- Venue
- Coleg Menai
- Location
- Wales
Degree shows are not remotely the first port of call for someone looking to develop some critical writing. They come with all the messy realities that attach to practices in development. There are no incremental public validations over time. No exegesis to unpick. There is no big essay into which to sink ones teeth and, perhaps, take an oppositional view. On the one hand, for anyone aware of engagement with art at arms length – an Achilles heel of sorts for curators – this makes the task harder. Lacking completely the armature of the gallery (be under no illusions: these shows are of art in the tidied up studios of educational establishments, not in galleries) one is forced back on oneself when looking and this might result in a more direct engagement and account. Equally, one feels positively a considerable weight of aspiration, both individual and collective, a well as the echoes of institutional tussle. In these respects, Out to Lunch is perhaps no different to other degree shows assessed in this forum. It marks the culmination of studies for the third cohort to graduate from the BA Fine Art Course at Coleg Menai in north Wales under the perceptive and thoughtful guidance of Helen Jones and Emrys Williams.
Out to Lunch has all the knowing self-mockery that often attaches to these projects – the slightly childish handwritten details on the provisional ‘out to lunch’ door sign that forms the cover of what passes exiguously for a catalogue includes the word ‘exhibition’ mis-spelled, crossed out and corrected. Putting aside the implication the phrase carries that the students might not be compos mentis, a jokey given for those a few years out of school that might not wear particularly well for those in middle age with a career or two under their belts, what saves it – just – is the headed compliments slip on which it is written. Because of its presence, are we to infer that perhaps the art school is out to lunch, as much or more so than the students? This is important in that, in a time of considerable turmoil in higher education, it remains the only very small, and easy to miss, point of reference to the art school and all that it does or might stand for, in the whole exhibition. The haphazard impact of cuts (recent and/or imminent), rising fees, student debt, and a very real demographic shift with far reaching implications underway in the country as a whole, combine to create an unspoken elephant in the room. (More on elephants later.)
Taken as a whole, the show is one of individualists each addressing widely differing concerns in their respective contributions, which are, by turns, discreetly and dutifully polished. What is rather striking is the address of subjects already fairly well established in the canon, so to speak, rather than the terra incognita of the future. The future as a subject feels strangely absent, Rather it is memory, both personal and art historic that tyrannizes. Responses to – in no particular order – the dream world, the slippage between sculpture and installation, post-feminism, existentialism and the self, symbolism, and the conflation of the liberties of the state with the identity of nationhood, all figure considerably in the show. Although this could be a negative, it doesn’t really feel like it.
Upstairs, and feeling very much like the youngest of the pack, Melanie Archer‘s work has generation z written all over it. Who needs actions when you’ve got words? is a text piece in weathered metal and a trippy handwritten style serving to remind viewers that performance isn’t necessarily ‘where its at’, whilst simultaneously acting as a paean to the dry early 70s linguistic conceptualism that has been so comprehensively neglected in north Wales at the hands of a politely mannered cult of landscape. It is by turns lyrical and cryptic, and just the right side of precocious. In a show with most work fighting the architecture, this piece just seems to work and balances out the rest of her contributions, particularly those that feel more like an immaculately presented, yet barely there, stream of consciousness. Bizarrely, it holds together despite being placed on the back of what looks like a lavatory cistern at a little more than eye level around which a partition wall has been cut to fit. (The architectural peculiarities of the degree show space is a study in itself and every show I see never fails to throw up unique, often hilarious, logjams of frustration and expediency.)
A space around the corner is home to Jacqueline Leggatt’s particular take on the Welsh tourist industry. Although in danger of appearing less as art and more as an illustrated sociological investigation, there are nuggets of interest here, in particular the carefully measured and amusingly pedantic correspondence plotting her efforts to bring a simple typographic error to book. Reading her letters and their replies, one follows a chain of cause and effect through which one senses the complex slights and offences taken on the one hand and all the oversights, embarrassments and gooey cultural apologia on the other. The issue of Cymraeg remains potent, and this is a refreshing effort to present its complexities, although an over reliance on irony and humour feels slightly tired here, reflecting perhaps the omnipresence of an artist like Bedwyr Williams for whom this territory really is bread and butter. In her work Please bring a packed lunch, I’d like to think a tweak to the medium would solve this, but I fear the issue is more complex. The medium, a sort of ghastly mass production plastic (plastic photographs, plastic furniture, plastic graphics, plastic tourist tat), sits well at Coleg Menai, blending seamlessly with its lego colours and tired 1980s optimism. If you can get beyond this you might find that the real subject of her work remains a critique of bureaucracy or modern statecraft, if you will, applicable anywhere, regardless of language, creed or nationalism. In consequence, paradoxically, there might not need to be anything particularly Welsh to it. By ‘statecraft’ I mean the manner in which an aspect of our culture is possessed by a quango and then re-presented to us, the very act of which encourages us to notice those small things that get lost in the process, rather than anything that statesmen – who haven’t existed in this country for at least forty years – might have done. The task she hints at is important given the greater extent of the state in Wales than England, not to mention the stubborn refusal of the Welsh tourist industry to embrace anything but the most exhausted of stereotypes.
