"The priority
was always to create an open space that people would enjoy hanging
out in." Thus spake Graham McKenzie, director of Glasgow's CCA
(Centre for Contemporary Arts) on the occasion of its October relaunch
after a couple of years' absence and a Stg£10 million-plus refit.
The makeover by Page and Park Architects of this centrally located
Sauchiehall Street venue involved a complex fusion of five distinct
buildings. This has resulted in an increase on the original overall
space from which the visual arts programme will, nevertheless, not
necessarily benefit significantly, at least on the evidence of the
rhetorical flourishes attending the opening festivities.
"Most spaces
still put on performance art for the performance art audience or
show films with five words of dialogue that only three nerds are
going to come and see on a Thursday afternoon," according to Vivienne
Gaskin, the CCA's head of artistic programme and education, "My
idea is that you can create an informal club space into which you
can feed various art forms without lecturing people." A refreshing
anti-elitism? Or simply a club-culture-friendly version of the gormless
populism that not many years ago saddled Glasgow with the world's
worst gallery of modern art? Time will tell.
Squaring gamely
up against an all-too-familiar scenario - in which the space allotted
for the presentation of the visual arts per se (am I mistaken, or
is it actually smaller than before?), and indeed for the other arts,
is entirely overshadowed by the bar, restaurant and other facilities
- was a thoughtful four-person exhibition, Words and Things,
curated by Francis McKee, formerly Head of Programme at the CCA.
Ostensibly addressing the topic of the human fascination with objects
- and thus pre-emptively thematising any perceived compromise in
the potential for their traditional display and delectation in the
reconfigured gallery space - McKee brought together the very disparate
talents of Mark Dion, Cheryl Donegan, JODI and Simon Starling. Dion's
familiar updating of the classic Victorian role of the amateur gentleman
scholar of the Natural Sciences perfectly equipped him to engage,
in the form of a series of sculptural tableaux, with various exhibits
in the nearby Hunterian Museum relating to experiments by Glasgow's
pre-eminent proponent of this role, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907).
Starling's
characteristic focus on the history of design in a notionally more
democratic age, i.e. mid-century modernism, often takes the form
of a laborious transformation of one fetishized design object into
another. The absurd protraction of Starling's production process,
and its subsequent notation, ideally paves the way for a fuller
consideration of the social and cultural matrices in which these
objects are embedded than they might ordinarily receive. In this
instance he used petal-shaped strips of metal cut from a Daihatsu
Jet Van to construct his own version of Poul Henningsen's classic
1957 Artichoke Lamp.
Cheryl Donegan's
Channeling In *Versions was an installation comprising a
projected video, a monitor-based video, a mylar-covered floor and
several related paintings. At the core of this dizzying conglomeration
was a clip from Ken Russell's 1975 film version of The Who's Tommy,
in which the frantic TV-channel-hopping of the hero's mother, played
by Ann-Margaret, reflects her rapid psychic disintegration. Donegan's
film of a lo-tech re-enactment of this scene within the mylar-covered
confines of her own studio, combined with her series of rudimentary
paintings of the abstracted set, further compounded this sense of
disintegrative sensual overload.
This deconstructive
impulse was followed through in the works shown by net.art pioneers
JODI, all of which involved a modification of the underlying code
of the classic shoot-'em-up computer game, Quake. Mind you, when
viewed in isolation from any debates regarding the politics or ethics
of the internet, the resulting sequences look suspiciously like
a new-media take on old-style formalist abstraction.
While Words
and Things was located in the interlocking spaces now designated
CCA 2 and 3, Tracey MacKenna and Edwin Janssen's collaborative installation,
Ed and Ellis in Ever Ever Land, was more prominently placed
in CCA 1, the foyer just inside the main door. The result of a CCA
commission to investigate the notion of 'Scottishness' over the
period of the Centre's closure, this took the form, characteristic
of this duo, of text-covered woollen blankets and related survey
materials.
•
Across town
in the cavernous Tramway gallery, curator Andrew Renton's group
show Total Object Complete with Missing Parts (the title
is borrowed from Beckett) was also concerned with the complex relationship
between words and things, between the physicality of an object and
its textual extension or discursive displacement. This theme was
explored or exemplified in contrasting ways by a dozen different
artists. Works exhibited included Fiona Banner's large-scale 3-D
sculptural rendering of punctuation marks in various fonts; Angela
Bulloch's neo-minimalist pixel boxes, whose visual pulsations reflected
a distilled fragment of on-screen action from the film The Matrix.;
Susan Philpsz's quiet acapella rendition of the entire album of
David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust; and João Penalva's poignantly
funny film Mister, displayed within a beat-up Punch-and-Judy
style tent, in which an old shoe recounts, in Beckettian fashion,
the story of its gradual dissolution.
Words
and Things, CCA, October-December 2001
Tracey MacKenna
and Edwin Janssen: Ed and Ellis in Ever Ever Land, CCA, October-December
2001 Total
Object Complete with Missing Parts, Tramway Gallery,
September/October 2001
Caoimhín
Mac Giolla Léith
