C106 review

Dundee: Claire Barclay at Dundee Contemporary Arts

The more ordinary something is, the more likely it is that it will happen, that it will come into being born, as it will be by imitation of other similar acts of thought or thoughtlessness: an idea, I think, that is at the very heart of Barclay's activity. An activity which, at its most penetrating and difficult, appears to shun simple explication (based on genre) for a more self-conscious and determined exploration of the ultimately inexplicable nature of the gestures and structures she makes: it is an art based on allusion; on the mnemonic echo and the interplay of shadows - one that has an uneasy relationship to language.

In keeping with an aesthetic based on objectivity, Barclay's installation is, if you will, a reverse-miracle - one that inspires doubt instead of belief. It seems to aim at nothing less than an evocation within each of us of experiences and impressions of things we may have made, worn or inhabited in the course of our lives - the lines, angles, colours and tones of the spaces in which we have lived, worked, visited and modified by our very presence and existence. But it also has alarming moments of provocation that are more akin to the fractured and hallucinatory content of the dream. This contrast, between objective and subjective points of view - between materiality, its assemblage and how we then perceive it - achieves real poignancy when Barclay has pushed it to extremes.

Clare Barclay: Ideal Pursuits, installation shots; courtesy Dundee Contemporary Arts

In the first of the gallery spaces the visitor encounters an open structure of bent and arching aluminium rod that touches, with machine-pointed tips, both floor and wall. You can walk under it. Around it. And you can view its frozen routine from a distance. A length of the rod passes through a leather sheathe, and polished bits of antler are seen on others - similarly two of the feet rest on other hunks of the same type of bone: it (the piece, like all the other pieces in the exhibition, has no title) has the edgy sort of impact I associate with the opening few paragraphs of Franz Kafka's short story The Transformation, where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into an enormous insect - his response: "Suppose I went back to sleep for a little and forgot all this nonsense." I found this to be the most enduring work in the exhibition.

The other large installation piece in the second gallery draws us into more familiar Barclay territory. In fact, the work struck me as a compendium of motifs, objects and materials which Barclay has used in her practice before (adding a further layer of richness for those familiar with it.) If less a singular sort of entity to the work in gallery one, it does however reward quiet and careful inspection: if you give Barclay's assemblages time, they will give up there subtle tension, their balanced poetry, and the more complex your matrix of thought and memory will become.

Kevin Henderson is a performance artist, writer and lecturer at the University of Dundee.

Claire Barclay: Ideal pursuits3 Dundee Contemporary Arts, September / October 2003