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Topophobia
, School Lane,
L1 3BX
Friday 2nd March - Sunday 22nd April, 10am-6pm
Reviewed by
PROXIMAL EMBODIMENT!?
Topophobia means ‘fear of place’ - it’s an exhibition
conceived and curated by Anne Eggebert and Polly Gould. I visited the
show for their opening Saturday guided tour. The exhibition features 10
UK international artists.
Eggebert-and-Gould like to use the phrase ‘butting up against’
for our experiences in relation to landscapes, and quote Jean Francois
Lyotard to field their philosophy that we’re unable to see a landscape
when we’re in it - ‘Estrangement would
appear to be a pre-condition for landscape’.
Although the art on show claims to be representative of threatening places
that foster spatial anxiety - places to be feared - Eggebert-and-Gould
have chosen several settings distant from the prospects that most people
live and survive in. As a result, this exhibition is largely cleansed
of presence and lacks credibility. The curators use the subtitle ‘Technologies
of Disappearance’ as a didactic umbrella for the show, but if it
takes people to personify fear, does this exhibition fall down on the
very premise it was set up on?
Within the context of the exhibition’s title ‘Topophobia’,
Matthias Einhoff’s video installation does present a place to fear.
He investigates a wasteland, previously part of the militarised zone within
the Berlin wall and now a stalled late-capitalist development. Einhoff
makes the area even stranger by using high-end corporate video techniques
- he disembodies the viewer with an almost flying camera and a discordant
propagandistic soundtrack. The sniping sounds of branches and plant life
hitting camera glass bring to mind the live gunshots guards would have
fired. This is a place of anxiety, an outcome of totalitarian rule - whether
Fascist, Stalinist or Market led. Here, people go about their daily business
in an ominous atmosphere of ‘what now’?
Contrastingly, with ‘Foamy Water’ and ‘Solid Growth’,
Almut Rink invites the viewer to perch uncomfortably on what could be
described as virtually a stool, to take us on an imaginary journey in
a virtual space with a monotonous, clinical soundtrack ‘coaching’
us on actions like drawing and rendering. While mouse clicking snips at
your brain, the two video installations are supposed to pose the question
of how these computer simulations affect our understanding of real landscapes
through being human - as Almut’s work ‘thematises the notion
of nature’. A series of pixels, this cyber screen space isn’t
a place to fear, it isn’t ‘a space our ego occupies’
but too dull for an ego to stick around, except to play at constructing
obviously fake environments - and that facility isn’t available
here. It reminds us of the existing power of the natural world but Rink
fails to link her art with actual software-realised urban environments,
or the escapism of computer generated movies, and people do not feature.
According to the curators Eggebert-and-Gould, from the virtual plants
in the displaced demonstrations, we’re able to pick up on a metaphor
for communities of people and alienation, i.e. what is it like being an
alien in a community? So is it actually the art spiel that personifies
a fantasy of total control in this exhibition?
I turn the corner and it’s always good to see books, but the relevance
here is what does the artist Abigail Reynolds have to say by presenting
these second-hand, centuries-old devices for viewing? Her ‘very
intentioned photographs clearly point to the social uses of landscape
– ground as ideological ground’: but is this any more than
the before and after photographs we’re all used to seeing, albeit
here some with the novelty of a layered peel-through access to a counterpoint
in time? A field packed with chrysanthemums becomes crammed with the faces
of Glastonbury Festival goers. A country scene with Morris Dancers becomes
a fence surrounded by Greenham Common protestors linking hands. This is
about the politics of landscape, but the reference point is in the past
and disappointingly isn’t contextualised within the current global
nuclear arms glut. Any trace of politics here is even further neutered
by the curators’ assertion that ‘The world has moved on from
the nuclear threat to those from natural disasters’.
In the same room, Uta Kogelsberger’s photos of the wilderness and
urban American landscapes are either cleansed of fear by being photographed
from the distance of the desert, or by being de-populated by long exposure
camera work and rendered expressionless as film shoot settings - unpopulated
backdrops. She succeeds in making a power station float and the light
pollution of filthy cities sparkle as if they were a collection of rocks
and stars seen by the Hubble telescope. Far from representing human agency
in the landscape, her photographs alienate us from this.
