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| Looking
for an opening - On Contemporary art in general and four emerging artists in particular Andrew McNamara |
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 David
Akenson, Roller, |
The sporting analogy might
suffice here. There is a field of contestation where you
encounter competitors, strategies and calculated moves.
Of course, this is both confronting and familiar. All
possible plays are anticipated. The moves are somewhat
choreographed, rehearsed, but the players are faced with
something largely unpredictable: the opportunity that
arises when things proceed otherwise within the field of
recognizable acts. Each looks for the opening. In contemporary art, it is the mutations of art practice that are the most incisive today. They constitute the play within the field of possibilities (practices, conventions and histories) that allow the unexpected to occur. The itinerary of contemporary art is comprised of mobile strategies that elicit social, personal and art-historical reference points. These are only viewed obliquely by way of obscure details, permutations, cryptic reference points and inference. The driving issue is not the late modernist differentiation of the two-dimensional from the three-dimensional, but rather objects conflating these possibilities. Its expression is not one of interiority or of uncovering an essence, but of uprootedness, as though contemporary art amounts to an intensification of what Siegfried Kracauer termed, extraterritorialism, as the putative modern condition. Mutations are pivotal to the practices looked at here. For example, in Peter Alwast’s work there is a fascination with a kind of viral arabesque. His works are forged and suspended upon a conflation of the seemingly incompatible combination of gestural and hard edge abstraction—the former standing for authenticity and depth, the latter a formal surface performativity. The resulting silicon-inspired formulations emit a gestural outbreak on what would otherwise be a bedrock of quite minimalist inspiration. On the other hand, Petalia Mackay seeks to paint three-dimensional paintings. She, too, is working off what, according to high modernist formalism, would be considered antithetical mediums— something like painting-sculpture. Mackay divides her canvases by means of the sparsest minimal gestures. For instance, the horizontal and vertical line divide the surface. Yet, in three-dimensional form, combined with their candy-like pastel colours, the works look anything but austere. Pip Haydon takes the candy-like association further. It is as though her work is composed of voluptuous confections. In her work colour and form combine in elaborate patterns that seemingly overflow from the surface to create three-dimensional objects composed of intricate decorative repetitions. While the colour combinations can tend toward the garish, her choices are also bold and exuberant. Each work is intricate and festive and, at their best, is not overwhelmed by the proliferation of visual highlights. In his own words, David Akenson’s work is 'roundabout'. Each meticulously crafted object floats around certain broad modernist propositions and various quotidian references without any direct outcome offered to the viewer. The works are like visual riddles and when they work well, they tease and forestall a response somewhere on the verge of recognition: are these toys, tools, and pieces of furniture or art-historical quotations? Their quizzical forms and candy-like colouring hint at some playful obsession, but form and colour often seem disjunctive in these works. This errant playfulness makes one ponder whether these are pieces of some game in which the rules are yet to be disclosed In the wake of Deleuze, you could typify this fascination in permutation as a baroque trait: fold within fold, elaboration upon elaboration. But while this description might be apt it may also be too convenient. Contemporary practice finds itself in an ambivalent position. It is, at once, wholly aligned, even indebted, to the trajectory of twentieth-century art and riven from its greatest ambitions. Looking at the late Sixties, the final erosion of a strong formalist argument about the course of contemporary art opened the way for trajectories of practice which did not then fit the bill, but have now become familiar. Lacking the singular coherence of the formalist explanation of modernism, artistic practice today can appear wholly unfathomable or, at least more telling in a contradictory way, it is not given to such a handy summary. By the end of the Sixties, modernist avant-gardism appeared to be collapsing in a frenzy of new and quickly rotating 'isms'. The rhetoric of avant-garde innovation had looked exhausted and appeared commonplace, verging on the trite. Its transgressions were expected and readily consumed. In 1968 Clement Greenberg complained that all that art needed was to be startling. As Greenberg argued: ‘It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling—or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized and part of safe good taste’. Greenberg had two complaints. Firstly, that the heterogeneity of approaches emanated from a common factor — the need to startle, an increasingly frantic need to be noticed and to offend polite opinion. This was a remnant of modernist transgression. Secondly, that the safe, good taste of startling innovation, which Greenberg is keen to disparage, only disguised or confused the issue of taste proper. Amidst total confusion, Greenberg confidently asserts that true taste discriminates good from bad. One way of discerning qualitative differences is to look at the duration of styles. The indicator of substance being the