Elgreen and Dragset's Harvest at Victoria Miro

Within an attic located up a steep flight of stairs, Elgreen and Dragset have made a faithful impression of a hayloft with tools hanging along the wall such as a harness, rake and scythe.  From a distance the timber structure of this imaginary barn spells out ‘kunst’, connecting the artifice of a working farm to art and the imagination. This blurring of boundaries sets up an entertaining enquiry into the realm of fantasy and expectation. On an opposing low wall the model of a boy sits looking down to the gallery below with his back to the tableau, while a resin vulture perches overhead. This menacing creature is named the ‘critic’ as a well-aimed barb at the expense of the media.

A darker theme is introduced by a miniature house placed on a rocking chair, titled ‘Home is the Place You Left. The reassuring environment of a farm with all its associations of nurture, fertility and abundance gradually acquires a gothic character arising out of these parodic props.  This uncanny set first establishes reassurance, and then undermines the apparent rural charm. Above a barn door, a stag’s antlers sprout from a head that is less skeletal than resiliently fleshy. An empty birdbox asserts the absence of life itself.

Continuing the Harvest theme below on the ground floor, the artists exhibit a project that sources layers of wall paint stripped from museums with techniques developed to preserve frescoes. Attached to framed canvasses, these fragments have been diligently removed from sites in Europe and the US and assume the monochromatic insistence of Minimalist painting. Tones range from bleached white to beige and textures vary from one ‘donor’ institution to the next. Their sizes are inconsistent as are the distances between each work, aping natural contrasts within public collections, and yet each banal surface of domestic paint shares formal origins and qualities.

Elgreen and Dragset’s hayloft introduces a nuanced psychic space of memory, discovery and potential trauma. The series of ‘paintings’ collected from and named after individual museums archly satirises Minimal seriality and institutional authority but this playfulness cannot compensate for a frustrating absence of enduring perceptual or conceptual weight.

Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser and Wirth

By taking architectural floorplans from the first, published encyclopaedia as a source for seven large scale works made of graphite and acrylic, Guillermo Kuitca sets up an enquiry into the processes and history of organizing knowledge. Encyclopaedias exhibit the best impulses of human curiosity but also carry inherent doubt and contingency . Kuitca’s large and impressive canvases appear to scatter original drawings of neo-classical buildings into intricate fragments as if we are observing a puzzle being re-assembled on a floor. While aspects of ‘Encylopedie VII’ remains coherent and identifiably reproduced from an original, printed plate, other areas of the image appear to be in a state of chaotic collapse. ‘Untitled’, 2010 is a  work almost measuring 2 by 4 metres and  occupies a room to itself, but unlike the other pieces in the series, this image is taken to the edge of legibility. Details are so atomised that the original source becomes elusive.

There is a familiar, contemporary technique here of digital imaging because these fragments are so confidently severed from each other as if Kuitca had applied ‘desktop’ strategies to manipulate copies. These enlarged and altered architectural plates, retrieved from history, extend Kuitca’s ongoing interest in epistemology, which he locates within the impulse to collate comprehensive information together .

In an adjoining gallery, the artist was exhibiting untitled paintings that extend the same theme within a contrasting formal style. These canvases mimic the painterly, analytic brushwork of cubist painting and yet originate in unidentified maps. Like the scattered architectural plates, these paintings reconfigure pictorial facts. However, these abstract paintings almost lose any power of communication except for lines of paint in red and yellow that may suggest roads or landmarks on a map. The viewer is left with a series of painterly marks that conflate analytic description with instinctual expression. Our bearings are lost as we are left with implied information within images seemingly driven by subjectivity.

Kuitca’s works inspired by the invention of the enclycopaedia brilliantly opens up a post-modern dialogue around meaning and authority, but the reconfigured maps are overly conceptual and are left adrift in a deep gap between invention and quotation so that they feel contrived and inert.

Nancy Holt at Haunch of Venison

Taking art beyond the studio to the landscape, Nancy Holt’s career has been linked with the ‘Land Art’ of Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and her late husband, Robert Smithson. Concerned with temporal interventions in specific sites, the work has an ambivalent status located outside the traditional, commodified nature of the art market. At Haunch of Venison, Holt exhibits over hundred photographs that document such site specific work or thematically link existing natural or man-made structures.

‘Sunlight In Sun Tunnels’ of 1976 charts the progression of the sun in the sky as light flows through apertures drilled into the roof of a concrete tunnel. Like a series of cinematic frames, moving light and shadow within the tunnels evinces the nature of time determined by nature’s clock, the sun. Sunlight slips across the hard surface of the concrete skin while the surrounding landscape remains visibly fixed, framed by the entrance to this circular sculpture.

An earlier piece, ‘California Sun Signs’ of 1972, photographically documents marketing cliches on billboards and signs that connect Californian sunshine with notions of hedonism and health. But this ambition is ironically subverted by the kitsch designs and tatty condition of these motels and shops, casting doubt whether the promise of satisfaction can ever be fulfilled. Arranged as a randomly shaped grid, these images of metaphorical vitality acquire a pleading quality by selling a climate for cash.

