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 Fred Sandback at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2005
Art Monthly
As with food, there is fast art and slow art. Slow art whispers rather than howls and draws you gently into its own time and space dimensions. Fred Sandback's sculptures stop time and expand space beyond the confines of the gallery using nothing but lengths of acrylic yarn. While Sandback, who died aged 60 in 2003, left drawings with installation instructions, he also wanted his transient, straight-edged forms to respond to the architectural particularities of any given space. With its ceilings of varying heights and a room that grows at one end to accommodate a long window onto the street, Kettle's Yard grants unexpected variations within the pieces, especially with 'Untitled' (Variation of Four Exhibition Rooms/Four Horizontal Lines) 1969/1997. Here four red strings traverse the gallery, about one metre apart, the first at waist height creating a force-field only a toddler would breach. The next string zips along the floor like a drawn line, happy to meet with a solid surface. The third is at shoulder height, the fourth at knee height, causing the eye to follow a wave up and down through the air. They vibrate like a musical arrangement. Each string, neatly inserted into the gallery wall, appears at once to disappear inside its surface and be born from it, aspiring towards infinity.
Sandback preferred acrylic to wool because of its longer fibres and its 'ping'. He liked its tendency to fray, teasing out the edges into the air around. In 'Untitled' (Sculptural Study, Two-part Rectangular Wall Construction), 2001, 2005, two rectangles of different widths, set five centimetres apart, fit snugly to the wall. The slight fuzziness of the black yarn resembles a dusty charcoal line. The bare wall appears thicker within the string's parameters. You start to see things prompted by the frames - the ghosts of Malevich and Ryman. Then nothing. The Chinese call it a 'hsiang ', an image that float before us when we think, a substanceless image, what Lao Tzu refers to as 'an empty vessel/ that yet may be drawn from/without ever needing to be filled.'
In 'Untitled' (Seven-part Vertical Construction), 1990, a group of double-stranded sets of yarn plumb from ceiling to floor, like elongated figures, reduced to a white shadow, a black line, a golden metal wire. A skinny column of light fattens between the strands. As Giacometti once explained, 'the more I take away, the fatter it becomes. But why, I don't know yet...So I've got to take away...And that's where I really get lost. As if the material itself had become an illusion.
Nowhere is the paradoxical tension between containment and expansion, reality and illusion, stronger and more delightful than in 'Untitled' (Triangle), 1996, a light brown obtuse-angled triangle which hovers at the corner of the room, one corner at head height, the lower two attached about thirty centimetres off the ground. It's a large slice of cake rising off a plate. It has open arms to embrace you. Its tone belongs to the parquet yet it makes the floor fall away as it tilts its nothingness into the room. It's disorientating but in a strangely optimistic way. It's Buddha-bliss not annihilating vacuum. Figure and ground collapse into and through each other, relocating you as you watch. Perception and its laws can't be relied upon. Every plane becomes unstable, changing and there is a moment of Zen liberation in realising that we are too. We become as weightless as the invisible sculptural form.
While some of Sandback's work opens out space, others suck it in. It both disrupts gallery space and adds to it. 'Untitled', 1976, in black elastic cord, is a cheeky, upbeat intervention that stretches an oblong up a corner and along the floor. Its playfulness with minimal matter and minimalist tropes suggests Tom Friedman's practice. This piece creates a volume with the density of glass against the wall and then extends along the floor as flat as a drawing. This movement from fullness to flatness is entrancingly simple and satisfying. It asks questions of the soul, how we make meaning from meaningless, form from the immaterial. Reality dissolves at what Sandback called, 'the point at which all ideas fall apart...The inherent mysticism resides in ...the realisation that the simplest and most comfortable of our perceptions are shadows.'
Small reliefs complement the string works. Here the lines, rather than being the only matter in the piece, are grooves in the painted wood. Another kind of absence bestows a concrete, grounded effect. This is work of soft heft, lasting burn.
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 Ellen Gallagher 'Salt Eaters' at Hauser & Wirth,
London, 2006
Circa Magazine
It's significant that Ellen Gallagher's latest show is called 'Salt Eaters' as ideas around consumption are central to her work. I first came across her painting in 1995 at the Whitney Biennale and was fascinated by its peculiar material and cultural texture - she collaged sheets of blue-lined school writing paper onto canvas and ran series of disembodied popping eyes and hotdog lips over this surface, like features looking for a face, a whole body, to belong to. These isolated elements of minstrel caricature were astonishingly low-key and intense at the same time, a reiteration of blackness that marked how black faces had been read, reproduced and consumed as entertainment by white culture. After the punchy film and video work that Black-British artists had been producing in the 80s and 90s, this was a piercingly subtle way of tackling the interstices of representation that referenced a minimalist fine art tradition, rather than a maximalist documentary one. Like Agnes Martin, it was stealthily quiet. It didn't seem to care if you heard - it knew it was speaking a language audible to every black person who viewed it. It took me longer to tune in. I wasn't used to minimalism 'saying anything' beyond an aesthetic inquiry.
