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

Eddo Stern

CHAPTER
Market Road Canton
October 23–November 29

Eddo Stern, Best Flame War Ever, 2007, still from an animated video, 14 minutes 37 seconds.

The first solo exhibition in the UK by the Tel Aviv–born artist Eddo Stern presents a visually dazzling array of alternative universes. References to Balinese shadow puppets and fantasy fiction (think Aslan, the golden lion from C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” [1950–56], as well as indigo multiheaded dragons) meet and mingle with online avatars in Stern’s psychedelic sculptures and videos. The mechanical puppet Lotusman, 2007, is the first to greet viewers. This macho man’s visage floats on a bed of lotus-pink muscular limbs that flap like wings above green leaves. Casting giant, intensely hued moving shadows on a wall, this work evokes a mythical beast sailing menacingly through the air and re-creates the eerie glamour of bygone magic-lantern displays.

Yet Stern is nothing if not topical. He’s famous for populating his work with references to gaming, and his video animations are the most ostensibly conceptual works on view. Best Flame War Ever, 2007, is a recorded conversation between the King of Bards and Squire Rex, two online personae involved in the computer role-playing game EverQuest. Their discussion of the game rapidly morphs into an excuse to trade insults, revealing the masculinity-obsessed aggression lurking behind even such seemingly innocent flights of fancy.

Since Stern highlights the connection between fantasy (whether in the guise of mythology, sci-fi, or Internet subcultures) and humanity’s violent impulses, it is tempting to read political commentary into his sinisterly seductive art. The animation-based projection Portal, Wormhole, Flythrough (Fake Version), 2009, is deliberately disorientating. A massive screen is saturated with a blazing, throbbing, and patterned kaleidoscope of color: red, blue, hot pink, and checkered black-and-white hues appear and disappear, simulating the sensation of toppling headlong into an endless tunnel. Is this work a comment on the sliding boundaries between fact and fiction? Or a metaphor for Israel’s perennial border disputes?

— Zehra Jumabhoy