Perhaps, the most successful piece in the show, titled ‘Western Graveyards’ of 1968 is a composite of 60 prints running alongside two full walls of one room, documenting westwards migration. These graves have an improvised quality. Love and respect drive attempts to build places of remembrance delineated by arrangements of stones, plastic flowers and ribbons. Often, scripts on wood or stone are eroded, barely legible. Many graves appear anonymous, abandoned or lost to memory and seem to be returning to dry dust. There is a pathos to this work, a tribute to the grind of building lives in an unyielding environment. But ‘Western Graveyards’ also speaks of the almost futile project to settle the mythic west.

Holt’s career addresses this human impulse to fashion nature whether on Dartmoor in England or in the American deserts. Where her work is most beguiling is on the boundary where hope and desire meets the resistance of environment, site and time.

Grayson Perry at Victoria Miro

 

Employing the model of Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’, Grayson Perry presents a satirical morality tale of contemporary British life in The ‘Vanity of Small Differences’, a suite of six tapestries, measuring 200 by 400 in editions of six each. Designed using computer software, but made on traditional weaving looms in Spain, they form a remarkable new achievement for an artist affiliated to methods traditional craftsmanship and social satire as subject. The exhibition introduces several new pots made in his characteristic overlay of textural commentary and witty, graffiti-style illustrations, but the stars of this show are these exuberant and comic observations of British class and aspiration. These excavations of caste and class are stitched together from wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk, a deliberate blending of luxury materials with the synthetic.

The six tapestries illustrate the life and tragic demise of a brilliant software designer, Tim Rakewell, born into working class life who uses his talent to build a fortune but whose success leads to a tragically early death when driving his luxury car too fast on a grimy city street. Perry returns to the allegorical model of the tapestry because it lends itself even more so than painting to storytelling, particularly caricature. Weaving cannot produce the hyper-real illusion of the brushstroke. Instead, the tapestry is an ideal form for instruction and a cartoon-like summation.

Perry has a deft understanding of Britain’s anxieties about wealth and status often expressed in feelings of envy, hostility and distrust. ‘Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close’ illustrates  the protagonist’s final rupture with the family home as he moves towards bourgeois life with his middle-class girlfriend. All of the cultural chasms and subtleties of class distinction are laid bare. In the penultimate tapestry, Tim, is shown, hunting the upper class, personified by a stag being torn apart by hounds, which becomes a symbol for historical cycles of new money overtaking old.

‘The Vanity of Small Differences’ is a formally brilliant rendering of modern life, in the style of a parable. Perry’s flair for comedy produces an entertaining romp resembling a theatrical farce while still managing to create a persuasive critique of contemporary materialism.

Bruce Nauman's Days at the ICA

Bruce Nauman’s ‘Days’ invites you to walk down a gauntlet of amplified sounds that surprise with their insistent intangibility in the long, narrow space illuminated with daylight. Words spill across the room and jostle for audibility. If you stand close to one of the 14 flat panelled speakers strung out in opposing pairs, the clarity of the words is discernible, but strolling down the centre of room in a straight line immerses the visitor in fluid sounds that occasionally cohere into words. Seven unseen people ranging in age from childhood to old age say the days of the week, as if they are chanting. These voices are clearer or weaker depending on your position in the room but they also suggest  the essential, albeit, unseen individuality of each speaker. However, these seven named days of which our routines are made of are not ordered correctly in logical sequence. They are irrationally jumbled and articulated on inclination, thereby disrupting the reassuring structure of sequential time. Each unseen, anonymous speaker subjectively assaults the notion of this universal register that governs us all. Instead of reinforcing a unified cycle of time, these voices compete for attention in that confined room.

‘Days’ takes the sound of the human voice as the subject and material of an installation comprising simple, flat, white speakers suspended at ear height on wire set approximately two metres apart across the floor. Here at the ICA, the piece is delineated by the floor plan of the modestly sized  gallery which is entered by descending several steps down into an area unbounded by interior walls. Starting with the factual presence of speakers, Nauman moves his audience from the visible into the less certain realm of auditory perception. The artist and his protagonists’ gestural and physical presence is absent leaving only a proxy, the process of sounds emitted from the body which are then recorded, edited and finally amplified.

What we experience is an ambient dissonance of sounds and meaning. We slip in and out of familiarity and structure. This is an arena of collapsing communication. Such spoken repetition of words progressively leads them from tools of common comprehension towards gibberish. Meaning slips away. And this profusion of noise within an urban setting might be expected, but Nauman’s willful manipulation of spoken language teases us and provokes confusion. This is not necessarily unpleasant but rather disorientating like one of those fair ground rides that toys with our internal spirit -level. Similarly, ‘Days’ interrupts artificial time, demonstrating the ease with which an artist can alter the parameters of common experience.