Rounding out the work upstairs is The Kist Barrow by Ceri Leeder, subtitled An Installation of the Teaming Mind and of Lives Never Called on to Live. For me it’s one of the shows highlights: a rambling hang of charcoal drawings collaged and abutted in such a way as to cover every available inch of wall, with a kist barrow (historically, a sort of storage chest on a single pair of wheels) slap in the middle of the room. Sure, it’s poorly lit and tatty round the edges, and the broken mirror on the floor and T. S. Elliott’s whimsy about houses doesn’t add much, but never mind. There is an appealing attitude and self-absorption to the drawings that is fairly rare, and the bonkers expressionism and convoluted composition does go some way to help her achieve her aim that it depicts, literally, the mind turned inside out. And then there’s the charcoal, a medium by turns talisman or shibboleth depending on your attitude to the late Peter Prendergast who started the Foundation Course at Coleg Menai some 30 years ago, from which this degree course sprung, and for whom it was the definitive and almost biblical tool of instruction.
Downstairs, Sue Beechey exercises the post feminism du jour in her self-portraiture. Large paintings, small works on paper and serialized photographs all serve to tie up the male gaze in knots. In an entirely female cohort of students, this line of enquiry is to be expected and once you are past the gender politics there are echoes a certain jouissance, particularly in the photographs. That said, and applicable to a number of artists here, particularly on the ground floor, there is a strong feeling of trammelled self-expression that sits somewhat uneasily with the obvious care put into a professional finish. The latter really is just a means to an end, not the end in itself. Opposite her, and also showing some engaging work in the corridor is Emily Kyle Morison, with a particular type of sculpture at once recognizable and impossible to pin down. It is easy to recognize since it has the jagged awkward look of amalgamation and the found object. Impossible to pin down since its jangled symbolisms and references are difficult to join up. It does allude to pain and suffering unlike any other work in the show, and reminds us of art’s timeless palliative function.
Regardless of the wheel of fashion, it’s refreshing, as well as a little unusual, to see painting deployed in a manner quite as traditional as that by Maureen Benson in her aggregates of small oils on canvas dispersed across a single wall. The overarching title, Nascentes Morimur, which translates roughly as ‘death from the moment of birth’, whilst in some respects neatly encapsulating the fate of painting in the modern age (and the broken up grid that the works sit in underscores this), the idea that a single body of work will lay the enormous complexity of the question to rest is harder to swallow. That said, the idea postulated that painting makes its primary engagement with art history and adamantly not, to my mind in this work, with popular culture marks the approach out as unique in the show. Elsewhere on the ground floor work by Linda Jones revels entirely in materiality and what may come of it, not as if the history of art never existed, but rather, slyly in avoidance of it. The teaching of craft is perhaps so strong here that its product is often presented as fine art with the assumption that aesthetics trumps history, and in this her work appears diametrically opposite to that of Benson. That said, Frame of Reference has an undeniable beauty.
Finally the show includes a number of related works by Antonia Dewhurst. Despite her work being located on both floors in different spaces, not to mention a film installation in a small airless room by the front door, there is a cohesion to it since, despite being a fairly complex exploration of the psycho-geographic overlaps of domestic and public space, the perambulation a degree show necessitates is seamlessly taken on board to allow the connections to work. In this, her work has a passing resemblance to some of the best work by Mike Nelson, but sans the weight of art history, and consequent lugubrious worthiness, that often attaches to it. On the ground floor, Gimme Shelter introduces her work, being an immaculately made set of tiny garden sheds and allotment shelters. The obvious care with which they are made makes each seem less like a dolls house prop, and, given the intricate use of digital photography, more like a modern day palekh. Dwell upstairs is a not quite hidden gem, an installation that directly takes up a particularly modern way in which we think of home. Set up, to my mind, almost precisely like a living room set at IKEA, open at one side to the thoroughfare, its attendant slideshow provides, like a palimpsest reversed, a window into the same home, in another time, and around its corners and through its doors other lives would have plotted their courses. In that ‘other’ world, that side of the celluloid that separates the ‘then’ and ‘now’, is a small gold elephant, a simple ornament which takes on a particular significance.
Dewhurst has constructed her installation in such a way that by the time you get round the corner to its second part you are, literally, almost the other side of the projection wall. Here, in a somewhat cramped room, suitably minimally dressed, is a peculiar sort of quadripartite viewing box, in which you glimpse the selfsame elephant negotiating a seemingly endless maze of corridors and doorways. The house in (or of) our mind was ever thus, and much like Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole, the elephant – and by extension we ourselves – perpetually play out to ourselves an endless, intensely personal, endoscopy. If ever there was a totem for which the Indo-Chinese superstition of ‘pointing your elephant at the door’ should apply, it is surely this one. The architectural detail within the box you quickly recognize as that in Dewhurst’s film downstairs, filmed as if by a somnambulist, but equally with an elephant’s eye view. To bring together these interrelated viewpoints and have it still hold together is an accomplishment and it brings to mind the Vancouver School, particularly the films of Dan Graham and Stan Douglas, which perhaps achieve in film that which Dwell seeks to approach in real space installation.
Out to Lunch was the 2011 BA Fine Art Degree Show at Coleg Menai, Bangor, Wales, and ran from 11 to 22 June 2011.
