Vahakn Arslanian: the word 'Rorschach' does not appear in this review

This short-lived exhibition (it only lasts a month) consists of one idea. It’s not a bad idea, so it’s not disappointing to find it repeated about two dozen times at 20 Hoxton Square. Basically, he substitutes sections of burned-out paper for images of flame. It can be complicated by introducing further layers for a telescopic effect, or altering the ‘candle’ illustration from which the ‘flame’ comes.

To stand in the middle of the room surrounded by soft black shapes on this limited palette is pleasant insofar as it’s consistent. Arslanian’s paper is an ochreish beige that complements the soft-edged scorch patterns, and the underlayers of paper create heavy boundaries with the blackness. Each one is framed (and glazed) in a derelict window-frame (not untrendy, see Chiharu Shiota,) and the cold glass and chipped paint around the once-flaming material makes a feature of their thingness, reminding you of the drama that went with their creation. If not transcendental, at least it’s food for the imagination.

20 Hoxton Square London N1 6NT (gallery website, google map)

Hair today, gone tomorrow

If you can make it past the gigantic webs of ginger hair in the front room of Riflemaker and negotiate the narrow stairs without breaking your neck (or head), you’ll be glad you took the trouble for Alice Anderson’s new show. It announces its presence to passersby with a huge river of marmalade-coloured hair pouring out of a first-floor window and passing through the shop door, where the river splits up into the aforementioned webs, leaving a narrow path into the staircase. There are then two rooms: the basement containing a video and upstairs, some small sculpures.

The short film (8 minutes) is about a red-headed woman who treats dolls as children and children as dolls. Ignore the ever-so-slightly-naff dialogue (‘Dolls don’t die’) and it’s a pleasantly weird story much enhanced by some peculiar cinematography. Upstairs, dolls rear their tiny heads again, although the dominant presence in the first-floor room is that neverending hair, which proceeds diagonally down from the window and goes straight up the chimney. It’s suggestive and sinister and quite wonderful. The sculptures are of structures made from black sand that’s been bonded somehow, which tower over dolls made of (again marmalade-coloured) thread. The black sand pieces are presented with ‘inverted’ counterparts, casts for the shapes, which makes for a sort of visual rhyme.

Lots of intriguing preoccupations with control here. In a small cabinet, Anderson also presents some drawings done in her own blood. They don’t seem to tie in too closely the other pieces, but the colour is nothing if not appropriate.

Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, Soho, London W1 (gallery website, google map)

On a trip. Normal service will be resumed next week. Apologies.

Avery (detail): "jumping with brio"

Three pieces: a five-metre pencil drawing of a coastal town called Onomatopoeia; a tiny sepia photo of a city skyline seen from the sea, and a piece of short prose about roaming flower-covered plains in search of a cat which is also a ‘noumenon‘.

Not idle gestures, either. The drawing is jumping with brio. On the quayside below huge white blocky buildings, dozens upon dozens of character studies mingle with bizarre novelties like duck-beaked dogs, or the T-shirts or polygonal hats which are attributes of allegiance to one of  Onomatopoeia’s numerous philosophical cults, as advertised in posters and names of buildings: ‘Laissez-Faire’, ‘Empiricist‘, ‘FREE CHURCH OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM‘. The enormous liner ‘UTILITY’ is hoving in to dock. Children and monkeys scramble around under the boardwalk, where two grown men contemplate a jar of pickled eggs. Men bend down to adore mooring-pieces resembling female torsos.

Despite the comicbook-like cleanness of the lines, the drawing is apparently unfinished. It’s not a cliché about ‘process’, though; incomplete bodies take on uncanny ghostliness or ghastliness, some barely-realised dogs at the bottom left in particular. As for the human population, every age of humanity is on the smorgasbord, and notwithstanding their embroilment in Onomatopoeia’s thriving philosophical marketplace, the people and their faces are spirited. The omissions feel urgent; it makes you look again and again at what’s in: the half-formed customer, the child dangling his legs over the wharf, the figures investigating the landscape, like the pair of businessmen fondling an enormous perforated cast-iron egg.

The text, supposedly composed by a traveller in these parts, is likewise charming:

Two huge men in tall hats sat strikingly by a mirror on the wall.

The writer speculates that the local language of Onomatopoeia, If’enish, is no more than ‘gobbledegook improvised for the consumption of the tourists.’ Comprehension might well be a red herring, but why quibble when the drawing is so humane, and so splendid?

Pilar Corrias, Eastcastle Street W1, until 31st March (google map, gallery website)

A road to nowhere: Dan Holdsworth's Untitled (Autopia)

It doesn’t seem odd that an international art-leviathan like Gagosian should seek to capitalise on the counter-cultural cachet of someone like JG Ballard. So it shouldn’t be a disappointment to find that they’ve created a sprawling, lumpy show that’s designed to show off their collection, loosely in keeping with Ballard’s axiom “Sex x Technology = The Future”, but overburdened with contributions by star artists that only end up detracting from one another.

Not that there’s nothing to see here – in fact, there’s loads. Most of the artists are veritable Titans of the 20th and 21st-century art worlds, (check out the list and some of the works at Gagosian’s website) and a stroll round ‘Crash’ would be a good introduction for the uniniated. It’s like the Renaissance galleries of the V&A, with dozens of masterpieces packed into very little space. So it’s pretty hefty, but it’s a recipe for disaster for the curators to try and tick off high-ranking members of the canon at the same time as trying to be nasty and uncompromising.

The tone is bleak and fatalistic. Gory pop art and straight porn nestle among photos of lingerie models in neck braces, and endless images of buildings and cities, all appropriately deserted and crumbling. Weapons, machines, mindless replications and sci-fi landscapes all put in an appearance, but instead of creating oppressive atmosphere with the coherence of one of Ballard’s books, they simply jostle. With such sensational subject matter, it feels like each work is screaming at you to take notice of it, and there’s no harmonious dread: just your curiosity flickering from piece to piece and the sense that this isn’t much more than a sideshow.

Eduardo Paolozzi’s reptitious, lurid prints are delightful, as is Dan Holdsworth’s double image of a road at night (above);a collapsed bridge on a gigantic motorway intersection, seen from the air; or Mike Nelson’s encapsulated foyer, that could have come straight out of ‘High-Rise’. And there are loads of other great pieces here. It’s just a shame the experience is so dreary: for the most part, you meander from gallery to gallery, bombarded by sensationalisms.

Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia Street, WC1X (google map, gallery website)

Some subsequent thoughts here.

Amelia Whitelaw: "sloppy heap"

Although the evening’s theme was stories, two of the best pieces were silent. Kirstie Macleod, smouldering with contemplation, stood alone in an incense-laden room among suspended, glistening wires, and unravelled carmine wool onto a cubic frame on a treestump. In the adjoining corridor was her other piece: a sleeping woman half-buried in nightblue velvet bedding that continued far beyond her body, so you had to tread all over it.

The final performance was a short play about reproduction (in mammals) performed by Eloise Fornieles and Kate Hawkins. In it, a couplet-spouting sperm and egg of differing social status are brought together in the kindly embrace of the uterus lining. The performances were excellent, but a thick ideological gloss pushed it towards the unsavoury realm of edutainment.