Night and Day •Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
There was no catalogue, statement or
even press release given out at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery to accompany
the group show entitled “Night and Day.” Such an absence can
be at times baffling and misleading for the viewer, allowing endless referentiality
to grow in respect to the show’s purpose—in other words, something
like trying to be funny without any punch lines. Other times, direct experience
with the artworks is more than enough to get you right to the point. This
show was one of the latter times.
I started downstairs, where a sculpture bed entitled we franciscans by
Saint Clair Cemin was surrounded by portraits of dogs by Andrew Mansfield.
There was a sense of hovering loneliness projected by the dogs’ dull
eyes glancing at each other in this ascetic ambience. This room set the
pace for the rest of the show, the morbidity of the vacuum where night
and day are no longer interchanging but are one and the same. Next, pictures
by Richard Billingham were presented opposite Keith Tyson’s detailed
maps. Billingham’s photographs are of his parents (his working-class
father getting drunk at home, while his mother concentrates on completing
a jigsaw) and brother, taken over the past seven years. A lot of artists
seem to be trapped in immediate-family portrayals, a kind of this-is-my-life
genre that has become long outdated, but Billingham manages to transcend
this by taking pictures that maintain a familiarity with their subject
while at the same time upholding the cold-blooded distance of an observer.
To these people light and dark, day or night makes no real difference,
since they are focusing with religious concentration on a non-stop activity
in the interior of their home, engulfed in their own little universe.
Just opposite, Keith Tyson presents an extravagant fantasyland, a gigantic
pleasure park whose immensity increases the suffocating environment of
the Billingham interiors. Leon Golub’s trust me leads you up the
stairs to Georgina Starr’s party, video stills of the artist partying
on her own. In these photographs, she goes through the motions of a party
animal, mixing cocktails, posing, dancing next to a bar full of drinks
and a room decorated for the occasion. With considerable wit and a load
of sarcasm, Starr presents an elusive sense that she is the only attendant
of the party. This figure has the vacancy and solitude of a couch potato
watching television reruns from dawn to dusk. Almost reflecting the mood,
just opposite, a Bruce Nauman lithograph of a clown trapped in a television
set swings to eternity.
At face value, “Night and Day” delivers an authentic sense of
visual and aesthetic density. What is brought to mind, without any stereotyping,
is the Sinatra song image of skyscrapers by night, sunrise, and sunset.
Without undermining the context, works of very different backgrounds,
from Nauman to Billingham, similarly managed to look equally interesting
next to each other. With its select trimmings, this really good show was
an almost emblematic representation of night and day stretching to extraordinary
dimensions.
Emily Tsingou
Athens, Greece
1995