VisualArt
REVIEW SOUND & SCULPTURAL COMPOSITION RAYDALE DOWER: ON MEMORY AND CHANCE The Changing Room, Stirling, until Sat 4 Dec ●●●●●
Raydale Dower’s ad hoc art-cabaret speakeasy, Le Drapeau Noir, played with space at this year’s Glasgow International via a restless sonic excitability developed during his stint with post-Captain Beefheart hollerers Uncle John and Whitelock. His similarly all-embracing approach here makes an artwork out of an entire room. On the false wall that forms the
visual centrepiece is plastered the sort of star-studded frieze of 20th century pop-culture icons that playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell adorned their living room with. What looks like a retro-kitsch 1970s wall- clock is actually a set of unplayable piano keys, though the ticking comes from a trio of metronomes lined up in a domestic-sized take on Ligeti’s ‘Poème Symphonique (For 100 metronomes)’. This sets up an oddly soothing out of step rhythm accentuated by the overlapping loops and silences spilling through the mood-lit room next door. Here, a big old reel-to-reel tape machine sits as silent as the piano keys, making the recorded noises-off sound even more Zenned-out.
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM BABETTE MANGOLTE: YVONNE RAINER – TESTIMONY TO IMPROVISATION 1972–75 Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, until Fri 29 Oct ●●●●● ‘Improvisation Time in the Rehearsal Room’, a caustic poem by the late Adrian Mitchell, appeared in the 1981 edition of New Departures, Michael Horowitz’s organ for 1960s counter-culture’s literary survivors. In eight short lines, which depict the consequences of an actress calling an arrogant director’s bluff, Mitchell nails the dangers of too much artistic freedom. For freedom to work, Mitchell suggests, discipline is required, and vice versa. Anyone who has witnessed the work of veteran dance legend Yvonne Rainer will have drawn the same conclusion.
box. Elsewhere, a soloist comes across like some silent movie Eve holding an apple aloft while Rainer’s own turns in ‘This is the story about a woman who . . .’ offer a series of multi-dimensional vérité studies that extend the performance’s own sense of intimacy into something even more subjective.
Dominating the first room, beyond two deliciously skewed portraits is a looped screening of Mangolte’s impressionistic 1975 debut film, ‘What Maisie Knew’. Made on out-of-date stock, and with Rainer and a cast of friends (including cherub-faced composer Philip Glass) on board, Mangolte’s camera takes a languid child’s eye view on a very grown-up world. This resembles the nouveau roman of Marguerite Duras by way of some Chekhovian country house party fuelled by sexual tension and the potential for illicit trysts.
The recurring presence of Samuel Mangolte’s photographs of Rainer’s 1970s
Opening with a toe-to-head pan of one performer’s
Beckett is the giveaway. Dower’s collage resembles the playwright’s 25- second life-and-death miniature ‘Breath’, a sound installation by any other name. Like Beckett, Dower chances his arm in a profoundly entertaining display. (Neil Cooper)
performance-based work, contained within the Sorcha Dallas gallery’s second space, capture the insular, exploratory nature of the Me Generation in rest and motion, from the weary repose exhibited on the floorboard set of Rainer’s ‘Lives of Performers’, through tug-of-love happenings to a sequence in which an ensemble squeeze themselves into a large wooden body, the pages of a Schumann music score are blown by the wind as couples play footsie, doors open and close, and a woman splashes her bath water like a series of little depth charges. At one point, a close-up of slapped-down amorous advances becomes a frantic little pas de deux all by itself in this merriest of dances between discipline and freedom. (Neil Cooper)
REVIEW SCULPTURE JOANNE TATHAM AND TOM O’SULLIVAN: DIRECT SERIOUS ACTION IS THEREFORE NECESSARY CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 13 Nov ●●●●●
Breaking through the concrete floors of the CCA, large, vibrant worm-like sculptures draw attention to the architecture of the building, its function and history as a public exhibition space. Black and white photographs, depicting Glasgow locations, are presented in handsome handmade frames and show off their materiality as much as their subject matter.
‘Listen,’ speaks a loquacious voice from the accompanying text, ‘we as a nation used to be the envy of the world . . . but what’s left of our fast dwindling heritage is being palmed off by the plethora of besuited, greedy wee nyaffs to a shower of profiteering non-entities who could not give a shite for anything other than lining their pockets.’ Eulogising Glasgow in its vernacular use of language, the voice is both collective and individual. Glasgow-based duo Tatham and O’Sullivan use choreography to direct the audience, and as a strategy for their work to function independently of their egos. Their attempt to re-frame the well- trodden path through the CCA in an absurd, in-your-face kind of way, echoes traces of the personality of the city, rather than the personalities of the artists.
In a time where ‘public’ is a washed out, throw-away term, the exhibition
carries the voice of someone taking direct action, a soapboxing voice dissipating in the crowd like an ouroboros – the worm that eats itself. (Talitha Kotzé)
90 THE LIST 21 Oct–4 Nov 2010