Skip to main content

Katinka Bock – Radio Piombino

The Common Guild until July 8th

Summertime, and the fish aren’t jumping, but seem to be walking on land in Katinka Bock’s industrial-domestic intervention. The Paris-based German artist’s first UK show of sculptural works finds her raw materials dragged indoors after seemingly been left out in the rain to rust. One of several solid bronze flat-fish interspersed throughout looks more like a weather-beaten rat. If you enjoy imagining dystopia, it might well be the sort of mutant that swam to earth from polluted inner-city river-scapes and crawled through rubbish dumps, wheezing its way on to terra firma in a twisted, post-industrial take on evolution.

Bock’s show is named after the real life radio station serving the Tuscan town of Piombino, a port which served as a naval base, but has more latterly been used to carry freight as well as a marina. Almost certainly not twinned with Glasgow, Bock nevertheless uses the city’s history as a port for her show, as well as the Common Guild’s past as a trendy west end des-res with a view to die for. In this way, Bock has docked in a harbour where ship-building and the grounded hulks that go with it are rendered all but obsolete, as creatures who once gathered there now wander the land on the edge of extinction—or else stay indoors.

This may be why pebbledash is laid out on the floor of the hallway, and why pipes are run through walls upstairs. It’s as if the house is in the midst of some ongoing Sisyphean conversion, made an attractive prospect by the way the light falls onto copper, bronze and steel at a particular time of day or night, plugged in to history, but forever changing, always out of reach.

It’s telling that Bock’s only other UK project to date was on a show with Siobhan Davies Dance in London performed in 2017. The central construction in the upstairs gallery—in which pieces of ceramic tubing are hung by copper pipes over distressed tiles where one of the ratty walking fishes is placed— resembles a stage set. The narrative contained within it is one of times and places in motion, of houses and cities, and of ports and storms where things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

MAP, May 2018


ends



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more