John Latham

FLAT TIME HOUSE
210 Bellenden Road, Peckham
October 15–November 22

John Latham, Untitled (Roller Painting), 1964, spray paint on white duck, 9 x 12'.

Perhaps best known for chewing up and spitting out a copy of Clement Greenberg’s 1961 book Art and Culture in 1966, John Latham (1921–2006) also produced a body of paintings with a spray gun throughout the 1950s and ’60s. One of these works, Untitled (Roller Painting), 1964, is the focus of this solo exhibition at his former home and studio, Flat Time House. Untitled (Roller Painting), a large piece of canvas fixed onto a rod with a motor, is also one of Latham’s explorations of demonstrating time in and through painting. The piece hangs like a film screen or window shade and can be mechanically rolled up or down to reveal or conceal sections, thus manifesting painting-time as the rolling motion. When activated, the work appears to be performing for the other objects that surround it, namely Latham’s “clusters,” sculptures composed of books.

Cluster No. 11, for example, from the series “Cluster of Eleven,” 1992, is, like the others, a composite mobile of book fragments and plaster roughly hewn into a sphere. Its shape and form (round and suspended from the ceiling) refer to Latham’s interest in the earth and space, as well as his more abstract personal mythology, in which books are a metaphor for received knowledge, like cosmology. In this, the first of a two-part exhibition, the clusters are arranged to orbit around the roller painting and a photomontage titled Erth II, 1978, which offers images culled from Latham’s film about a journey to the center of the earth (Erth, 1971). In the next installment, slated to be on view in November, Untitled (Roller Painting) will be included in a group show of work that is equally involved in questions of time and space.

— Courtney J. Martin

“Art Now: Beating the Bounds”

TATE BRITAIN
Millbank
September 5–December 13

View of “Art Now: Beating the Bounds,” 2009. Foreground: Richard Deacon, North-Fruit, 2007. Background: Brian Griffiths, Bear Face, 2009.

The premise of this exhibition is curious—its title, “Art Now: Beating the Bounds,” refers to a defunct English practice in which church parishioners would reaffirm the boundaries of their parish by physically beating the perimeter of the grounds. This theme underpinning the exhibition is a quirky reference but also provides a tenuous thematic framework for the works of the nine included artists. In this context, the most successful piece is Emilly Wardill’s 16-mm film Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 2007, in which the scenes from several stained-glass friezes are dramatized in a self-conscious series of reenactments. Brian Griffiths’s comic Bear Face, 2009, is a more straightforward sculptural work that appears most oddly matched with the other pieces and excessive in its imposing scale.

In comparison, Eduardo Paolozzi’s Kardinal Syn, 1984, its title directly referring to the imposed limits of religion, depicts a head in anguish, bound in string, while Frank Auerbach’s Small Head of EOW, 1957–58, captures the physical limits of thickly layered paint. This approach is contrasted with the adjacent works of Glenn Brown, who is noted for his ultrasmooth reimaginings of Auerbach’s work. In this instance, Brown presents a flatly painted portrait entitled, The Suicide of Guy Debord, 2001, along with a humorous aside to his meticulous practice: a table-cum-palate bearing thousands of layered paint deposits. Similarly, Helene Appel’s examination of the remainders of studio practice is captured on a significantly more intimate level, in her oil-on-linen rendering of floor sweepings. These aesthetic and contextual affinities provide a hopscotch narrative that holds the exhibition together, despite the ambiguous nature of its metaphoric pretext.

— Steven Cairns

Gustav Metzger

SERPENTINE GALLERY
Kensington Gardens
September 29–November 8

Gustav Metzger, Liquid Crystal Environment, 2005–2009, five slide projectors, liquid crystals, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In a BBC interview earlier this fall, Pete Townshend credited Gustav Metzger with teaching him the concept of an environment, the set of conditions under which Townshend, while playing with the Who, would end a song with a screeching riff and then destroy his guitar. Many avant-garde artists were aligned with Metzger’s practice of destruction in the 1960s, which situated the binary of creation and demolition of art as an intertwined objective. A number of them (including Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and the Viennese Actionists) attended Metzger’s September 1966 conference in London, aptly titled the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS). Beginning with the film of some of his early actions—Auto-Destructive Art, the Activities of G. Metzger, 1963, installed adjacent to his manifestos—this exhibition uses the historical relevance of DIAS as a starting point to survey Metzger’s practice to date.

Despite Metzger’s association with the performative aspect of destruction, some of his early works are kinetic installations. Drop on Hot Plate, 1968/2009, for example, is an experiment with water condensation in which water descends from an IV bag through a tube onto a hot plate. Here, a fully formed drop of water rests on the metal surface before evaporating. The evaporation is a seamless process, invisible to the human eye. The artist’s well-known light projections also convey his deep interest in science. The exhibition gives an entire room over to Liquid Crystal Environment, 2005–2009, a five-screen projection of light shot through liquid crystals (compressed between slides) whose colors and viscous forms slowly mutate with the temperature fluctuation caused by a fan on top of the projector. Where Drop on Hot Plate might be clinical, this light show is warmly emotive, giving balance to the remainder of the exhibition, which deals with Metzger’s interest in historic atrocities, specifically the Holocaust, from which he escaped via the Kindertransport to Britain.

A few of the works are participatory. Viewers crawl, one at a time, on the floor under a sheet to view Historic Photographs: To Crawl into; Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938, 1996, or shuffle awkwardly sideways down the raw linen curtain placed over Historic Photographs: To Walk into Massacre on the Mount, Jerusalem, 8 November 1990, 1996. In both cases, one’s bodily movements call attention to the gravity of the images. So, too, do the works suggest Metzger’s ongoing search for interventions into crisis. Not surprisingly, he is staging another conference next year, on the subject of extinction.

— Courtney J. Martin

Olivia Plender

GASWORKS
155 Vauxhall Street
September 25–November 15

Olivia Plender, Empire City, 2009, wood, paper, glue, dimensions variable. Installation view.

The weighty topic of national identity is dealt with in Olivia Plender’s new works on view in “AADIEU ADIEU APA (Goodbye Goodbye Father).” The artist’s concerns are multifarious, but this specific theme takes precedence and knowingly scrutinizes British imperialism in its various forms. The most content-heavy piece is What Is London? (all works 2009), a video projection delivered on an office-style presentation screen, in which a narrator recounts the 1920s British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London, in a voice-over set to contemporary footage of the location. The obvious ironies that emerge in the comparison of imperialism’s ideals and their actualization are highlighted, as is the artist’s hindsight bias in her absurdist treatment of this mock report: In the moments when the narrator appears on-screen, his demeanor, along with the production’s lo-fi aesthetic, underscores Plender’s humorous intentions.

On one wall of the gallery a large printed fabric hanging depicts a stadium audience in the act of spectatorship. With this piece, the artist emphasizes her interests in the dynamic underlying dialogues present in the reception of information; this bold statement complements the more confusing printed poster works pasted in various locations within and outside the gallery. In the adjacent space is an installed room set; its centerpiece, The Empire City, depicts the aforementioned exhibition in scale-model form. In presenting this as an artifact, with twenty-first-century modifications, the artist questions our immediate history by undermining historical fact. Plender makes clear through these devices that as history is made and recorded, its understanding is ultimately imposed in retrospect; in its distortions are a contemporary concern.

— Steven Cairns