CCA, Glasgow until
March 23rd.
Four stars
It's the sound of
clock-clacking typewriter keys that strikes you first stepping into
this three-way split of a show which, in different ways, reflects on
the colour of memory. In the case of all three artists, who have a
long history with the CCA building when it housed the Third Eye
Centre, it reveals – or not - how that memory, collective or
otherwise, can be moulded, shaped and customised to order, be it
through preservation, wilful negation or else, in Boyce's case, via a
gloriously messy reclaiming of half-hidden pop-cultural detritus.
The typing noises come
from Buchler's ''I am going to use this projector', in which a
cassette recorder hung on the wall plays a recording of someone
typing out a transcription of the rollingly endless text that hangs
next to it. Hiller too shows how free-association can be harnessed in
'Measure by Measure Section II', which preserves the ashes of
paintings burnt by Hiller in a series of jars and containers. As with
the framed diary pages of Buchler's 'Idle Thoughts', in which the
same pages are written over again and again until the newest present
effectively obliterates the past, Hiller's piece tantalises about
what's being hidden even as it creates something afresh.
It is Boyce's piece,
'The Devotional Collection', however, that remains the most immediate
and affectingly joyous example of how scraps of the past captured in
a record or a on a magazine cover can shape an entire culture.
Against one wall, rows of artifacts from black women in music are
lined up, moving from Amazulu to Winifred Atwell, Betty Boo to Neneh
Cherry, Mylene Klsass to Cleo Laine, Sade to the Saturdays and
beyond. These are women who found their voices, and in turn gave
voice to others in a way that's gloriously refreshed every time the
needle hits the groove.
The List, February 2014
ends
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