time during which a style is, in Greenberg’s explanation, "the vessel of the largest part of the important art being produced in a given medium within a given cultural orbit." What’s different today is that taste does not have the bulwark of the given medium on which to hang its legitimacy. In fact, it is the assumed giveness of the medium that is most at stake in contemporary practice. And no longer do we experience the sensation of a spectacular turnover of 'isms'. Indeed, the once momentous programs of trangression only occur now as fads, fashions and partial revivals. Much of contemporary practice today maintains an ironic attitude to modernist avant-gardism and its twin values of innovation and transgression. Gone is the assumption that the transgressive act is above and beyond what it criticized and rebuked. And with it, the pure and external stance of the avant-garde, that once hovered in some imaginary netherworld, free from complicity with the bourgeois status quo or fraught institutions that it constantly reviled. In contemporary practice, two very general attitudes are evident in relation to the issue of innovation as transgression. The first approach employs a masquerade of various identities, practices and procedures. This strategy of surface effects presumes a certain transgression—or, at least, violation—of certain taboos or social limits and thus assumes a playfully disruptive stance. Yet, it is a highly ambivalent mode, which often remains unsure whether it is rebuking, or complicit with that which it engages. As though a subversive Fifth Columnist, this form of camp porady is always already seduced in an ironic embrace because it invests so much in identity. It seeks to uncover nothing other than its own display of self-fulfilling artifice and thus proves very faithful to the deceit of an uncompromised transgression. A second stance is evident in the work of the artists discussed here. This position regards avant-garde propositions as forming part of a suspended inventory. Key modernist values such as innovation and transgression, as well as the conventions of its procedures, are greeted as though they are petrified. For this very reason, the values and practices of modernism appear static and listless; yet they are always and only capable of being redeployed. One distinct feature of this redeployment is that so little of contemporary practice strives to establish the parameters of a given medium. The work involves a range of media, but also seeks to establish itself within its context or environment. This latter approach has no recourse to the triumphant anti-institutionalism of past avant-gardes where isolation meant a defensive position, and anti-institutional formulations were espoused in a blitzkrieg of iconoclastic fervour. Nor does contemporary art necessarily involve a banal repetition of the already accepted, but it can never escape historical memory. Instead, contemporary practice gears itself to cunningly acute elaborations within the cracks of a highly developed, long familiar retinue of modernist practice. It seeks to activate critical possibilities dormant within the modernist legacy. It seeks what it cannot fully control and cannot adequately foresee. The works discussed here are derived from practices open to contingency within specific frameworks. It is as if a certain art-historical attentiveness produces a playful, colourful exposition of possibilities and processes that derive from problems or issues bequeathed by late modernism. These are rather obsessive practices at that; they are built up on the basis of an endless layering, lacquering, manipulating and contorting. Such practices, in turn, give way to references to other obsessions and memories or dislocated associations of colour, form and personal histories. In Alwast’s, Haydon’s and Mackay’s works, the processes involved engage the edge of the paintings as much as the focal, facing surface. Haydon, in particular, has applied highly ornate patterns to the edges of her work and left the surface a simple monochrome. To this extent, the works can appear literally excessive as they overflow and spill out of some notional frame termed 'painting'. While all four artists apply paint to a surface, painting with a brush on a canvas seems a rather remote activity. Akenson pursues a more directly sculptural path, by contrast, yet his highly crafted objects are equally pursued and developed to such a point of fabrication that truth to materials no longer has any meaning. Like inserts in circulars, materials are wrung out to the point where paint lends a wholly plastic quality to the craftwood supports. Here, subtle modes of fabrication and artifice become the incendiary devices of the quiet revolutionaries of style. What remains intriguing about contemporary art is not the identification of a grand narrative, a common thread that ties it all together. Instead, what compels attention is the proliferating permutations that twist and turn upon modernist dictums and art-historical conventions. As one improvises practice, one must improvise taste and judgment. And, as Walter Benjamin argued, "Fruitless searching is as much part of this as succeeding". Andrew
McNamara © the artist |
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 Peter
Alwast, Intestinal |
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Pip Haydon, Squeeze
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 Petalia
Mackay, SB number |
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Pip Haydon, Red
& black |
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 David
Akenson, Circulars, |
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 Peter
Alwast, Haptic, acrylic |
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