- Venue
- Supersaurus
- Location
- Wales
Despite the erratic opening hours, Supersaurus has established itself as a valuable venue for showcasing emerging artists in South Wales. The space that is Supersaurus is an unexpected place to exhibit art. From the outside it is innocuous, passable-by as I did twice whilst looking for it, utterly unrecognizing it as a place to see art; barely seeing it sandwiched between the dereliction and official urbanity that is Swansea. On the inside it is youth-centre-esque, complete with comfortable corner tattily furnished with sofas and coffee tables and a further, larger table that doubles (online social networks reveal) as the sometime site of leisurely ping-pong battles. The true identity of the place is revealed in the details: piles of art magazines, apiological (honey bee-biased) posters on the walls and the partitioning folding screens that reveal/conceal the strange and wondrous objects of the proprietors’ practices.
A further area has been reserved for the exhibition of artworks. This dedicated area is intimately small. A single entrance leads inwards dramatically reducing wall space when its door is open. On this occasion the exhibited works are Tom Goddard’s black, fine-tipped ink pen drawings. Every minute and visable scratch and stroke of the nib evidences the time each work has afforded the artist. The format of their making is constrained, dictated by a series of self-imposed restrictions, repeated throughout. There are all drafted on everyday A4 white printer paper. The layout of each work is also standardized but simultaneously steeped in art history tradition: the mystical, mathematical golden ratio, an ancient means of achieving fundamental compositions of beauty and balance. Within each there is drawn a larger central motif, most often figures, surrounded by other lesser-sized people, objects, icons and logos. Closer inspection identifies many of the subjects and objects drawn from recognizable sources, from history, newspapers and televisions. It dawns that the exhibition poster is not a memorial to some dead artist who was born in 1961 to live fast and burn out all too soon at the young-for-some age of thirty-eight. Instead the span refers to this beginning of Goddard’s backward travelling, illustrated version of history with each drawing representing one of the years between 1999 and 1961. A work in progress then with an ambitious plan to traverse the whole of human history tracing back our genealogies through celebrities, politicians and other apes.
A game begins between the small numbers of viewers who can cram into the room and still view. A game of recognition, some we win, some we lose; name that face, that invention, that logo, that outrage, name that year; no give-aways here like a linear hang. Together the viewers draw out buried memories of times past. We can associate certain events with occurrences in our own lives, we remember where we were when this and that happened. We are seemingly brought together by our engagement with this art and its depictions of histories.
This is no Wikipedia in ink, but a thoroughly researched, meticulously planned, intricately and obsessively drawn catalogue of the late twentieth-century; a graphic taxonomy of world politics, events, inventions and pop culture. The artist’s self-proclaimed ignorance spurred him on to create his teleological version of events, selected and rejected according to his own preferences and interests that reveals as much about the artist as it does history. And what we find, what we are told, is that nothing changes. Our fears and paranoia of our imminent demise by ideological, technological or sociological means: war, terrorism, mass-reproduction, starvation, disease remain the same, the focus, the perpetrators may fluctuate and relocate, their messages, demands and desires for the world may change; but the means remain the same. We are fearful, creative and destructive bastards.
Then there are the films, black-humoured, flash animations, rendered in a style locatable somewhere between Hokusai and Hergé, that simply and quite beautifully depict possible apocalyptic endings to the artist’s illustrated cycle of repetitions. An end not by the inhumanity of humanity but by nature: fire, ice and flood; the tsunami bearing down on this civilization, the melting ice-caps submerging all we know, the unbearable hellish heat as the world burns. Nature is the blood-lusting dictator with holocaust in mind, the extreme fundamentalist who will cleanse us. These are the somewhat pessimistic, or possibly realistic, endings we have in store, the true threat to humanity. All we need do is carry onwards as we always have, headlong to our doom.
The message may be grim, the outlook gloomy, but there is a sense of optimism, for this is the most engaging exhibition of works I can remember seeing. This is art that is meaningful and inclusive, that relays messages that can be understood by all, that shakes us from complacency, that generates dialogues and opinion exchanges, that makes people talk to one another, to strangers, about the art and relate it to themselves. This is art that breaks down difference, creating momentary micro-topias from which we can see the world afresh. Perhaps now armed with a new sense of communal togetherness, with new insight we can break the cycle of the past, we can become impervious to flood and flame, we can survive Goddard’s apocalyptical futures or at best we can drown or burn in one another’s arms.
