- Venue
- Bury Art Gallery and Museum
- Location
- North West England
The Flatness OfIrony.
That popular late-1980’s art-world mainstay irony hasreached Bury Art Gallery. At least it has within the title of the exhibition ofdrawings ‘The Irony Of Flatness’- presumably the reference to irony extends tothe un-ironic use of the term irony. Or maybe not.
Confronted with the shows title, once the temptation toresort to irony’s uncouth relative sarcasm has passed, the drawings on displayprove to be a mixed bag.
Karin Sander’s six drawings, produced between 1993 and 1996,distil the essentials of drawing into basic arrangements of pencil hatchingsand raised lines and groupings of staples. They are almost completelyunreadable outside their own rules of display, their indifferent disposabilitymake them a compelling sequence of hermetically sealed landscapes of placementand balance of inconsequential marks.
Equally spartan is what appears to be the retro-cool designsensibility, teetering on optical effect, of Kristjan Gudmundsson’s ‘Faster And Slower Lines’. As it isactually from 1976 I couldn’t get rid of the image of the red stripe down theside of Starsky and Hutch’s car. It’s hard to revisit a point in time in whichtwo horizontal pilings of differently weighted red lines could be anappropriate response to a historical moment, but they still radiate theconfidence of a focused application and seem to sit on the wall waiting for theviewer to catch up with them.
Rachel Goodyear’s drawings veer from comic representations,an adolescent’s attempts to fix an image of self-regarding hormonal confusion,to sophisticated musings about the act of visually negotiating the space of adrawing. Often, obsessively detailed areas of drawing are isolated in the deadwhite of a rectangle of paper. Here, in ‘Two Birds’, two scruffy sparrowsstranded bottom left are accompanied by what appears to be an abbreviated andtruncated shopping list. The implied dead hours of a day, apparently spent onautomatic pilot, prove to be time spent considering the difficulty of editingand transposing experience into the strait-jacket of drawing’s constraininglanguage.
Irritatingly, the drawing is exhibited horizontally on aplinth under a glass case surround, which destroys its studied casualness.
Similarly presented, but to better effect, is sculptorUlrick Ruckriem’s ‘Untitled’; a milky smudged layering of angled blocks echoingthe large, simple stone slabs of his free standing sculptures. Ruckriem’spresence points to the potential to refer to flatness on the horizontal planebut it’s here that the wheels come off the vehicle. In Stefan Gec’s ‘Untitled(Channel Tunnel)’ DVD projection a birds-eye viewing point pans over theanaemic white of a three-dimensional diagrammatic transportation system. The expansive tabletop flatness, interrupted by the vertical line of diminishingfencing posts, unfortunately, emphasises the literal and metaphorical surfaceflatness of the work.
The other projection piece, Marianne Eigenheer’s ‘DancingChairs, Walking Woman, Cairo’ is visually confusing and unsuccessful: staticimages of a variety of empty chairs recorded in the doorways and streets of Cairo, viewing platforms of social power for the local men, are alternated withEigenheer’s simple curving drawings, which are supposed to reflect the artist’ssolo wanderings through the city. The drawings are un-engaging, unconvincingmannered impersonations of drawings which disrupt the effective simplicity ofthe battered static chairs, with the potential for the juxtaposing ofalternating planes completely overlooked.
Art magazines and broadsheets’ life-style sections havetrumpeted the resurrection of drawing as a medium, however loosely defined, forquite a number of years now. Both are guilty of proudly announcing the relativeaffordability of drawings as investments and the indulgent pleasure of owning aslice of contemporary ‘noughties’ culture. The sheer complexity of theoperations of flat images, marks and lines presented vertically activating analternative space for imaginative play, or proposing models of difference, israrely addressed. Some of the work here attempts to unpick itself in an effortto re-examine the potential of drawing as a self-critical enterprise, but ‘TheIrony Of Flatness’ fails as a cohesive exhibition because it attempts to coverall bases under the umbrella of a title which is ultimately meaningless.
Paul Cordwell
Bury Art Gallery, Bury, Lancashire
19th July – 8th November.
