Sights from a Steeple
Ibid Projects, London, UK
Ulla Von Brandenburg, Geist (2007)
The summer has arrived at last so instead of complaining about the fact that it hasn’t we can now complain about how ‘muggy’ it is. Another thing usually worth complaining about at this time of year are the ‘summer shows’ put on by commercial galleries. Always hit-and-miss affairs, these are normally either filler whilst the gallerists go to wherever they go in the summer, or a chance for someone at the gallery (or a hired freelancer) to stretch their curatorial muscle with a thematic group show.
Ibid’s summer show, ‘Sights From the Steeple’, falls into the latter category. The works presented, according to the press release, take their cue from late-Romantic views on love and loss, as well as ‘attitudes of austerity and self-restraint.’ The title, taken from a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the collection Twice-Told Tales (1837), gives some sense of what is on offer here: the works, imbued with gothic wistfulness, will constitute an ‘antidote to the traditional summer show’. But all is not lost. Two works in particular, by Karl Holmqvist and Ulla Von Brandenburg, make the trip worthwhile. The other artists in the show – Gregor Hildebrandt, Jorinde Voigt, Barbara Wolff and Skafte Kuhn – are too easily packaged and explained away by the theme. Kuhn’s diptych, an etching on glass, Untitled (Hervor aus Gebrigen des Nichtmehr / Coming from the mountain of the bygone) (2007), depicts English goth rockers Bauhaus alongside a sampling of their lyrics, translated into antiquated German. Referencing the collision of ‘80s pop music with gothic imagery is well-trodden ground.
Von Brandenburg is represented by a film, Geist (2007), in which a figure draped in a white sheet activates a 16mm camera, aimed at an area of park land with trees in the distance. As the figure nears the trees, moving almost out of view, the reel finishes and the film loops. This pastische of Victorian quasi-scientific recordings of paranormal phenomena juts uncomfortably – or maybe all too comfortably, which is of course the point – against the form of performance-based video from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The fact that the theoretical underpinnings of conceptual and post-conceptual practices can be mapped to certain tropes of late-Romantic thought and art is by no means revelatory, but in this context adds a touch of critical sophistication.
Karl Holmqvist, Give Poetry a Try (1991–2008)
Holmqvist accompanies a small photocopied book of his poems (available to peruse, but not to take away) with a manifestation of a work that has been recycled several times since its first outing in 1991, and which normally accompanies a performance. It consists of three empty wine bottles with simple orange labels emblazoned with the title of the work: Give Poetry a Try (1991–2008). Behind these, on the wall, there is a framed list of handwritten instructions encouraging viewers to make candle holders out of recently emptied bottles and to write their own poetry. The last two read: ‘4. Read poem out to yourself and/or someone else’, and ‘5. Ready.’ Holmqvist humorously punctures the Romantic view of poetry as a privileged, exulted form, while simultaneously casting doubt on the contemporary dictum that everyone has ‘talent’.
Dan Kidner
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