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VisualArt REVIEWS
MIXED MEDIA KARLA BLACK Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 24 Jun ●●●●●
Between Karla Black’s work and its viewer, the tension is unbearable. Rarely can inert sculptural work have exerted such a gravitational pull upon its audience, and the effect of ‘art vertigo’ it inspires just can’t be understood unless it’s seen live. ‘Empty Now’, the most striking of two pieces here, is breathtaking and ludicrous in equal measure – a huge rectangular cake of layered, tightly-packed sawdust which takes up most of the gallery’s floor space. It looks like an enormous springy mattress or a giant tiramisu, its edges sharply defined in defiance of the work’s fragility.
Touching isn’t allowed, but the work, curiously, isn’t roped off. The piece feels like one enormous dare to the people of Glasgow, or more precisely the natural mishaps that might ensue when a rogue toddler views the piece or a subway train rolls by underneath. The life of this artwork is not the time it takes to view it or the years it might be hermetically packed away in a collection, but as an evolving, decaying, living thing, from the day the show opens until the moment it closes its doors.
That Black has intervened at various points around the work with handmade dents and scars seems almost like an unnecessary intrusions, but the presence of manufactured cosmetics – a sawdust-encrusted lipstick, scattered pearls of bronzer, mascara-painted wooden sculptures – adds a compelling context, the colour of the sawdust resembling that of a tanned female body and its transient form suggesting an inevitable decay which artificial enhancements inevitably can’t counter. The second work ‘Will Attach’, swirls of nail varnish-smeared cellophane hanging from the ceiling with two hidden sacs of gel body wash – one split, one sealed – is almost inevitably not as striking, although it hangs down below eye level in places, again almost demanding the intervention of our contact. (David Pollock)
MIXED MEDIA EMORY DOUGLAS: SEIZE THE TIME Kendall Koppe, Glasgow, until Fri 1 Jun ●●●●●
At a time when the Arab Spring and Occupy movements have reintroduced a generation to often violent political protest, the Black Panther party’s first and only minister for culture’s slogan-driven cartoons, from the pages of his self-edited newspaper are a reminder of the days when polemic was permitted to exist in more than 140 characters.
The work is presented on original poster-sized pullouts from the magazine, framed and re- contextualised for the gallery space. These are no longer artefacts, but living, breathing examples of a political message mixed with the alluring, sexy tropes of advertising, from the machine gun silhouette motif to the recurring slogans like ‘shoot to kill’ and ‘death to the fascist pigs’. In one image a black homeowner has apparently shot an official home invader to death; in another a black man prepares a homemade bomb under the slogan ‘by any means necessary, unless you got something better’. In the titular wall-sized mural, an armed African-American mob chase pigs – literally – from the frame. These are dynamic, frightening, darkly amusing images that helped define the language and iconography of revolt. (David Pollock)
SCULPTURE FOLKERT DE JONG: THE IMMORTALS Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, until Sat 12 May ●●●●●
A gaudily attired couple sit astride some scaffolding watching the debris-ridden legacy of the best minds of their generation. Or at least that’s the sense you get of Dutch artist Folkert De Jong’s site-specific sculptural intervention, which looks to the gallery’s namesake and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, for inspiration. Looking for all the world like paint-spattered
dayglo-punk charity-shop dandies, it’s as if the pair are occupying some building-site royal box while a cheap seat variety show plays out below. The effect is heightened by the figure of a woman sporting a hat, which from a distance looks straight out of cabaret, holding on tight to two male figures, while beside the scaffolding a male figure holds on to a battered approximation of a wooden acoustic guitar. A solitary female figure stands astride a trestle table in the midst of some carefully choreographed dance of death. Positioned amidst more regularly classical statues, this is theatre as still life, captured for posterity and ready for its close-up. (Neil Cooper)
PHOTOGRAPHY WOLFGANG TILLMANS Common Guild, Glasgow, until Sat 23 Jun ●●●●●
Wolfgang Tillmans’ new installation at the Common Guild is composed of a mix of photographic works, both visually stunning and technically excellent, with a disconcerting disregard for continuity of imagery. The collection includes abstract images such as ‘Silver 57’, a towering, almost blank, mirror-like surface created entirely through analogue manipulation. Or ‘Paper drop’, a beautifully focused composition on the edge of a piece of photographic paper arranged to create a tear shape and filled with prismatic colour. Figurative works include ‘Dan’, a top-down shot of a man balanced on one concealed leg while touching the wall with the other, revealing a wonderful mix of strength and vulnerability. The stairwell holds a series of closed-up large scale studies of car headlights, which seem to revel in the unique yet everyday nature of their design.
Tillmans’ apparent lack of consideration for the correlation of imagery is intriguing and certainly seems his signature. It is as though the materiality and temporality of subjects and prints in themselves are enough, and through it Tillmans shows us a real, astonishingly visceral beauty. (Michael Davis)
26 Apr–24 May 2012 THE LIST 119