INTERFACE

REVIEW

Straylight Cavern

Cooper Gallery, Dundee
15 November - 13 December

Reviewed by: Alex Hetherington »

Douglas Coupland, the Canadian author of Generation X and Microserfs, and a visual artist, observed as a motivation for his work a despondency at being denied the opportunity to "see the twenty-fifth century". His 'generation' of principally male artists growing up in the 60s, 70s and 80s, shared this frustration and limitation by transporting themselves into the 'future' through their own imaginary, devised narratives. These were pulled from the cinema and TV: 'Logan's Run', 'Barbarella' and 'Space 1999', and by employing action figures, toy spacecraft and Blue Peter-style homemade aesthetics. Additionally, Peter Griffin in the animated series 'Family Guy' observes in a pastiche of the original Star Wars film that it was "a long, long time ago, yet somehow in the future". These past/present/future amalgamations find nostalgic residence in the music of The Future Sound of London (ISDN) and Boards of Canada (Music has the Right to Children), and art such as the cyborg sculptures of Lee Bul and Daria Martin's film 'Soft Materials'.

Richard Priestley and Milika Muritu, artists, directors and curators of Cell Project Space, London, enlarge on this retro-futurism of laser-beam cinema, spaced-out imagination, DIY aesthetics, A.I. terminology and a dilapidated trust in the future's utopian promise through their installation 'Straylight Cavern'; the title of which is derived from sci-fi visionary William Gibson's novel 'Neuromancer'.

Their outrageously spellbinding, intense curatorial experiment demands of its artists and audience to succumb to the atmosphere, ideologies and enveloping disposition of Gibsons' fictional survivalist scenarios and Priestley's own imaginative take on the sci-fi genre. This gels art and audience together, immersed within a crudely built Logan's Run-style imitation ice grotto of cloth, wood and clingfilm, while this enforced collaborative technique refuses separate readings of the work, which includes video, sound, animation and sculpture, implementing a harmonising, anti-authorship, re-contextualising of practice, curator, image, artist, object and space. The 'ice cavern' itself is a sculptural, psychological intricacy, meandering channels bringing the observer back to adolescent adventure, opening up to a central bubble of wonders, a sanctuary wrought with synthetic celebrations and blissed-out self-awareness.

'Straylight Cavern's impulse is its scrutiny of the creative continuum between artist and curator, audience and experience, and is best expressed by its equation of anti-authorship propositions, with the unflinching abduction of the fantastical cinema experience from glittering screen, transposed in a bedroom reality. I was impressed by its complex, mischievous staging of individual practices: Jonathan Baldock's humanoid, decorative busts in salt-dough seen against Angelo Plessas' interactive gaming videos; Aisling Hedgecock's pearly polystyrene sculptures beside Rick Buckley's post-apocalyptic monochrome close-up videos of landscapes in clutter, glass, skin and dry-ice; Ian Monroe's elaborate vinyls juxtaposed with Michael Bell-Smith's pixel vistas; an incessant bleep and glitch soundtrack with cheap plastic set-designs and a drug-like voyage through mutating colours in Takeshi Murata's animation. Through these associations, the curators argue for dialogues about the nature of the singular, artistic vision and the consumption of art as commodity; its audacious approach mirrors the activism of permissive culture and its scrutiny of authority, re-enactment and copyright.

I was captivated by the references this show sets up: 70s fantasy cinema intertwined with post-rave electronica, contrasting graphic languages and its pervasive distorting surfaces. Equally I share their enthusiasm for the live mix and synchronisation of multiple genres and materials and an interrogation of the nature of the exhibition: specifically, thematic group shows and a radical rethinking, in its icy volumes, of the purpose of the 'white space'. Its value is embedded in this strategy, a resonance between promoting personal relationships to its eccentric subject matter and an enquiry around the correlation between style, time, artist, curator, gallery and audience.

'Straylight Cavern' is showing at Cell Project Space, London until 1 March.

Writer detail:
Visual artist and writer based in Scotland and the USA.

www.alexhetherington.net

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