Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 10 April 2010

THE CONTEMPORARY Art Society celebrates its centenary this year. Over the years it has gifted over 8000 works to British collections. The Pier has not only received four works, but also benefited from the CAS’s partnership with the Scottish Arts Council, which has yielded a further ten works.

Work by Lesley Foxcroft, Mark Francis and Sean Scully

Space for Colour – the title is important – encourages the viewer to make comparisons between the original Margaret Gardiner collection – the Hepworths and Nicolsons in particular – and the new work on show. It was said that she ‘collected for colour’, and it’s true that the permanent collection is full of intense jewels. But it could equally well be said that she collected for shape – or perhaps that shape was continually perplexing and provoking the St Ives group, and this exhibition is, I think, more about shape than colour.

I say this despite the fact that the major installation, Colour Play, by Adam Barker-Mills, “experiment(s) with colour… explore(s)relationships between colours, their brightness, saturation, tone, and density”, and the suite of 12 etchings by Turner prizewinner Amish Kapoor is “using colour and space to explore ideas of presence and absence.”

My feeling is that both allow their love of intense colour and the theory of its power to overwhelm their artistic judgment. Like the other artists on show, however, they do in their different ways make compelling arguments with shape and structure. But more of that later.

Terry Frost (1915-2003) introduces the theme – the first picture you encounter is vital, and the Pier know this. It’s a beauty, painted in 1959 and just called Red and Blue, tactile, lumpy, scratchy, rich. It’s far more than red and blue – there’s purple so deep you could dive into it. The shapes are linear, evoking book spines on a shelf, boats in a harbour, a scarf or a rug.

Just along a bit Barbara Hepworth’s lithograph Squares and Circles appears to be just that – a bit like a 1940s map of aerial bombardment, but, unlike Frost, Hepworth is strict with her colours, and the drift of yellow could be missed until you realise that’s what holds the whole print together. In the Frost, it’s the colour that pulls you in – then you see the shape. Hepworth does things the other way round. This contrast, and how you feel about it, is what will take you back and back to the show.

I head right, into the intimate quiet space which hosts some loans, and some new acquisitions. Lines are everywhere, echoing the tiled floor – lines which don’t always look like lines. In Mark K. Francis’ untitled monotype on paper (1992) they merge together till they look like linen.

The subtle tones – cream, yellow, charcoal – suggest dried flowers strewn on a kitchen tablecloth – but it doesn’t have to be that. The interesting thing is what happens to our expectation. Lines don’t have to be mathematical and scratchy. For Sean Scully, (Colourland 2004, oil on linen) they are brash and bouncy, a brick wall of them with the light bouncing off the brushstrokes. It’s Mondrian with guts. And because the form is simple, you really notice the colour – the juxtapositions – ochre, red – excite. What would this man do with a dyke, I wonder.

Right next door – back to the tranquil exploration of line, rectangle, square, in Alan Reynolds lovely earth-and-blue untitled piece. Nothing is quite horizontal here, and no line is without a layer of colour to define it – but you could live with it for years. Even the bold big canvas that’s Callum Innes’ Exposed Painting, Deep Violet, Charcoal Black (2004, oil on canvas) plays with our idea of lines and squares.

It reminded me of A A Milne’s aptly titled poem Lines and Squares: “whenever I walk on a London street/I’m ever so careful to watch my feet…”. Here the stark white black and purple expanses are softened at the edges by a lacy effect, oil pretending to be knitting wool, or the end of a wave. There’s no such thing, he seems to say, as a true edge.

The Roger Ackling acquisition, Wayland (1996 sunlight on wood) sits well here – lines burnt and etched, in natural tones – complimented on the other side of the space by Lesley Foxcroft’s witty Stackwork – a tower of corrugated cardboard – an Old Man of Hoy with a difference, full of pattern and nuanced colour. There’s lots to enjoy.

Move through to the long gallery and Anish Kapoor hits you – I was going to say like a brick, but it’s more like, well, a sort of spongey jelly, really. Like being assaulted by a sea anemonae. The colour certainly is deep – very orange, very red. The blue and brown etchings I much prefer – a big Quink blot, very Rorschach, and a beige polyp-like thing (though the hospital-ish look – like a slide of your innards – puts me off a bit).

He has made choices, of course – the etchings aren’t random. The organic shapes, being so amorphous, evoke lots of things – vulvas, plant life, amoebas, cells. Here there are no lines, nothing rectangular – it’s all flux. I find the colours unsubtle, sometimes unpleasant.

