It’s Sunday afternoon a little past lunchtime. Which means the pubs are open. Which means generally you’d find me slumped in some comfortable corner of a convenient bar with friends engaged in the parry and thrust of rapier-like dialectical disquisition, sharing an afternoon of convivial insobriety. But not today. Instead I’m huddled with a bunch of hushed expectant strangers in the open doorway of a wooden crate the size of a decent garden shed. We are watching a slide show. Random images flit by every ten seconds or so. The photographs have a strangely ephemeral quality, almost as if they were taken by accident in a moment of distraction, inadvertent snapshots of an anonymous urban landscape. Nobody comments. The only movement is the tousling of an occasional extravagant moustache. The projector hums coolly. I can feel my watch ticking obtrusively against my wrist and momentarily regret not owning a battery operated time piece. Minutes of strenuous gazing slip by without any of us seeming to breathe or even blink. Two dozen eyeballs are fastened rigidly on the same point ten feet in front of us. The cumulative concentration is almost palpable. But soon I sense the young woman to my right is getting restive. She fidgets on her chair, taps her fingers to some internally generated rhythm and rustles the shopping bag on her lap. Then she leans to the older lady next to her – possibly her mum, they share a certain likeness – and whispers something that makes them both quake silently. All I can make out of the exchange are the words “spillage” and “security tape”. They get to their feet in unison, gather their belongings and quietly leave, heads down. The rest of us don’t deign to divert our eyes from the screen to cast the slightest hint at a derisory glance. We’re here to appreciate. We know it’s not always obvious at first glance. First one to move is a philistine, an oaf, a dimwit. We are in Leeds City Art Gallery and this is the Northern Art Prize. This stuff is shortlisted, damn it!
It’s my fourth visit to the NAP. First was Monday, the bloggers event, worth attending to get the inside dope from the people what know about art (thanks mainly to Sarah Brown, the Curator of Exhibitions at Leeds Art Gallery, which is obviously a Very Important Position as her job title is capitalised. That’s never happened to me.) Second was Tuesday, the opening bash, worth getting invited for the copious amounts of free alcohol and the subsequent non-art related random overheard conversations – I completely missed the speeches owing to earwigging a riveting Alan Bennettesque dialogue on the correct way to house train a Shih Tsu puppy, something about which I can now claim an amount of second-hand expertise. It all adds to the CV. Third was when I dropped in on Saturday, after the pub and before the shopping, and spent a merry hour reading the blurb, looking at the stuff with more familiar eyes, checking my more considered reactions against my first impressions. And lastly, Sunday, I came back for a leisurely stroll around the exhibition with the intention of writing something over coffee in the Tiled Hall. Which is what I’m doing now. Before I go to the pub. So, here goes . . .
The telegraph poles are marvelous. The blurb says these are “found objects,” which made me wonder about the size of the skip Richard Rigg was rummaging about in. They are huge, heavy, impressive things and totally lord it over the gallery space. They are also rough and weathered, objects meant for the outdoors, in complete contrast to the clean, polished, clinical interior of the art gallery; it’s hard to imagine the point of a “Do Not Touch” sign, except perhaps to warn of toppling! They do look rather precarious. Apparently the poles are meant to make us think about the complexity of human communication – it is a fairly common and well worn metaphor to be honest – and it is easy to see them as figures in conversation owing to the unusually short distance separating them. However, the ungrammatical lengthy title is supposed to subvert the idea of simple, transparent connection. I’m not entirely convinced. They are well worth seeing though.
On my first visit I was quite amused by the chair and the wall hook. The amusement quickly wore off. They felt a little gimmicky and I was irritated by the heavy dose of intellectual pabulum that would have us believe that stuff like this “pitches reason against itself to undermine our rational and habitual understanding of objects and their meanings.” Really? My rationality tells me it would be foolish to attempt to sit on that chair (and the gallery staff would intervene should my reason fail me!) and I would never get into the habit of attempting to hang anything from that hook. My Aristotelian logic is still functioning perfectly well after its confrontation with “theoretical conundrums and playful propositions” thank you very much. I did however love the desks, though I can’t quite explain why, they just seemed to work. They were very beautifully made and I didn’t really care that they’d been rendered unusable for the purpose of writing. I know that if I’d been tempted to make something like that I’d have gone completely tricksy, probably nailing them feet to feet or top to top . . . which explains why I’ll never make it as a visual artist.
