The Tuileries Incident
In an imaginative, artist-in-the-gallery encounter Mick Wilson dusts off one of the gems in the Hugh Lane collection. Manet's La Musique aux Tuileries (1862) becomes the subject of an art-historical detective story. In the spirit of noir thrillers, The Tuileries Incident creates an investigative fog that raises more questions than it answers. Wilson is fond of messing with different narratives and lines of enquiry. Along shelves of propped cards he sets up four ways of approaching Manet's painting; through reproductions, surfaces, lost meanings and anecdotes. The issue of lost meaning is the crux of this show. La Musique aux Tuileries features many literal blank-outs or intriguingly underpainted areas. In 1862, as the first tremors of modernism began to be felt, this painting strained the conventions of representation. Then as now, the public were faced with a problem of interpretation. In projected lines of text Wilson takes the words of Walter Benjamin, the philosopher of modernism, and cheekily blends them with a mixture of Chandleresque melodrama and advertising copy. Benjamin's jaundiced image of the angel of history being blown backwards into the future is further ironised with the line "just like that movie...this storm is called progress."
Appropriately enough Wilson views the legacy of modernism like a hardened detective who doesn't expect to find the truth but carries on searching. The spine and jacket of Thomas Bodkin's book, Hugh Lane and his Pictures , is attached to the wall like evidence. The flavour of the show is that of a torturously extended attempt to locate the meaning of the artwork. Here Wilson operates on a different plane to Manet whose subversive intentions were encoded in the subtleties of painting. The crudely pixellated video, Man Watching Painting , stretches our patience more than our aesthetic sensibilities, as do the lengthy pauses between the phrases of text. This is a time-based event that forces the audience to perform a sort of intellectual warm-up before looking and thinking about the painting itself.
Occupied
Breaking the familiar circuit of galleries, Occupied presents a vacated office space as the mise en scène for the work of Veronica Larsson, Ruth Rogers and Simon Morse. The dingy room, complete with wall to wall beauty board and a glazed partition, provides a suitably downbeat yet nostalgic atmosphere. In an interior within an interior, Ruth Rogers' series of images, Inside, probes the textures of a dilapidated cottage. Visual punning continues in Moving , where a picturesque group of headscarfed peasant women appear to be heading towards a blacked-out horizon. Veronica Larsson's The Bridge features close-ups of dewy rose petals alongside shots of evening sunlight falling on muddy canal waters. These images of nature in the city suggest that an elusive quality might be lurking in the mundane.
While Larsson's photographs struggle against their banal surroundings, Simon Morse's manic noticeboards positively revel in them. Taking a creative romp through the madness of office culture, the noticeboards are a vehicle for a witty parody of corporate means of communication. In Diplodocus , the eponymous corporation is the entity behind a series of absurd notices concerning the protocol for meal times among other things, all written in an internal jargon. There are sinister Nauman-like undercurrents as employees are referred to as numbers or clowns. In Workmates , which looks like an innocuous supermarket board of informational white cards, we read a series of nasty vignettes about humiliating accidents befalling a luckless employee. The sheer visual display of office paraphernalia and stationery is deployed to great effect by Morse down to the authoritative but sweetly anachronistic typeface Gill Sans.
The End and the Beginning
Kathy Prendergast has the ability to make simple objects communicate the big themes of nurturing, birth, life and death. Her work can be devastatingly matter of fact, like the wooden spool of thread made from three generations of human hair, her own, her mother's and her son's.
In the ongoing series of modest pencil drawings based on maps of international capital cities, Prendergast captures a sense of them as living fibrous entities. As you identify the cities you notice the difference between the familiar dense sprawl of London, with the Thames looping through, and a tiny, faint place like Valetta, capital of Malta. The theme of beating hearts is carried through in the small, knitted baby sweater hung high on the wall. A little motor inside makes it breathe in and out. In this absurdly fragile object we see the force of life itself.
The show is balanced between the global scale of the city drawings and a domestic intimacy expressed in a series of installations. A pillow made of old-fashioned ticking is covered in fibres of hair. In its larger-than-life, enigmatic symbolism, this object is truly uncanny. Like other pieces it is charged with fatalistic intuitions. The oppressive edge to these dreamy, feminine spaces is epitomised in the claustrophobic room papered in a florid, black and magnolia Victorian pattern with a central matching tomb. Returning to the city drawings one becomes aware of how much they have abandoned the original, military, logical function of a map and brought out the sense that it exists as a sort of double or alter ego of the original city. A charmed life is a superstitious idea, but if this exhibition is anything to go by, it is an idea that still wields power.
