Cedar Lewishohn
hiding in a hole somewhere south of Tikrit. The world is watching and waiting
in anticipation to see what happens next.
Meanwhile, back in Glasgow I’m looking at the work of Polish painter
Piotr Janas. Sloppy yet refined, his medium scale abstracts are primarily
white, black and red (with the odd dab of sky blue or dark green). To call this
stuff retro would be like saying Dolly Parton has a mildly pronounced chest. In
truth there is nothing but retro. Imagine a Kiki Smith performance painted by Cy
Twombly with some early 80’s arcade graphics thrown in for good measure and
you’re just about there.
So what makes this work new? Not the format, or the materials, and
definitely not the aesthetic. In which case its left down to that old chestnut
of “context” to drag the work into
the world of now. There are no rules in art, so artists aren’t obliged to
reference the time in which they live. If we look at the best art from the past
however, it all seems to reflect the time in which it was made. And this is
perhaps what’s missing from Janis’s equation. Displayed alongside the paintings
was a scattering of sculptural pieces by recent graduate Daniel Bell. The works
had the look of a Franz West’s sculpture made by Brian Griffiths circa 1997.
The use of a table for a plinth also brought Franz West to mind. Unfortunately
the sculptures lacked the clumsy delicacy of Griffiths or the logic-defying
zaneyness of West, and had no salient virtues of their own.
By the time I’d descended into the depths of Transmission’s second
gallery space my thoughts were again with tyrant Dictator Saddam Hussein. I
imagined his dug out hide away was something like the basement I was now
entering, maybe a bit smaller and minus the art of course. (Though it was
rumoured Saddam had kept a Richard Prince screen print with him the whole time
he was on the run.) The downstairs gallery housed a separate exhibition by Mick
Peter, which featured a half-finished wall made of large grey bricks.
“Untitled” (2003), was probably the best thing in both shows simply because it
had the balls to be a total bit of shit. While the work upstairs was little
more than pastiche, Peter’s star piece took a devil-may-care attitude, and
succeeded on those terms. Devoid of colour, technical adeptitude or any sense
of conventional beauty, the work at least inspired a fleeting sense of wonder.
Peter’s nonchalant slackness was shot to bits with the addition of five
shabbily displayed A4 prints (a couple of which showed promise) and a seriously
wack over-scaled trompe oeil armchair frame. In the end, the main
problem with the two shows at Transmission Gallery in December 2003 wasn’t just
lack of ambition, humour or originality— because there’s loads of great art
that doesn’t have any of those things. The main problem was the art just wasn’t
very interesting to start with.
style=’mso-char-type:symbol;mso-symbol-font-family:"Times New Roman Special G1"’>©
lang=EN-GB style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> Cedar
Lewisohn 2004
