it's DARK @ CoExist Gallery

We're talking about some wacky bloke she met, and how inscrutable and exclusive he seemed to be: doggy style, apparently, he had tiddled on his lamposts and marked his territory as 'Modern' and 'Stuckist', marking his little plot in the great terrain of the visual arts. I hope that's all the doggy style he'll get, too.

Rather than announce - pronounce - one's artistic GPS, some souls send up a flare - and there were several this evening. Not being familiar on video installation, I was shown what it could be: two pieces particularly struck me: Semiconductors' Black Rain, the most beautiful imagery of solar winds, and I don't use the word beautiful at all lightly: there is no greater achievement. And it had a hypnotic beauty, black and white, the abstractions of eclipses like the patterning of an iris, the trajectory of the missile from this NASA footage, and rain, or Coronal Mass Ejections giving an eternal sense of space and weightless time. Is that beauty in the eye of the beholder, or in my perception, or worst, in my taste? I don't think so: others flopped onto the beanbags, the static softness within the boundaries of audability cushioning and enveloping this space. The last time I saw art change people was in The Weather Project (you remember Eliassons Sunset at the Tate) with people lolling on the floor. Amazing.

DARK, curated by Michaela Freeman, was as stylish as the little black dress she wore with ease and panache this evening. Here's what it can be: engaging, hypnotic, cleanly and stylishly executed. John Smiths' 'The Black Tower', 1984, was mystifying to me: eventually, he was talking about death. Spare - spartan - concise, lightly humorous, staring at things, bits of place, our minds are engaged in a preoccupation, while staring at what is in front of us with apparently no comprehension. Saddening, but the pragmatism and gentleness that constructs this narrative has that touch of humour: we are shown the colour of the sky, of his porridge, of the bits and pieces of his mechanics of his daily life, and his doppelganger in the form of a black building, the notion of death in the peripheral vision, now brought to the fore, into consciousness. In Ireland, we'd put that on the National Curriculum: it's all about growing up, finally realising the finity of self, the drawing together, the drawing in of the day.

And tomorrow, I'll go back. Josh Langan, less a flare and more a live wire buzzing with static (watch this space) - I couldn't see his work for the amount of bodies at this Private View, I couldn't get a seat in Susan Francis' installation, and I didn't get time to absorb Lemeh42's work. Here's to a success, here's to what it can be, here's to style. Bravo.

Pin the Tale on the Donkey

We're on the phone arranging to take work to a show in a month or two, and he voiced a concern about a fellow practitioner. What was contemporary about the work he had seen just recently?

For craft practitioners, the material and it's expression comes first, quite often in a functional way, and to defunctionalise that crafted object is a breed of "art" that has spawned the 'neither this nor that' offspring, but we are made to contemplate aforesaid offspring, because if we don't, we're heathens. No wonder at some of the dumbstruck silence that pervades. The pursuit of beauty has many poor relations, cruelly and unfortunately. Cristín Leach, the eminent Irish critic, recently wrote an article about the Summer Degree shows at NCAD, and to her, it's maybe a matter of marrying craft skill to concept: few of those artists will survive, breed, but we'll have a new landscape in which to wander. For those with skill and no concept, as Bill Bryson ignominiously commented on Norwegian television "It gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience", as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty, that Scarlet Pimpernel, elusive and undefined. And for those with concept and no skill, pass the planks and hammer.

But it's easy to get bogged down in the craft of the matter, for those who are so inclined. Rather than raise one's head above the parapet, and comment on the wider arena, in the same way that one raises a wet finger to see which way it's blowing, it's far easier to stick it in the mud and Carry On Regardless. Is it important to create new art that is relevant, refreshing, innovative and engaging? To carry on the conversation of art, an artist's practice within the big picture, the vista, the landscape...?

I went to Rainham Marshes recently, and I know nothing of birds, at all. Still a fabulous sight to see, and I can understand the endless enthusiasm for spotting and classifying birds, albeit through a long lense: give me that long lense and I'll happily spot the lesser warbled artist stuck in the grassroots or feminist '70's, the glam '80's glitteriness of style without substance, and then the conceptualisation of the artist (by merit of signing their work) to the hastily bashed together planks of wood with the indescribably poetic yet fundamental profundity of hot air. The Emperors clothes. That's pretty scathing: all of this art is known to have validity, but I'd like to open the newspaper and then look at the stuff on the wall and imagine these things have a knowingness of each other. But this isn't fashion, for me, it's about animals, and to pin the tale on the donkey, we need prior visual memory of aforesaid donkey, aim for it's arse and give it the Tale it's asked for.

When dinosaurs roamed the earth

A preoccupation of the Chapman brothers, dinosaurs do roam their earth  - a boyish, fetishistic but playful preoccupation. Hell, Sixty-Five Million Years BC, 2004-5 is a childlike interpretation of what dionosaurs were like - small-scale, made from toilet-roll-innards and washing-up bottles and poster paint and what ever Mum has going to spare at the time kind of aesthetic. These dinosaurs are really cute.

Hell, Sixty-Five Million Years BC, 2004-5, Detail (Roger, I've called him), Jake and Dinos Chapman,

 

 

Courtesy of the artists who are not friends of mine but I do facebook them

 

 

 

 

 

But the Chapman's work isn't really about cute, it's serious stuff. Engaging, seductive, wherether in a childlike way, or a malicious way - to draw the viewer towards something that is beyond disgust, as we are forced to confront the thirst for sensationalism in ourselves, with a pretence towards an academic interest in themotivations of these artists and the meanings and messages of the work - but it's there: cohesive and reasoned, clever, witty and dry.

These dinosaurs aren't scary but the ones I do see around me are. I'm not imagining things: I see painters who claim their work is painting when I see an object, and the artist engaged in concerns that I consider sculptural: weight, balance, space - of the physical, not visual kind, and colour. Planes of colour, monotone, be it a pretty purple or earthy green, but held in this physical space by virtue of the canvas underneath, stretched across a plane to create an opacity that then encapsulates physical space. Okay, so some of those concerns are painterly.  Stick it on the wall, Simon Callery, and call it painting, but the physicality of the object, the desire for physicality is yearning. To provoke the viewer to explore the canvassed object - to ask them to physically move themselves, to explore the form through different viewpoints, that's being engaged with an object. Little objects: pick them up, turn them round; big objects: walk around them. The dematerialisation of colour has more to do with Rothko's spiritual experiences and less to do with Dulux colourmatching, but slowly the hues have bled away. This has more to do with the transubstantiation of materials - to dematerialise the visual, to explode the physical - the solar plexus blow of Rodins' Kiss. A friend, on completion of his MA at Manchester in Painting some years ago, announced that Painting Is Dead. I would now be inclined to agree with him. he's now in the business of architecture. In regards to callery, one wonders if he was hung in the Sculpture Room in the Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum, Stiles, Wilcox and Mathieu (date not given), published by Sesame Street: a totally charming book. Well, one wonders what the playing field would be like in regards to images and objects and their transmogrification (for all you Calvin and Hobbs fans). Short and sweet: put your work on the floor and reconsider?

And another pterodactyl shadowed my footpath recently. Archaic ways of seeing the world, an over-romanticised view of the Way Things Should Be and Do Take My Advice and Guidance, I Know What's Best Because I Teach. Silly ideas like Bring Out Your Work (I'm ringing the bell), Bare Your Soul, That's Very Good, and It Is Because I Say It Is, belong to Tracey. Who, incidentally, is not a personal friend of mine but I do facebook her.