Like It Matters
Until October 29; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow

When a press release contains such words as “nonsensical” and “difficult”, alarm bells inevitably start to ring. They’re tinkling as I make my way into the CCA’s new exhibition, Like It Matters, but fortunately it’s a false alarm. The show is, in places, nonsensical, and in some ways difficult. But it grabs you from the start, and sends you home with plenty of food for thought.

John Calcutt, in his role as Associate Curator at CCA, has put the work of three young Glasgow sculptors in a room with four classic American videos of performance art. The mix isn’t obvious, but it works. The performing artists of the 1960s and 1970s seem to fill the spaces left inside and around the contemporary sculptures. Their projected bodies remind us that the new works aren’t neutral objects, but a live residue of human activity.

Karla Black’s sculptures aren’t made from stone or bronze; not even from plastic or wood; but from vaseline, nail varnish and powder. These are private materials, which a woman might apply to her body away from the glare of the public eye. Here they exist in isolation, a globule of nail varnish here, a compacted heap of powder there.

In Differences Are Definite, Black has poured these soft materials into plastic bags and left them to set, wrinkled and shaped by gravity. Some are displayed out of their bags; others, unlikely ever to take permanent shape, are still in them. This takes Black right back to the 1960s, when Robert Morris and others rebelled against the permanent, industrial materials of Minimalism in favour of flopping, drooping, spilling and rotting materials.

Black is surely invoking Minimalism in her careful arrangement of tracing paper laid on the floor. Dan Flavin’s neon monuments come to mind, but their hard, thrusting verticality is replaced with wafting impermanence. Black has painted her sheets with glue, which is even now wrinkling and pooling on the brittle paper’s surface.

To recast Minimalism in such a fragile, changing state is not new; neither is Black the first to do it from an explicitly female point of view. But process art by its nature doesn’t last, and 40 years later we’re in need of a fresh batch. Black’s is gentle, subversive and utterly appealing.

Mick Peter’s sculptures, though carefully modelled, look almost as prone to collapse as Black’s. Nope is a large cement structure which looks like it’s still wet, and therefore incredibly heavy. The chunky geometrical frame is home to a huge cement die, placed casually on top.

Nearby, the artist’s Pig Tanker is equally high impact. The long black cardboard oil tanker is fronted by an outsized pig’s head. You know that a child would make perfect sense of this and of the giant cement die. There is a larger-than-life storybook explanation to all of it, if only we knew where to start.

Echoes of this absurdity abound in Robert Rauschenberg’s filmed performance of 1967, Linoleum. A man propels himself around the stage in a bird cage which he shares with live chickens, stopping occasionally to eat fried chicken. Meanwhile an athlete drags himself around with one leg trapped in a bed-frame. Rauschenberg himself draws lines on the floor around sculptures, only to see them wheeling away of their own accord.

Everybody is trapped inside furniture, inside structures. Seen in that light, the die in Nope could be a person, suspended precariously inside the rigid scaffold form.

All four of Calcutt’s selected videos depict artists struggling against the limitations of geometry. There’s Bruce Nauman’s famous video, Walking In An Exaggerated Manner Around The Perimeter Of A Square. The artist minces slowly around a square, forwards, backwards, and forwards again. Nauman, whatever his stylistic invention, never makes it beyond these four lines.

Bas Jan Ader made a career out of falling from trees, houses and bridges for the video camera. In Broken Fall (Geometric), he falls over an A-board, collapsing it and him. In Up To And Including Her Limits, Carolee Schneemann takes action painting to its limits. Hanging from a rope harness, her whole straining body is involved in the creation of each and every chalk mark.

While these artists of the 1960s and 1970s highlighted the tyranny of form, our three young sculptors explore ways of escaping it. Karla Black is the most obvious example, allowing her materials to choose their own shape. Michael Stumpf escapes geometry in a different sense, sliding sneakily between dimensions.

In one of Stumpf’s three works, an amorphous tree wears jeans, one leg a metallic, leafless branch. Where chest and head should be, there is only a lump of stuffed jersey, tapering to a single, tall denim-leaved branch. This apparent state of metamorphosis brings Ovid to mind, whose Baucis and Philemon are willingly turned into trees.

All Stumpf’s works seem to hang, suspended, between states. Autograph is a giant, solid, representation of the artist’s signature, breaking through from linguistic abstraction into this physical world. It comes complete with a blood-red smear on top, and a frayed length of denim like a tiny hair magnified in forensic examination. What the writing says is no longer important; now we see what it is.

In a sense, Stumpf’s work is diametrically opposed to Black’s. Her lumps of powder and vaseline rebel against their role as objects, threatening to break down at any moment. Stumpf takes the intangible world of language and makes it real; words become objects to walk around, as solid as logs.

What ties all three young artists together is the way they relish stuff, and what stuff does. Black’s nail varnish settles into blobs, Peter drips black rubber from his black Pig Tanker, and Stumpf spatters shining drips of pewter onto his make-shift boulder. Each is dripping with associations, with imagined stories, and with inexpressible allure.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 25.09.05