Unrelated
Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK
Two sets of grubby digits grip a sheet of plywood, lifting it off the ground just high enough to reveal the cuffs of a pair of workman’s trousers. The ply-carrier’s body is almost entirely concealed by the panel, but there’s enough visual data to leave the impression of virile, glamorous muscularity hidden behind it. Judy Linn’s coy-but-posturing black-and-white photograph Untitled (2006) seems like a good place to begin unpicking ‘Unrelated’, a wonderfully thoughtful summer show curated by Matthew Higgs, whose title seems both a provocation and a warning against making unwarranted connections between the five exhibited artists’ works. Yet this reticence is a sort of theme despite itself – there’s a general concern here with bodies hidden and revealed, of identities arrived at by gesture and oblique display.
Higgs, who is both a practicing artist and the director of White Columns in New York, has taken over both floors of Wilkinson’s cavernous Vyner Street space. The ground floor is given over to Higgs’s own work, a series of rather tasteful appropriation works pilfered from second-hand art books, whilst the upstairs space houses ‘Unrelated’. Unfortunately, Higgs’s own offering seems rather perfunctory, like an addendum to the real work going on upstairs. His modest, framed images are often chapter pages, blank but for their brief hackneyed titles: ‘Genius’, ‘Nobody Lives For Ever’ and ‘How Much is Enough?’ How much indeed. Where the artists in ‘Unrelated’ utilize image-making to assert their own identities, often in the first-person even when quoting others, Higgs’s own magpie-like display seems somewhat disconnected – appropriation art bottomed-out to just ‘stuff I like’.
By way of contrast, the five artists that make up ‘Unrelated’ are strikingly impassioned, punkish in their visceral posturing. Paul Bloodgood’s England 1819 (2006) is a typographic arrangement of Shelley’s eponymous sonnet of desolation and hope that has obvious contemporary resonance: ‘rulers who neither feel or know […] are graves from which a glorious phantom may burst, to illuminate this tempestuous day.’ His Cezanne-like paintings, such as Study for “Thoreau’s Table” (2008), rendered in sea-blues, leaf-greens, and expansive whites, are equally insistent, unabashed in their quoted self-expression. Likewise, Dan Asher’s gestural oil stick-on-paper visages – seemingly created in under a minute and all dating to 1983 – gawp and gaze with the impudence of a Black Flag two-minute rant about beer and TV and having nothing better to do.
Polished and poised, but equally of its era, Linn’s photograph Laundrobag (Patti as Bob Dylan), taken at some unspecified date in the 1970s, shows Patti Smith slumped rakishly beside a laundry bag whilst masking herself behind a publicity shot of the freewheelin’ one. Janice Guy’s series of impressively atmospheric hand-tinted photographs from 1979 is a meditation on the artist’s own naked body, filtered and masked by mirrors, glass panes, and noirish sheets of rain. Today Guy is better known as one half of New York’s Murray Guy gallery, but these works put her firmly alongside Mark Morrisroe, Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman. Sam Gordon’s video 24 Hours in London (The Lost Kinetic World, Volumes 1-12) (2005-07) – a vast archive of art events, openings, performances and street life – is a hyperactive dematerialization of the self: the I-am-you-and-you-are-we of culture. Higgs’s intuition seems the right one: art works remain active only insofar as these connections remain untethered, obstinately unrelated.
Colin Perry
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