I wondered what the blurb for the next work ‘Everything begins
and ends at exactly the right time and place’ could mean within
the Exhibition focus. Louise K Wilson’s 13 minute and 13 seconds
looped video installation is about fictional disappearance - it’s
basically a speeded up version of Picnic at Hanging Rock with an out-of-synch
pre-digital sound track. The curators point out that the artist has pixelated
the rock formation of the ‘real’ place the story is set in,
thus enabling them to soak up the filmic girls. If this obscure metaphorical
possibility allies the fantastical subject of this installation to Topophobia,
why is it inaccessible and not overtly linked to, for example, the everyday
space of the living room where mindless consumption of television can
‘disappear’ us?
During the guided tour we suddenly see a pair of legs, then a ponytail,
dangling from a distant box high up on scaffolding. This is a surprise
simply because – though silent, remote and compartmentalised –
Liverpool based artist Emily Speed is a human being in an exhibition largely
cleansed of contemporaneous representation. Also on display is her flat-pack
version of a mediaeval defensive design for the Star Fort, which is ‘capable
of being worn as a hybrid form that references furniture, clothing, and
architecture’, and a sculpture of backlit boxes of the same. Unfortunately
the Star Fort doesn’t come across as exemplifying ‘how architecture
represents an especially poignant example of transience’, and has
a middle-class designer edge. Emily wasn’t present the second time
I went.
The penultimate room houses the contributions of three artists, and although
it does contain some people and watercolour paint, in the end its tidiness
is cold and destroys the human narrative elements that would bring about
a fear of location. Anne Eggebert is looking for something to evidence
the presence of her father in her largely googled and unearthly spatial
allocation. ‘Have you noticed how when you float along a street
in Google Earth you can’t look in at the windows’, she says,
to which I want to reply ‘Yet’, but fear this may add an unwelcome
political dimension. From Marja Helander’s self-portrait photographs
- setting her in the snow, and among the cardboard and tin of supermarket
packaging, all sold with a change of outfits, jaunty stances and a red
hat – we’re supposed to pick up that she is displaced, shamanistic
and missing tribal ancestors. Polly Gould’s watercolours are literally
flat, but brought to life in ‘hand-blown’ mirrored globes
to ‘engage us with themes of perspective, distortion and the presentation
of space’. This ‘delightful visual trick’ is pretty
but makes me think of an upper-income bracket shiny shopping experience.
I butt up against Topophobia’s art when I find it amusing that
I have a similar red hat to the one in Marja Helander’s pictures.
Getting it out of my bag, I momentarily place a glove close to the surface
of a watercolour on a column supporting a globe. While fully understanding
Polly Gould’s quick, po-faced dive to remove the gauntlet, I notice
that the hat humour isn’t really welcome in such a serious exhibitive
landscape, and, as something to be cleansed, I hold my laughter in with
an effortful act of personal enclosure.
By the time I climb the long staircase to the final work, David Ferrando
Giraut’s ‘perpetual site of distress’, I want to burst
out laughing as my ordinary, everyday shadow mischievously walks along
the screen when I cross the room to gain a viewing perspective in what
turns out to be another seriously considered but empty filmic phenomena.
A previously live, continuous, meta-textual but narratively static, panoramic
turn of a camera depicting the aftermath of a crash, this mini road movie
is set in the countryside and populated with props. It does contain a
human, but an expressionless one who doesn’t move or speak, and
though injured, I’m told is capable of remaining sturdily upright
for the 49 minute duration that I doubt any viewer would hang around for.
The panning, coupled with an unnaturally weird audio track, doesn’t
achieve its aim of placing me at the centre of the work to be trapped
in its direful time, as my naughty shadow proves when I pass the screen
to leave.
Apart from Matthias Einhoff, with his war zone presented in a Stalinist/Capitalist
duel of dangerous reality and propaganda, this exhibition is cleansed
of politics - though an effete attempt was made with the curators calling
Emily Speed’s occupation of a box ‘a gendered space’.
The show lacks originality, is seriously flat, middle-class and remote.
Beyond a veneer of presentation in ways of seeing, or ‘devices of
spectatorship’ as the blurb goes, it is devoid of meaning. Cleansed
of the actual embodiment, actions and politics of human life in living
landscapes, this art doesn’t evoke a fear of place - it alienates
us from itself. Topophobia presents ephemeral viewpoints wrapped up with
a tome of words - writing that’s both on the wall and available
at the bookshop. It’s an anthropophobic, apolotical and funded folly,
exhibited in a place where gallery attendants are generally unpaid, and
often unemployed, volunteers.
After Liverpool, Topophobia moves on to the self-referentially named
destination of Spacex in Exeter where it can be viewed from 22 May 2012.
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