The Exhibition I left the exhibition and closed the gallery door behind me. After descending several flights of stairs I stopped. The rhythm of stepping superseded my thoughts and into this non-thought shot a reverie. These are the words I wrote on the photocopied gallery floor plan.
Am I holding hollow? I’ve carried this scrawl in my bag since last Saturday. It’s now Wednesday and I’m going to make something out of these words and what it was that prompted me to stop and write them in an ice-cold stairwell. Why did I go to the exhibition? I went because I know the artist a bit, yet I couldn’t imagine what his work would look like. I went out of blunt curiosity. I went looking for something I’d never seen before. I went alone, on the last day of the exhibition, with a feeling of last chance exclusivity. What do I remember? A blanket spread across the floor and hollow limbs – bits of limbs, legs standing, legs reclining and interlocking arms resolutely folded. Blankets protect people and things. Limbs frozen awkwardly in front of me, it was as if the body, unexpectedly finding itself on show, was self-consciously holding still ’til my back was turned. What was on show? I stood back from the edge of the blanket and looked at the limbs. I imagined kneeling on the blue blanket, reassembling the body and carefully dismantling it, again and again. In this hypothetical way I played with the possibilities laid out for me. Then I paused – in a lucid moment of play I’d found a tension between colour, shape, texture and form that made me want to make something. What’s the relationship between playing and making? What’s a ‘lucid moment of play’? It’s pausing. It’s being arrested by the recognition that you are on the cusp of making something. In this refined moment of play it’s easy to get too excited about the future, to like what you see too much, to plan what you will build upon the moment, to get anxious about the start of something new and fast forward to the end, instead of just enjoying the pause. What happened next? A limb furled up into a spiral and climbed upon a plinth. I stood and plotted the journey from the blanket to the plinth. There in the middle of forming my own story about how bits often yield to the pressures of presentation I paused to look at the drawing hanging on the wall beside me. This small, rigorous drawing was in a business like mood. Its tightly drawn panels, gradients and ovals took charge. Can a drawing be a title of an exhibition? A title draws my attention to or away from themes. Its words are usually encouraging but often insensitive. A drawing would be a much more subtle way into an exhibition. The drawing was rendered with enough professional sincerity as to be mistaken for a plan. Do you work things out on paper first before committing yourself to a great endeavour the way an Architect does? Architect’s drawings are disappointing, I always skip the drawings in books on Architecture, they make buildings seem lost and Architects seem lonely. What gets lost when you make an exhibition? Everything that is not good enough to be shown, everything that is removed to make way for the mechanics of presentation. But something inside the body is trying to escape. Out of the bottom of the spiral limb protruded a cylindrical, rubber foot that bowed with the weight above it. Rubber is comedic. To follow the author Adam Thirlwell’s line in his article, ‘Only When I Laugh’ 1, pure comedy is realistic. Pure comedy is not jokes or farce, or zany exaggeration, or slapstick but the unglamorous revelations about the practical difficulties of life. Rubber solves so many problems of modern living in its vulgar, practical way. It’s so acquiescent, dumb and useful that I feel ashamed for it. As a comedic prop, the rubber foot was doing a great job at undermining any artistic pretentions. What endures beyond an exhibition? Questions, personal judgements and an exciting change in mood I would call inspiration. What next? In Mark Cousins essay, ‘The Ugly’ 2, he describes, from the perspective of Western philosophy, the relationship between perfection, completion and the idea of ugliness. ‘The perfect object is, rather, one which is finished, completed. Any addition or subtraction from the object would ruin its form.’ He concludes that, ‘This stress upon the object’s being perfect and therefore finished already suggests a philosophical criterion as to what will function as ugly. It is that which prevents a work’s completion, or deforms a totality – whatever resists the whole.’ A bit-like intensity of parts What was it about the exhibition that prompted me to stop and write in a cold stairwell? The serious games of children keep them constantly on the threshold of making. Then, later, adult endeavours begin to demand endings. Isn’t the adult reproach to, ‘Play nicely!’ a contradiction in terms that expresses an impossible wish for play to always have a happy ending? The limbs leant themselves to my imagination like an easy adoption, where their concerns are easily joined to mine. What the exhibition put on show is the relationship between playing and making and how, if our desire to get things finished is forestalled, the pleasures of playfully thinking around art can be taken up by an audience. What next? I don’t know how to end this because I want to keep my words in play. But I think it might be too late to avoid an ending – I’ve made a few personal judgements, drawn a conclusion and what began as enthusiasm has become appraisal. I think it would have been better if I had just stopped writing. 1 Only When I Laugh, The Guardian, 23rd August 2003 2 The Ugly Part 1, AA Files 28, Architectural Association, 1995
‘Part Lost Objects’ New Work by James McLardy Glasgow Project Room
Sarah Tripp
James McLardy
Glasgow Sculpture Studios
145 Kelvinhaugh Street
G3 8PX
Glasgow
United Kingdom
Europe
