C103 Review

Glasgow: Harvey Jackson at Street Level, Belinda Guidi at CCA

Harvey Jackson: Fish out of water, installation shot; courtesy the artist

In this age of big-budget visual media there is perhaps something extra-special about low-tech illusion. The ability to create a homemade, handmade visual extravaganza using time-honoured op art techniques is enviable. It is appropriate, then, that Harvey Jackson's subject matter should revolve around old-skool illusion. In ... and now you don't, recently held at Glasgow's Street Level Photoworks, Jackson's influences in terms of subject matter are made explicit. Much of the imagery is identifiably that of fairground jiggery-pokery (goldfish in particular are a recurring motif). The titles too demonstrate the artist's deliberate attempt to recreate an atmosphere of charged yet casual, enjoyable magic, making illusion seem effortless. The performance of a music hall entertainer, for example, is invoked in works such as Sleight of hand, in which a projected light reveals the secret content of a trickster's hand. Harvey, taking its name from the classic James Stewart film, again plays on our collective memory, assuming a knowledge of nostalgic 'rabbit-in-a-hat' tricks. In technique, though, Harvey is reminiscent of nothing so much as the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's The ambassadors (as the exhibition's accompanying text by Andrew Patrizio notes). And this is not the only art-historical reference: there is surely a (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) nod to Damien Hirst's Mother and child divided in the title of Jackson's lonely goldfish in Together but alone.

Harvey Jackson: Drip, installation shot; courtesy the artist

1970s conceptual art, too, gets a wink in Drip, an installation which consists of a metronome placed on a shallow, wall-mounted shelf over which a clear water-filled bag containing water is suspended. While we know our apprehension is being coaxed, our instincts cannot help cringe at the sight of what could be an impending fiasco. The visual effect is one of eerie slapstick, and the sound of continual dripping could easily make a wreck of any invigilator.

Belinda Guidi: Alphaville, 2002; courtesy CCA

While much of Jackson's work is reliant on visitor interaction (simple instructions have to be followed in several pieces) the work of Belinda Guidi, showing concurrently at the CCA, is very much a spectator sport. Like Jackson, Guidi makes no secret of the stylistic catalysts which informed Alphaville and Vertigo, the two works which make up her International Business Machines exhibition. While Jackson's exhibition had an element of childhood play and toyshop visitor experimentation, Guidi's is contemplative and passive in its impact. Of the two works, the huge structure of Alphaville is undoubtedly the more visually resolved While Guidi's aims for Vertigo are intriguing, the visual impact falls short of the lofty ambition. In Alphaville, though, Guidi immediately scores cool points in using Jean Luc Godard's seminal film of 1965 as the direct stylistic influence. The sculpture is, in fact, a replica of one used in the film - ostensibly a giant snowflake made up of bricks of light attached to a metal frame within which the inner circle of the 'snowflake' slowly revolves. Alphaville's reductive, graphic appearance could work well as the insignia of a futuristic authoritarian state, and we are 'pointed' in this direction of a 'reading' of the work both by the title of the show ('International Business Machines') and a knowledge of Godard's film. The Stalinist scale of Alphaville and its positioning in the centre of a minimal gallery space lend an air of austere and clinical beauty to the piece. Through this, the air is infused with a hint of Orwellian CCTV voyeurism which, at the same time as being 'sci-fi', harks back to the medieval use of architecture to extract religious fear/fervour through monumental monolithic 'houses of god'. Considered in passing, or without a knowledge of the themes of Godard's film, Alphaville could easily be seen as a soulless, monumental corporate decoration. Nevertheless, the underlying visual meta-narrative is the same. Essentially, whatever the specific inspiration, in responding to Alphaville as a pastiche of the foyer-fodder served up for the HQs of wealthy multi-nationals, the work rests on the notion of monumental sculpture as an icon of power.

Susannah Thompson is a visual arts writer based in Glasgow and works as Exhibitions Assistant at The Glasgow School of Art.

Harvey Jackson: and now don't, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, November 2002 - January 2003

Belinda Guidi: International Business Machines, CCA, Glasgow, September 2002 - January 2003

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