonies. Here it is the slight emergence of the VIVid orange that both offsets and harmonies with the obsessive neon blue brush marks. which introduce a second important theme in Baker's work. the refrain. ‘Brown'. typical of the larger works. sees rhythmic short lines painted over the changing contours and patches of grey upon orange in equally bright orange paint.
By being able to come to terms with the steady enumeration of the mark. you sense that you are able to better understand the language in which these pieces are being written. and you can joyfully watch as it changes upon passing over a subtly different area or encounters an unexpected mark or wash. It is the ability Baker has to make subtle difference seem so prominent. and likewise. control the fraught. dangerous reds and complementary colours to produce subtle changes in mood and intensny. which makes this work so enjoyable to view. Neither being apathetic enough to be minimalist, nor impulsive enough to be expressionist. Baker's work is simply an exploration of paint. which in her hands is joyfully quixotic. (James Clegg)
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With a career built upon reconfiguring pop memorabilia, Ruppersberg has continually attempted to divorce artefacts from their ageing foundations in order to re-radicalise them. The centrepiece of the show is one of the largest exhibits, ‘The Singing Posters’. Comprising of 600 gaudy-coloured posters, it looks like a vibrant shrine to 1950s fly posting. The work actually reprints Alfred Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and recreates the vitality of the controversial Beat poem in a visual monument.
Admittedly his tone has moderated since his younger artist-chef days, where he regularly served up plates of ‘Simulated Burned Pine Needles a la Johnny Cash, Served With a Live Fern’ and side orders of ‘Three Rocks With Crumpled Wad’ at his interactive installation Al’s Cafe in downtown LA. But his absurdist vocabulary has widened beyond fake culinary treats to encompass a show that will spill out across both DCA galleries. In fact, this will be one of Ruppersberg’s largest ever exhibitions in the UK, and the show has already been greeted at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf with a clamouring to reappraise a man who has been working assiduously for the past 45 years. (lsla Leaver-Yap)
13-27 Apr 2006 1145 LIST 95