Qwaypurlake

Hauser and Wirth Somerset

15^th November – 31^st January

David Wojtowycz, The Lake (2012)

There is nothing more unsettling in our tumultuous times, than images of nature appearing to act naturally. In the age of the Anthropocene, a trip to the Somerset countryside no longer has the same picturesque, nostalgia-inducing appeal that once enticed caravaners and watercolourists out of the suburbs. Landscape is no longer witness to the dream of reason. Sublime and technological sublime are now entangled in a romantic embrace of slow-death; locked in the mutual chokehold of the forever undead. The hills really do have eyes, but this time not those of alienated savages but of an alien landscape – the nature once feared before it was tamed and refashioned in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Or perhaps these are the eyes of surveillance, following us from the city. A gaze that follows us from within and without our bodies, oscillating between perceived unity and abject thingness, as we peer from behind ourselves. Hidden in the foliage the gaze that watches identifies both with the unknown threat of horror cliché and Benjamin's camera operator but never with the zombie actor whose sightseeing corpse is framed. It is the familiar yet unidentifiable gaze that surveils us in our endless work lives as we chase the next project or tweet another opinion, and as we check-in with our fictions of how best to promote ourselves online or how the world perceives us. It is the blind reptilian gaze of neoliberalism, which doubles as our own, dreaming our dreams and enabling the reconfiguration of power and control around our CV careers; tightening around everyday life with every breath – every blog post – like a vast boa constrictor. It watches us mockingly as we hopelessly try to reconcile the rift between self and world with the sheer will and conviction of our Gore-Texed rural perambulations. It is the GPS that pinpoints our exact location as we scan the view for signs of life. It is the faint intangible atmosphere that haunts us as we attempt to stop the buzzing swarm of me-ness and penetrate the smug mimesis of the landscape before us that withholds its materiality from representation.

Approaching Hauser and Wirth Somerset by car is a reminder that middle class mythologies still hang like an opulent damask veil over our disquieting new landscape. My friends and I debate whether or not wellies will be needed for the short walk from the visitor car park to the lavishly refurbished farm buildings. We glimpse the bistro in which we have a table booked for lunch. We peruse the selection of art theory books including, unironically, Clare Bishop's critique of participatory art, 'Artificial Hells'. On entering Qwaypurlake, a group exhibition curated by Simon Morrissey, what strikes you is the apparent tameness, even conservatism, of the works included. The seeming mundaneness of some of the photographic images, for example, and the reassuring familiarity of the landscape images, lull us into a false sense of security. Look again. These are not the landscapes you're looking for! The works here are representations of an older landscape – the pagan landscape of soil and life-cycles, geology and 'deep time', pantheism and animistic energies – that is hidden just below the septic aberration of space and time we call capitalism. The strange resonances that come from many of the works are like clarion calls from our planet, not in the egotistical sense of it asking us to save it but a deeper tone. The voice of landscape as a primordial echo – a shrug of knowing acceptance or an earthly stirring to shake off the sedimented crust of scar tissue we call human culture.

The landscape of Qwaypurlake, a title taken from the road leading out of Bruton in the direction of Frome called Quaperlake Street, is a sentient one. The exhibition most obviously draws inspiration from of Stanislaw Lem's novel 'Solaris' (1961), which is centred on a conscious oceanic planet. As global sea levels rise, this vision offers a glimpse of a very possible dystopian future. Indeed, the first work we encounter is a film by David Wojtowycz that depicts a familiar yet alien seascape centrally divided by a pier. At first, the scene seems oddly mundane, until the viewer becomes aware that the waters on either side of the pier behave in strange and unnatural ways. To the right the sea is choppy and convulsing, as if broken by jumping fish, and to the left the water surface is still as a pond, pulled flat as if by some unknown force. A sonic resonance burrs from the well-like forms of Kit Poulson / Alex Baker's 'transmitters'. Jem Southam and Aaron Scuhman's sparse, bleak landscapes focus on dew ponds, and smouldering wood and ashes, respectively, to produce eerie post-human narratives of absence / presence. The tree spirits are tangibly present in the dense boscage of James Ravilious' black and white photographs and Ben Rivers' mud-daubed pagan ancestors watch us from the undergrowth. An undercurrent of primitivism runs through the exhibition through Michael Dean's large standing forms, Elizabeth Frink's mutant creatures and Han's Coper's Cycladic forms. Likewise, Daphne Wright's workaday beasts, echo both the harsh realities of our rural past – enclosures, hunting rights, poaching – and the neoclassical spender of the landed gentry. Indeed, 'Stallion' (2009) is a particular startling sculpture, whose grandiose classicism, fuses power and status with the brutal realism and mundane functionality of an equine autopsy. Heather and Ivan Morison's sculptures play in the archetypal landscapes of British surrealist tradition, mixing Nash's rural 'equivalents' with monstrous sublimatory forms. Ian McKeever's thingly paintings have a presence reminiscent of Rothko's Segram Murals, and are slightly menacing. The interplay of light and dark dances on the canvases like daylight from a rock crevice catching the torrential flow of an underground river. The thickness and darkness of the paint is deceptive as there is a gentle melancholy to the gesture and movement of the paint. There is a filmic quality to these paintings. As my eyes panned across their huge surfaces and inky root-like forms, I was reminded of the murky painted backdrops for the subterranean scenes in the 1978 animated adaptation of Watership Down. Of course, the inclusion of Frink and Coper, together with Peter Lanyon and Richard Deacon, remind us that British modernism has always looked beyond the human and engaged with the affective nature of landscape: attentively slowing down human temporal experience to the 'deep time' of geology and nature, and listening to animistic objects and sentient landscapes that speak to us from a time before we were here to listen and will continue to resonate long after we are gone. 

