 |
 |
|
|
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
A COMPULSION FOR SEEINGKate Sully's Homage exhibition reviewed by Pablo Luis GonzálezWhat is the link between a windowless studio located in the basement of a Sheffield terraced house, a Mamiya Press camera, Millais' Ophelia, Narcissus, medical slides, AIDS, leukemia, Marks & Spencer's carrier bags, seduction and fear, CP Snow's Two Cultures lecture, and a 'compulsion for seeing' akin to science's 'compulsion for understanding'? Kate Sully's Homage exhibition held at Hull's Quay Art gallery during March and April 1999. 'The collection of large images and objects begin by paying homage to the beauty of our cultural past. Using familiar items of furniture and links to art history there is a sense of comfort derived from this recognition. Kate Sully Beware of this homage, however, as a built-in sting soon becomes apparent. We are seduced by the colours and sinuous images as we wander through the collections that comprise this exhibition. Groups of large and slightly smaller photomontages of colour laser copies derived from medium format colour slides of luscious installations involving the artist herself in Pre-Raphaelite poses, are complemented by what seems to be at first sight comfortable and rather traditionally elegant pieces of furniture. That comfort, coming from the safety of the familiarity of objects from our cultural past, by itself an underworld, is then eroded by inserting images of decay, rotting natural and man-made matter in the furniture, enlargements of leukemia viruses within a 'nice' coffee table, or 'Aids' viruses upholstering 'nice' traditional chairs. Images of fearsome levels of reality are thrown into our faces from otherwise inaccessible underworlds that are always there, lurking, waiting to jump on us... Yet these are compelling images in their colours and shapes, derived from medical slides of viruses and water fleas, enlargements photographed through powerful microscopes. A Pre-Raphaelite sense of lusciousness in the colours and the formal treatment of photomontages pervades us. We view the sensuality of the artist's narcissistic self-representation of John Everett Millais' representation of 'Ophelia', with a certain sense of revulsion coupled with a morbid curiosity when we realise that the figure is wrapped in the detritus of dead flowers, Mark & Spencer's carrier bags, and other layers of un-named and un-nameable matter. Millais' Ophelia brings in its references to the whole depiction of the tragi-comedy of the human condition, even the Bard's 'invention' of the human character in Western literature and culture, as it has recently been claimed. Beauty and death. The equation 'human body=meat', ie, physical and psychological decay, viruses, illnesses, cells, DNA, is then subverted, as the ugliness of decay is eliminated from it. However, these images provoke not only a clinical dissection of a dialogue between 'seduction and repulsion', but also a childlike sense of wonder, amazement and curiosity about it all, a quality shared by artists and scientitsts. 'We are seduced by colour and form even though the knowledge about the images is indeed disturbing.' Kate Sully What this work also proposes is the ultimate perverse pleasure of the act of seeing. What has been postulated as having been seen may or may not be related in various degrees to an outside reality that cannot be accessed without the use of sophisticated man-made instruments, each one adding its own level of relativity and bias to the 'observed' fact. The 'observed' fact is not by itself 'reality', but 'our' interpretaion of our understanding of it, from a Western point of view. The possibility of such connections becomes ultimately irrelevant to the process of aprehension of this particular set of images. The culture of science is not dissimilar to that of art. What Kate Sully has done is to extract knowledge away from the realm of scientific journals, to throw it right in front of our eyes within an artistic set-up. Her enterprise is essentially that of an artist rather than that of a scientist. Undoubtelly her artistic vision reveals a compulsion for seeing beyond our physical and ideological boundaries, a compulsion for seeking patterns and, ultimately, beauty, in the cultural underworlds of detritus of a consumerist society and the physical underworlds of viruses and other microscopic creatures threatening to disrupt our cosy lives at any moment. Is not this imperative for seeing, what Susan Sontag called 'scopeaphilia', or love of seeing, akin to the imperative for understanding and forcing open the borders of our knowledge of the physical world which characterises the scientific endeavour? The mathematical complexity of a Jackson Pollock painting, the work of artists such as Kate Sully, Chris Borland, Susan Hillier, Damien Hirst, or Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard, are signalling that the boundaries between science, art and technology are already being crossed effortlessly. Perhaps, forty years after CP Snow delivered his Rede Lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the task is no longer to bridge the split between science and the arts, but to construct a general theory of knowledge entwined with a theory of consciousness. Such a construct would be more like an ever changing tri-dimensional web rather than a fixed tree, or series of trees, where any point of it can legitimately be connected at any moment and any location with any other point of it. No distinction between art, science and technology would then be relevant, as these are deeply rooted in a metaphysical tradition originated in the 18th and 19th centuries. Would be a painter in the 21st century hold a degree in something like 'Interconnectivity of nods with specialisation in visual representation'? This review was originally published in QA Newsletter, July 1999. Comment »
Do you want to receive news? | Subscribe » Report a broken link | Report » Page uploaded 17 November 2003 |
|
|
|