My relationship with orange has never been cordial, and I applaud an artist who can make me see all the wonderful variations it inhabits, and all the contrasts it points up. But Kapoor’s orange has no variation. Depth, probably. But I find it a bit sick-making.

Sensibly, these works have been hung in a big space. I’m awed a bit by the vigour of them, but they don’t move me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many images of space from the Hubble telescope. I like to feel people’s hands on work – a bit of sweat, a bit of rough. Here I find myself looking at the mounting paper, which has nice ragged edges, and wondering why it’s lifting, as if it’s got damp. I’m hoping it’s on purpose, because that adds volumes to the meaning of the etchings.

On to the light installation, Colour Play, by Adam Barker-Mill. He was a lighting camera man and photography director (he worked with the Sex Pistols! There’s a pic of him standing beside Johnny Rotten on the web!).

The leaflet tells me that this is a sequence of four works – Interchange, What is White, Pulse and Journey, originated by Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen in 2009. I presume that means that Peacock Arts made the installation for the artist, but I don’t know. Already we are a step away from the bit of sweat and bit of rough I incline towards. The works, I’m told, “through the offsetting of time sequences between background and aperture affects (sic) our perception of colour to create a compelling sensory experience.”

Okay. Interestingly, Health and Safety have just popped by the Gallery and are asking about the effect it might have on folk. There are “short coloured flashes.” It’s all safe, so that’s good.

It’s a big screen with a sort of baseball board mounted up high. (maybe that hides a camera or something? Or maybe it’s a statement about shape? It’s square…) The room is bare – no seats, blank walls. You feel a bit like a monk in a cell looking at the sun. Except that you can’t really look at the sun directly – but here it seems you can!

There’s a perfect circle on the screen, which changes colour. As I enter it’s in a grey/lilac phase, and the walls are all washed in it. I’m thinking Newton would have loved this – it’s all about Optics, a kind of cathedral erected to Technology and Science. A world away from the colour cards we had in art class – hot colours this side, cold the other.

Ooh, now it’s blue and turquoise. Ooh, now there’s a flash of red. I think I see something floating, but maybe it’s just an after-image. Where’s the beginning? Which bit have I come in at? Is it “the wall slowly decreases and increases in intensity”? Or is the central aperture (aw shucks, it’s an aperture, I thought it was the sun) “breathing rhythmically?”

Oh no, not another colour. Oh blimey, that looks awful against the circle shape. Oh, this is a bit like a snowy light – I quite like it, I could stand in this for a while – eek, it’s changed again. Light is so cold, pure light. There’s so little texture that the eye starts manufacturing its own. It feels empty of humanity. You try to coat it with ideas – this is a dawn light, that’s like late summer, that’s a pulse, that could be a storm. Then your eye starts doubling up the images, as if you’ve been looking at something a bit too bright and moved into darkness. I looked for a bench to sit on.

The overall running time is 31 minutes and 30 seconds. I have to tell you, Constant Reader, that I lasted about ten minutes. I loved the first four or five of those minutes, and then it got increasingly annoying and disorientating. No human being can watch an aperture and a wall doing all the colours of the spectrum for 31 minutes without having some sort of conniption.

I may have said before that the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome abounds in the arts – nobody likes to say what they’re really thinking (he’s naked! The King is in the altogether, as Danny Kaye put it – we’re all just pretending!) in case it sounds philistine, or gives fuel to the why-are-we-funding-this brigade.

I believe in pushing boundaries, and doing strange things, and funding what seems unfundable. But there is always a case for saying honestly: I think there’s a bit of self-indulgence here. So I’m saying it.

This installation is too long. Too portentous. It collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. Perhaps two works would have been manageable. It’s like being collared by an enthusiast who forgets about his audience.

When I came out, and moved on to the last gallery, I had spots and black cobwebby things before my eyes. It was a relief to see a relief, all bronze brown, chunky, rectangular and unassuming, by Robert Adam (1917-1984), and Hepworth’s sexy stone round Involute 11. These I want to touch. These make me think, and warm to the endeavour that goes into art.

I thought hard about Colour Play, and the best thing to say to explain what I felt it lacked is: do you remember Lava lamps? Those reviled objects – they became an object of derision, a mark of a your class and your taste. Well, they had warmth, and a kind of magic about them. They made unexpected shapes in interesting colours. They didn’t make your head buzz.

Okay, they didn’t make you think profound thoughts. But they had something about them. Play. That’s what Colour Play doesn’t have. And if you say – maybe the light-installation man wasn’t interested in play, I’d say – clearly not, and what a shame.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Contemporary Art Society
  

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