Martin Creed: Down Over Up Iran Do Espírito Santo Matter 5: Adam Paxton Anna Chapman: Subjects For Melancholy Retrospection There are some artists that galleries would rather have peeing out of their tents than in. These are the artists that defy interpretation, and defy the establishment – even sometimes their entire audience – but still they manage to touch a raw nerve. Martin Creed, the Turner Prize’s most notorious winner, is one of those. Famous for that light going on and off, the Glaswegian resists every theory, every attempt at pigeon-holing. He wants openly “to make stupid work”. He does his very best to ensure that it is devoid of meaning, or style. If not humorous, it can be aggressive: as if to test the audience’s staying power. Creed’s solo show at The Fruitmarket Gallery is focussed on the artist’s ordering impulses: cactus plants are lined up in order of height, canvasses are painted using every brush in a set; tables and chairs are stacked in pyramids. The centrepiece, brand new Work No. 1061, is a staircase which plays a scale as you go up or down it; identical, unfortunately, to last year’s viral marketing hit, Piano Stairs, made in a Stockholm subway. The five year old lift-based work, in which a Glasgow choir sings you upwards or downwards in spooky chromatic increments, is far more satisfying. Creed sets himself strict rules – stacking planks in arthmetical sequence, for instance – in order to make sense of the chaos of existence. Filling the gallery with such works leaves you without any insight, but with an inescapable sense of obsessive compulsion. Creed is by no means the first artist to box himself in with self-imposed systems; many Minimalists and Conceptual artists of the 1960s favoured this rule-based approach. Bruce Nauman is clearly referenced during Creed’s Ballet Work No. 1020, at the Traverse Theatre, as a single dancer walks in a square around the stage. While Creed’s visual art is the material evidence of some sort of controlled madness, it’s his performance which makes the strongest impression. At the Traverse, the artist performs his unique brand of pared-down punk while five dancers, ordered by height, play out simple arithmetic and geometric sequences. No one can sing a song containing only the letter A quite like Creed, count musically to 100 or repeat Fuck Off more times than you can count. While his art leaves you empty, Creed’s nihilist musical minimalism offers more than the sum of its parts. Moving to Ingleby Gallery, the reductive sequences seem to follow you; the four largest walls of the empty main gallery are painted with precisely measured stripes, graded from black to white with every shade of grey in between. This is the first UK solo show of successful Brazilian artist, Iran Do Espírito Santo. These grey stripes are not like Creed’s though, or at least they serve a different purpose. Just as the precise hatching of 18th century engravings modelled light and shadow, so we allow our eyes to read these stripes as darkness and light. Then real life intervenes: we notice a bend in the wall producing its own stripe of shadow out of turn, and vertical bands of light streaming in through the windows. Within minutes, we find ourselves fully attuned to the subtle play of daylight across the room. Other immaculate works, tucked away in more intimate parts of the building, seem at first to be eclectic and without direction. Monochromatic photograms, a slouching mirror, a stainless steel light bulb and silver pencil; and a drinking glass made from solid crystal. On reflection, it’s all about light. Espírito Santo likes to bend light, subvert it, and generally master it. The photograms are graveyards of light, where contact with photosensitive paper has sucked the brightness from it. His brushed metal light bulb, similarly, is a heavy-looking object, dark and shadowy. The four-part mirror, assembled from pin-point precise constructivist shapes and slumping casually from wall to floor, is the most showmanlike of all. Verticals (including your own reflected figure) are subtly tilted, pillars leaning and the floor rising up to create unworldly angles. Like the rest of the show, it’s stylish and it sharpens your powers of perception, but its polished surfaces won’t let you in. At Dovecot, the surfaces are a bit more welcoming. Having curated four short exhibitions of other makers’ work from April to July, jeweller Adam Paxton devotes the fifth and final show to his own oeuvre. The whole Matter series has been marked by its thoughtfulness and attention to detail, and this is no exception. Paxton has made the gallery into a very special space, with the magical atmosphere of a secret suspended world hidden under some tropical waterfall. Paxton’s jewellery almost levitates amongst showers of stones, their brash colours and forms loving the limelight. Imagine alien space ships, transmitters and satellites crossed with tentacles, slugs, and water droplets; imagine these combined in psychedelic colours, and you will realise that these are not your everyday pieces of jewellery. This combination of artificial and organic forms is realised in bright plastic, though it looks precious enough to be blown glass. Plastic is beautiful in Paxton’s hands, and it’s also great to play with. One of the joys of his work is its movement; joints are articulated, globules peek in and out of their hidey holes, and chunky necklaces twist like aged snakes. But the artist sacrifices the animated aspect of his pieces, choosing instead to emphasize their eerie beauty by hanging them like holograms in mid-air. Exhibiting jewellery, which is properly shown off on a moving human body, is a knotty problem, and one which is not fully solved here. But even so, Paxton’s beautiful plastic forms, and their imaginative presentation, make for a stunning exhibition experience. Moving east to the edges of the city, young artist Anna Chapman has made discreet interventions at the well-worn 18th century Palladian villa, Newhailes. Eagle-eyed visitors are left to notice the six works for themselves during guided tours of the house, or they can take advantage of the special open viewing evening on 26 August. The most successful work is a sound installation made with composer Martin Parker. Newhailes’ library, heavy with dust, is a corpse without its books. The shelves covering every wall are empty, the collection having been gifted to the National Library of Scotland in 1971. Chapman and Parker have introduced a ghost into the library. The sound of data streams, computers and scanners clicking and whirring, reverberates around the empty shelves, reminding us of the information they used to contain, and the Enlightenment debate which used to vibrate the air. Marginalia from Newhailes’ collection of manuscripts has been used as the basis for Chapman’s spidery drawings slotted quietly into private rooms upstairs. These jottings, including those of Enlightenment man of letters Dr Johnson, are meaningless when taken out of context, but possess the same intimate quality as the myriad unexplained marks and scrapes in the lived-in walls and furniture of the house. Chapman’s interventions employ a touch so light that they risk total obscurity, but perhaps it’s enough that they haunt the house like ghosts whose secrets are known only to themselves. |