Days of the week are some of our earliest instructions. We encounter them as the building blocks of comprehension alongside letters of the alphabet, colours and numbers. From infancy, our parents and teachers try to convey structure and logic through language, the skeleton of human relations. Naumann takes this certainty, embedded like a seed within us and instills doubt. From order we are gently led towards an exaggerated subjective experience that borders on psychic dissolution. These clashing sounds in the gallery suggest the hope that repetitious intonation can thwart impending chaos by reasserting an assumption of concrete fact.

I first saw (or heard) this work in New York’s MOMA where it was exhibited within a pristine, sealed room. There Nauman’s work acquired an assertive, confident quality. It was less disconcerting and felt like an appropriate amplification of Manhattan’s competing energies and agendas encountered on the street below. At London’s ICA, ‘Days’ seems a more unnerving, inconclusive project. Inevitably, a sound installation such as this will adapt to its site, but in the incongruous setting of the Mall as the Olympic volleyball arena is being assembled nearby with all of the accompanying technology, time keeping andinvestment in accuracy, Nauman’s ‘Days‘ becomes a hesitant, wistful quest that exposes both our dependence on the calendar and it’s intrinsic artifice. Perhaps the days of the week inevitably slip out of alignment, as each of us take our own course through life, defying our best intentions to describe and share the irrefutable passage of the sun.

Sara VanDerBeek at the Approach

Where Sara VanDerBeek once photographed sculptures, she now establishes in her new show at the Approach, clear physical distinctions between photographic image and sculptural object. Here she dispenses with a clear progression from one state to another. Instead, she sets up improvised movement by three dancers and then records the formal complexity produced by the shape of bodies articulated by light and the reflective floor of the dance studio. These bodies hold and release energy in a series of assumed poses enabling the artist to build up a compendium of physical expression across the images. Sometimes the figure is cropped leaving only concentrated aspects of limbs and torsos balanced by contrasting details of another dancer’s body being inserted into the photograph. These investigations in black and white illustrate both the pliability and limits of the human body.

Maintaining her interest in process, VanDerBeek has recently made a series of accompanying plaster sculptures in response to the photographs thereby reversing her earlier strategy. Inspired by but not imitating the dancers, these delicately, vertical pieces ascend upwards in stacked, identical blocks which create a concrete unity that the more dynamic and imperfect human body can only aspire to achieve. Assembled across the floor of one room alongside the photographs, these works have a material, craft- like quality employing plaster and white paint. Some of the columns acquire a rhythmical character containing either serrated surfaces and or repeating patterns within the blocks that lead the eye along the entire length of the column. Being artificially lit from above, the sculptures do not cast shadows on the floor, but light does accentuate their textured and undulating nature.

The relationship between photographs and sculptures is clearly orchestrated but it’s the gaps rather than a direct correspondence, which demands attention. An evident divide opens up between the organic nature of the human body and the rigid certainties of the geometric forms in the gallery. So while this project may at first feel rather contrived, it does not simply connect the dancers to the sculptures, but opens up an engaging flow of shape and texture across competing media and subjects.

Li Tianbing at the Stephen Friedman Gallery

China’s recent history has provided fertile ground for artists, particularly those addressing a western audience. Li Tianbing’s new series of paintings focus particularly on autobiographical family history. Having grown up in China during the 1970s, the artist won a scholarship to study in Paris where he now continues to work. Taking rare photographic images as a child captured by his father on a borrowed camera, Li inserts these fragments of a wider national story into large photo-realist paintings that use his young image as a means of connecting the past to contemporary life . The photographs are reproduced as a direct quotation in black and white, softly overlaying more generic scenes of life in China, which produces a cinematographic effect of montage and fades. Amongst, the finely finished photographic surface, paint is sometimes applied in textured blobs or allowed to run down the surface as a contradiction to the appearance of mechanical reproduction.

‘Don’t Touch My Dog’ depicts the young Li holding an imaginary dog surrounded by invented friends. Communist Party street flyers  are attached to a wire fence through which the children emerge. For Li, childhood is remembered as an experience of individual isolation and deprivation as a consequence of China’s introduction of a compulsory ‘one child’ policy. ‘Bullet Holes’ establishes a foregrounded, transparent screen damaged by fired guns through which we see two crouching infants looking back towards the viewer. An indeterminate air of menace shapes the narrative here. Many of these recent paintings also suggest repressed emotional trauma.

In some works, Li places his childish alter-ego amongst western artistic activity. In ‘Return With Fruitful Results’ the infant Li appears to returning from a shopping trip carrying a long blackboard decorated with chalk motifs by Michel Basquiat and holding a plastic bag archly branded with Warhol’s appropriated ‘Brillo’ logo. This child anticipates his adult engagement in a wider cultural conversation, aligning his formative, Chinese origins with a more universal adult aspiration. This picture illustrates Li’s use of hybrid sources arising out of lived observation, fantasy, education and travel. While such eclectic references present inevitable problems of interpretation and complex hybridity, these paintings are tempered by unique memory and experience.