Later came Gallagher's interventions on newspaper adverts for hair-products and wigs in African-American postwar magazines. Here she built fantastical modernist structures in yellow (blonde?) plasticine onto the model's heads which screamed against discreet assimilation - 'Hello! We're here!' Like Constructivist headdresses, African masks, sci-fi helmets, Bauhaus bonnets, these intricate, loud ensembles sidestepped, elegantly and assuredly, from minimalist satire to futuristic figuration. This melding of materials (paper, pencil, oil, plasticine, gold leaf, newsprint) and historical and aesthetic languages continue to distinguish her practice.
Technical proficiency and an icy wit inform Gallagher's investigation of how the architecture of race was built. Critic Thyrza Nichols Goodeve calls her method of constructing new cosmologies rather than didactically critiquing existing social and aesthetic systems, 'generative art', similar in strategy to Matthew Barney's. Three plasticine pieces in 'Salt-Eaters' produce anti-ads from snippets of products claiming to cure bunions, drunkenness, headaches etc. jumbling their message to a poignant absurdity: 'salt-free and time-tested, worn by stars, don't send no money, may cause fatal infection, genuine cultured, immediate delivery...' Made of two-tone, light-drinking grey, the panels of sliced and pressed plasticine exude aspiration, reek of lack and dissatisfaction. Like the wig charts, they intervene in the semiotics of consumption, looking at how we're moulded like play-putty, then and now.
Collaged strips of magazine ads and plasticine appliqué also feature in a large painting, 'Bird in Hand', 2006. Here, a black figure, dressed as a pirate, with a peg-leg, stands under dreadlocks composed of paint and amoeba-like cut-outs, amid tributaries of collaged magazine ads shaped like seaweed tendrils that proliferate like tongues of broken but beautiful speech. Again, the yellowing writing paper is the base on which Gallagher invents her truth, her version of the story of Cape Verde slaves who gathered salt and gained knowledge of sea-faring to become sailors and captains. It has the untamed energy of a spreading myth, yet is meticulously controlled. There is something slightly demonic about the figure's face, outlined in 3D layers, with one blue photographed eye stuck on like a comment on miscegenation. (Gallagher's father was from Cape Verde and her Irish mother from Rhode Island and she once said that 'there is a tendency to erase my Irish family, so that it doesn't contaminate people's narrow definition of blackness' (1))
There is also a collusion of formal tactics in 'Dirty O's' where 3D 'wigs' engulf watercolour portraits of the face itself, in oval layers of newsprint and plasticine. The scaffolding of the face, the attempts to construct an identity the self can pass behind, are comic, determined and richly allusive: while ridiculing the conformation to whiteness, Gallagher also celebrates these portraits as necessary strategies of survival and glamour. She dismantles white history and representation and puts it together again, her tendrils reaching deftly through art history from postwar fashion and popular culture to the history of slavery. So when she makes more abstract and conceptual moves as in 'Brava', a short filmic loop of an island that never draws closer, and the painting 's'Odium' - the clues are there as indelible, slyly readable signifiers from her own intellectually dexterous universe.
(1) Quoted in Claire Doherty's catalogue essay for the Ikon Gallery, 1998
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With six bold - as - brass abstract paintings by Carrie Moyer and four large floor sculptures by Diana Puntar, who favours lurid pink carved foam on geometric mirrored pedestals, the works in this show seem to scream for attention at different pitches. But engage with each artist separately and the dissonance between them starts to perform highly articulate connections. Both Puntar and Moyer use layered colour and a clash of forms and materials to tease out and expand upon modernist art and design references. Puntar's triangulated mirrored 'grounds' suggest a dialogue with hard-edged Deco and the fractured self-images of 70s feminist art practice, while the painted abstract forms, which threaten like sudden growths you don't want to deal with or negotiate, read like the druggie offspring of Eva Hesse. Titles like Lucky Stiff (2006) and The Devil That You Know (2006) are preposterously hard-boiled and funny. Their blasé bubblegum beauty atop the rigid laminated plywood plinths begins to cling unexpectedly.
Moyer's paintings also offer the sumptuous and the sinister. The hard lines that radiate out from several of the canvases echo Puntar's pieces, and quote Russian Constructivists and Bauhaus idealists like Josef Albers. Images suggesting keyholes and transmission towers may critique the increasing use of surveillance and the propagandist tyranny of broadcasting , but Moyer also enjoys trying to resolve how to represent the vibrant and pleasurable legacy of form through each painting. The transparent layers of spoilt yellow and dirty red acrylic , and clusters of glitter caught in the varnish, play off image-making techniques to create new formal tensions. The foregrounded forms rely on the deliberately dated dull umber or unmarked canvas of the ground, to signify their contemporaneity, suggesting how much we rely on the sediments of culture and history to define and understand the present. While a spiral of red paint set over a density of black thumbprints could act to comment on paranoid security identification measures, Moyer clearly delights in the deliciously playful collision of texture, colour and signs. It doesn't seem farfetched to determine the Twin Towers smouldering in the vertically charged Faktura #3 (2005) and a blackened flag in Faktura #4 (2005) and their infiltrating consequences. Moyer's ability to shatter line and command wholeness at the same time, to evoke a political consciousness while maintaining outstanding beauty in her work makes her an exceptional artist. Despite the engulfing strobe of information control and the blob-headed mass of pale figures that seem to be experiencing democracy fade-out in While You Were Sleeping (2005) these are nonetheless upbeat paintings about the persistent resistance required by critical thinkers living in the US today. Like Puntar, Moyer is working out how to think about painting, the body, society and history all at the same time. Their work burns with ideas and against their amnesia. This is not just another faddish sampling of high modernism, but a rich interrogation of its ideals, making it cough up new and difficult truths.
