GEORGE BOLSTER @ GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

Kinda tricky, this did a lot of things and copped a lot of moves that don't really come up on my radar that much. Its kindof hard to know how much slack i'm cutting it for doing a lot of stuff that only really seems novel from my fairly limited perspective. Still it did was pretty fun in the way it spun a ton of disparate themes (youth culture, Religion, queerness) together in way that felt coherent but thankfully, yknow, incoherent. Still I wonder how much of his leaning on this heavily-stylized brand of draughtsmanship was more crutch than armature.

He's kindof obsessed w/ headphones I think; both drawings and sculptures feature them. As both bases for strange architecture, like worlds within sounds. Also as little thumping elements of what seems like tiny gothic flower arrangements. He has easy way of putting an elegantly unshowy twist on an unglamorous material (cf. the TXTSK red thread graffiti -Bolster my heart is urs for this btw). Highlight is obviously the, kindof insane really fusion of Buckminster Fuller and, well the press release claims its inspired by some 60's queer spiritual leader called Bretzlo who founded the church of spiritual equality, but googling both just sends me back to the press release. Nice.

Still, this was fresh, and hip in a breezy but clever way and so you cut things like that a lot of slack you know. And by the time you see the geodesic-church-of-non-traditional-marriage you're sufficiently charmed by this guy's playfulness and inventiveness that it doesn't feel like an easy pass anymore. Its like when my driving instructor told me: if you give the tester a smooth ride he's gonna forget the pen.

DOMINIC THORPE @ G126

This sort of dovetails neatly with something I've been mulling over a little lately: that the artistic response to AIDS was fairly didactic agit prop stuff seems a logical response to Reaganian silence, an attempt at institution building when establishment power was doing its best to ignore a devastating catastrophe for an inconvenient constituency. It is not that cataclysmic events naturally produce politically motivated art, but silenced voices might find articulation in artistic expression.

With the exception of Mannix Flynn whose work has persistently agitated the religious/political/social forces in the systematising of clerical abuse, I can't really think of many Irish artists who are making work that tries to grapple with an issue that leaves a major scar on the national psyche as well as, in its unfolding, become symbolic of the ways in which contemporary Ireland has come to view itself. I mean maybe this disconnection w/ pre-90s ireland is a major source of a younger generation not really feeling any real relationship w/ this stuff, but even then it sort of helps psychically structure how we see ourselves now "as distinct from then"

Which is why its especially cool to see a young artist who tries to access the trauma of Abuse, and more specifically its broader abusive context of silence, in a way that is ambiguous wrt to historical specificity and vivid in its depiction of its emotional wounding.

I'm lucky, I saw this on the last day as a performance, though the exhibition continued as a display of the residue. The performance itself is an impressive condensation of bad vibes, the claustrophobically blacked out performance space lit only by handheld torches, like a fresh crime scene. The artist, somnambulantly but noisily trying to escape the gallery, scraping against the walls, splattered w/ his characteristically fractured drawing/writing on the wall (though to be honest I like that aspect more when I saw it included in the g126 group show earlier this year.)

Thorpe seems to draw on early Paul McCarthy, the phase of his career that was at once more formalist and more insidious in its intimations of violence, and the immersive horror of this show is impressive and engaging.

The residue is on display until the end of this week at g126.

Imgs courtesy Dominic Thorpe

http://www.dominicthorpe.net/

"Explore"

This is like my number one pet hate. I'm not gonna pretend that this is not just a left over art-school-bullshit-radar symptom, but one thing that bothers me whenever I go to see almost any show that leans heavily on establishing itself in its own artist statement/press release, is the use of this little weasel word. Explore. The main problem I have with this word is that it seems to imply an expansiveness wrt the subject matter which often, and not even to the detriment of the work is not even attempted, but I mean....

I feel like exploratory strategies in art imply more than an elucidation, illumination, juxtaposition etc. That exploration becomes the stand in for a vague set of assumptions wrt the relat. b/w the artist and the final product. As though the mere act of artistic mediation becomes in itself an "exploration." I'm not buying it guys.

