MAY 2015 | No 386 | UK£4.80 US$7.40

John HilliardInterviewed by Patricia Bickers

Downing StreetDavid Barrett

GlocalisationMarcus Verhagen

Structuralism is Dead?Mark Prince

| Reviews | Exhibitions |

MAY 15 | ART MONTHLY | 386| 32 |

Marcus Coates’s solo exhibition at Workplace convenes three new works. The lower gallery includes the show’s standout piece, The Sounds of Others: A Biophonic Line, 2014, which consists of sound files based on animal noises recorded by Geoff Sample. Birdsong, a baby crying, a killer whale and a field of crickets are some of the sounds Coates distorts. In tandem with LED displays that show the concurrent animal and tempo of the recording, Coates speeds up and slows down the sound files, playing DJ to the sounds of nature. The display units recall athletics score boards and alarm clocks, calling to mind Darwinist competition between the species. The work extends Coates’s interest in taxonomic representations of nature, and the work is at once a zoological archive and something altogether odder. A crying baby starts to sound similar to a killer whale, forming bizarre sonic ecologies. I’m left thinking about the differing communicative emphasis between species – from communicating fear to expressing hunger. In this work, animal voices become beautifully somatic and melodic as much as anything else. Although humans possess around 30,000 words to express themselves, why does it always feel particularly hard to find the right one to end on? z

GEORGE VASEY is the curator of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland and writer based in Gateshead.

London Round-upIMT • Copperfield • Tintype • Sprüth Magers

The coalition’s introduction of fixed-term parliaments has – serendipitously, no doubt – made it much easier for artists to plan shows to coincide with a general election. So what would artists exhibit were they aiming to secure your vote in the forthcoming poll? Not, you’d think, anything like Gordon Shrigley’s ‘Project for an Unidentified Political Object’, even though he is standing for his own Campaign Party in Hackney South and Shoreditch. The voters are unlikely to be impressed by his 22-page manifesto, not so much because they disagree but because they will be baffled. Shrigley parodies structuralist artspeak in explaining that he proposes only to generate a space for the imagination of his electorate. His clinching point is typical, urging the voter to consider the possibility of ‘an oxymoronic territory of atemporality’. Asked to boil his vision down, he offered: ‘I have nothing to offer, but offer itself,’ and has gone on to issue posters with slogans such as: ‘I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t exist.’ It’s an appealing satire of the political pretence to know best. Moreover, with a consistency which we would applaud in politicians, Shrigley also avoids expressing any views in his accompanying exhibition – in contrast with much ‘political art’. What visitors see are three vintage photographs blown up to poster size and a sculptural form like a set of MDF steps, the highest with the outline markings

of a crown. Shrigley associates the steps with an aspiration to seek truth by ascending nearer to God, but they can also be read as a bar chart of votes cast, or a podium which the winner will mount. The photographs are of: Yuri Gagarin, inverted as if spinning in zero gravity; a Soviet ground control; and a German family group in front of the sort of construction which looked like the future in 1970. Perhaps there is a further critique of aspiration here, but I suspect you have to like his show, just as you have to vote Shrigley, for what he doesn’t do rather than for what he does.

Oscar Santillan’s solo show at Copperfield became political by accident when Cumbria Tourism’s complaints about it reached the national papers. That took the young Ecuadorian artist by surprise, even though it was a provocation of sorts to remove what one might call the mountain tip – ‘the top inch’ – from England’s highest point on Scarfell Pike and display this small chip of rock as The Intruder, 2015. Maybe all publicity is good publicity, but that was a pity, as it struck me as the least interesting piece of a varied and imaginative exhibition. ‘To Break a Silence into Smaller Silences’ was at its best in exploring human and animal behaviours, and how the gap between them might be bridged. The Wandering Kingdoms, 2013, looked at how we relate to birds. It combined the notations which served to document their songs prior to the development of recording technologies, the broadcast of musical performances of those scores and photographs of the woodland environments in which the birds might be found. A close examination of the photographs revealed that

Oscar Santillan Armour 2015

| Reviews | Exhibitions |

MAY 15 | ART MONTHLY | 386 | 33 |

the musicians we could hear were secreted among the trees, calling to each other: they were behaving as birds, and finding them became our task as birdwatchers. Another effective conjunction was of two photographs: in La Clairvoyance, 2012, a horse in close-up observes a large bubble made out of its own semen, the form and function of which is echoed in Armour, 2015, by two eggs which have been caught mid-air above a man’s face such that their shadows appear to provide him with skull-like sunglasses – armour, one presumes, against the sun. Striking as those images are, the titles felt a little too insistent, and perhaps the multimedia presentation Afterword, 2015, also pushed a little too far. It identified the fascinating story of Nietzsche’s late dalliance with a typewriter that proved faulty but with which he persisted. Santillan’s presentation of the story and overlaying of the errors caused worked well, but I was less persuaded by the extension into the psychic claims of the daughter of the man who manufactured the Writing Ball typewriter in question.

