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Eerily coinciding with the much discussed advent of the Euro, Nylon’s Geometers, curated by Simon Morrissey, features work by artists preoccupied with the act of quantification – systems of measurement, categorising, counting and ordering. Geometers aims to juxtapose the rigidity of quantification with its artistic personalisation. One would expect this to result in a simple dichotomy of conformity versus individuality, but in fact the work in the exhibition reveals the attempt to express individuality through the very confines of a preordained system. These are engagingly neurotic works of art, and Nylon’s galleries are filled with the constant movement of the video monitors and the cacophonous output of the sound installations – there is in fact very little that is static in the exhibition.

The relationship between the personal and the (purportedly) neutrally quantitative is the primary basis of the exhibition, but this premise invariably opens up to consider more general questions of space, time, and in the best of instances, memory. The most literal works – and thus the works that anchor and organise Geometers’ theme – play upon spatial measurement. They range from Cornelia Parker’s Measuring Liberty with a Dollar – a silver dollar drawn into a wire measuring the height of the Statue of Liberty, then coiled back upon itself – to Carl von Weiler’s measurements of interior spaces using charcoal covered sticks. Positioned at opposite ends of the galleries, they serve as visual bookends to the exhibition.
These works lay the foundations of Geometers, and allow for the more associative works that follow. If Parker and von Weiler’s works are approximately concerned with linear extensions, then Melanie Counsell’s work is about consolidation. Winkley Street, a video composed of innumerable one-second shots of the domestic spaces in which Counsell lives and works, nicely ties in spatial and temporal references. It is something of a catalogue of everyday life, with the sort of anonymity the term implies. That is to say, rather than functioning as an artistic self-portrait, these snapshot images form a more universal collage of the familiar textures and tones of daily living. Bettina von Zwehl’s photographic portraits are similarly concerned with the anonymity of shared settings. Photographing different subjects under the same visual circumstances, von Zwehl produces a series of images more disturbingly uniform, more visibly constrictive, than criminal mug shots.





Alex Morrison’s pieces fit within the context of a larger, global inquiry into the urban experience of skateboarding, which of late has spawned everything from urban architecture and art exhibitions to lengthy academic publications. Morrison effectively draws the viewer into the visual psyche of the skateboarder, a mindset preoccupied with seeking out the acute and obtuse angles, the circular diameters, of potential skateboard ramps. Banal urban architecture seamlessly morphs into a series of tantalising skateboard ramps and rails in the three photographs that form Found Minimalism. In the video piece Homewrecker, Morrison skateboards inside the domestic interior of his flat. While the public/domestic inversion is perhaps both too familiar and too automatic, there is still plenty of visual pleasure in watching the incongruous spectacle of interior skateboarding, and the title’s wordplay is both clever and relevant.

Most successful are the works caught in the attempt at quantifying, recording, and cataloguing explicitly personal, spatial and temporal experiences. What these works make clear is that this endeavour is irreducible from the attempt to create a series of enduring memories; systems of measurement and quantification are merely tools intended to facilitate the process. But to grapple with memory is to invite the ceaseless distortions and complications of recollection, an added dimension that nuances the work, and injects an effective multiplicity.

Juan Cruz’s text piece, Two Cameras, is a masterfully rambling, appropriately Proustian text detailing the various artistic and personal legacies surrounding the acquisition of his cameras. The text veers from delineating the specific technical aspects of the cameras to compulsively divulging intensely intimate memories of his family. At the crux of the piece is the conflict between the intimacy of memory and the indiscriminate generality of technology; photography and film are tentatively forwarded as an artistic medium of reconciliation.

Like Counsell’s Winkley Street, Mark Dean’s No. One is concerned with cataloguing and consolidation. A sound piece composed of fragments of all the songs in Dean’s extensive record collection, it is an extra-ordinarily persuasive archival catalogue of the artist’s life. Like Cruz’s text piece, it is not simply concerned with the personal, but more specifically with memory, and with the cultural technologies we use to facilitate the process of recollection. But if Cruz’s text functions as a comfortable and comforting conduit into the past, then the wretched cacophony of Dean’s piece seems to express a hopelessness matched only by the title of the work itself. Gather up the past, it seems to imply, and what emerges is impossibly sycophantic, entirely illegible.

Jeremy Deadman’s Flayed is an office wall clock that emits a cry of pain with each passing second. The piece grapples with some of the so-called ‘big’ themes – most obviously, time and death. What rescues the yelping clock from tormented hubris is the simplicity of both the concept and its execution. That, and the sly humour of the work; in fact one of the most rewarding things about this yelping clock is the fact that it not only invites multiple, contradictory readings, but also allows space for them to cohere properly.

Flayed is also the work that implicitly complements those of Cruz and Dean. Memory struggles to function in opposition to time (and by implication to death), but memory is ultimately about loss, and about the various impossibilities engendered in the attempt to recover that loss. Memory attempts to undo the linearity of time; Deadman’s ticking clock reminds us of how impossible that task is.

Geometers was at Nylon, London,

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