- Venue
- Hatton Gallery
- Location
Bringing together the work of artists separated by both time and distance is a problematic affair; the desire to shoehorn disparate works into the digestible framework of a cohesive whole can rob them of individual impact. This show is clearly at risk from this, presenting work produced by wholly unconnected artists over a vast timescale – there is no single point being made; instead, the pieces represent highly individual responses to the personal and psychological insecurities inherent in everyday life.
Each piece seems to document a particular obsession – Katarzyna Jozefowicz’s Paper comprises of dozens of thinly-sliced strips of newspaper wound tightly like rolls of celluloid, each providing tangible evidence of the hours of labour and concentration invested in their creation. Mark Lombardi’s pencil illustrations map out the complex, corrupt affairs of America’s financial elite in an elaborate and precise manner – a wholly different subject to Jozefowicz, but the product of similar hours of meticulous industry. Sophie Calle’s stalker-lite Hotel Rooms subject the belongings of unsuspecting tourists to forensic examination, with all items of interest photographed and logged. The searches are so careful and fastidious that it is hard to feel any outrage at these eerie violations of privacy; rather, it is the compulsive, inexplicable behaviour of the artist herself that attracts us.
The most intriguing works are those of Henry Darger, the archetypal “outsider” of “Outsider Art”. Seven large-scale watercolours from Realms of the Unreal – the unpublished illustrated novel that consumed much of his life – fill a small room in the gallery. We wander between these works, hung like precious Japanese scrolls, and witness Darger’s mind spill out over the pages, somewhere between childish daydreams and sinister adult fantasies. The viewer contributes little if anything to the paintings – they are unmistakably of the artist, a dialogue between the individual and his compulsions, one to which we are not intended to be party and can scarcely begin to understand.
In Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performances, he consciously adopts the role of the outsider, pledging to live outdoors, be confined to a cell, or tied to a woman for a year. We cannot hope to comprehend the ways in which these protracted performances affected the artist, something which seems to be accepted here as these acts are documented by only sober monochromatic posters that explain the rules for each performance. Roberto Cuoghi goes even further, having spent ten years disguised as his father, and in doing so subjecting himself to the weight gain and health problems inherent in the obese and elderly. The purpose is unclear; the act itself is not documented, save for a single staged photograph. The artwork is not in the gallery; it has expired, survived only by the idea itself, and subject to the manipulation of our imaginations.
Are we intended to simply marvel at the resolve and dedication of these artists? We are undoubtedly one step apart from them; their personal projects have been completed and we observe them detachedly, as historical relics. Some of the works here were never intended for the gallery environment and cannot be fully appreciated within it. Indeed, the sole commissioned work exhibited here – a large-scale sculpture by Mike Nelson – is simply too aware of its status as a curated art object to sit happily with the other exhibits. What we are presented with, however, are records of lives lived deliberately, and bubbling under the surface, the incitement for us to approach our own lives in an equally deliberate fashion.
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