Elizabeth Gossling, in ‘Burn’ at Tintype, runs a similar risk by focusing on the unusual figure of John Cura. He found a commercial niche in the 1950s and 1960s by photographing TV programmes from the screen in the period before recording technology enabled easy production of stills. He printed at least 250,000 images in order to sell them to magazines, actors and directors. Cura had built up a huge archive of television not otherwise preserved at the time of his death in 1969, which his widow is said to have burned in rage when the BBC refused them. The few remaining Tele-snaps

have become collectors’ items. Cura also photographed – often by deliberately causing – the wide range of defects encountered in TVs of the time, and used those images to illustrate popular advice booklets such as Correcting Television Picture Faults of 1960. Gossling’s question, then, is: what does she do with this man who experienced the image overload of the digital age in advance, hacked TVs the way artists now hack computer programmes and produced evocatively round-edged mass-observation screenshots of his time? In line with her wider practice of meshing old and new technologies, Gossling avoids simple re-presentation and fast forwards to the most recent scanning technology to make images of Cura (Bonfire, 2015) and of TVs he might have watched (Blowout, 2015). The man of many photographs is captured, to some extent, by a battery of 64 cameras, a photograph of his face smeared on in post-production. The scanned TVs are distorted appropriately by the technology’s inability to capture the reflective surfaces of their screens. The results, ash grey and crematorial, are presented life-sized as if on huge flat-screen TVs: cinematically proportioned and wall-mounted on TV brackets so they can be swivelled around. It is hard to be sure whether Gossling achieves a more interesting show than an archival display might have provided – perhaps she could have hunted down some election coverage – but we are drawn into Cura’s world through works which are effective in themselves.

Croatian David Maljkovic’s background makes it easy to see him as one of rather a lot of artists exploring how the souring of socialist aspirations can be read into Modernism, even as the ideals of both are absorbed into the ascendant capitalist paradigm. True, his early film Scenes for a New Heritage, 2004-06, used Bakic’s monument in Petrova Gora to examine what happens to a form when its ideology has departed (Reviews AM306). Yet his central concern now is arguably closer to Gossling’s: the matter of projection, both physically and as how we present or impose a view on the world. Consistent with that foregrounding of the formal over the political, his compact exhibition at Sprüth Magers covers the walls with life-size images of how his retrospective was installed at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, it also shows a film, Out of Projection 2009-14, of retired Peugeot workers revisiting the prototypes of planned but unrealised cars and turns superimposed elements of previous works into large collages, each titled New Reproduction, 2013. The effect is to shuttle between the present and the past’s expectations of the future in a way reminiscent of Gerard Byrne, and to recycle exhibition histories as work in the manner of Joëlle Tuerlinckx. So where is the conceptual originality in this attractive enough combination? Perhaps it lies in using the conditions and means of display to reveal how the apparent timelines and would-be certainties of the personal and the political are simultaneously fractured by the shifting tectonics of the post-analogue world. The result is that not only can’t we escape the spectral presence of the past, but also that we can’t build on it towards a meaningful vision of future. That sounds like a conundrum for Shrigley, should he be elected. z

PAUL CAREY-KENT is a writer and curator based in Southampton.

www.hansardgallery.org.uk An Intervention12 may – 27 june 2015

Shezad Dawood14 july – 5 september 2015

Elizabeth Gossling Headlock 2015

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CONTENTS May 2015 Issue No 386www.artmonthly.co.uk

COVER John Hilliard Western(1) 1999

1 INTERVIEW Cover Stories John Hilliard interviewed by Patricia Bickers

7 FEATURES Structuralism is Dead? Mark Prince finds reports of its death premature 13 Glocalisation Marcus Verhagen on site- specificity and the biennale

17 COMMENT EDITORIAL

18 NEWS ARTNOTES 21 OBITUARIES

Albert Irvin Stuart Croft

Drop City · NewBridge Project · Hatton Gallery · Workplace George Vasey32 London Round-up: IMT · Copperfield · Tintype · Sprüth Magers Paul Carey-Kent34 PERFORMANCE

Eva Weinmayr: Downing Street David Barrett35 New Art Spaces: Open House Eleanor Clayton36 BOOKS

Eddie Chambers: Black Artists in British Art Jonathan Harris37 Anthony Gardner: Politically Unbecoming – Postsocialist Art Against Democracy John Douglas Millar 38 LISTINGS

22 REVIEWS EXHIBITIONS

La Mer au Milieu des Terres / Mare Medi Terraneum Virginia Whiles23 Five Issues of Studio International JJ Charlesworth24 Encounters and Collisions Cherry Smyth25 Michelle Stuart: Trace Memory – Selected Works 1969-2015 Christopher Townsend26 Columbidae Galit Mana27 Devotions Lizzie Homersham 29 Li Binyuan: Social Behaviours Bob Dickinson Nicky Hamlyn: Zoetrope Sophia Phoca30 Newcastle and Gateshead Round-up:

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