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Responding
To History
Mark Glazebrook
Looking through
Time Out, which can be culpably capricious about which exhibitions
it lists, I came across a show with an intriguing title. The gallery,
which opened last October, is called Transition and is next to the
wine merchant Threshers, in a leafy London village near Victoria
Park, Hackney where many artists live.
Transition, which rather sensibly is open at weekends only, is a
space which has been given temporarily to Cathy Lomax, the painter.
With a light hearted and witty show curated by Paul Murphy, the
photographer and video artist, the gallery makes up in charm and
intelligent presentation for what it lacks in size. Naturally, it’s
a little less sensational than the trend-setting Sensation at The
Royal Academy but in its own small way the show is more intelligible
than was a subsequent Tate Britain theme exhibition of three years
ago called, somewhat meaninglessly, Intelligence.
The portentous title of the impish little show under discussion
is Sense and Sensibility: Artists Take on Art History. The work
of thirty artists is on shown, They have all been invited to make
a small work in response to an aspect of art history. Four of the
artists, including the curator, show videos. Since these videos
are shown in sequence on one small television in the corner of the
room they do not frighten the photographs or the paintings, some
of which are both legible and good. Pauline Thomas presents ‘Wanderer
Above the Sea of Fog’ after the painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
Two days before seeing this video I had been in a room of Friedrichs
in Dresden, near beautiful and romantic Saxon Switzerland which
so inspired the German master, and I therefore report with authority
that Pauline Thomas has got it absolutely right – Friedrich’s
elusive, understated, piercingly simple spirit, that is. Her camera
was held still. Thereby letting the boulders, the clouds and sea
do the work.
On the other hand, Nicky Magliulo’s quite funny video ‘Under
My Thumb: The Stones, My Mum & Russell Hobbs’, described
optimistically as ‘a quiet, fugitive intervention into mid-sixties
art and rock’ has the most tenuous of art-historical connections.
It begins with the artist’s mother on the telephone: she has
turned down a date with Mick Jagger, for some reason.
Certain works in this show refer to more than one artist from the
past. In a beautifully painted oil on copper self-portrait of a
crying lady, Nadia Hebson ‘takes on’ Rogier van der Weyden
and Hans Membling and an unspecified crying lady at the base of
a deposition in the Prado. Nadia hebson is a painter to watch. ‘The
Gestation of Venus’ by Arabella Lee evokes Boticelli’s
‘Birth of Venus’. Venus has yet to emerge so we see only
the shell at the bottom of an actual wood and glass box. The box
calls to mind the magical Joseph Cornell. As the artist explains:
‘she eventually rose out of the sea because Cronos’s testicles
were dropped into it by his son Zeus’.
Other artists ‘referenced’ as the homemade catalogue puts
it include Robert Smithson, Van Gogh, Marcus Harvey, Bernini, Wayne
Thiebaud and Jackson Pollock. Styles of art from Lascaux cave painting
to 20th-century minimalism are engaged. Olly Beck has contributed
‘Mystical Density Fibres’, a perfect and modestly priced
version of that ‘mysterious icon of modern art’, the monochrome
painting. In Beck’s version even the paint (but not the varnish)
has been subtracted. Clement Greenberg comes in for a mild roasting
from Isha Bohling for negating the word ‘beauty’ and various
aspects of Modernism are politely questioned or poked fun at. Daedalus,
alias Paul Lewis, contributes a ‘Sense and Sensibility Smorgasbord’
which aims, apparently, to constitute a ‘complex critique of
20th-century art history’.
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