Nathan Coley
May. 15th, 2007 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy 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.
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.