Reviews
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The Real Ideal: |
| Utopian Ideals and Dystopian Realities |
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| 17 September - 17 December 2005 |
| Millenium Galleries, Sheffield |
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Independent, Friday, 7 October 2005
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| It's life, but not as we know it |
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| THE REAL IDEAL |
| UTOPIAN IDEALS AND DYSTOPIAN REALITIES |
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Millennium Galleries
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SHEFFIELD * * *
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| Utopian ideals? Dystopian realities? This exhibition of work by 11 youngish artists at the sleekly appointed Millennium Galleries in Sheffield sounds a little pretentiously off-putting. But the idea that drives it is less intimidating, and less lofty and out-of-the-ordinary, than the title may seem to suggest. |
| This is what it's all about. Artists - like the rest of us - have visions of ideal worlds. Unfortunately, the real world - of compromise, shady dealings and all the grubby human baggage that we never fail to drag along behind us - always manages to come between us and our lofty visions, and all that stuff gets mixed in with the art, too. It's a simple idea - and a very ancient one. It's also a baggily accommodating notion that can be reduced to such platitudes as: art is always complicated by life, and things aren't quite what they seen. |
| In spite of the pseudo-academic posturing of the title, there is a lot of good work in this show, and it's well presented, too. In fact, to walk through it, passing from space to space - each partially shielded from the next by a series of false walls - across a highly polished floor that reflects light back up, is a kind of dreamily disturbing experience, and rendered all the more so by the sound track spilling out of the room that houses Pipilotti Rist’s Sip My Ocean, a video installation that is playing, over and over again, to the accompaniment of the artist singing a song in a high-pitched, girly voice. At first she sings cooingly, as if to reassure us. Then, all of a sudden, that voice is joined by another, of a girl - perhaps it's the same girl, overdubbed - screaming like a mad thing. |
| Some of the best work here is by Theo Kaccoufa. He has created a series of wall-mounted wire sculptures. Displayed against soft green walls that resemble billiard tables in their hue and their soft yieldingness, they look, in their gentle twistings and outflowings, like prototypes - or genetically modified prototypes - of strange plants; or perhaps, even the (gulp) skeletons of prototypes of genetically modified plants. It is all so troublingly betwixt and between. The colours with which he overpaints all those intricately convoluted, though quite pleasingly seductive, wire-works, are soft and pastel-like lemony yellows and dullish pinks, as if none of them would ever hurt a fly, let alone snap open to eat one. He calls them Cyber Flora, and that seems about right in teasy, question-begging way. |
| Next, we drift to some mangled silverware by Cornelia Parker, with the cooing and the screaming ever at our back. Parker has often been in the habit of suspending her work from the ceiling by thin and almost invisible wires, as if what she is offering us is only partially here at all, like any other object that might choose to levitate in front of our eyes. Here, in Thirty Pieces of Silver (Exhaled) Sugar Bowl, we see a ring of silver objects hovering six inches above the ground. They are all stationary, but they look as if they might have made a momentary pause in their giddy, spinning, lives for our benefit, like some thoughtful constellation of ever-turning stars. All those things - a jug, a tea pot, a salver – were beautiful items for adorning a table until someone chose to squash them flat. The result is that, although they may have pretty well retained their forms, they are now nothing other than images of their former selves, wholly useless. They display the reality and the simple usefulness of the object, compared with the uselessness and the almost spectral unreality of tainted art. |
| Michael Glover |
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Independent, Friday, 7 October 2005
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| Guardian, October 24, 2005 |
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| The Real Ideal |
| 2 stars Millennium Galleries, Sheffield |
| Alfred Hickling |
| Monday October 24, 2005 |
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| The Real Ideal claims to be a "response to the tension between utopian visions of the world and the imperfect reality of everyday life". What the show really illustrates, however, is the depressing insularity of the contemporary art industry, where whatever goes around eventually comes around. For example, take Michael Samuels' miniature tropical islands, constructed from DIY materials laid on workmanlike wooden trestles. I last encountered these two years ago in a show in Sunderland, where they were brought in to illustrate a quote appropriated from William Blake. Then there are Pipilotti Rist's videos of herself behaving very badly, which crop up all the time in shows claiming to challenge the gender hegemony of this, that or the other. At least such catch-all concept shows can be relied upon to provide some amusement with the earnestness of the explanatory wall panels. Diana Thater's digital weather system, we are told, is a 21st-century reinterpretation of the sublime, in which "we see the beauty of the projection without thinking about the technology which openly enables its existence". Alternatively, you may ask yourself why there are DVD players and wires all over the floor, without noticing the clouds on the ceiling. You really have to work to make connections for yourself. Rist's scuba-diving film features some close-ups of a coral reef that may just - at a pinch - tie in with Theo Kaccoufa's creepy GM teddy bears, which has developed squid-like tentacles, or the dangling filaments of his Cyber-Flora. Taken on their own merits, Kaccoufa's fernlike contributions could make a coherent exhibition, which leads you to wonder: with fronds like these, who needs anemones? |
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| · Until December 11. Details: 0114-278 2600. |
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| Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 |
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