Karla Black at Modern Art
October 13 through November 7, 2014
4-8 Helmet Row (between Mitchell and Old streets)
London, +44 20 7299 7950

Modern Art gallery recently moved back towards the East End of London, having been (in 2008) one of the first galleries to go west. There, Glasgow-based 2011 Turner Prize nominee Karla Black (born 1972) has fitted a site-specific installation of separate but related works to an elegant and airy two-room space. For over a decade now, Black has been making such installations out of her characteristic mixture of art and non-art materials: paint, plaster, chalk, cellophane, make-up, gels. All are used in a distinctly raw way — the chalk will be dust, the plaster in powder form. The dominant element at Modern Art is what art historian, critic, and curator Briony Fer has called Black’s “literal versions of Frankenthaler’s translucent veils”: room-width wall-come-curtains of cellophane, irregularly and faintly colored with a mixture of paint and nail varnish. Named The Body Presumes (all work 2014), The Body Presumes Again and so forth, they hang from straps of sellotape and are sufficiently light that the ambient flows of the viewer’s approach make them swish across the floor, adding a restrained aural aspect.

One must pass through door-like openings to reach the more substantial works beyond. In the first room, one cellophane screen gives onto what seems in context a heavy hanging-form Times made from chalked sheets of sugar paper. The second room has three barriers of cellophane before we reach the suspended brown wrapping paper of Prevent, and the show’s only floor-based artwork, the flattish mound-shaped sugar-paper structure Pre-empt. As each cellophane wall has three layers, washed with color sequences — such as yellow, green, blue — the limits of seeing through them are reached, and so there’s a sense of uncovering inner secrets as one moves into the work.

It’s all rather seductive, and – however formless and fleeting its materials may seem to be — is also precisely controlled. It’s no surprise that Black has said that, “Aesthetics are so important to me and the work is not about decay. It is about preserving this really perfect moment.” Indeed, she asks collectors to send her an annual photograph to prove that their purchase is still as it should be. Consistent with that, Black has spoken about her very particular color preferences, holding, for example, that cerise pink is “disgusting,” and explaining, “I can only go in a tiny little bit of the spectrum, especially in pink. There’s a really specific, really pale baby pink, which is what I like.”

So, that’s the look of it, but what’s the substance behind all this insubstantiality? Is it, perhaps, to deflate the pretensions of patriarchal monumentalism by summoning up such traditionally female zones as the bakery and nursery, using lots of pink, and employing materials — especially cosmetics — which women tend to use more than men? Black will have none of that. “It is ridiculous and annoying,” she’s said. “Why do people call it feminine? Because it is light, fragile, pale? Because it is weak, impermanent?” We should, it seems, look towards Richard Tuttle rather than Phyllida Barlow to find parallels for Black’s concerns. Yet I think that masculine-feminine contrast is there, however she protests. So is a child-like aesthetic — toddlers always want to engage a little too directly with her work — which can also be seen to cock a snook at the authority and seriousness of sculptural tradition.

The child’s perspective chimes with another aspect: how walking into the work physically involves the viewer. Black has spoken about prioritising material experience over language, and you might see that as paralleling a baby’s exploration of the world. The aims here are as close to a painter’s as a sculptor’s, though Black’s approach is also theatrical in that unlike most abstract painting it transforms materials in an illusionistic way. And that shifting of how we view the materials is a significant factor in the work’s seductive impact.

This installation is also one of her most architectural. That adds another to the many possible classifying dyads that Black keeps just out of definitional reach: art versus non-art, art materials vs domestic materials, temporary vs permanent, awkward vs elegant, high-minded formalism vs children’s birthday parties, architecture vs sculpture vs painting. The work enacts the lack of categorization it asserts. Beyond the pleasure in materials and their transformation, the point of this show, then, is something of nothing: it’s the insubstantiality of form matched to evasion of categorization that makes Black a substantial artist.

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The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
April 20 to May 7, 2012

Bookended by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s glorious Arts and Crafts Glasgow School of Art on the hill, (like Edinburgh Castle, protective and aloof) and the urban fabric of the once blighted and still slowly recovering industrial city beneath is a small, well-knit network of galleries and public spaces that help make Glasgow the second most vibrant art scene in the UK.  Some of the more polished venues aspire to London-style blue chip glitziness, but other, more thoughtful, independent spaces, retain a gritty, vernacular quality, inhabiting empty warehouses and commercial quarters true to the heart of the city’s Victorian architecture.