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Lee Lozano at Hauser & Wirth, London, 2007
Art Review
The first thing that distinguishes Lee Lozano's work is its force, whether felt in the intense shading and chaotic lines of her scatological and sexual drawings, or in the elegant precision of her abstract paintings. She burst onto the New York art scene in 1960, showed with artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Morris, only to burn out her fuse (or smother its spark) ten years later in her Drop Out Piece, 1969-70 in which she abandoned the art world, moved to Dallas and bizarrely stopped talking to women. Critics have seen this critique of capitalism and patriarchy as both pathological and utopian, but it effectively made Lozano vanish until a retrospective show in 1998, a year before her death.
Throughout her brief career, the artist's communication with men was problematised repeatedly in cartoonish cock drawings - imagine an expressionist hybrid of Richard Prince and Sue Williams, drawings in which, for example, a man's ear becomes a penis, with the text 'Man Cocking His Ear', (Untitled , 1963), or a lipsticked mouth is stuffed with an ass, a cock coming out of the asshole, accompanied by the phrase 'menage-a-trois', (Untitled , 1963). They're visceral, crude, disturbing narratives of the phallus as the tool that drives men's minds and bodies. At the same time, Lozano was making large dark paintings of bore drills, bolts, hammers and screws, as if visualising the steeliness needed to penetrate the male-dominated field of minimalism.
While solo exhibitions in Basel and Eindhoven showed both strands of her work, Hauser & Wirth concentrates on later paintings and small graphite studies for the work on canvas. It's unfortunate since it seems that Lozano could only talk in this language (minimalism) because she screamed in another (figuration). Nevertheless, her set of four large paintings, No title, 1969, is stunning. Four sections of a circular band hang in a square, so that the spectator's eye completes the absent sphere. The fury of her drawings reaches what Adorno called the successful sublimation of rage - an eloquence of form that holds nothingness at its centre. The mild hues of grey and cream capture temperatures of light, both day and night, and planetary eclipse. The 3" housepainters' brushes she preferred to use leave smooth, wide strokes that accentuate the change in texture between the shaded band and the ground. For Lozano, the perfect body hung in space, free from human protrusions. 'If we were more intelligent we would be shaped like spheres.... We could change from solid to liquid to gaseous states of matter or become nothing but a charge or a force...' (From her notebooks). The illusive density of space is pierced by a hole in the top canvas, like a spyhole to another universe. Its circle of light and shadow both produces and playfully punctures the question of the w/hole Lozano was trying to pose. This geometrical knowing seems like a beginning, or maybe for Lozano was a fitting end.
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Catalogue Essays 'Radiant Vitality', the work of Thomas Flechtner, for 'Bloom', LARS MULLER Publications, 2007
'Private Emergencies', on Salla Tykka for CHAPTER ARTS, Cardiff, 2006
'Gnaw at the Barrier', on Ann Course and Emma Woffenden for ANGEL ROW GALLERY and FIRST SITE GALLERY, 2004
'Who Can Fail', for No Respect Group Show, PROJECT ARTS CENTRE, Dublin, 2004
'Field of Marks', on David Harker, CLERKENWELL GREEN ASSOCIATION, 2004
'Flown and Sealed: The Work of Orla Barry' for TEMPLE BAR GALLERY, Dublin, 2002
'Intimate Handling: The Work of Dirk Braeckman' for A PRIOR JOURNAL, Brussels, 2002
'The Gate of Chalk: The Work of Pierre Imhof' for the BROADBENT GALLERY, 2002
The Florence Trust Summer Show, 2002 & 2003
'Digging for Sand in Sand', on Orla Barry for the ART PHOTOGRAPHERS' GALLERY, HELSINKI, 2000
'Dragged', on Sarah Pucill and Phil Sayers for THE REAL GALLERY, NYC, 1998
Jane and Louise Wilson for the CHISENHALE GALLERY, 1995
'The Transgressive Subject' in QUEER ROMANCE, ROUTLEDGE, 1995
'What She Wants' in WHAT SHE WANTS: WOMEN ARTISTS LOOK AT MEN, VERSO, 1994
BAD GIRLS CATALOGUE, ICA PUBLICATIONS, 1994
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Curating
Curatorial Adviser - Open Frequency, AXIS ARTS, 2006
Curator - 'STAY', Escalator Visual Arts/COMMISSIONS EAST at the Great Eastern Hotel, London 2004-2005
Curator - Summer Shows, FLORENCE TRUST GALLERY, London, 2002 & 2003
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'By means of a line an act of transmission has taken place.'
Henri Michaux
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