Over to Old Street tube station today and, once again, I have to scratch my head trying to figure out which of the confusion of subterranean exits is the best one to take. Fortunately, when I do finally navigate my way out of the grim and grubby labyrinth and emerge into the grey and gloomy half-light of day, I can see in the distance the warming glow of the golden arches that signify fast food is near at hand and that I have indeed chosen the right route to escape out of the underworld. But no, it’s not the sweet, salty, fatty comforting temptations of a juicy garnished burger and fries that have bought me to this slightly depressing north London location. McDonald’s is merely the very useful landmark pointing the way to the side road turning that, hopefully, will lead on to a less calorific and altogether more nutritious and satisfying, slow-art visual sustenance experience. And so it is that I reach the Parasol Unit art gallery, hungrily anticipating the opportunity to check out at their latest exhibition, Here & There, which is a look back at the recent-ish work of the artist Lisa Milroy.
When Milroy first burst upon the London artworld scene sometime in the mid-1980s, I suppose her painterly style might have initially looked like a kind of belated, last gasp nod to the Pop Art tradition that had so invigorated an earlier generation. And it’s true that her use of a lusciously lush painting technique to create hyper-realistic renditions of relatively mundane household objects – light bulbs, doughnuts, pot sherds and the like – seemed to echo the work of the American Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. But, crucially, Milroy dropped all aspects of narrative structure and instead of describing banal scenes from everyday life, as her proper Pop predecessors had done, she simply itemised, categorised and logged their constituent elements, laying everything out in regimented rows against a typically blank white background. It was a clever, subversive presentation that offered something of a neat new spin on the long, historic tradition of a still life formula perfected by the likes of Chardin; and then reinvigorated by Cezanne and his Cubist confreres; before being updated by Pop Artists to acknowledge the flat designer-graphic visuals of the TV age in which they had grown up. And so, as opposed to directly referencing the kinds of scenes one might typically come across during the course of normal dull daily life – a flower placed in a vase on a mantle-piece; a bowl of fruit spilling on to a table; the assortment of cakes in a diner display case – and then prettifying them into tidy visual vignettes, Milroy’s trick was to start taking things apart and separating them out.
Experimenting with this radical decontextualisation and very literal, visual, form of deconstruction was an interesting route to follow but having a novel and intriguing theoretical backstory doesn’t always – or even usually – result in attractive or interesting artworks. Except, in this case it did and some of Milroy’s youthful paintings were not just a thought provoking revision of several centuries of the still life genre tradition but also looked strikingly beautiful and were highly memorable. It is, therefore, something of a shame that for the current display the curatorial decision has evidently been made to include just one solitary exemplar of these earlier, wonderfully iconic works. Although Shoes, the painting that’s been picked to represent the format, is definitely a stunner and acts as a kind of anchor point for the rest of the exhibition which updates what the artist has been producing during the course of her continuing various explorations and experimentations with ways of representing a modern mediated view of the world.
As the current exhibition shows, Milroy has expanded her repertoire beyond painting to include assemblages and sculptural works, and zoned in on clothing, fashion and fabrics as the main subject matter for her investigations. Alas, she’s decided to turn her back on the earlier luxuriant painting techniques, although the flatter, more cartoonish style that has superseded it, along with the occasional use of some tricky trompe l’oeil gamesplaying, show a similar sense of confidence and panache when it comes to making marks on a canvas. As such, I think it’s probably fair to say that much of the more recent work looks like draft studies, trial runs and test ideas, albeit that they’re presented in a highly polished format. But if her current output which riffs on fabric designs, pattern books and studio props – may all be a bit tentative and unsure and heading off in multiple different directions all at the same time, it also has a sort of light optimistic touch that suggest the artists is at least enjoying the freedom of playing about with her loose form of representational experimentations. Whether these exploratory strands will eventually knit together to reprise the previously achieved resolution of functional form is hard to tell but, either way, the current show provides a fascinating glimpse into the evolving creative process of a very smart and interesting artist.
Leaving the Parasol Unit I call into the Victoria Miro Gallery which is situated right next door and bump into Keith Piper, an artist who I first met thirty-odd years ago when I was helping to stage shows at Brixton Art Gallery. After a bit of prompting he courteously pretends to remember who I am and then graciously accepts one of my promotional postcards for the Unvarnished blogsite, promising to check it out the next time he goes surfing through cyberspace. It’s only after I’ve left the Gallery – having taken a cursory look at Jorge Pardo’s twinkly steel constructions that for some reason have been lit up to resemble a tacky display of illuminations in a down market furnishing store – that I realise I may have committed a bit of a faux pas. For if Piper does get around to checking out what I’ve been blogging about and then types his own name into the search box he’s going to discover that I was a somewhat less than enthusiastic about his exhibition at the Beaconsfield Gallery last year.
Comforting myself with the thought that Piper is such a charmingly modest sort of a fellow that he’s unlikely to be one of those kind of people who goes around googling their own names, I set off on a bit of a roundabout journey to get to Marble Arch and then on to the Michael Werner gallery for a small display of works by Peter Doig. I have to confess that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Doig’s paintings. I think I can see their appeal – they’re colourful, and the quasi-symbolistic mystical narratives of their compositions do hold the attention – but are they anything more than just pretty anodyne pastiches of a million previous images blended into a sort of miasma of meaningless mush? And I know it’s not the artist’s fault and shouldn’t really come into the aesthetic equation when trying to make some kind of reasonable reasoned value judgement about his works, but I can’t help thinking that the most interesting thing about Doig as an artist has got nothing to do with his technical abilities or the novelty or otherwise of his creative capacity but the extraordinary fact that one of his paintings sold at auction for an almost unbelievably staggering $28m, making him this country’s most expensive living artist.
As for the paintings in this current show, well, there are quite a lot of preparatory doodles and sketches that do little other than reveal the lack of any great natural draughtsmanship skills but the fully finished paintings are pretty enough. Most seem to be set on a sort of timeless paradisiacal island – a semi-mythical setting that allows Doig to place his characters and props in a transient no-man’s-land where amongst the happily random sights to be seen are a lion basking on the sands of a lilac beach, a calypso singer wearing a large white cowboy hat and a lifeguard with lime green trunks posing for his portrait. That these and the all the other inhabitants seems to be somewhat awkwardly frozen in their aimless, timeless dreamworld prompts one to question what they’re all about. And I hate to say it but I’ve got a horrible feeling that taken together they’re very probably all about a couple of hundred thousand quid.