This, imo, misuse of that particular word feels partic. heinous in instances where the particular concerns of the artist feels kind of modest on a conceptual level. Explore has come to stand for an uncertain and seemingly willingly obfuscated process. And I get where ppl are coming from on this. It is easier to imply a vague strategy w/-in a body of work, esp. when conflicting strategies/instincts/precedents/values constantly seem to disrupt the potential for a coherent and stable voice or elaboration of ideas w/in the oeuvre, even as that condition structures the possibility for the same. At the same time, w/ the deflection of the work onto the statement, which is then deflected onto this seemingly evasive concept of "exploration," the possibility for actual meaning to emerge seems constantly deferred.

ALFRED JENSEN @ DOUGLAS HYDE

Okay, I got confused when I heard about this exhibition and thought I was going to see SERGEJ Jensen, who I love. It wasn't exactly a bad surprise, but rarely have I seen a painting exhibition that felt like so much work. Born in Guatemala, but spending his formative years in Denmark and then France before settling in New York, Jensen's idiosyncratic style drew from an odd set of esoteric sources, from Goethe's colour theories to Mayan calenders. His richly impastoed and vibrantly patterned canvases are at once playful and programmatic, a strangely colourful set of mathematical proofs.

Its sort of, well, maddening, the boxes filled with numbers and strange glyphs constantly seem like puzzles begging to be solved, like those frustrating IQ test things. Its this strange dissonance between order and poetry that gives this work their hypnotic charm, their atavistic half-coherence always setting in motion a system of legibility it shirks its promise to resolve. The fact that the heavily textured surfaces recall tapestries underlines the primevalism and sense of pre-linguistic order that Jensen infuses his work with.

I mean I want to say something about the colour though, the colour is harsh and acidic and really fucking vibrant. Its never really *contained* by the copositions, it seems to push outside it. His shuddering lines don't really to the best job of containing his ostentations colour choices within his ordered geometries. The gingham design of "The Marriage of Odd and Even Numbers" is a bewitching monkey-puzzle, you spend the whole time staring at it, trying to decode its strange logic, even within its formally constraining grid structure (Jensen favours the contiguity of squares rectangles and diamod shapes) the interference between different sequences and cycles resolves itself messily and mysteriously.

LOCKY MORRIS @ MOTHER'S TANKSTATION

There's something really awesome about enjoying a show that does a lot of things that have become automatic turnoffs. The current show, by Derry-based artist Locky Martin, trades in a kind of anecdotal neo-Conceptualism, in the vein of Sophie Calle. I see this stuff more at degree shows & c. and its really something that seems a bit tired. Mainly what was refreshing was that it seemed to abandon the two major crutches that you usually come across with work of this kind: an overly elaborate tricksiness or an over-ripe fascination with its own retro-isms (you know the kind of polaroids and super8 stuff that really gets caught up in empty nostalgia real quick)

The centre-piece of the show is a sound/sculpture installation based on the cover of a recording of Chopin Preludes, a piano seen through a rain-streaked window, a view the artist found eerily like the view of a piano seen through the door of a church near his studio. A photograph of this, along with the record sleeve itself and a haunting, repeated piano chord recorded in the studio itself are hung around a piano top. There's a definite nakedness about the presentation, eloquent and beautiful but no overt cleverness or cute resolution.

I mean there's something throw away, but also fresh-feeling about the photograph of a splayed white dog lying next to an upturned plastic lawn chair, the way it rhymes the forms is funny and smart without being glib and knowing. I guess its an attitude thing I enjoyed about this show, not exactly innovative or new but capable of striking the right chord and with a generous individuality.

I feel like a big part of the kudos for these shows at MTS has to go to the gallery itself. I've been to a few shows here, and while I understand that they have some unique ethos or whatever, I won't pretend I really know what it is, just that whatever it is it seems to work. For a start, every show I've seen here has been so confidently staged, I'm thinking here of the sculpture that is just the empty blister-packets of antacids held in the slide-holder from a projector. But, and I don't think this is beside the point here, it looks good. It sits in the space with a kind of airy insouciance.

I think its a pretty huge credit to this place that I've never managed to go there w/o getting into a coversation of some kind with one of the staff, usually the gallerist herself, and always initiated by them. I mean there's this genuine feeling that they want people to come and see the art on show here, and on this particular occasion i got a lot out of the brief chat I had with the assistant working there. Her take on the pieces was interesting and I especially liked her pointing out the anecdote behind From Day One, the piece which lends its title to the exhibition, a card collar holder from his daughter's shirt left lying on the carpet, preserved here -square piece of carpet and all- in a square glass vitrine. His poor wife she said, imagine the empty square left in their sitting room.

Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts @ IMMA

The current marquee exhibition at IMMA is strangely high-concept. Based around the collection of minimalist composer and Ab-Ex scenester Morton Feldman, the show is a welcome opportunity to see some high-water American mid-century abstraction along with some, um, rugs.

Feldman's relationship with the irascible set (and the strong influence of post-war NY painting on the development of his compositional style) has meant that Feldman's music has become the de facto soundtrack to late American modernism. This relationship seems crystallized in the use of his music in scoring Hans Namuth's short films of Pollock's and de Kooning's studios, among the most iconic documents of the Abstract Expressionist generation, as well as his elegiac Rothko Chapel.

I had given myself the idea that this was going to include some Barnett Newman's and I was disappointed that it didn't, I also kinda felt like there was a lot of talk about the Pollocks, but as far as i remember, there were only two (one I can't remember at all, the other was absolutely stunning, the name escapes me, but it was enamel and gesso on paper, and had a pulsing lyricism I don't normally expect from Pollock, especially on a small scale)

Feldman's artistic and personal relationship with the New York art scene, ends up providing a really subtle and interesting structure for the show, especially as big, blue chip shows like this can often feel bulky and white-elephantish, the inclusion of the aforementioned Namuth films, as well as a (really hypnotic) film of Mondrian's last studio, helped flesh out and illuminate the overlapping artistic narratives, alluded to in, for eg., a little Philip Guston drawing dedicated to "mortyfeldman" or naming a piece after critic/poet/fire-island casualty Frank O'Hara. I mean a major problem I have with this sometimes is that, and this is really tempting for somebody like me who is a bit too romantic about this era, it becomes way too fetishistic about '50s NYC as a kind of garrulous bohemia, too author-centric, too nostalgic.

A nice thing to be able to say though, is that the work in the show is so top notch that it makes those criticisms feel pretty irrelevent. The Towering Franz Kline for eg. is really virtuoso and thrilling in a way that you don't really see anymore, its dexterity amplified by a thrilling lack of futzing around. Which is funny because the put it right next to a Philip Guston where a gnawing indecision seems to be the only structure for the canvas. (this pairing is pretty much the highlight of the show, and pretty much all the Guston's in this show are awesome and revelatory for me) where rash-like, inflamed reds and pinks disintegrate like a tissue used as a cloth into a meaty dead flesh grey (giving off weirdly ectoplasmic turqoise halos).

Elsewhere, more ink drawings by Guston, some of them feeling real contemporary, have a kind of half-interested verve, that is, a dashed off yet fine-pointed facility with line and an easy way of electrifying a page.

I don't really know what else to say, it is a major disappointment that the final room is a collection of rugs he bought. I mean I guess the curators felt they really needed to the biographical concept of the show, but I really care more about it being a good show to be honest, which, I mean, it was.

Show Runs until 27th June

STEPHEN GUNNING @ MOTHER'S TANKSTATION

I spent longer watching the two videos that comprise this show than i normally do (i am hella philistine abt video in gen.) for a number of reasons but they were all pretty practical. Mother's Tankstation is the furthest out of the city's galleries and since it wasn't open when I walked out past NCAD I had to come back later especially. And it was cold, and I kinda had a headache and I didn't really wanna get back out into the weather so I just kinda chilled there a bit.

And I'm pretty glad I did. Duration feels important in this exhibition. Just inside the door there is a looped shot of a the feet of that Turkish (dancing) where they wear those full length tunic things and spin, I wanna say Dervish. The soundtrack is a bit like some 90's dubby techno with the beats dropped out, slightly menacing and purposeful sub-bass frequencies. Its hypnotic and strange, and in its abstraction of a specific cultural form it signals the theme which is not really so much being discussed in this exhibition as it haunts it or clings to it. Something to do with cultural tourism, a kind of fetishistic Otherness.

The main gallery is a static shot of tourists coming and going from a mosque, taking scarves from the pile provided, putting their shoes in little plastic baggies. Its effect is cumulative, just the repeating of the gesture over and over it becomes ritualistic in its own right, but also operates in the interstices whereby two cultures interface with each other but not in a waythat is abt engaging with each other, more abt watching each other, reducing and fetishising. I felt woozy and strange after watching it.

Stephen Gunning - Journeyman @ Mother's tankstation, exhibition runs until 13 Feb, 2010 4-6pm daily.