 

Aaron Schuman, Untitled (Bonfire), from the series Summer Set (2012)

Shezad Dawood: Towards the Possible Film

 Still from Towards the Possible Film (2014)

By his own admission, Shezad Dawood has a habit of naming shows after his films. On reflection, the reason for this becomes self-apparent in his wider practice. Dawood feels that studio work is an intrinsic part of the reflective process of film-making. His diverse studio practice, which also includes, painting, sculpture, digital animation and neon works, happens alongside his films. Long production schedules provide an important gestation period for his work – a time the artist describes as “whilst the film is cooking”. Even after works are finished, there is still the process of responding to different exhibition contexts. The dialogue between 'finished' pieces is as much a part of the conceptual process as his research. For Dawood, “the work takes place between the work”. Whilst the film is the sun around which the planets turn, the other works speak with equal clarity about their shared multi-dimensional worlds. Paintings made on canvases of vintage fabrics produced by nomadic Pakistani women in the 1970s (prior to the military coup of '79), are evolving hybrids. These textiles can be viewed in a similar way to art cinema – as experimental media. They once operated as open and destabilising forms of cultural production that sat outside of the dogmatic religious and ideological structures that finally put an end to them. They are culture as, what Bhabha (1994) terms, 'empirical knowledge'. The neon works are both modern and mystical – a balancing act between formal and spiritual meditation. A digital animation of the head of novelist and scientific philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, uses photos taken at different angles and ages to produce a multi-dimensional “quantum portrait”. The exhibition also includes another film, A Mystery Play (2010), to make comparisons between three types of magic – stage, screen and the occult. Here, Dawood continues to explore his interest in Buster Keaton and silent film. He does this via Keaton's links to Houdini, together with the twin histories of Vaudeville and the Occult in the city of Winnipeg – a city whose masonic architecture becomes a metaphor for the loss of progress and the embeddedness of power structures.

The film at the epicentre of Dawood's (re)collected body of work, Towards the Possible Film (2014), opens with a series of powerful images – the pyramid and winking eye of canary wharf, a jaguar, a Mayan pyramid – totems of power, mastery and sacrifice. As the jaguar passes across the screen, it seems to connect two seemingly very different kinds of power, the mystical and the mystifying; magic both ancient and modern. From Spanish colonised Central America we travel to the Moroccan coast with its similar legacy of occupation. We then see a close-up of a blue-skinned astronaut uttering a Marcusian commentary in Berber dialect. The subtitles read: “The  old sense  of  alienation  is  no longer possible. When  individuals identify  with a lifestyle  imposed  on  them, and  through  it  experience gratification and satisfaction,  their alienation  is  subsumed  by  their own alienated existence”.

Beyond setting the scene, description is useless in communicating the sheer complexity of the film's references: pre-Islamic animist cultures in Morocco, the animistic landscape as witness, the triad of ancient religions in Mexico, India and north African connected via Phoenician trade routes and centred on myths originating from visitations by alien astronauts. Dawood problematises postcolonial narratives in the face of the complexities of globalisation – the accelerated violence of neoliberal global capitalism, paradoxically both atomising and uniting us. Persecutor becomes persecuted and coloniser becomes colonised. Obtuse allegorical references act as both pinpricks of ethical reflection and dystopian omens. A piece of lemon rind in seaweed connotes the carrion-eating low-impact lifestyles of those who choose decent from capitalism. How do we reconcile the smallest actions with their incomprehensible global consequences? Pre-Islamic natives stomp their feet, perhaps asking the landscape for answers. They face the sea, waiting for it to speak, like the sentient oceanic planet in Solaris. What emerges are two blue-skinned visitors from another world who see this world as overlaying multi-dimensional fragments. An act of extreme violence perpetrated by a 'native' to one of the alien colonists / tourists / gods, becomes a question – like that of Meursault spoken through his killing of an Arab in Camus' novel. Where is the subject in subjectivity? God is everywhere and nowhere, the greater forces hold us in their gravitational pull.

Ultimately however, it is pointless to endlessly dissect Dawood's post-human parafield because to theorise is to close-down, and for him, art is like “shattering the bedrock of culture” to reveal new layers, new openings. Dawood's practice is an empirical process of opening out – of making “successive openings” in the binary landscape, through which, in Barthes' terms, we can 'outplay the paradigm'; to reveal 'obtuse meaning', or even 'post-meaning' (Barthes, 2002). After all, as the artist suggests, “we are all just objects thinking we're subjects”.