C108
Review
London: A
Kind of Bliss at Drawing Room
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A
Kind of Bliss,
installation shot, The Drawing Room, London; photo
Stephen White; courtesy The Drawing Room
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This show is about colour.
The title itself could be mistaken for a Kylie Minogue
song. Instead A Kind of Bliss is taken from
an essay by Roland Barthes about Cy Twombly, describing
the effects of the brushstroke on canvas. The three curators
have selected artists Polly Apfelbaum, Katy Dove, Len
Lye and Lily van der Stokker, who, as the catalogue explains,
"employ the use of colour through the act of drawing to
describe a personal and sensory experience of life."
The exhibition opens with two movies
by the late New Zealand artist Len Lye (1901-1980), often
described as inventor of ways to make film without a camera.
In Colour box (1935) and Rainbow dance
(1936) Lye painted and scratched directly onto celluloid,
thus creating films which made it into the chronology
of kinetic art of the twentieth century.
Whereas Lye was adding sound tracks
(e.g., by Visatone Marconi) to match the stories painted
on film, Katy Dove samples her own sounds into her animations.
Luna (2004), projected in a dark cabin, echoes
Lye's low-tech, nonfuturistic, rather playful compositions
while making the best possible use of Macromedia's Flash
software.1 The software
is used to animate Dove's felt-tip drawings in response
to her music.
On the main gallery floor lies Apfelbaum's
fallen painting, Love love me do (2004). Her use
of synthetic velvet, dyed with hallucinogenic colours,
works as a mixture of painting, sculpture and installation.
It screams for attention and either blinds the viewer
or evokes his desire to fall into a sea smelling of flowers
in the middle of Hackney's grey February afternoon. Apfelbaum
is also showing a Polaroid triptych, which, unrelated
to the fallen painting, appears to be taken from a local
Batik workshop.
Next to Apfelbaum's flower power,
Lily van der Stokker is showing Untitled wall painting
and couch in shiny green (2003 - 4), a wall painting
using specially mixed pastel colours, which by its technique
is reminiscent of Takashi Murakami's work. Using a plinth
or couch in front of her work, van der Stokker is trying
to establish a formal connection between the painting
and the object without declaring her work as decorative.
A public van der Stokker piece, similar to her contribution
to the Hannover EXPO in 20002,
would certainly be a good idea for most of the UK's colourless
urban sprawls.
The catalogue for the show includes
a commissioned work by David Batchelor3,
whose significant writing seems to have inspired the curators
towards putting together this show.
A Kind of Bliss will travel
to Warwick Arts Centre from 29 May to 26 June 2004.
Tobi Maier is co-director
of Dosensos art projects, London.
A Kind of Bliss,
The Drawing Room, London, February / March 2004
