The Associates
Until June 21; Dundee Contemporary Arts

Dundee Contemporary Arts celebrates its tenth birthday with an exhibition of the city’s most recent success stories. Seventeen young artists, all of whom studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, and all of whom are making names for themselves at home and abroad, are reunited in The Associates.

Half way through its ten years, DCA put on a show called Plunder: it was all about collage, and artists’ appropriation of other cultural material in their own work. It took in such 20th century greats as Kurt Schwitters and Eduardo Paolozzi, concluding with contemporary artists including Cathy Wilkes (who taught many of the artists in the current group show). Of all the 66 shows which DCA has mounted, Plunder is the one which The Associates most clearly brings to mind.

Collage is ever-present in The Associates. There is a liberal sprinkling of traditional chopped up newsprint and magazine images; other media include plywood, cigarette papers, photography and video. Time, space and artistic styles are cut into pieces and stuck back together again, some finding a new coherence and others delighting in their incongruity.

The exhibition begins and ends with a reference to DCA’s first ever show, Prime. Fiona Jardine’s two new digital collages of the same name are sophisticated reconstructions of the inaugural exhibition. Using different views of the group show, photographed in different light conditions, she has fragmented the space and rebuilt it, incorporating different textures such as digital noise and filmic hairs and scratches.

Jardine’s collages are hung in the galleries which they depict, further deepening the sense of dislocation and reordering. The most impressive feature is that despite these layers of disruption, of both time and space, the resulting images are intact: we automatically comprehend them as places we can and do inhabit.

Kevin Hutcheson and Steven Cairns are both true to the origins of collage. Taking one or two bits of text or picture, crudely cut from magazines and newspapers, they bring them together in a way which, unlike Jardine’s clever construction, defies any easy reading. In a nod to Schwitters, pioneer of collage, Hutcheson uses sandpaper, both real and photographed.

Cairns also contributes a video to the exhibition, which combines scraps of TV footage with deadpan, digital voiceovers. Artistic practice is briefly denounced as fiction, and a Jude Law look-alike is singled out from a 1980s newsreel. The voiceover wonders whether the young man is surprised to look like Jude Law, while acknowledging that in the 1980s, the actor was yet to grow up and become a star.

Cairns’ video, in its own simple way, reveals life as something of a Dadaist collage. Looking at that dated footage we are unable to accept it at face value; we inevitably mix it up in our heads with unrelated information and experience, and in this way we dream up a host of new absurdities every day.

Duncan Marquiss and Graham Little’s works on paper aren’t technically collages. Instead, they are drawings, skilfully rendered in coloured pencil and chalk, of which artists in centuries gone by would have been proud. But, like collages, they are rudely interrupted.

A lilac rectangle disrupts the narrative in Marquiss’s Apparent And Unapparent Surfaces. Here, a bland male figure in shirt and tie is startled out of his chair by the flat shape, cut into the picture’s surface. The bricks on the chimney-breast behind him are in the process of dislodging themselves, and no part of his world can be trusted not to glide between two dimensions and three. The picture bears strong echoes of Steven Campbell’s topsy turvy world, where buildings take revenge on architects, and rooms regularly turn upside down and inside out.

Little’s untitled drawing, carefully hatched and modelled, recalls the fleshy flounces of late 19th century art. A naked woman is half wrapped in plastic, either asleep or dead. A dark green sphere, like a crystal ball, sits oddly over her head, like the rectangles of Marquiss’s drawings. Is the sphere a part of some mystical narrative, or is it another escapee from the third dimension?

Little moves entirely into the third dimension with his wacky sculpture, Facts Are Stupid Things (Fruit vs Fashion). A mass of oddly protruding planks and boxes is papered over and painted with one continuous surface. It’s a crazy stylistic pick and mix: op art rubs shoulders with rustic figurative painting, rococo-inspired draperies and Christmas card-style baubles. Minimalist this is not. There is no word for what it is.

In the Lonely Piper’s lyrical story, Fame And The Fisherman, dislocation is not achieved with scissors and glue, but it’s central to the work. The artist singles out the moment of disruption, when our hero is psychologically wrenched out of this world and tumbled into another. The tale is told with characteristic poetic flair, both visual and verbal, true to form for the self-proclaimed “bog-cotton picking son of a Neil M. Gunn”.

In addition to that moment of disruption which comes with collage, there is a second thread which runs through the show. The works by no means look the same, but they all share a certain aesthetic something. Surfaces tend to be lacklustre, resisting anything too glossy or painterly. Virtuoso technical displays are carried out in modest coloured pencil, not luscious, luminous oil. Where oil paint is used, its handling is clumsy and flat. While there is a definite interest in surface textures and patterns, there is a firm democracy at work which refuses to be seduced either by fine materials or by craftsmanship.

Katy Dove’s two oil paintings are typically modest and unassuming. With an interest in automatic drawing, her paintings are always basic, intimate, and visually naïve. It’s when she brings them together in animations that the magic begins, as witnessed by the three films in this show. The first was made while she was still at college in Dundee, and the last, Welcome, was made last year. Including unusual sections of live footage, and more disjointed than past works, the new film sits well in this group show.

Lucy McKenzie’s large installation recreates a ponderous, wood-panelled room, complete with art nouveau door handles, on a massive wall-mounted canvas. Originally shown in New York’s MoMA, it was made as a setting in which to show the artist’s own paintings – revealing how pictures are controlled as much by their environment as by their maker. As an oil painting itself, the style is deliberately flat and uninspiring.

Scott Myles plays with surfaces too, on his over-sized metal trinkets. Hello, It’s Me is a six-foot bronze pillar covered roughly in white house paint. All drips, scrapes and pock marks, this classic – and expensive – high-art material becomes in Myles’s hands a veritable white elephant.

To look at The Associates, it’s easy to conclude that Dundee produces artists preoccupied with collage, deconstruction and low-key surface patterns. Or perhaps it’s with these commonalities in mind that this selection of artists was made in the first place. Either way, it makes for a coherent group show where the art makes up for a lack of interpretation by debating amongst itself. If you can tune in, it’s worth eavesdropping.

Catrìona Black, The Herald 10.04.09