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Found Paintings / Curatorial
Beyond the Endgame
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Written by Dan Smith | 270/ART MONTHLY/10.03
‘Beyond the Endgame’ presents itself as a show comprising two propositions. The first is that there is a provincially specific history of the production and reception of contemporary art in Manchester, which privileges abstract painting as a primary and consistent form of practice. This history, the focus of which dates from the 60s to the reopening of Manchester Art Gallery in 2002, is presented as the outcome of a research project undertaken by the exhibition’s curator Ben Cook at Manchester Metropolitan University. Although unapologetically myopic in its scope, a reading of his potted account, summarised within the accompanying catalogue, carries with it a sense of relevance as a view on notions of localised activity, defined by Cook as ‘regional identity’, which are positioned within an increasingly globalised set of artworlds.
The second key proposition is that the more recent manifestations of these practices are endemic of abstract painting as an expanded activity. That is, as a form of practice which is consciously informed by forms of art and visual culture outside of painting. This is the point at which ‘Beyond the Endgame’ becomes problematic. It is on the one hand a tautology: all art practice is constantly and continuously defined as a set of relations to everything else in the world. On the other hand it is a paradox: if abstract painting is as strong and independent a form of practice as suggested here, why does it need to justify itself according to a concessionary approach to forms that appear more relevant and contemporary? This second issue is manifested, with some sensitivity, as a set of thematic concerns, primarily identified as digital media, textiles and installation, which take literal but varied form throughout much of the work selected or commissioned for the show.
Serving as both introduction and conclusion, Andrew Bracey has covered the glass wall of the stairwell in brightly coloured vinyl stickers, each of which is an enlargement of a hand-drawn squiggle. Within their rectangular frame, the squiggles are theoretically visible as a complete image from the roof of Waterhouse’s spectacular Town Hall building. It also provides a transformed view of Manchester rooftops from inside the stairwell. Coming up the stairs to enter the gallery, it barely registers, but leaving the gallery, it dominates the field of visibility and functions as an endpoint. Bracey isn’t alone in his use of site specificity. In one corner of the gallery, Paul Cordwell’s installation of paintings and the inclusion of a sheet of clear glass makes use of the surrounding architectural features as formal references, in particular the green-tinted glass panels that constitute the ceiling. It resembles a homage to Ryman and Richter with an added twist: the accompanying list of media includes bristles, dust and hair, which can be seen evenly embedded into the surfaces of his paintings. The incorporation of these impurities is a playful acknowledgement of the near impossibility of attaining an immaculate surface.
Jacqueline Wylie has made, or remade, a minimalist stacked tower from serial elements. It comprises small square canvases stretched across with knitted wool, uniform in size but varied in colour. Rick Copsey’s two paintings, Eleven Nine and Four Two, 2003, employ elaborate compositions, which are intended to evoke processes of cutting and pasting from digital media. In conjunction with a confusing variety of technical strategies, his work is both ugly and visually compelling. Blobs of garish painted tartan float among solar systems of planet-like orbs, which incorporate the traces of twisting threads. Maggie Ayliffe’s diptych Equal Opportunities, 2003, has sections which are actually digitally produced prints of stitches on a textile grid. The result is like David Reed filtered through an over enthusiastic reading of Sadie Plant. Hilary Jack’s Moving the Goalposts, 2002, is a football stitched together from pieces of paintings. Each section has its own drips and washes of colour. The use of painted canvas as a raw material for the manufacture of an object associated with popular culture and with the local context of Manchester fits the thematic structure of the show, but the credibility of this object as an example of painting as an expanded practice and its geographic specificity is overstretched through such crude literalism.
There are some more straightforward examples of abstract painting here as well. At This Hour, 2002, by Rebecca Sitar is that kind of abstraction which suggests itself as lyrical and humanistic romanticism. Peter Seal’s small canvases are effective pieces of formal abstraction, which play on an oscillation between facture of surface, and a luminosity of illusionistic depth. His work also functions as a historical keystone to the show. He was part of a generation of painters responsible for setting up the first artist-run studio group in Manchester and later the establishment of the Castlefield Gallery in 1984. In sharp opposition to both Seal and Sitar’s work – but also, we are led to believe, in sympathy with it – is Stuart Edmundson’s Heavy Metal Bubblegum, 2003: an assemblage of brightly coloured drinking straws and sponges, cocktail sticks and Sellotape, inserted into the wall as if it has burst out of it, tearing out chunks of plaster in the process. While its inclusion contextualises it within the field of abstract painting, it could just as easily be associated with installation, sculpture and even architecture. It emphasises the discomfort generated by emphasising abstract painting as an immutable core sensibility while simultaneously exploding its boundaries so that it becomes indistinguishable from a more general set of practices. Yet this sense of discomfort is itself the most significant achievement of ‘Beyond the Endgame’ in the form of a creative tension of conflicting propositions, something not easily accomplished by thematically orientated shows. The tendencies explored here reflect Cook’s own concerns as a painter. This is curating as a set of personalised concerns which here are somewhat fortuitously compatible with those of Manchester Art Gallery as an institutional body.
Written by Alfred Hickling | The Guardian | Tuesday, 9.9.03 | (3 stars out of five)
This exhibition conclusively proves that abstract painting is rubbish. Hilary Jack is an experienced non-figurative painter who chops up her old canvases and recycles them into something useful: washing lines, blinds and so forth. Here she exhibits a work reconstituted as a football that has been booted around the streets of Manchester. It is an apt metaphor for the way the city’s abstract tradition has been critically received in recent years.
Since the 1960s, Manchester has been a magnet for abstract painters, and young Manchester artist Ben Cook has devised a show to demonstrate that there’s still life in its old bones. Cook is celebrated for exhibiting off-cuts of mass-produced fabric as ‘found’ paintings. And though he does not exhibit here, his selection does illustrate what might be thought of as the textile tendency among Mancunian artists.
Jacqueline Wiley makes brightly coloured knitted squares and stacks them on top of each other like multi-storeyed liquorice allsorts. Rick Copsey’s quasi-scientific DNA profiles contain little swabs of tartan and Maggie Ayliffe’s “girlie abstraction” (her description) is organised around digitally manipulated cross-stitch patterns.
The slightly dour output of the old school is represented by the venerable Peter Seal, who gives his severe rectangles enigmatic titles like Drone, as if granting the viewer licence to nod off. His minimalist successor might be Paul Cordwell, whose grey ensemble of squares and glass could be the left over components of a patio and conservatory set.
Rebecca Sitar produces pale and interesting pieces, like Monet waterlillies magnified 100 times. But the strength of the exhibition comes, paradoxically, from the flimsiness of pieces such as Stuart Edmonson’s three-dimensional cellophane-and-drinking straw combination, which erupts from the wall like kitsch fungus, or Andrew Bracey’s peppering of a panoramic plate-glass window with brightly coloured vinyl circles. It really does induce the sensation of leaving the exhibition with spots before your eyes.