Nowhere … do we go from here?
(A contemporary art exhibition about our uncertain times presented by Jacobson Space downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1.)
Written by Oliver Harris.
“Nowhere” is the launch exhibition for Jacobson Space. Featuring both established artists such as Gerhard Richter and Larry Bell, and younger artists including Swiss painter Pia Fries and new British photographer Sam Irons, it has been assembled to reflect a hiatus: political, cultural and economic. The exhibition tackles this historic moment, before the last decade has become history and the new one begins assembling itself, to present a set of artists whose engagement with uncertainty has never been more relevant. What seems to connect their recent work is an attempt to take themselves out of the picture making process and while doing so creating a sense of nowhereness ... perhaps with a promise of place and purpose just beyond the horizon.
Pia Fries and her one-time mentor, Gerhard Richter, have consistently pushed painting to the limits of representation and, in the process, have developed a very confident post-painterly abstraction. Confronted by Fries’s crisp abstract works we become conscious of her art’s effort to assert itself in a contemporary context. Her works force the viewer’s eye to travel across unconventionally laid down paint, without the compass of icon, through an emptiness that seems both meditative and unsettling at the same time. Jason Martin’s work, likewise, can seem simultaneously expressive, unearthly and hypnotic. His monochrome surfaces - paint scraped across stainless steel, aluminium or plexiglass – are unnerving precisely because they position themselves between the human gesture and the mechanised.
Elsewhere in the exhibition landscape is a common thread. In particular, we see uninhabited spaces that must make themselves from nothing and threaten to revert to being ‘nowhere’. Mankind has always been haunted and tantalised by the image of a world without its own presence. Even the great creation myths contain within them a cataclysmic destruction or a flood - a glimpse of how close we exist to a world without the human. With this comes a perennial instinct to start afresh. Andreas Gursky turns to the fantasies of the recent vacuous and generic developments fuelled by money so new it hasn’t yet been made. Here we see a new vision of mankind, human effort versus desert emptiness, roads going nowhere but into themselves, a train with no station. Olafur Eliasson has turned to the desolate atmosphere of his native Scandinavia for this imagery. In these pictures the very distinction between nature and culture becomes challenged. In his own bare, haunting works Sam Irons shows that it is the act of prohibition that defines the human trace: the blank back of a casino in New Mexico; the tantalising tape drawn across a vacant art fair. ‘It is the forbidden that makes a place of nowhere,’ Irons claims. He demonstrates the ways in which photography contains its own barriers, inherently surreal because photographs must always ‘promise a knowledge they can’t deliver’.
The hiatus is the absence of narrative. In the hiatus attention is drawn to the material itself: sand, paint, glass. Larry Bell’s elusive cubes seem to exist as a geometric twilight, at once transparent and reflective. Since the 1960s his experimentations with vacuum-produced glass planes have been responsible for some of the most exquisite and exacting minimalist sculpture. Young-Jin Choi’s equally evocative photographic prints are caught between the semi-abstract beauty of the images themselves and the manmade ecological destruction they record. Choi’s photographs of South Korea’s coastline lie between the aesthetic and the tragic; they create their own moment of suspension, freezing the catastrophe and rendering it sublime.
A hiatus is both stasis and transition. It suggests the resumption of normal service soon, but also offers a space between, a place of nowhere in its own right. We might choose to stay in the moment of indeterminacy, safe within the still eye of the storm, or we might choose to hear the demand within it for a movement forward. The only question is: where to?
"Nowhere ... do we go from here?" is presented by Jacobson Space downstairs at 6 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NX.
From Tuesday 5 January to Saturday 30 January 2010.
Open Monday to Friday 10AM 'till 6PM, Saturday 11AM 'till 1PM.
Admission Free.