In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love
Until January 28 2006; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow

As soon as you walk through the door of the CCA’s exhibition, In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love, you come face to face with a video by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Swamp, made in 1971, is an awkward foray into reedy territory, seen close up through Holt’s bolex camera as she staggers through forests of bamboo. All the while, Smithson, unhampered by the restrictions of a view-finder, is dishing out directions to the struggling Holt.

Experiencing the swamp through Holt’s eyes, you share her disorientation. If you don’t first get ensnared in the brittle bamboo, you know you’re in danger of sinking in some water-logged patch of bog. Smithson, able to see what you can’t, has some sort of plan and you’re just not getting it.

Be warned: Swamp is a good metaphor for this exhibition. The guest curator, Tanya Leighton, a writer and curator on the subject of art and the moving image, plays the role of Smithson. With some bigger picture in mind, she directs us through a swamp of uncooperative artworks, leaving us more bewildered than she found us. Your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to understand the significance of your befuddlement.

Leighton is interested, as far as can be divined, in artists who disrupt and transform the streams of visual information we’re bombarded with every day, drawing out unspoken, unseen truths. In her own words “Operating through a topological mechanics, a poetic or philosophical distance, abstraction, or indirect vision, [the works] seek to return the ‘visual’ to its ‘fullness,’ simultaneously rejecting and requiring directness and indirectness.”

If, like me, you’ve no idea what that means, the good news is that much of the art itself is worth coming to see. Ranging from the 1960s to the present day, there is a strong contingent of New York artists, a reflection of Leighton’s time at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Disappointingly, many of those listed, such as Andy Warhol, are not in the gallery space. Instead their films are being screened at special events, or over the course of the day in the gallery’s cinema.

Many of the works, in keeping with the concerns of our age, expose the subjectivity of seemingly neutral material. Walid Raad’s recent video, I Only Wish That I Could Weep, takes a sunset – one of the most essential, universal, elements of life – and gives it a resonating political significance. Then, in a double-bluff, he strips that political narrative away to reveal a bare fiction. The sunset never changes, but our appreciation of it does, based on our belief of who is behind the camera.

We are warned repeatedly not to trust what we see. Moving images don’t match their own soundtracks, buildings are reconstructed in flimsy paper, and small ads are scrutinized for hidden agendas. Curators themselves don’t escape the scalpel; Lucas Ospina’s mini-exhibition is, like much in this show, a complete fiction. After he tells us of a Colombian artist who never existed, we are left suspicious of curators who can change the story of art by stealth.

Not that the curatorial style at CCA could ever be accused of stealth. The organisation’s guest curators and associate curators have been so keen to make their creative presence felt that several group shows have buckled under the weight. Art, both good and bad, has been hung on inappropriate theoretical frameworks in the curators’ efforts to fill the gallery as they would illustrate an essay. With a change of director underway, now’s the time to take a deep breath, and think again.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.11.05