VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
EXHIBITION SHONKY: THE AESTHETICS OF AWKWARDNESS Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 27 May ●●●●●
There’s a disorientating sonic mantra burbling away in the background of this new group exhibition – curated by the artist John Walter and presented by the Hayward Gallery’s Touring series – caused by the awkwardly colliding selection of sounds used by the artists. The most vivid comes from Plastique Fantastique’s ‘The Twelve Major Arcana of the Hanging Traitor Meme’, in which a disembodied female voice incants the world ‘traitor’ over a series of human-sized, garishly painted, rope-slung religious stations and a tarot-strewn video backdrop which reveals the meme of the title.
In Duggie Fields’ ‘Ignore It’, the Teddy Boy artist dances over a busy, semi-digital background; Benedict Drew’s ‘A Dyspraxic Techno’ fills one side-room with strobing, swirling film patterns and the illuminated motto ‘hand eye coordination fuck off’; on the floor in one corner, a twisting ball of lifelike fur has escaped from Tim Spooner’s weirdly pulsing ‘Natural Habitat’. The effect is at once to disorientate and to focus the mind, for the sights and sounds here are unusual and awkwardly thrown together, but they’re all so vividly different that they create one huge and very compelling meta-sculpture. Walter’s purpose is to throw light upon those artists and works which don’t fit the clean-lined aesthetic of the contemporary art world, to talk up those who revel in the weird and often garish. Cosima von Bonin displays two sculptural scallop shells, which open to reveal eyes; Andrew Logan has a very tacky sculptural wall portrait of the artist and provocateur Divine; Justin Favela presents ‘Floor Nachos’, giant cardboard nachos strewn on the floor; and there are gaudy tapestries, paintings and textile . . . things elsewhere. It’s all very refreshing, and if the spirit of punk rock still lives in any manner in the art scene of 2018, then it’s in these rooms and their collection of artists who don’t demand to fit in or be viewed with joyless seriousness. (David Pollock)
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MIXED MEDIA LEE LOZANO: SLIP SLIDE SPLICE Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 3 Jun ●●●●●
In 1969, at the age of 39, the American artist Lee Lozano undertook a series of conceptual actions, the last of which she called ‘Dropout Piece’. In it, she proposed to withdraw from the art world and stop making art. She was as good as her word – Lozano let New York for Dallas, Texas, and died in 1999, having made nothing more. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in work she left behind, evidence of an intense decade of development and experimentation. Early drawings, confident and playful, give way to small, occasionally surreal oil paintings in which objects morph into body parts.
In the mid 1960s, she makes a striking shift to
large-scale abstract paintings, meticulously planned and sumptuously coloured. Her final works were conceptual performances which she called ‘Life-Art’. We are left with the sense of a person who was
prepared to push her art to the limits. Would she have become a major artist, had she continued? We simply don’t know. By taking her conceptual experiments to their logical – and terminal – conclusion, she secured a reputation as an enigma, a figure whose personal story is in danger of being more interesting than any of the work she made. (Susan Mansfield)
104 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2018 104 THE LIST 1 Apr–31 May 2018
RETROSPECTIVE / GROUP SHOW NOW: JENNY SAVILLE, SARA BARKER, CHRISTINE BORLAND, ROBIN RHODE, MARKUS SCHINWALD, CATHERINE STREET Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One, Edinburgh, until Sun 16 Sep
Although Jenny Saville’s work has appeared in Scottish galleries over the intervening years, this will be the first time she’s had a dedicated retrospective of her work since her degree show at Glasgow School of Art in 1992. ‘This came out of conversations we were having about trying to show different artists,’ says senior curator Lucy Askew. ‘Jenny has been making work for more than 25 years now, over a broad spectrum of influences, although she’s very well known for the work she made in the early ‘90s. She’s pushed and pushed her practice, she’s such a consummate painter.’
The famed YBA artist will have 16 works shown over five rooms in the gallery. 'Her work is about the process of making, the experience of looking and the emotional confrontation that those things offer, as much as the subject matter,’ says Askew. Alongside Saville's works, a specially chosen supporting group of painters will be on show, including new pieces by the Edinburgh-based Catherine Rose and the South African debutant in Scotland, Robin Rose. (David Pollock)
MIXED MEDIA INGELA IHRMAN: WE THRIVE Cooper Gallery, Dundee, until Fri 13 Apr ●●●●●
Upon first sight, it’s the apparent silliness of Swedish artist Ingela Ihrman’s work which makes the clearest impression. The lower floor of the Cooper Gallery is given over to her video piece ‘The Toad (Obstacle Race)’, in which the artist, dressed as a toad, attempts to hop haplessly around a gymnasium assault course; the stairwell exhibits the video work ‘When the Ice Sheet Retreated from the Nordic Countries, the Norway Spruce Came Wandering in from the North’, in which she dresses as the tree of the title and stumbles around a path dropping seeds; upstairs ‘The Giant Water Lily Victoria Amazonica BLOOMS’ sees her clumsily bursting open the petals of her flower suit for a giggling gallery audience. There’s a comedic sense to her video work which
is at odds with the somewhat sinister air around her sculptural pieces; a tangle of hanging textile intestines, for example, or the giant, very realistic paper hogweed suspended in the centre of the gallery. In all her pieces, however, the binding element is the tension between the natural world and the way its mechanical perfection appears hapless and second-rate when humans appear to recreate it. Depending on how full your glass is, there’s either a hopefulness or a fatalism at the heart of her practice. (David Pollock)