Location: UK
24 July – 7 September 2002
www.gimpel-fils.com
In the
opening pages of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the
protagonist re-reads a sentence previously scribbled in his geography
textbook: ‘Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College,
Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.’ This
litany, rather than inducing a consensus vis à vis his present location,
serves to paradoxically dis-locate Stephen Dedalus’s sense of place. And
herein lies both the strengths and weaknesses of this show: any attempt to
represent the parameters and specificity of a cultural, geographic, or
national location, however discursively, is not only illusory but ultimately
illusive. It is acknowledgement of the latter, moreover, that comes closest
to approximating an understanding of what it is to be located.
Amongst the work represented here, however, a number do register such
misgivings. George Shaw’s pencil drawing of an abject-looking social club,
for example, both itemises a sense of place yet renders that place
precarious – it is, after all, only a pencil drawing and seems aware, in its
anxiousness to re-present a location as accurately as possible, of its own
in-built limitations. In Christopher Stewart’s portrait of a young man,
Untitled – England (2000), an individual stands against an anonymous
red-bricked wall, his singularity reduced to his broad geographic location
as if the possibility of locating him in more specific terms would be
somehow futile.
The title of Hannah Starkey’s photograph, February 2002 (2002), which may or may not be an image of scrape marks on a floor, reconfigures the notion of place within the equally unpredictable realm of temporality and its role in locating a place – however abstracted the latter may appear. Mark Wallinger, on the other hand, places us in a very specific and recognisable locale – London’s Camberwell New Road to be exact – and stages a portrait of himself as, apparently, a blind beggar exhorting us not for money but to practice the art of staying still. Yet, as Heraclitus noted, not even standing still will reconcile the flux of existence that surrounds us. All locations are, of course, in flux. To be located, in sum, is to be in transition – one of the many, certainly not unproductive, conundrums of modern living.
Anthony Downey