Several exhibits in the Glasgow International seemed geared to impress an international art crowd.  The Glasgow School of Art commissioned series of sculptures by Folkert De Jong, while local hero Karla Black filled the Gallery of Modern Art with an overwhelming installation, also a commission.  The most heavily promoted attraction of the festival, however, was  “Sacrilege” by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. An inflatable “bouncy castle” life-size version of Stonehenge, the piece questioned both the British reverence of the neolithic stone circle on Salisbury plain and it’s importance in contemporary culture as a lightning-rod for kitschy celebrations of the vernal equinox and summer solstice, and low-budget sci-fi flicks about witches and druids. For all the seductive and viscerally engaging quality of this doppelganger in rubber, a lingering feeling that the British have already transformed Stonehenge into a conceptual bouncy castle made this elastic piece of satire a bit redundant. And sadly, rain made actual bouncing on the castle impossible; harsher critics than I, aged four to ten, deemed the piece completely useless.

The debut exhibition at the gallery at 42 Carlton Place, “Ever Since I put Your Picture in a Frame,” is a refreshingly thoughtful and diverse selection of painting both contemporary and from the early 20th Century.  The gallery is a project of the painters Carol Rhodes and Merlin James; curated by James, “Ever Since…” clearly shows the touch of a painter.  Initially a bit bewildering in its breadth, it corrals portraits by artists such as Alex Katz, André Derain and Walter Richard Sickert alongside landscapes by the self-taught artists Alfred Wallis and James Castle.  Despite all the recognizable faces, places and sundry animals, including Richard Walker’s mesmerizing “Moth” and Stephen McKenna’s delightful “Lesser Antilles Bullfinches,” this is an exhibition of paint and materiality.  Both framed and unframed, all the works in this show are consciously vehicles of their own creation.  Clive Hodgson’s “Untitled,” a meditation on decoration and it’s often uneasy allegiance with deep symbolism, revels in it’s painterliness, while Joel Tomlin’s “Elk,” and Julie Roberts “Young Apprentice (Study)” investigate the lugubrious  propensities of oil paint to define a painter’s style.

It is the trifecta of Derain, Sickert and Wallis at the heart of this show, however, that lend sturdy historicity to James’ curatorial endeavor.  Sickert’s delicate 1930s oil sketch of “Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies as Elizabeth Barrett Browning” on a brutal, textured canvas, conveys a spontaneity of creation that perhaps bespeaks his obsession with the pretty young actress, while Wallis’ blunt but warm sketch of “Fishermen’s Cottages” done in a fresh and unassuming hand captures the pure beauty and rustic simplicity of a working seaside village.  With such a variety of subject and so many different viewpoints—including abstractions by James Hyde, Tony Swain and Joe Fyfe—the show insists upon the old adage, “the devil is in the details.”

Karla Black’s installation at GoMA was a more sincere rejoinder to Deller’s “Sacrilege,” located in the precious classical library that almost claustrophobically fills Royal Exchange Square, Black’s sawdust and face makeup rectangular mound, “Empty Now,” similarly dominated the interior of the gallery.   The sheer magnitude of this layered, almost geologic concretion of earth tones, resembling a giant bar of halvah, oscillated between grabbing the viewer with its delicious consistency and coloring, and repulsing them through fear of its seemingly immanent collapse.  Hanging over the piece was “Will Attach,” a filigree of clear packing tape daubed with more face makeup in iridescent pinks and gold.  Too junk-like to be visually pleasing (as is Black’s aesthetic) it hung low enough to threaten the spectator’s shoulders and hair.

The two galleries at 6 Dixon Street, Mary Mary and Kendall Koppe managed, despite being under the same roof, to locate their exhibitions about as far apart on the art spectrum as possible.  Lorna Macintyre’s “Midnight Scenes & Other Works” at Mary Mary featured two quiet and subtle totemic sculptural installations that played with themes derived from Brancusi, also pensively questioning the idea of perimeter and containment in sculpture. The raw outrage of the work of Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for The Black Panther Party, was very tastefully framed and commodified at Kendall Koppe:  an attempt was made to revive some of the anger in the work by having a wall painting featuring violent protesters and dead pigs created by the artist himself around the doorway to the gallery.  The Modern Institute presented a very personal series of notebooks and related artworks by  Paul Thek (1933-88),“If you don’t like this book you don’t like me,”  and “Dresden,” a Beuys-referential/reverential show by  Michael Wilkinson at their new space on Aird’s Lane.

This quick survey of the officially sanctioned GI would not be complete without mention of the alternative, “satellite” shows organized by emerging artists and students. The gritty, earnest assemblages in “Stay Vector, Stay!” organized by a group of graduate students at the Glasgow School of Art in an empty storefront on Albion Street had a willful, kinetic energy.  Justin Stephens’ punctured canvases resonated with the colorful drapery of G. Küng’s ceiling hanging, while Dunja Herzog’s rickety sculptures lurched threateningly over Scott Rogers floor pieces that resembled a awesomely cracked out Smurf village, while Sarah Rose’s thoughtful video installation flickered on the chipped paint walls of this suitably grungy venue.

The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art manages to keep a healthy distance from outright bald-faced capitalism with a predominance of commissioned works and archival museum-quality exhibitions:  it still is a festival, not an art fair.

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