An Artbash review of the collaboration, Makings, between Andrew Barber and John Reynold for Ledge Gallery Hamilton.

By John Hurrell

This very small show is the result of a collaboration. It consists of Andrew Barber presenting John Reynolds with two completed, oddly shaped canvases to write on. One, in its line and colouring, refers to McCahon, the other Mondrian; and the canvases are rectangular but with the vertical sides converging at the top - not parallel.

By David Levinson

As a self-declared hippie, Tao Wells’ output makes itself circumspect to social baggage that’s had forty years to stultify - for all intents and purposes, he condemns US troops, the culpability of the Red Cross in war’s regime, and finally KFC’s mistreatment of animals. Of course, the danger of a strong critical will is always that it rationalises something that’s inherently (for good and for bad) irrational. Contrary to the normal ship of celebrity, run on pornographic self-revelation, art must maintain a face that’s glamorously opaque - all the better to serve its dubious economy.

More than that though, reifying a work’s relationship to society threatens the aura of distance that helps set it apart as an object. Nevertheless, in the case of Wells, he airs social concerns with such a marked lack of restraint that, like oil on water, they can’t help but sit uncomfortably atop his piercing aesthetic sensibility. Because art trumps conventional psychology, the appearance of a ‘voice’ in the most un-tempered sense (as when Wells declares in bold black swashes on a white flag, I CONDEMN US TROOPS) will always engender slippage. As a result, the question that’s aroused is, who exactly is speaking here? Rather than seize the artist’s vocal cords, it’s almost as if the awareness of social protest existed apart from the work, as something to be playfully intersected. Hence, a piece like Untitled (‘Organic KFC’) is self-consciously dumb - it is big, bright and tacky - because what it’s fighting for is an entirely misguided application of left-wing politics. The notion of an ‘Organic KFC’ is a contradiction in terms, because if KFC went organic, it would cease to be KFC.

Meanwhile My Shot Red Cross is a far more austere interpolation, one that turns common war iconography, the Red Cross logo and broken glass, into precise formal chatter. Consisting of a glass-panelled door, with a painted Red Cross logo, the unerring border of the sculpture comes to frame a single puncture-wound that miraculously leaves the remaining glass untouched. As agitprop, the work is too reminiscent of its source to have been made by human hands; alone, and haphazardly perched in the largest room in the gallery, it seems to gain a form of autonomy outside its supposed social agenda.

That Fireworks are stimulated warfare, don’t want to get involved (sixty-four sheets of paper stained with cum) was made with human hands, there can be little doubt. Yet if the intended message is that either ‘you will go to war, you will come back, whatever’ or ‘you will go to war, you will not come back, whatever,’ then Wells is rechannelling the sum of that indifference into a total self-absorption: as much as the come-stains persist as a riotous fuck-you, their intention is almost cancelled out by the spectacle of endless pleasure so bull-headedly pitted against endless labour. In other words - it’s all about Tao. This confirmed in his opening-night performance – stained sheets finally reunited with their maker, his body entered into a hypnotic melange of sex rhythms and krump freak-out, the segue between the two bookmarked with Kim Gordon screaming, ‘SHAKE OFF YOUR FLESH!!’ As Wells says, he may indeed be a ‘damned’ (rather than politically constructive) hippie, yet there’s little doubt as to which is better suited to the realm of art.

Spoilt Boy Aesthetic
An exhibition by Tao Wells at Gambia Castle
22 February – 10 March 2007

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Every time I give up I’ve got nothing to do and it gets really boring.

I get the feeling that Nick’s works in the show are doing what they’re doing, and also they’re ideas that are doing their thing. Like there are these thoughts that have this existence in the paintings or the paintings as constructed thought-actions. Ideas can really change and disappear on you so they can’t really be stuck down with too much stuff, otherwise it turns into facts or something like a fridge, and no matter how long you look at it, you know that it’s full of beer that’s taking too long to get cold, and the beauty of the fridge is actually making the beer, that’s just about ready because you put it in the freezer, taste nicer than if it came out of a fridge that you got from a garage sale and has a sticker of a radio station on it. Does it need to be free of having to do other things, like having importance or engaging with other problems and ideas about things outside of the work?

I was thinking about how the paintings exist as objects in relation to the room.