Skip to main content

Altered States Of Paint - Peering Through The Doors of Perception

Dundee Contemporary Arts, 5 July-7 September 2008
According to clichéd legend, if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. The artists taking part in ‘Altered States Of Paint’ who were around then were still in their wide-eyed infancy. The ones who weren’t are barely out of theirs. Which, for a show that posits the gallery space as a portal to leap through en route to self-knowledge, is how it should be. For the spirit of Aldous Huxley’s maxim in his 1954 mind-expanding handbook ‘The Doors Of Perception’ that 'The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out' to be pursued via painting alone, however, is itself something of a jolt.

“It’s paintings that do something more”, according to curator Graham Domke. “I’ve always been fascinated by this idea of the mad scientist, who look for life’s meaning and take it very seriously, but take it too far. Like in ‘The Man With X-Ray Eyes,’ where initially everything seems great and he can see girls pants, but ends up seeing too much. That’s why the exhibition starts off psychedelic and gradually gets darker.”

So, skipping backwards through the alphabet, Jutta Koether, Till Gerhard, Andreas Dobler, Angela de la Cruz, Neil Clements and Rabiya Choudry aren’t involving themselves in some Stuckist reaction to Conceptualism, but, as with the poets, mystics and psychedelicists who inspired them by way of William Blake leaping into Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass into Alexander Trocchi’s ‘invisible insurrection of a million minds’, are desperately seeking something. Something other, at that.

Which is why the work in ‘Altered States Of Paint,’ named after Ken Russell’s crazed 1980 sensory overload flick, will appear on walls and doorways, painted as murals, and, in the case of de la Cruz, deliberately twisted, smashed and mangled.

“The show started with Angela’s paintings,” says Domke. “The way she transgresses the canvas and literally breaks on through the paintings and physically pushes herself with it.”

Accompanying the show is a season of films by Kenneth Anger, which sit alongside a set of reference points that include Zachary Lewis’ imagined sixties novel, ‘Sway.’ Also invoked are a bunch of very Scottish counter-cultural icons, from Aleister Crowley and ‘The Wicker Man’ to ‘Performance’ director Donald Cammell. Domke maintains, however, that this is more contemporary than hippy revivalism, something which the presence of Neil Clements, the youngest of the group, testifies to.

Clements has previously shown black-painted shapes based on flamboyantly sculpted guitars. Here, “They are all from the 1980's,” Clements points out, “as opposed to my previous interest in those originally patented by Gibson in 1959. Whereas the original guitars were later adopted by rock musicians, the later generation were made for a market of metal fans.”

“We’re trying to do something less tight-assed with this exhibition,” Domke says. “You can be intelligent and playful about how you do a show. Hopefully it’s going to burn.”

The List, June 2008

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...