- Venue
- Intermedia, CCA
- Location
- Scotland
… I watched enthralled from the empty deck as, every day, for the space of a few minutes, in all quarters of a horizon vaster than any I had ever seen before, the rising and the setting of the sun presented the beginning, development and conclusion of supernatural cataclysms. If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appearances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then – so it seemed to me – I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession; however strange and peculiar the experiences to which anthropological research which expose me, there would be none whose meaning and importance I could not eventually make clear to everybody. – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John & Doreen Weightman, (New York; Penguin Books, 1973), 62
“the ponderous illusions of solidity, the non-existence of things, is what the artist takes for ‘materials.’” Robert Smithson
“One needs to consider that the gallery is a dramatic, theatrical cavity. ” Jannis Kounellis
“Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form — confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.” Gordon Matta-Clark, Anarchitecture, circa 1973-76
Kate V Robertson’s intertwining impulses – subverting, failing, malfunctioning, predictions of obsolescent, instinctive fabrications, miscommunication – materialize through lines of intermittency. This is sometimes turbulent, often disordered, but always ephemeral; a constitution in the elusive. Similar to a group of her peers, she works with diverse materials: performance, found objects, lexicons of abrasive imagery, video, text and sculpture, and while this may form a common expectation, for Robertson’s practice it predicates a habit for the sensuously transformative. Each part or preoccupation the concurrence of a desire to activate, instate and retreat, an instinct to work with materials and conditions as they are found and how they might correspond, unite, embrace, excite or insult each other. Word has it she’s making clouds over Scotland, an atmospheric installation in a sky of chance, fluctuation and attraction to gravity, is fabricating a rippling wall, pitting architectural surfaces and practicality against a simulated effervescent adaptation of itself, is spilling inks on newsprint in the hope of recreating the handless decay of a found image, is making a man’s shirt sleeve into bewildering game of voyeurism, haziness and delay, or has a smoking candle on a crudely, gesturally expressionistic painted plinth: a metaphor for demise and anti-illumination, she’s burning wood panels manifesting them as scorched imitation self-generating impasto surfaces, neutralizing and invocating Reinhardt and Auerbach, imageless. These baffles and manoeuvres, which to understand are given to no other supplementary commentary, bar this text and this is really just a caption. It exists as another component drawn in Robertson’s flamboyant line, her equilibrium between bringing something into existence, its uncertainty, its collapse, its surrender, demise and illusions of solidity.
These illusions conduit to Robertson’s embracing of a personality clash and extension, becoming a curator and editor to herself, to re-imagine her recent studio projects, here, as a group show. This is a residual ingredient of the process around which Inter/media as a space curates itself, how it is programmed and employed and how it is housed, absorbed, annexed or otherwise allied to a larger arts space with its own curatorial provisions. This self-induced group show mentality alongside her approach to this bellwether space-within-a-space seeks to imply the multiple frequencies embedded within; the intent, the proposal, the work and its final presentation a sculptural imitation of how this space works and how she got here, her presence forming part of the subversion and an echo of her investigations into ideological failures, disappointments and impracticalities. While the imitation group show approach allows Robertson to devise a multiple identities within her own creative processes, and to simulate a curator, the deception of an external curator, the authoritative voice, another embracing of illusions of solidity within this body of work, which is not only about their manufacture, installation and compilation but also an observation on the processes behind what brought them here. Robertson therefore, as curator, artist, editor, is able to observe the nature of all three activities positioning her work alongside similar recent activities such as Straylight Cavern, at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee curated by artists Richard Priestley and Milika Muritu or Rebus, at Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Vik Muniz.
Within this is, as Iris Marion Young describes is a “seriality “ of collective identities, that Robertson explores through artists’ circumferences and constraints which belong more often than not to process and reveal, production and consumption and commodity. Robertson maintains a practice which is a “series”: resolutely about the contexts and situations behind the familiar parameters of art practice and therein lies a capacity for a kind of agile delinquency. A theatricality. And a negation of the commodity. She is motivated to inspect beyond and behind surface and agitate the gallery, the public space or the natural environment into the realms of subcultural ferocity or revolutionary propulsions.
In these revolutionary moments Robertson’s practice begins to bear similarities to the work of the San Francisco-based artist Trisha Donnelly whose “ineffable body of work resists simple characterization. A lexicon of imagery and action relies on the power of suggestion… media-diverse work are gestures of altered time, shifters, dimensional explorations, evocation, perception, and belief structures. … And seeing this work firsthand is crucial to the questions Donnelly’s work pursues. The work requires your presence.” Famously Donnelly came to a gallery opening of her work dressed as a Napoleonic courier, rode into the gallery on a white horse, read a message of surrender, turned around and rode out. This simultaneous gesture of rebellion, charisma and capitulation equally surrounds Robertson’s work. What is proposed is an observation of the presence of the materials: their performance or animation, the space in which they exist temporarily, the objects and their activity as narrative (and art historical) receptors, their utterances (as man-made, contrived or borne of chance), and their propulsion into a current and activated condition, all the while being aware of their diminishing and receding and their return to invisibility. It requires and proposes self observation and it is to be thunderstruck: “… If it need be termed surrender, then let it be so, for he has surrendered in word, not will. He has said, ‘My fall will be great but it will be useful.’ The emperor has fallen and he rests his weight upon your mind and mine and with this I am electric. I am electric.”
