Michael Fullerton: Suck on Science
Until March 12; CCA, Glasgow

What do corneas, John Peel, and a large German chemical corporation have to do with each other? The short answer is that they’re all in Michael Fullerton’s show at CCA. Actually, that’s pretty much the long answer too.

The young Glasgow artist is hot property, singled out last year by Channel 4 for their new art collection, and by Charles Saatchi for his exhibition, New Blood. Seeing only a handful of his works, you might think Fullerton was a straightforward portrait painter, skilled in the styles of centuries gone by. But that’s not the way he sees it.

In this, his biggest show to date, Fullerton’s paintings are sprinkled amongst a bewildering array of prints, found images, video and sculpture. The subject matter is equally wide-ranging, pointing to so many different possibilities that the end result is bafflement. The artist’s carefully planted clues, lurking in titles as well as images, offer little relief.

Amongst this forest of thoughts, there are some persistent themes. There’s alchemy, seen in touches of gold paint here and there. There’s the big German chemical company, BASF – alchemists of a sort. There’s the anatomy of the eye, with its rods and cones, and there’s the transmission of information, whether it be written, spoken, painted or photocopied.

One work manages to combine all these themes at once. Its name is a clue: Who Keeps The World Both Old And New, In Pain Or Pleasure? The title is a quote from Lord Byron’s Don Juan, describing the political power held by bankers Rothschild and Baring over 19th century Europe and America. The hanging mobile of six steel rods is coated in a kaleidoscopic BASF powder called Magic Purple (a nod towards alchemy). Fullerton has modelled the sculpture on an illustration in an optological text-book.

That’s a lot of references to pack into one simple form. I can only offer one interpretation. BASF is the post-war inheritor of the infamous Nazi-friendly company IG Farben. That firm produced Zyclon B, the gas which was used in death camps such as Auschwitz. Is Fullerton alluding to the fact that one corporate power can control both pain and pleasure, between lethal gas and pretty colours? Even if that’s right, that still leaves us with the riddle of the optological illustration.

Rods and cones come in several forms in this show: painted protrusions from a young boy’s eyes, plastic cones stuck to the walls, and whole series of retinal paintings by a medical illustrator. These small acrylics illustrate eye defects, their titles providing the names of the patients. A group of male retinae is hung separately from a group of females, as if we could see the human beings attached. If the eye really is a window onto the soul, surely we should see more than a few bulging veins and growths.

Fullerton has been interested for years in the transmission and reception of information. As receivers of information, the rods and cones are related to magnetic audio tape (invented by BASF in 1935), which the artist has melted down to use as paint. They’re also related to Alistair Cooke’s old BBC microphone, which relayed all those cherished letters from America; goodness knows how Fullerton got hold of it. And from the BBC microphone, we get to John Peel; Fullerton painted his portrait just before the DJ died.

Peel is leaning, relaxed, against a wall, as if prepared for a cosy chat. But his eyes are not quite fixed upon us – appropriately enough, as he could never see or know all those listeners who felt intimately acquainted with him. Another BBC figure, Ross McWhirter, is painted as a boy. Co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records, McWhirter was shot by the IRA in 1975 for his outspoken views.

Fullerton can really paint – there’s no question of it. One minute he’s Gainsborough, the next Degas – and he pulls it off without apparent effort. But after the painting is finished, things get clunkier. Ross McWhirter’s portrait is dwarfed by a list of BASF inventions, black vinyl text on white; if there is a connection there, I’ve missed it.

Over the last few years, Fullerton has painted a series of portraits of figures who have been unjustly imprisoned. He has also made a very odd painting of two wholesome-looking children smoking dope and looking paranoid. Facing them, a Glasgow City surveillance expert poses like James Dean, the faint echo of a halo visible behind his head.

Here we have the watchers and the watched, those above the law and those in its grip. Judging by this, and by his fondness for cryptic references and obscure links, I’m guessing that Fullerton is a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He certainly questions everything. Like Nietzsche, he seems to assume that there is no absolute truth.

Nietzsche makes an appearance in this show too. At least his house does. Stretched, fragmented and repeated, it gradually disappears as Fullerton’s printing ink runs out. Significantly, it’s printed on this kind of paper – newsprint – but that’s no guarantee, Fullerton seems to imply, that the information is correct. In fact two massive rolls of blank newsprint sit in the front lobby of CCA, with Mark Rothko’s quote, “silence is so accurate”, printed on the cover.

That’s a lot of ground to cover in one show, and I haven’t even mentioned the film of Fullerton leaving home, or the clown picture. The show is packed full of such visual non-sequiturs, like a stream of consciousness with the connecting paths rubbed out. Alchemists used to experiment with odd concoctions of ingredients in an effort to distil one pure, precious result. If Fullerton is trying to do the same with art, he’s set himself a difficult challenge.

Michael Fullerton is clearly a lateral thinker and a skilled painter. He delves into rich seams of thought and history, but has yet to work out a way of bringing it all together. At CCA he hasn’t offered a coherent solution, but there’s plenty of potential on show. Mark my words, there’s gold in there somewhere.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 13.02.05