Direct Serious Action is Therefore Necessary: Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan Restore Us and Regain The work of Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan has always been a mystery to me. Their giant, smiley-faced pyramids are easy to love or hate at first sight, but popping up as they often do, in isolation, their meaning is difficult to fathom. With a brand new Tatham and O’Sullivan solo show opening at CCA, I decide it’s high time I got to grips with those pesky pyramids. The exhibition, Direct Serious Action Is Therefore Necessary, takes me one step closer to understanding the artists’ work, but it’s one step and no further. Dominating the show are two lines of sculpture typical of Tatham and O’Sullivan. The large, geometric blocks of painted MDF create a sort of angled 1980s Loch Ness monster, square arches looping across the floor, the gaping face reaching two storeys high. Two things strike me about this sculpture: first, the colours are pretty. This helps a lot when you are faced with something so inaccessible, and so physically aggressive. And that’s the second thing: the sculpture gets very deliberately in your way, like a man in a doorway (the angry Glaswegian in the accompanying text, perhaps), saying “what are you going to do about it?”. The answer to that question is contained in the exhibition’s title. From the moment you enter the gallery’s reception area, you need to make a conscious decision: what is usually an unthinking meander through an open space becomes a self-conscious exercise in knowing where you’re going and how to get there. Direct serious action is therefore necessary. The photographs on show confirm this aspect of Tatham and O’Sullivan’s work. Sixteen fairly uninteresting corners of Glasgow – from affluent tenements to council schemes – present a subtle challenge to the eye. You attempt, mentally, to traverse the terrain between you and the buildings pictured; you have to negotiate skips, trees, landscaping, fences and weeds. What these photographs and sculptures teach us is that we will always view everything – including art – in relation to ourselves, as physical beings in the world. This is an interesting exercise which preoccupied the Minimalists of the 1960s, but beyond that, I still can’t figure out what Tatham and O’Sullivan are all about. More mysteries lurk up the hill at Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Museum, where three contemporary artists pick apart the sublime. In Restore Us And Regain, Tommy Grace, Tony Swain and Ged Quinn are tenuously linked by engagement with the romantic and classical idylls of western art history. The connection is a little uneasy, but the works on show do share a certain synergy. Whether this is to do with a little Turneresque drama here and a nod to Claude Lorrain there is not the whole story. It’s more about degrees of alienation from those lost paradises (hinted at by the title, a quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost); a post-modern inability to picture, without first distancing ourselves, an ideal world. Quinn’s paintings illustrate that point at its crudest; masterpieces of landscape are interrupted by outrageous incongruities; totalitarian art hangs upside down in the sky; a malevolent owl-creature sits in his graffiti-scrawled tree house, the sky’s golden glow now rather more apocalyptic than romantic. Tommy Grace’s wonderfully inventive contributions are more nuanced. The double-sided Recto Verso lithographs have me circling in vain, desperately seeking a clear view of Michelangelo’s sculptures, always, in this mediated world, just out of reach. Rancucius, an ethereal mixture of pinhole photography and digital trickery, creates a timeless, spaceless place where either part could be considered more real than the other. Tony Swain’s collages are a devilish mix of newsprint, painted passages, fragmentation, mirroring, reversal and advertisement, all brought together to create instantly readable scenes which just as instantly lose their credibility. The suspension of disbelief hangs in the balance, and Milton’s blissful seat remains stubbornly outwith our grasp.
|