Mystics or Rationalists at the Ingleby

The following article was written during a particularly arduous gallery assistant shift in August and, while now a full month out of date, deserves to stand as a record (mainly to myself) of what I am inspired by, and horrified by, in contemporary art.

After a few weeks away from the computer I return. Yes I know that it is the festival and I should be spending every waking hour trawling lesser known venues for under appreciated talent but, quite frankly, after six years of elbowing my way through plastic poncho clad crowds I have morphed into… a festival Scrooge. My best friend in the world (who multitasks as a rather fab actress) came to stay with me for the start of August. While out jogging one morning - something I neither enjoy, nor am seeing any significant benefit from, a passer by was heard to shout, ‘The Festival wankers have arrived!’ I turned to look at my friend clad in rather sleek black Lycra and sporting a pare of sun glasses in the rain and was rather inclined to agree with said passing Edinburgian. With this in mind I retired for the entirety of the month to the secluded comfort of my flat. There has however been a few exceptions to this rule - each coinciding with a bout of rain, a resultant illness and a vow not to go out until September.

The Ingleby Gallery proved worth braving the elements for. ‘Mystics or Rationalists’ takes its title from Sol LeWitt’s seminal Sentences on Contemporary Art. I was skeptical on arrival when presented with a ‘Welcome’ mat as the first piece on display by the artist Ceal Floyer. I have just looked at the website to find that, ‘Ceal Floyer’s work challenges us to re-examine the world around us,’ my mistake, I thought that that was the object of contemporary art. A welcome mat, rather than doing this, should be confined to the Homebase bargain bin. Do not get me wrong, Homebase is my Narnia; a place of dreams which, once entered, many a Sunday DIY dabbler may not return. This as may be the Welcome-mat-as-art conundrum symbolises a depressing relic of the early naughties when the artist pallet was made up of a set of letraset transfers and a ruler disguising itself as an alphabet. Needless to say, the exhibition improved markedly on entering.

‘Mystics or Rationalists’ is packed with big names; Susan Hiller, Cornelia Parker, Katie Paterson, yet each piece was small, unassuming and reverently selected (with exemption of Susan Hiller’s homages). A shelf of stunningly functionless marble ’Globes’ by Iran do Espirito Santo based on light fittings (so I was informed) were wittily presented not in plinth nor cabinet form but on a simple shelf jutting out from the wall, as if being proffered for use, were they to have one. The Ingleby Gallery website describes him as, ‘Often working on an ambitious scale, [where] he wryly subverts the Minimalist tradition through his abstracted sculptures of familiar everyday objects made strange by their disorientating size and incongruous materials.’

Another stand out piece for me was Cornelia Parker’s ‘Bullet Drawings’ made from lead bullets drawn into wire and set suspended in glass frames. While I know her mainly for blowing up sheds and the likes, these bullet drawings, while quieter, encapsulated a similar cyclical quality between destruction and regeneration. So, Cornelia Parker blows things up. ‘Blow something up’ would be one of those ambiguous crossword clues with duel and completely unrelated meanings; exploding matter and enlarging or scaling up. Both definitions could be used to describe Parker’s practice, both are rooted in science. At this point a glimmer of GCSE Physics returns to me, The Conservation of Energy where, ‘Nothing can be created or destroyed, it just moves from one state to another.’ Parker definitely falls in the ‘Rationalist’ part of the title.

Something should also be said about Simon Starling’s ‘Autoxylopyrocycloboros’; a self-generating piece of work exhibited in slide projected format. Come to think of it this is not unrelated to my hypothesis that Cornelia Parker has based her entire career on the Conservation of Energy Theory. Starling’s piece was a number of photos shown on a continuous loop accompanied by a clicking, wiring soundtrack which now places the carousel slide projector in the retro category. The stills showed the artist progressively (or digressionally) attacking a boat he was in while feeding the debris into the boat’s furnace. This goes on until of course only the furnace remained and, with neither fuel nor boat to power, it sunk into the river. While this could be read as a depressing morality tale, I prefer to see it more rationally. Maybe next time this is shown the boat will be solar powered, the furnace will be electric… and the slide projector will have been replaced by HD, 3D surround cinema. For, while I may be pessimistic about the Scottish weather, creativity is not a sinking ship eaten up by the technological furnace. If I were to be rational about it!