Generation 25 (Modern Art 2 venue) review
Generation 25 is envisioned as an epochal quarter century exhibition celebrating current generation of scottish artists as well as being a reflection on it’s past, present and future.
From the entrance it leads us into the dreamscape of a contemporary person. We are met in corridor by Jonathan Monk’s paintings set as handwritten window travel agency advertisements offering charter tours to different resort destinations. Surprisingly, entering the next room we see a cycle of Ciara Phillips works ”Antonia reading” – multiplied as if frozen in endless repetition casual photo on the handpainted blue wallpaper resembling water with splashes.
To add to this theme another corridor is filled with 50s styled paintings of yachts by Alex Dordoy as if calling to take you away.
So what is it a contemporary scotsman is dreaming to escape from to the warm seaside and where is the journey taking him?
From? Yes, a familiar installation of 80s subculture living room with alcohol containers and dusty vintage furs, ”trashy” but still a bit sweeter, warmer and more welcoming than Tracy Emin’s unmade bed, entitled Peek a Jobby raising the issue of unemployment, leading further to a Douglas Gordon’s cut of Hitchcock’s Psycho played in slow motion bringing to mind all the long hours we spend stuck as if in a neverending slow motion filmcut i front of a tv, leading further to logically consequential scenes of suicide by suffocation by Smith/Stewart.
On the other hand, Charles Avery’s The Islanders could represent the imaginary sea resort/port, at times surreal, at times giving occasional political mesasages, at times repulsive and strange….all those cafees and sunbathers-it is probably how we see ourselves in a sardonic slogan ”life is a beach”….but the drawings, technically quite well rendered, are still performed in black and white as ”Psycho” footage and ”Antonia Reading” multiplied photo, apart from bright surrealist geometric constucts breaking into the main motif as some existential or matrix error.
But is there another way then to just be sick of it all and take a boat to a southern destination?
The second floor of gallery does represent dreamscape local to the country.
It starts with photoworks by Roderick Buchanan, vintage style representation of traditional, to many sentimental and outdated, folk culture, among others group photo of Gringair Thistle Flute Board, faces that touch and give warm feeling of provincial family album with all its funny inappropriateness. But the warmth is broken up by soundtrack from videowork in next room, shifting from techno to contortive contemporary symphonic pieces, bringing the feeling that idyllic traditional society is being threatened and disrupted by modern hi-tech culture like a hobbits den’s peace threatened by occasional disruption from messengers of Mordor.
Next room bringsus to visionary highlight of the show: Ross Sinclar’s Nova Scotia. It represents the rural dream of taken into 21 century. Idyllic pastoral setting of Scottish hills where people og hunting, growing vegetables, referring to hipster culture of farmer’s markets and feral living. Unfortunately the animals are taxidermed, the vegetation is plastic and the soundtrack of Bonnie Love sounds with distortion, evoking the idea that the New Age idea of feral living is nothing but plastic.
This room is adjointed and stylistically related to next room, featuringnSimon Starling’s Burn-Time. Is it referral to Rober Burns with omitted letter or «burning down the house»? The installation consists of the building of National Gallery made of cardboard (which is apparently what we are invited to burn at some point, maybe as something outdated or not thorougly made) with one piece of wall missing and placed on the floor next surrounded by geometric composition of what looks like patè or mousse desert jars with rests of food in several of them, probably inviting former National Gallery lovers known for their taste for patè and mousse, to join in a feral picnick on the floor, setting up new table manners and code of behavior. Next to it is a rural village oven, apparently mean for further burning of Natiinal Gallery.
Does the artist convince us to join in this ritual of bonfire or funeral fire? Before You answer, i’ll remind of burnings of heretic and alchemical texts by inquisition as well as of books by many classical and modern authors by Hitler. To support this reference, a vintage german newspaper Berliner Abendnatt is thrown on picnick cloth.
Next two rooms represent female fate in this scenario: idyosyncratically copied DeKooning’s pieces with a hysterical tytle «Who’s a woman now» (and i can envision the artist shouting that to her male partner in the similar manner that initially scared DeKooning into creating his in his turn idyosyncratic pieces) and the Julie Robert’s figurative paintings of Restrainig Coats, gynaecological chair and subsequent corps on a trolley.
The journey (with small omissions) ends in a light room with Alison watt’s big scale figurative paintings. To remind, the artist is known for contemporary rendering of Quatrocento art, with plastic and robotic looking figures instead of harmoniously realistic renaissanse ones. This time she presents a cycle of thorougly rendered realistic draperies. But, entering from the previous room, one cannot shake of the thought: aret those sweatily cramped hospital bedsheets?
Personally to me they reminded of close-ups of Georgia O’Keffe’s flowers, well executed, but purely decorative.
To some they wil remind of curves in expensive linen in a charter tour hotel from the exhibition’s first floor’s dream, maybe to some (as pieces are monocromatically executed in greyscale) will bring upon erotic fantasy of 50 Shades of Grey.
Would You buy the artwork to hang in Your dream bedroom? I am sure You would. Do these works make a crown finale of the 25 years of journey through scottish art? Will You find something profound hiding in the folds , some sort of epiphany, or maybe a vision for future for Scotland, independent or not?
I will let You decide.