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Stephen Sutcliffe: Work from the Collection

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow until January 21st 2018

2017 has been a busy year for Stephen Sutcliffe, the Glasgow-based pop cultural obsessive who re-imagines a pick-and-mix of late twentieth century iconography culled from his personal archive in his own fractured image. GOMA's showing of three video collages, photographs and wall drawings follows the Anthony Burgess inspired No End to Enderby in Manchester and the Lindsay Anderson based Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs in Edinburgh. It marks the first public showing of five of the works together since being bought by Glasgow Museums in 2013. Two others loaned by Sutcliffe complete the show.

The walls may be painted bright yellow, but the crossed-out cartoon clouds are anything but bright in Untitled Wall Drawing (Selected Errors) (2011), which, inspired by New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg, sets out its store as a monument to failure. Such expressions of self-doubt and ennui were part and parcel for serious young men of Sutcliffe's generation, who channel-hopped their way through stumbled-upon totems of hope and despair.

It is the latter word that gives the longest video work its title. Despair (2009) begins with more crossings out, and is broken into numbered chapters, each punctuated by a Monty Python sounding cough. A moustache is drawn over an archive interview with Dirk Bogarde, who is seen again behind a taciturn Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as layer on on layer of sound and vision struggle after a punchline.

In Plum (2012), an edition of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour programme plays over the aural wallpaper of a rock pool as doodles are squiggled on top. Come to the Edge (2003) is a video of boys' school common room horseplay turned nasty to the sound of a poem by Christopher Logue.

No (after Steinberg) (2011) and Self Portrait with Boxes (after Steinberg) (2011) staged reconstructions of Steinberg cartoons. With Sutcliffe at the centre of each photograph, the first is of an interview with a giant 'No' chalked on a blackboard like a speech bubble. The second sees a queue of kids with cardboard boxes on their heads waiting to have faces painted on. Looming over all this to one side in Untitled Wall Drawing (after Weber) (2009) is a life-size hangdog slacker wearing a sandwich board on which is a drawing of a gallery opening.

Steinberg described himself as “a writer who draws.” This description could similarly apply to Sutcliffe, whose work here is revealed as a series of tragi-comic visual routines delivered with deadpan, and at times deadly, dry as a bone wit.

Scottish Art News, Autumn/Winter 2017

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