High Priestess
PHOTOGRAPHY PETER JAQUES: BABBLE The Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh, Fri 27 Apr-Thu 14 Jun
Locking yourself in a pitch black basement with a dog and writing excerpts from ancient Greek texts such as Orpheus and Eurydice and The Twelve Labours of Hercules onto photographic paper with an old style quill pen dipped in chemicals may not seem much like photography. Yet London based artist Peter Jaques asswes us it is. though he calls it ‘performed photography‘. Created in a single session while listening in the dark to a recording of himself reciting the texts. Jaques performs alone. save for his trusty dog. who acts like a guardian to Jaques' own little underworld. Scratching words across huge reams of paper maniacally and randomly. Jaques lets the chemicals run together and almost destroy the stream of written words along the way.
There is no relationship between hand and eye. so no opportunity to aestheticise the writing. making the end result unknowable and autonomous. The long reams of scrawled on paper are then chemically exposed as if ordinary photographs. Jagues' huge. black and white finished photographs are surprisingly illegible. the written text barely detectable beneath the dominance of white drips pouring down the grey or black background. Yet. the traces of written words are hiding in there in little scribbles and scratches. reminding us that textual performance is — as Caroline Alexander. gallery director has said — the ‘primary but unseen element in his finished work'. Jaques' interest in ancient tradition and the romance of storytelling is evident. and the quill pen he has created many of his works with. now almost completely corroded away by noxious chemicals. is seen by Jaques to Signin the dying of the still ultimately appealing written word. (Rosie Lesso)
Visual Art
PAINTING AND INSTALLATION NEIL CLEMENTS: PARANOID i SouthSide Studios, Fridge Gallery, Glasgow ' (viewing by appointment Sat 14-Sun 29 Apr) moo :
The small, dimly lit Fridge gallery acts like a mausoleum for Glasgow-based Neil Clements to create a painting, light and sound installation that takes an image of Op Art heroine Bridget Riley and the emergence of the de-tuned electric guitar in heavy metal music as subject matter for his show. This new work continues the artist’s obsession both with planarity in high modernist American and British painting in the 603 and 705, and with the darker side of ‘pop’ music, influences that he also recently brought together in an exhibition entitled After-Human in a temporary space at Glasgow’s Trongate. Previously, Clements has exhibited as part of the New Work Scotland programme at Edinburgh’s Collective gallery, where what can be referred to as ‘black square’ European modernism was used to explore the satanic undercurrent in some contemporary ‘death metal’, post-industrial, serioust gothic music from Europe.
It is not by any means ‘new’ to create a relationship between music and art - there is a strong modernist tradition that links abstract, avant-gardist and dissonant manifestations of both art forms - and this seems to be the stream that Clements hopes to navigate. The enormous success of his work is due to a sophisticated understanding of paint, its flat application and brushy removal (in ‘High Priestess’, a portrait of Riley), brought together in perfectly composed canvases. The red neon barrier around the work adds an attractive otherworldly glow that also forces the viewer to keep her/his distance. His silver-grey and black canvases critique the distinction between expression (as mess) and abstraction (as cool, detached analysis), demonstrating that form is empty, and is only temporarily animated, or imbued by the viewer with elements from the stylistic cues that they take from the historical context they find themselves in.
It’s an age-old art historical problem - can an image contain or express an argument, a point of view, or, is it merely put there by the viewer who ‘reads’ the image and its glyphs? Clements cleverly exploits and inverts this ‘will to interpret’, and we find that we are reading the more lyrical elements of his work as analytical, and the severe geometry of other canvases as deeply expressive. (Alexander Kennedy)
Charlotte Rampling Ashtray by Clunle Reid
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WORK ON PAPER GROUP SHOW: LUTZ FEZER, KEVIN HUTCHESON & CLUNIE REID
Transmission, Glasgow, until Sat 12 May 000
A grid work of duct tape only heightens the sense of fetishisation across Clunie Reid's ‘Something Bold. Something Insane. Something Snivelled. Something True' that pulls you in from the street and into a flood of familiar imagery at this group show at Transmission. All three artists in the show. London-based Reid. Germany's Lutz Fezer. and Glasgow artist Kevm Hutcheson. reappropriate a visual language pilfered from tabloid. celluloid. pulp and fashion — flickering. bite-size imagery that holds our easily-distracted modern gaze for just long enough before something prettier. uglier. funnier. or scarier comes along. Reid makes this point in a highly charged way — completely covering walls with reCurring photocopied images ripped straight out of tabloid Culture. the sense of such intense repetitious overload obliterating the effect of the original image.
Show us a picture often enOugh and its initial context will soon get lost in a choppy sea of cultural flotsam and jetsam. Fezer's works are less intensely stated — his pencil drawings lending a twisted innocence to images lifted from the thickly slick gloss of magazines. And a series of spray-painted. scalpel-incised photographs of actress Christina Ricci become a little too stalkerish to be comfortable to look at. Hutcheson's four collages punctuate what might be a rather Germanic sense of kitsch with an edge of vintage nostalgia (Hutcheson falls on the right side of a very fine line between the two). And his subtle and clever appropriations of the found image create dreamlike narratives that actually let you. in a way. momentarin escape the riptide of media bombardment. (Claire Mitchell)
26 Apr~l() May 2007 THE LIST 89