Rigg’s other piece was a picture of a kind of faded knot. Rather lovely. Again though I thought the intellectualism got in the way, and my only response to finding out the piece explored abstract knot theory was, people think deep thoughts about tangled string! Now I have a philosophy degree and consider myself a maven of pointless cogitation, but even I have never had a moment of profundity with a knot.
Leo Fitzmaurice is the guy who took the pictures that were projected in the large wooden structure I mentioned at the start. He also made the structure. Apparently he took the pics on his mobile as a memory jogger and never intended them for public exhibition. At first I did think, then why exhibit? But the longer I looked at them the more I got to like them. The images really do look like they were taken while his mind was elsewhere; bins, traffic cones, broken windows, spilled paint, empty shops, yellow lines, empty car parks, discarded domestic objects, graffiti, weeds . . . if you walked around any city in the country and took random snaps you’d get a similar result. I’m not sure why it’s meant to be much of a surprise; I enjoyed the pictures because they gave me a sense of familiarity. I felt at home. Quite the opposite of uncanny. Cities are precisely the site of “awkward disjunctures,” one person builds a road, another builds a wall, one more paints a sign or spills or defaces or erases – interests and intentions intersect and collide, it happens all the time and everywhere in any city. Fitzmaurice’s pictures capture the urban landscape without comment or critique or censure. I’m not so sure he unsettles the familiar. The familiar is unsettled already.
His other work in the gallery is Horizon. Basically he’s borrowed a dozen or so traditional landscape paintings from the collection and arranged them on a long wall so the horizon is matched up all along the line. I get it. It’s clever, but I’m not sure what point there is beyond the illustration of an obvious convention, or what the art adds over and above a piece of information.
Liadin Cooke’s work is probably the hardest to like. I don’t intend that in any mean sense, I’m just not really sure what I’m meant to be experiencing. On Monday we were told that one piece was solid brass and deceptively heavy. The blurb beside the piece mentions that Cooke is synaesthetic and the particular colour of the piece, a pale, insipid blue, evoked the musical note “D”. Both these pieces of information may be true but I’m not sure they help very much. The piece is contained in a glass case and protected from any kinetic contact by some very vigilant gallery staff; it could be made of mint Aero, or melamine, or anti-matter for all the difference it would make. And I have an odd form of gustatory/olfactory synaesthesia, things evoke a particular taste or smell; this piece had the texture of old, hardened blue tack and tasted a queer mix of tinned peaches and wasabi . . . quite unfortunate and entirely irrelevant.
The piece called “Felicific Bar” was equally perplexing. The blurb describes it as “a claggy mass of green wax wrapped around a brass bar.” I’ve never regarded claggy as a positive adjective before. Again the colour and texture evoke some unpleasant associations; there’s something warm and sickly about it, something organic but not quite right . . . I don’t want to go any further. What it had to do with Jeremy Bentham and the theory of utilitarianism is anyone’s guess.
Her last but one piece at first looked like a clump of wet leaves swirled into a gutter and left to rot. The more I looked at it the more excremental it seemed. I’m not sure what I ought to be thinking but it really wasn’t “fragility and resilience” . . . work that “pulls apart a subject then re-presents it with a personal resonance that is highly individual” obviously invites a response which is intensely subjective.
The last artist, James Hugonin, is difficult in a different way. His work is so far removed from referentiality and personal response that it simply invites you to stop and look. He doesn’t go in for clever titles, and he doesn’t rely on extraneous knowledge of history or philosophy or whatever to overwhelm us with the depth of his wisdom and perspicacity. He just paints . . . Well, he probably just gets his assistant to paint, but the result is astonishing. If there’s one reason to go to see the Northern Art Prize, this is it. Forget the gallery blurb, and don’t try to fathom the technicalities of how Hugonin produces these paintings, it really doesn’t matter. The algorithmic method of composition is a bit like a zen koan, it’s there to tie your mind in knots and break your brain . . . Just sit and look at the wall. It’s worth it.