imomus | Nathan Coley

My mother isn't a fan of contemporary art. She came with Hisae and me to Edinburgh's Dean Gallery on Sunday mostly to look at some surrealist paintings. Surrealism may have been deeply disturbing to bourgeois sensibilities seventy years ago, but now Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux paintings are reassuringly literary and pictorial -- quaint, even. The stuff I wanted to see was in "Off the Wall", the museum's collection of floor and ceiling-mounted work by contemporary Scottish artists like Jim Lambie and Martin Creed.

For my mother, a room with coloured tape on the floor, or filled with balls of different sizes and colours (Martin Creed's installation) is some kind of hoax or joke. She tut tuts at it. In a way, though, it's hardly any more challenging than the surrealism she likes -- cute formalism, diluted conceptualism with an accent on the decorative, the colourful, the playful. It brightens a grey Sunday in Edinburgh, anyway.

Something my mother and I could agree on, though, was the brilliance of the Nathan Coley installation "The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, Edinburgh 2004". This isn't part of "Off The Wall", though it could be. Two rooms have been turned into a scale model of all the places of worship listed in the Edinburgh and region Yellow Pages. Crammed together, the 286 churches, meeting rooms and mosques are made of cardboard and stand about four feet high. It took Coley six months (and some money from Bloomberg) to make, and you can spend a lot of time -- and have a lot of fun -- trying to recognize the buildings, towering over them like King Kong.

I ended up buying the Coley book There Will Be No Miracles Here (it's published by Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, but good luck finding a page about it on their re-designed website).

I find Coley's understatement interesting -- though the works are visually very pleasing, they're essentially architectural models, so they have something dry and restrained about them. There are camouflaged churches and mosques covered in Daniel-Buren-type stripes, a stage-set but-and-ben cottage set down in incongruous locations on the Isle of Bute, and some nice slideshows juxtaposing a Barratt home with descriptions of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, or ramshackle patina pigeon lofts with catalogue descriptions of upmarket conservatories and summer houses. Coley quotes Ruskin ("It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice") and seems to hunger for his spiritual seriousness, or Le Corbu's.

Coley (a Scot, like Lambie and -- by upbringing, anyway -- Creed) is up for the Turner Prize this year. He'd be my choice if I were on the jury. In fact, it's Michael Bracewell and Miranda Sawyer who'll decide. Oh, and Fiona Bradley, who directs Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery and wrote the introduction to the book about him. So I'd say he's in with a good chance (knowing Bracewell, I think he might be well-disposed towards him too). I also like Wallinger's appropriation of Brian Haw's Iraq protest art, banned from the lawn in front of the House of Commons. The winner will be announced on December 3rd.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kumakouji.livejournal.com

There was a report on the news this morning about an art instalation here that's just a giant glass box filled with thick mist that you can walk in.

I think contemporary art only really has one way forward and that's the creation of immersive enviroments, which will reach it's peak once we have virtual reality fine-tuned properly to the point we can create our own realities.

From:

kumakouji.livejournal.com

Oh, and just to clarify -- I know art installations have been prominant since the 1970s, theyre hardly new, however, they've very restricted by space and money. You would have to have a lot of money at your disposal to take installation art up a notch. Where as 2D art and 3D sculpture really has very few restrictions in terms of media available, installation art is still very restricted I think.

From: (Anonymous)

You're right that surrealism seems quaint now, and was in any case subsumed into popular culture as long ago as Hitchcock's Spellbound. But I have to say that a lot of contemporary art has a rather quaint feeling to it as well, only this time the reference is the sixties. Creed's lights going on and off? Could be some 60s conceptual piece. Coloured tape on the floor? Maybe some op art/pop art thing from the 60s. Or even the floor on the cover of a solo Syd Barrett album. In fact, with this return to the sixties it seems contemporary art is in pretty much the same place as contemporary rock. They both seem something of an exhausted medium, even if the genre restrictions of art are a little looser. (I'm guessing the main difference for you is that you're seduced by the glamour of art, whereas the glamour of rock, not so much.)

From:

kumakouji.livejournal.com

I think contemporary art in this era has reached the stage where it's restricted not by restraints upon ideas but by present technology. We just dont have the technology to progress further at this present time.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

I only ever bought rock albums for the covers anyway. When they switched to CD, that was really the beginning of the end.

I think the rock establishment has a tendency to reward relatively moronic and unoriginal beahviour, whereas the art establishment rewards relatively intelligent and original behaviour, although as you say there are only degrees of difference between them. But let me put it this way. On the cover of Q magazine this month is Oasis. Yes, Oasis. On the cover of Frieze is George Condo.

Andreas Gursky ("In Praise of Blandness") is the cover feature of Modern Painters, wheras Word puts Nick Cave and other "mavericks" on the cover. Gursky was born in 1955, Cave in 1957. Gursky is the more radical and relevant of those two, I think -- he's managed to photograph globalization, a pretty difficult feat -- yet it's Nick Cave who's being presented as a "maverick" (if you read the feature, this is mostly about the virtue of being unfashionable and how great Neil Young is) whereas Gursky is praising blandness. This is what I meant when I talked about Coley's "restraint". The rock world promotes conservative values aggressively, insisting they're radical ones. The art world is quietly deviant.

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