reviews a SECRET SERVICE
A secret service: Art,
compulsion, conceAlment
WhITWoRTh aRT GallERy, M anChESTER
5 M ay – 29 July
Are the hermetic ‘problems’ that many artists encounter really just self-
diagnoses born of compulsion? To the art of the past hundred years – with
its accent on fragmentation – it is a particularly relevant question, and one
which serves as a guiding impulse behind A Secret Service, an exhibition
uniting the imaginaries of autodidact naïfs such as Henry Darger and
Oskar Voll with the autistic affinities of professional artists such as Sophie
Calle, Tehching Hsieh and Kurt Schwitters.
Many of the promises made in ordinary language have no basis
in ‘reality’, just as the logic motivating the production of artworks is not
ontologically given. But what happens when the logic is deliberately
withheld or when it’s intentionally inconsistent or circular? What services
can be solicited of a self-legitimating consciousness? Schwitters’s
Merzbarn (1946–8), permanently ensconced in the Hatton Gallery in
Newcastle, has long raised these questions, and it serves as curator
Richard Grayson’s conceptual starting-point for A Secret Service. Grayson
extends the Merzbarn’s enigmatic qualities into a provocative premise for
this fascinating and richly polyvalent exhibition.
Much of the exhibition is a symptom of the way that figures such as
Schwitters, Darger and Voll have spawned an industry of iconographers
precisely because they provide so few cues. A seasoned prankster such
as Jeffery Vallance, on the other hand, has numerous entry points to his
projects via the customary research methods of specialists. In one project,
My FBI File (1981), his repeated attempts to legitimately access his FBI
records raise enough suspicion to merit an FBI file. In Clowns and Shroud
(1998) he examines the Turin Shroud and finds that scorch marks have
left behind the traces of clown’s faces. In both works he engages with
organisations that inexorably pursue esoteric (and ludicrous forms) of
knowledge – a hermeneutics of bric-a-brac – designed to exclude the
majority of people from power. What is most effective is that Vallance
engages with these systems on their own terms, satirising them in the
process. Vallance takes the audience’s confidence hostage in a way that is
perceptive because it is increasingly so commonplace.
A Secret Service doesn’t spurn exposé. The Speculative Archive art
group strip layers of secrecy and obfuscation encouraged by American
anti-terror restrictions which prevent ‘sensitive’ structures from being
photographed – easily sourcing the prohibited images on the Internet.
Sophie Calle, The Hotel, Room 29, 1981. © Tate, london
The inaccessible ‘content’ of many of the works just as frequently places
emphasis on an erotics of effect. Katarzyna Józefowicz’s Games (2001–3),
for example, diverts the sobriety and care of the iconoclast to the services
of inspiring awe. In other instances we gain access to works that are
quasi-mythical, notably Hsieh’s infamous performances that required his
lengthy withdrawal from society. We can’t presuppose that idiosyncrasies
are accessible even to the initiated. In approaching such illocutionary
and opaque works, we are asked to abandon normative reasoning and
have ‘faith’. This is certainly the case with the talismanic ideographs of
Gedewon, which require a leap of faith too far for most sceptics. Soliciting
such reactions shouldn’t be confused with depth; trying to be opaque does
not prevent superficiality any more than attempting to be transparent
might. Neil Mulholland
125 Artreview
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 11 7/8/07 15:46:54
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