Over to Angel tube station then down the gentle slope of Old Street all the way to the bottom where the welcoming appearance of two graceful golden glowing arches indicates that speedy sustenance is instantly at hand for those who need it. Not that I’m going to grab a Big Mac, or even a little one for that matter, as I’m not in search of calories but culture and the only reason I look out for this particular drive-in McDonald’s is that it happens to be the local landmark indicating the turn off into Wharf Road, wherein is sited the rather smart and stylish Parasol unit. Both floors of the space have currently been given over to Rana Begum for her exhibition entitled The Space Between, a sort of mini-retrospective of the abstract work that she’s been making over the past decade and a half. It’s a survey that runs all the way from No. 18, a wall-mounted arrangement of eight shallow grey boxes, right up to this year’s No. 676, a long yellow steel rod that’s been anchored at one end in a solid concrete base and then been given a couple of bends so that it looks like a sort of tilted-over square.
What else is on show, well, there’s also No. 161, No. 274, No. 489 and No. 563 and a couple of dozen other numbers, although I’m not sure that this Chinese takeaway style of cataloguing work is all that helpful, aside from indicating Begum’s chronological development through a variety of different styles. While all the works could be reasonably placed at the Geometric-Minimalist end of the abstract spectrum – there’s not a great deal to see and what’s there mostly involves straight lines – over the years Begum has experimented with all manner of carefully crafted structures in wood and metal. The ones here range in size from a small stack of brightly coloured lozenges; through the large wooden reliefs that shift from reds to blues depending on the position of the viewer; right up to a couple of, roomsize installation – one filled with little fluorescent light tubes and the other a cascade of subtly shaded overlapping metal meshes. It’s easy enough to pick out Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley, Dan Flavin and James Turrell as among the illustrious alumni from an earlier generation of abstractionists who have provided her with inspirational ideas but, I think it’s fair to say, Begun does manage to rework them sufficiently and successfully enough to make them appear quite fresh again. The work is all beautifully constructed and certainly well displayed in the gallery and while it probably won’t make any converts amongst those who prefer their art to shock and screech or replicate the world and tell stories, it should definitely appeal to those with a more subtle sensibility – amongst whom I am happy to include myself.
Before heading off I waste a few minutes listening in to the video loop interview between the artist and Parasol’s director Ziba Ardalan. As expected, this yields little useful information beyond confirming the difficulty of saying anything very illuminating, instructive or worthwhile about this kind of art. It’s probably best just to advise the curious to go and take a look and make up their own minds. Some people find a stack of yellow poles leaning up against a gallery wall rather a compelling visual indulgence – I’m one of them – but I’m absolutely sure that no words of mine or anyone else, however multitudinous or mellifluous, are ever going to convince the naysayer who thinks that it’s just a pile of meaningless junk.
Departing the gallery, I dive back into the real world of sensory overload where McDonald’s sell their salty snacks and a clamour of cars chase down the noisy chaotic roads that encircle Old Street tube station. No wonder some of us enjoy the relief of a bit of sophisticated abstract silence. Well, anyway, that’s what I ruminate on as I head off down Hoxton way and on to the Peer gallery for another dip into the sea of abstractionism. This time the work comes from Jeremy Moon, an artist who had a relatively short career (he died a few years before Begum was born) although he did achieve some recognition, notably for producing a sort of quirky version of abstract design that occasionally lapsed into the downright, tongue-in-cheek comedic. When so much of the abstract art of the ‘60s was created with such an air of pompous seriousness, frequently echoed by the po-faced analysis of certain critics, I’m not sure how well his work was received at the time. But looking back now, with the benefit of quite a few decades of hindsight and filtered through the prism of Post-Modern flippancy, Moon’s work looks all rather perky and pleasant. Well, anyway, I quite liked the star made of intersecting triangles and the round blue circle with the cut-out holes that looks like a caricature Swiss cheese gone off. In addition to the small display of Moon’s original artistic works, Neil Clements has created a sort of curious homage to the artist by way of a comprehensive slide projector display of his works from the early 1960s. Projector and screen are set on what looks like the reconstruction of a suitably contemporaneous metal sculpture in the style of Anthony Caro or Phillip King. Presumably this is meant to be an example of the kind of jokey silliness that Moon himself would have appreciated, so I suppose the rest of us should try to force an empathetic smile and not be too critical.
I suppose there must be some sort of Jungian synchronicity in the East End air at present as the title of the Peer gallery show, Out of Nowhere, finds an appropriate echo round the corner at Flowers with their Out of Obscurity, the first half of a two-parter show that focuses on abstraction within contemporary photography. The dozen or so artists here use a range of techniques both inside and outside the darkroom to distort, distress and otherwise confuse their negatives and prints in order to produce a wide variety of non-figurative imagery. Chris McCaw lets the light show through his silver-grey negatives by slashing at them with some kind of blade, as if emulating the Italian Spatialist Fontana or maybe the Mexican bandit Zorro; while Wang Ningde lines up hundreds of small coloured acetate strips to make a pink and blue skyscene; and Michael Benson uses some kind of photocollage technique to create a sort of fantasy landscape where the waves and shorelines mixes amongst meanders and rivulets and everything is part obscured by clouds and spray. It’s a reasonably interesting show although there are no real stand-out superstar shots just a lot of quite clever photo-manipulations and maybe it would have been worth leavening all the blurs and scrunched up graphics with just a bit of figurative realism.
Finally, after a bit of a walk and a tube ride I get to London Bridge and so to White Cube and the abstract paintings of Christine Ay Tjoe. At least, the mess of scratchy coloured lines look like total abstraction at first sight – think of a sort of electrified Cy Twombly on acid. But a more careful viewing reveals that the fringes of all the coloured action seem to unthread into a sort of sketchy mix of rough line drawings of men and machines, while occasionally some of the more central skeins and contours coalesce into the suggestion of something organic, like the eye of a fish or the fins from a ghoul or gremlin. For all their slightly different constituent elements, however, all the paintings seem to end up as part of a similar soupy mix and while I suppose that they’re not unattractive I remain unconvinced that there’s really very much going on here beneath the pretty, ephemeral surface.
On the other hand, it could be argued that there’s a whole lot too much going on in the rest of the White Cube’s large galleries where Raqib Shaw brings the curtain abruptly down on my day’s journey into abstraction with his extremely detailed, extremely realistic, over the top figurative fantasy concoctions. Mixing up subject matter referenced from European old master paintings along with scenes from contemporary London life and odd references to the artist’s travels in Kashmir and Japan, Shaw constructs a series phenomenally elaborate and intricately interwoven narratives. There’s such a wealth of gaudily patterned and painted stuff going on in each and every one of his hodge-podge of parodic Post-Modern pastiches that I can’t help feeling like my optic nerves have undergone the equivalent of being force fed a couple of supersize Big Mac meals with extra fries and a ton of ketchup. Suffice to say I’m feeling more than a little queasy and hugely relieved when I finally get outside and back into the fresh air and am able to start blinking away the memory of his flashy, overworked imagery. Oh for a stack of yellow poles leaning up against a gallery wall.