- Venue
- Bury Art Gallery
- Location
In Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Against The Day’ multiple narratives, colliding fictions and time-travel allow the author to play with the flow of early twentieth-century historical certainties. Within the novel’s pataphysical musings calcite (Iceland Spar) acts as a lens in to “ the architecture of dreams, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude”.
Fittingly, Iceland Spar gets a mention in the parallel columns of English and Icelandic of Lawrence Weiner’s ‘Untitled’ text work currently on show at Bury Art Gallery in an exhibition of works from the Reykjavik based Safn (‘museum’) collection of Icelandic and international art. Accumulated over 30 years by Petur Arason and Ragna Robertsdottir the pieces often reference Iceland and show a sympathy towards the concerns of minimal and conceptual art yet maintain a healthily independent perspective so often missing from contemporary art collections.
A sense of melancholic displacement accompanies many of the non-Icelanders works – geographical place as fictional space announcing a clash between imaginings and the tectonic shifts of elusive slippery reality: Weiner’s collage on graph paper ‘As It Is Said – As It Is Written’ carries a printed summarized history of Icelandic literature supplemented by enigmatic doodles including a compass star pointing north and the handwritten phrases “Moonlight In The Day” and “Sunlight In The Night”; three typed On Kawara letters announce “I Am Still Alive’; Roni Horn’s two photographs of a snarling stuffed fox (one front view, one back), set against a clinically neutral light blue, show an encounter with animal aggression forever deferred and set in an alien, un-enterable non-space.
A more introverted distancing and doubling is central to “Untitled’ by Por Vigfusson. In this mirror of layered red and green plexi-glass reflected objects sit in air made gelatinous by a sickly pink wash, the mirrors two constituent squares horizontally bisect any reflection and give a suggestion of a slightly doubled image not dissimilar to the crude optical layering of 3D glasses.
Not unsurprisingly landscape imagery features strongly. Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Untitled (Green River Project)’, a photographic image of an unfeasibly synthetic green river, a huge meandering ribbon of visual excess, becomes a heightened memory of flow mediated by digital means. Roni Horn’s ‘Untitled (A Brink Of Infinity)’ looks like a photograph of a stream hitting rocks or a hot geyser- all surface agitation and heavy spray. Two printed images of a man on a hillside gazing out of frame form Birgir Adresson’s ‘Drauma Joi’, any close examination destroyed by the optically disruptive mesh of Benday dots which formulate and ground the image.
In stark contrast to intimations of the sublime Rana Robertsdottir’s ‘Silver, November 2004’, a small tarnished rectangle of metal reminiscent of a printers eroded plate, sits mutely on the wall looking like an unearthed relic.
Tacita Dean’s large multi-panel ‘The Russian Endings’ almost seems like a theatrical compilation of the other elements of the show; throwing together old processed pictures of hot-air balloons, explosions, funerals, collapsing bridges, tethered dead whales, and communal groupings, all infected with tightly handwritten connecting thoughts, descriptions of objects and suggested camera angles.
The final impression of ‘Iceland’ is of an exhibition, which requires more space to allow the ambience of the art to be appreciated. ‘Iceland’ parts two and three, plus an accompanying overview publication, may begin to do justice to a collection which announces the centrality of the geographically marginal in re-invigorating any debates about arts function beyond the market-place.
