- Venue
- Shed Gallery, 28 Sedbergh Park, Ilkley LS29 8SZ Tel.0194 336 07841
- Location
- North West England
The first thing to note is that ‘The Tate’ in this instance is a shed in an Ilkley backyard. While it’s not just any shed – but in fact a seasonally open, non-commercial gallery slowly building a good reputation- it is not ‘The Tate’. The ‘Lister at the Tate’ title echoes a long-ago Francis Bacon retrospective, tinged with self-deprecation typical of Yorkshire-born Andrew Lister, and a modicum of aspiration (if anyone from the real Tate, lawyers aside, is still reading). In truth, it’s less flippant than accurate: everything on view is also a pairing of an unknown with a blue chip art world name.
This grouping of Andrew Lister’s work could also be considered a response to the Tate’s collection. It’s a series of appropriations and portraits referencing Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Michaelangelo and Goya, amongst others. The subject matter is varied, but at the same time single-source: it’s work and artists that Lister likes from the Western Canon– often ones he came across early on in his own art education.
But the diversity of Lister’s presentation at ‘the Tate’ doesn’t end with the subject matter. This show has drawing, painting and marquetry in different combinations and styles on wood, ceramic, textile and paper. The choice of representational strategy and medium is traditionally driven by the subject matter, but Lister’s choices are determined by the object on which he’s painting or drawing. They certainly aren’t calculated to make his task easy. Take the choice of a farmhouse draining board: this corrugated, mid-toned hardwood surface looks like it repels not only water, but graphite, let alone any attempt to render a perfectly-proportioned body. Yet Lister has chosen this relic of home life for his homage to Michelangelo with a classical figure study.
He describes work as putting wrong things together, in quirky combinations of quotations from art history and well-crafted junk. Lister strives for a way to make his well-known subject matter fresh in itself and to the object, which has its own cultural context. This necessitates playing down the (considerable) technical skill involved, so that the resulting work and its own internal relationship become dominant. Lister also strives to make an object: “that is hopefully beautiful”.
After spending some time in front of Lister’s work it becomes clearer that he as much a fan of the objects upon which he’s working as he is of Mondrian, Holbein, Hamilton and Crivelli. The latter is the more rarefied taste, enveloping chunks of weathered wood, twee English cottage ceramic plaques and the backs of old mirrors. Lister’s admiration is a mix of veneration for the work of the anonymous craftsperson and a museum curator’s respect for the incomplete or damaged artefact. This is the kind of connoisseurship builds through prolonged exposure, so it’s no surprise to learn that, after a stint as a Leeds College of Art tutor, he owned a second hand shop.
My far-and-away favourite fusion of ‘wrong’ subject-objects is Dead Christ in the Tomb (after Holbein). Jesus is portrayed side-on and in a crypt as in the original, but this meticulous copy is in acrylic on a jay-cloth. The original is thought to be a predella – a small painting on the lowest part of an altarpiece, positioned correspondingly on the lower third of the jay-cloth. Of all the re-usable tools in the contemporary kitchen, the jay-cloth is certainly the cheapest and most short-lived. It’s also highly absorbent, making for a harrowing technical challenge.
But is it meant to be daft or dark? Like Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary, the work isn’t a statement about a religious figure, but a painted object. Here Lister brings recognisable subject matter and an equally recognisable household item into unlikely union, setting up an internal dialogue that is so equivocal that it is almost its own metaphysical feedback loop. Reflexive art knows a few varieties, but Lister’s is grounded in art-for-art’s sake aestheticism and is partly self-referential, in terms of the way the image is interacting with the object, and partly homage.
Marquetry is another medium that Lister makes skilled use of in image-objects and text-objects. In Hello Mr. Mondrian, an old wooden worktop is inlaid (in piano key ivory) with a conversation whose content is nebulous enough to ebb away naturally, just as the composition of the work reaches completion. If you weren’t already aware of the right-left brain exercise in front of you, this skilful deflection from legible meaning forces contemplation of the subject-object relationship. With all its nicks and scars at eye-level, the hardwood’s history is inescapable. The artist has literally brought his subject and object onto one plane, and they are definitely in dialogue. For me, the most discernible words are, “the guy likes Mondrian.”
Mondrian gets another treatment in Mondrian with Mondrian, a carefully-judged juxtaposition of a monochrome portrait of the painter above a painted reproduction of his work. Lister is always politely, but resolutely non-prescriptive about the reading of his work. There is “nothing to explain.” It is “a documentary painting of the artist and one of his works.” It makes you wonder why Lister hasn’t yet made work that quotes Frank ‘what is there, is there’ Stella.
However: What Lister will talk about, with regard to this or any other of his works, is how what is there got there. For Mondrian with Mondrian, his process included various artistic, formal and technical dead-ends and retrenchments that arose from the found object – in this case a found frame. In this work and others, Lister’s process is so fraught and protracted that the ‘documentary’ moniker is equally applicable to the painting’s support. Not infrequently, Lister uses trompe l’oeil painting or resets carved wood in order to correct or restart a work. For the careful viewer then, many of Lister’s works are also an index of making.
Not far away, at the British Art Show 8 in Leeds, the life of objects as initiators of action and nodes on the networked present and much else besides, is the subject of much artistic investigation and pure effort. After looking at Andrew Lister’s work, you can only conclude: ’t was ever thus.
