reviews imagine action
imagine action
Lisson gaLLery, LonDon
5 JuLy – 22 sePtem ber
Judith Hopf, Hospital Bone Dance, 2006,
DVD projection. Photo: Ken adlard.
© the artist, 2007. courtesy the artist
and Lisson gallery, London
The Lisson’s summer group show, Imagine Action, opened with a judging and judged audience. The best pieces in the show share this
(re)performance, by Dan Graham, of his now iconic Audience/Performer/ humanism, navigating the territory of social relations by using represented
Mirror (first staged in 1975), in which Graham narrates his actions and the beings rather than abstract formalism. The British artist Josephine Pryde,
(re)actions of the audience as they happen (eg, ‘someone is smiling in the whose photographic work situates itself in the wake of conceptualism,
front row… he is smiling a little more now… he is now trying not to smile’). contributes a series of tinted photographs of Texel sheep – a breed that
This opening salvo of 1970s conceptualism sets the tone for the show, both generally fetches a high price at auction. Each photograph is identified by
in its purview – the work addressed questions familiar to that period, such a different musical instrument, deftly mimicking one of the classic means
as categories of public and private space, and the distinction between of individual identification (‘I play drums’). Despite the piece’s grapeshot
individual and group identity – and in the strategies employed, such as the implications of sheephood – teenagers are sheep, the artworld are sheep,
use of architecture and serial forms. Curated by Casco Projects’s Emily the music world are sheep – it’s deeply generous, suggesting solidarity
Pethick, the show’s well-chosen mixture of youngish artists offers less with, rather than condescension towards, the aims of identifying oneself.
utopian or optimistic plans for what could be than melancholic reflections Differently, the Dutch artist Falke Pisano presents a two-monitor video of
on what is lost in the transition from private to social being. herself looking through a book on sculptor Eduardo Chillida, recounting
Failure and futility is inscribed into much of the work on show. The both her reactions to the massive public sculptures and the story of the
Danish artist Pia Rönicke has built a 1:10 scale model for a three-screen monograph’s author, David Finn. Moving easily between video, sculpture
cinema, screening three films (all made by her) that address unrealised and text, Chillida (Forms & Feelings) (2006) plays with the shift in film
or unfulfilled urban planning projects. Luca Frei’s Plexiglas park tree and from private to public scansion – Barthes’s idea that, in watching a film,
benches, a public space, is notably placed in the private gallery space. the individual cedes his own control over the length of time he can peruse
Ricardo Basbaum’s Diagrams (superpronoun) (2003–7) reduces semiotics the images to the prescribed duration of the film. Our loss in watching
and questions of intersubjectivity to squiggly lines. someone else flip through and ruminate on a book we will probably never
Seeing Graham’s piece in the flesh highlighted the pathos of the see as a primary source is a jarring reminder of the gallerygoer’s typically
artist’s position, as a solitary man on display, set against the by-turns bored, reactive and receptive role as an ‘audience member’. Melissa Gronlund
155 artreview
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 9 4/9/07 12:32:20
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