VisualArt REVIEWS
SCULPTURE THE SCULPTURE SHOW Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One, Edinburgh, until Sun 24 Jun ●●●●●
Those who find their attention can escape the orbit of this show’s central spectacle – Ron Mueck’s striking ‘A Girl’, a life-like model of a quite grumpy-looking newborn baby girl rendered as a vast monolith many dozens of times the size of nature – will discover more challenging and memorable works that offer a potted glimpse of the history of 20th century sculpture and beyond. Although the curatorial division of eras and themes is well managed and educational, however, this is still a show where the big impression matters. So there are forays into Cubist and Impressionist sculpture – the latter featuring an early bronze model of Rodin’s fearsome ‘A Call to Arms’ – and concisely themed views of both German interwar sculpture’s miserable images of poverty and postwar Britain’s garish reflection of the nuclear age, the latter exemplified by Eduardo Paolozzi’s gnarled bronzes. Later-era works become more brash: Damien Hirst’s unsettling bronze figure ‘Wretched War’; John Davies’ fearsomely life-like mob of mannequins ‘For the Last Time’; Duane Hanson’s ever-jovial ‘The Tourists’.
It’s a wide-ranging show that doesn’t offer a distinct thematic take on the medium of sculpture – how could it? – but rather provides as much perspective on the bounds of the medium as possible. Collage and assemblage are explored as alternative forms, as well as Michelangelo Pistoletto’s industrialist prints on polished steel, Rachel Whiteread’s photographic series ‘Demolished’ and Turner Prize-winner Martin Boyce’s light sculpture ‘Untitled (after Rietveld)’, a low-key tribute to the design and ambience of a late 20th century office environment. Scots artists are well represented, including Douglas Gordon, Jim Lambie, David Shrigley (presenting a piece of paper lying on the floor) and Karla Black, and detailed explanations suffice when the work is incapable of reproduction, for example Charles Ray’s photographs of his body and a plank of wood as ‘sculpture’. (David Pollock)
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLAN SEKULA: SHIP OF FOOLS Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 18 Mar ●●●●●
SCULPTURE ANNA BARRIBALL Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Mon 9 Apr ●●●●● SCULPTURE ALEX DORDOY The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Wed 22 Feb ●●●●●
Now that capitalism is a sinking ship, Allan Sekula’s ongoing photographic exploration of globalisation in motion is the perfect metaphor for a world all at sea. This most recent series by the Pennsylvania-born documentarist forms the second part of Stills’ Social Documents programme, trailing screenings of his new film, The Forgotten Space, en route.
The large-scale colour images here chart the voyage of the Global Mariner, a cargo vessel carrying, not produce from exotic lands to be marked up in price, but a touring exhibition outlining the shipping industry’s crucial role in exploitation of labour. The activists manning the vessel are captured by Sekula with a casual dignity in snapshot-like fashion against the vivid seascape behind, with workers caught unposed and in motion. Throughout the gallery is a series of seafaring souvenirs that both kowtow to the clichés of salty old seadogs as well as navigating this most romanticised of industry’s hidden history. For every shipyard closed, every docker sacked and every slave transported, Sekula has made a crucial voyage. (Neil Cooper)
120 THE LIST 2 Feb–1 Mar 2012
There’s a certain fascination in concealment within the work of Plymouth-born Anna Barriball, a tension between what the works appear to be and what they actually are. Is a framed, full-sized pencil rubbing of a door a drawing of said door, or are its 3D contours a sculptural representation of it? What colour is a loosely rolled-up bale of apparently once- white paper that’s been entirely pencil-shaded? Is a blade-shaped cut out from a piece of white card wrapped in black thread a representation of the titular knife or just an abstract assemblage? Bold and playful in their formal conceits, Barriball’s
works are strongly-conceived, from the eerie slurp and flap of a video piece showing a sheet of paper being sucked into a fireplace, to an autumnal confetti of leaves cut from old curtains and an entire wall painstakingly pencilled with the pattern of soundproofing tiles.
The point seems to slip away with one or two pieces – a flashy showcase wall of marker pen- darkened windbreaks, for example – but this is largely a show of focused intention and relaxed humour. (David Pollock)
Alex Dordoy’s new body of work mixes the digital and the analogue, the abstract and the real, in a search for new means of perception. Three bright and eye-catching panoramic canvases – meticulously painted reproductions of digitally abstracted figures and landscapes – bring the visitor into the space. The strange merging of shapes through geometric vectors and patterns is continued on the gallery floor with a series of fragile and beautiful plaster-cast prints of unfolded paper aeroplanes on machined polycarbonate plinths. These sculptures, entitled ‘Folded Unfolded, Sunk and Scanned’, which are created through a method of contact printing that allows the plaster to absorb both the fine lines of toner, and the folded forms of its original, are the highlight of the show. On the far wall, blurred figures painted on rough plaster casts gradually break away into a final work, gradated car tire prints that fade down from the glass roof.
There’s an overarching sense of the mutability of physical objects here. Dordoy’s work appears on the boundaries of disciplines, but finds a fractal-like beauty in the minute detail of forms. (Michael Davis)