Matthew Bown, First floor, 11 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PG
Rating:
Simon Cunningham, 'Mollymuddle', 2007
By Martin Herbert
Posted: Mon Aug 20 2007
‘Writers don’t have much time for things, and dispose of them by encoding them in words,’ the handout cheekily proclaims, before arguing that artists advance upon the human condition in their considered then. Here’s a disposal, then. This show achieves a fatal formlessness via an utterly nebulous theme, and furthermore offers an object lesson in kneecapping what one exhibits. In recent graduate Simon Cunningham’s video a seated man grips his bare leg, gazing at it raptly as if it were a newborn; such is the composition that the leg seems detached from the body. It’s a progressively estranging sight, but the gallery risks diminishing it into a franchise by offering, nearby, a photographic version. They do the same with Richard Wilson’s time-lapse film of a compacted aeroplane slowly unfolding, and Andrew Parker’s memorably allusive film of what looks like models of domestic white goods breaking up in the wintry tide of an English seaside. In fact, these spin-offs look more like posters.
Hopeful but short-circuiting productions proliferate elsewhere. There’s an attractive blankness to immi’s paintings of footballs, but you can’t get near them; the way is blocked by Matt and Ross’s ‘Stunt Complex’, a cluster of architectural models speculatively reshaped for skateboarders or BMX riders. It’s a piece that might deepen if given elbow room and thoughtful presentation, neither of which seems possible here.
For me it's an inscription of difference within the same; a chiasmic doubling, or crossing, definable in terms of the divergence and reversibility of perceiving subject and object of perception
isn't this reviewer rather wistfully forgetting that art is essentially a commodity? new media might be all the rage (ho ho), but what's wrong with something tangible to sit alongside?
Too many times I have trekked to a commercial (clue is in the name) gallery to see almost nothing on display. Maybe a slight overcrowding is preferable to yet another trendy white wall.
I liked the exhibition, and also bought the t-shirt, lunch box and corned beef sandwich embossed with the artists names.
5 comments
Picasso, Matisse, Johns, Quinn, uh...Cunningham. One thinks not.
For me it's an inscription of difference within the same; a chiasmic doubling, or crossing, definable in terms of the divergence and reversibility of perceiving subject and object of perception
Man stares at leg. Now, that's what the world needs. A nonsense contribution. Get a proper job.
I like the where he disappears up his own arse better.
isn't this reviewer rather wistfully forgetting that art is essentially a commodity? new media might be all the rage (ho ho), but what's wrong with something tangible to sit alongside?
Too many times I have trekked to a commercial (clue is in the name) gallery to see almost nothing on display. Maybe a slight overcrowding is preferable to yet another trendy white wall.
I liked the exhibition, and also bought the t-shirt, lunch box and corned beef sandwich embossed with the artists names.