VisualArt REVIEWS
INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION JEREMY DELLER: SACRILEGE Glasgow Green, until Mon 7 May ●●●●●
If you’re feeling down in the dumps, there are few things more rejuvenating than jumping up and down like an idiot for a few minutes. If you can do so without bursting out laughing like an even bigger loon, chances are you’re dead. As a child of the rave age, Jeremy Deller is in a perfect
position to tap into such variations on a natural high, repetitive beats and all. By reimagining Stonehenge as a bouncy castle type structure that will later be inflated in London during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Deller is also making an explicitly political point, both about the right to assemble and how religious and artistic totems have become untouchable.
With the real Stonehenge once a Mecca of the free
festival movement and now cordoned off to all but the hardiest of revellers, to witness big daft kids of all ages hurling themselves around and about the structures with touchy-feely abandon on a sunny Sunday afternoon is a subversive delight. Taking your shoes off and joining in is even better in a work that might well be descended from theatre director Joan Littlewood’s original idea to create a fun palace on London’s South Bank where Deller’s magnificent retrospective, ‘Joy in People’, is currently in residence at the Hayward Gallery.
Just as rave culture democratised the dancefloor,
Sacrilege is a spectacle of people power in action that has the mass appeal of Billy Smart’s Circus and the political and conceptual sophistication of Bakunin. Ultimately, Deller is both enabling and revelling in the creative power of play, and that, rather than fear or stifle that that power as authoritarian regimes tend to do, it should be celebrated in excelsis. If such a living monument was in permanent residence, similarly-minded children of the stones could be jumping for joy forevermore. (Neil Cooper)
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MIXED MEDIA LORNA MACINTYRE: MIDNIGHT SCENES & OTHER WORKS Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 2 Jun ●●●●● SCULPTURE & PHOTOGRAPHY TERESA MARGOLLES Glasgow Sculpture Studios, until Tue 12 Jun ●●●●●
Midnight Scenes & Other Works at first appears to be a series of intriguing but unrelated pieces across various media. There’s a video work, ‘Everything merges with the night’, which seems to be a cycling meditation on shades of blue and black but is actually a series of stills of the Glasgow night sky. There are abstract prints made using cyanotypes, a sunlight-based photographic process, and another, ‘Nothing remains but change’, which uses the same process and a transposed double print of an elaborate stone doorway, actually a photograph taken in the nearby former Dreghorn Mansion. The blue cast over everything evokes the sense of
history’s heat haze, as if these pieces have been aged, the hanging steel cylinders of ‘Midnight Scenes’ intentionally corroded. That the artist’s purpose isn’t immediately apparent is a shame, for the reference of the diptych ‘Apollo’ and ‘Artemis’ – two installations featuring wooden sculptures and painted mirrors separated by a wall of rope – to this gallery’s past life as a hotel conjures the sense that we’re tantalisingly close and forever estranged from the history of the space we inhabit. (David Pollock)
120 THE LIST 26 Apr–24 May 2012
Life’s a riot in Teresa Margolles’ work for Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ new space in Glasgow’s old whisky bond building, which sources a photographic archive of the now decaying Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez alongside a new piece mined from frontline Croydon during the 2011 London riots.
In the small Project Gallery, three projectors quick- fire off more than 6000 images by Luis Alvarado that charts a historical landscape from the 1960s to the 1980s peopled by heroic masked wrestlers, politicians, wedding parties and street corner night owls, all captured in the throes of a thousand social rituals.
In the main room, the phrase ‘A DIAMOND FOR THE CROWN’ is carved across the back wall like an epitaph. On another wall in a glass box sits the tiniest and loveliest of diamonds sourced from burnt wood and carbon from the riots and painstakingly buffed into beautiful life by Margolles. That something so sparklingly serene was born of a disenfranchised energy feels how a revolution is meant to turn out. (Neil Cooper)
DRAWING & PAINTING RICHARD WRIGHT: WORKS ON PAPER Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 23 Jun ●●●●●
Buried in the back corner of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Richard Wright exhibits some of his lesser- known works on paper. They are unassuming, enigmatic and predominantly abstract as with most of Wright’s work. However, in contrast to his more usual large-scale wall-based works, these are small, delicate and fragile. The incessant pattern making of Wright without great regard to anything else, and the arabesque, gothic and psychedelic motifs in the works gives a feeling of unfocused doodling. But this belies their true labour intensive processes. This odd juxtaposition between painstaking application and purposelessness of image is truly bewildering. In the rare works that are not entirely abstract, Wright depicts strangely alien, minimal, illusionistic scenarios, which are equally impenetrable. The determined fragility and concise obscurity of these works is somehow ingratiating. The work has a knowing acceptance of its histories, choosing an ameliorative process, which is entirely at odds with the confrontational methods so often employed in contemporary arts. (Michael Davis)