Art
Welds, weaves
John McEwen
Over the centuries Dutch artists have displayed an instinctual ease with abstraction or, more accurately perhaps, because all art is to some degree abstract, with the geometry of form, that has been demonstratively quite foreign to English art. Some say this reflects the nature of the Dutch lowlands: the straight horizon, the symmetrical division of thefields within the grid of their irrigation system, and so on.
• Whatever the reasons, the tradition is healthily evident today in the work of several Dutch artists, most notably in the photographic works of Jan Dibbets and the sculpture of Card l Visser, a retrospective of whose objects, drawings and collages is currently at the Whitechapel (many till 26 February).
Visser's father was an engineer and Visser himself has a professorship in architecture, so it is not surprising that his best work plays around with structure. He quotes Chaplin as saying that if one idea did not lead to another it might just as well be ,chucked in the waste-paper basket, and the main core of his sculptural interest has been expressed in serial pieces or ones in which there is at least a counterpart, the whole forming a continuous series in itself. His most consistent preoccupation and the
backbone of his work has concerned the cube. He has reduced it by chopping a triangle off each of its sides in turn; he has taken two iron beams of equal length, divided one of them into eighths and, by a display of the strength of welding, hung it into space off the end of the first beam in apparent defiance of the law of gravity; he has flattened cubes out using hinges of leather, and then folded them upright again; and more recently he has taken to collapsing them. Much of the strength of these pieces derives from the simplicity of their logic, a pleasing sense of making the most of least. Mondrian famously reduced the image of a tree to its structural minimum and Visser has been imbued in this tradition. In an early drawing he bows the knee to Mondrian and some of his continuing preoccupations, with the depiction of water for instance, are identical. Visser does not illustrate, he analyses nature with a bluntness that is matched by his loving use of materials. A cluster of bulbs, the vertebrae of a fish, the coupling of birds and locusts. an object reflected by water will act as the starting point for a series of interlinked — actual links are an important part of his sculptural vocabulary (welds, hinges, weaves) — structural insights. That is when he is at his best. In certain instances the effect can he too blatant, or the sequential point dull and mechanical; and upstairs, where most of the works are collage pieces, he seems to have let market fashions distract him from the firmer purpose of his sculpture. But as this is his latest work one hopes it will eventually come to mark only a passing phase in an oeuvre that has already forged links with the intellectuality of Mondrian and the sculptural simplicity of Brancusi.
Some of the most visually interesting work being done in England at the moment is in the.field of photography. Tom Cooper, whose exhibition of photographs at Robert Self was one of the highlights of last year, has now returned to his native America. but his close friend and co-lecturer at Trent Polytechnic, Paul Hill, now follows him on at the gallery (till 18 February). His photographs are in black and white and mostly contain figures. or parts of figures. Some were taken at a summer festivity at Matlock, others are of shop-windows, dayto-day events like wiping a windscreen or standing by a photo-booth. But the images are from festive, the befugged figure in the car wiping the windscreen seems to be drowning as ineffectually as a Hans Bellmer doll, the photo-booth is an essay on photographic nature. Hill is at best with children. Here the sense of unease, which can be a bit forced in his work, is easily reciprocated by the viewer. Spontaneous moments which have been viewed unnervingly to match the child with its destiny.
Two painting shows by well-established middle-generation English artists are less enthralling: new work by Adrian Heath (Redfern till 23 February) and a retrospective of the last twelve 'years of Jack Smith's output at the Serpentine (till 19 February). The best things in Adrian Heath's show of organic, in most cases overtly sexual, abstractions, are two drawings from 1978, so clearly there is room for hope. Elsewhere that purposefullness commented on earlier in Visser's work, is distinctly lacking. The scale of the paintings is politely large, the imagery tentative, at worst vulgar in the best of the little drawings there is no room for such hesitation while the pleasure derived from some of the colour and paint handling is weakened by the thin gruel of Euston Roadism: the working method exposed, sometimes imposed, as if to proclaim that painting like cleaning lavatories is a worthy job. Jack Smith's work has no such redeeming features. It purports to illustrate musical sound by means of a new alphabet no less, though close examination reveals the famous alphabet to be a slightly modified version of our old a, b, c. None of this should disguise the fact that to paint pictures of sound at all in this way is as facile an approach to the wonders and rigours of so-called abstraction as doing a close-up of a cowpat, and the superficiality of the premise is only matched by the coarseness of the technique. As for development, 'Jack Smith's' (as apposed to Jack Heinz's) '57 varieties' sums it up. Mercifully we are spared the musical accompaniment.
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