Singular Pleasures 1
This is the first of a series of columns I ran in one of subsections of The Age in the late 90s.
Solveig Polk, The Scream of
the Marmot; Byron Yapp, Shrillness,
both at Rectoscope Galleries, Fitzroy.
Torquil Sprague, Recent
Paintings; Leicester-Farglow 2, Malvern.
In The Scream of the Marmot
at Rectoscope Galleries, Solveig Polk throws down a clear challenge. This
installation, featuring a small fur-covered cube as a narrative anchor, taunts
the viewer with situations that are as abrupt as they are hirsute. Representing
a thematic elaboration of the polemic stated in Choice/Condiments (1995), perceptions of the discourse between
person and place are interrogated further, mediated through (and indeed by) a
series of open cubicles. While functioning as both matrix and context for the
fur cubes, their patina of gestural incisions suggests telephone boxes. If the
notion of time rendered as electrical impulses, is being addressed here, I
would have expected it to be executed with more fluency by an artist of this
calibre. Each partition encloses what is ultimately an institutional space,
broadly hinted at by the presence in one of a defaced health insurance company
brochure. The catalogue essay appropriates far too heavily from Victoria
Kettering's over-familiar Barthe's
Espadrilles and Hegel's Despair, adding to the redoubling echoes of time
wasted.
Shrillness, also at
Rectoscope, is an altogether different premise. Byron Yapp engineers a triumph
of the dynamic over the moribund, combining soot-stained industrial artefacts
with muted cibachrome reproductions of Flemish genre paintings. The dominance
of functional and obdurate diagonals over the bland rotundity of the reproduced
images can be read as a sly aside at the expense of their implicit bourgeois
morality. Yapp's sense of playfulness, as in last year's Cheese and Briquettes, always runs the risk of straying into
gaucheness. Here, though, there is only one questionable instance: the
inclusion of a bread roll bearing David Hockney's signature in a jar of
formaldehyde is simply unnecessary. Preserved autographed bread products notwithstanding,
this exhibition is a bold manifestation of Yapp's burgeoning aptitude for
positing essential questions of meaning in a voice that remains on the right
side of stridency.
Across town at at Leicester-Farglow 2, one of the sorriest spectacles
of the Art year to date clings to the walls as though recoiling from
embarrassment. It cannot be disputed that several-time Wynn and Sulman Prize
winner Torquil Sprague has acquired a mastery of painterly technique in his
long career. Compositionally, he can scarely be faulted, and his subtle
rendering of the interplay of transient light and natural form is seldom
bettered. Nevertheless, this collection of recent works displays something
bordering on contempt. It appears that the informed observer is meant to do
nothing more than train the apparatus of perception on a mute gaggle of
ostensibly impressive and well painted landscapes.... and that is precisely the
trouble. It is all so much paint, devoid of polemic, discourse, leitmotif,
subtext, schadenfreude, iconographic anaptyxis and even the most rudimentary
metaphor. There is nothing beneath these surfaces apart from canvas and
priming, and of course the preliminary drawings, executed no doubt with
Sprague's refined draftsmanship. When we dissect their intent, we register only
the inherently disspiriting information that someone has observed the natural
world and translated that experience into paint. They steadfastly resist
deconstruction, which leads me to suspect that Sprague is saying merely
"Look, I've painted some rocks, trees and skies". Can there be a more
empty assertion in modern art praxis? To think that only last month, the same
space hosted the awe-inspiring fibrous tension of Bronwyn Katsambakis's Meditation for a Bag of Flour and 400
Teledexes and the pungent foam rubber spirals of her Marjory has an Operation. These two works displayed an abundance of
all that Sprague fails to divulge in 20 major canvases. What a great pity.
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