Art Reviews
Performing No Thingness
East Gallery NUA
27/09/16
Performing No Thingness is a progressive show pinioning the concepts that drove 1960s counter culture. It is pivotal in commandeering the ideas that first formed the movement of Concrete Poetry, and is designed to explore the concepts of emptiness, the finite and indefinable and how these abstract notions have both haunted and inspired many generations of artists.
Exhibited at Norwich University's East Gallery on St Andrews Street, the show is a commendation to the ethos of the gallery in demonstrating influential and integral contemporary and modern art. Curated by resident Masters student Nicola Simpson, she has captured the resonance of the experimental, yet carefully coordinated ideas of artists Dom Sylvester Houedard, Li Yuan Chia and Kenelm Cox. The arrangement of the show has nailed the intricate and complex workings of each artist, and has collected in one place the pioneers of the medium and lays out a clear map for the audience to navigate the kinetic energies of these creators and understand what they attempt to communicate in their pieces. It allows us to understand the philosophy that informed their work and see for ourselves how it demonstrates the relational and emotional exchanges that occurs between object, space and viewer.
The exhibition focuses on the Eastern philosophies that informed and entranced each artist. Every piece displayed is dependant on its positioning and presentation for that work to come into being as an object for us, the audience, to understand and engage with. I found it interesting to observe how this three dimensional interaction adds to the emotional and sensational impact of taking in the messages communicated through the structures;, particularly when viewing Ken Cox's Elemental Balloons.
Five large balloons in red, blue, yellow, orange and green rotating in tandem on stands. He literally has made poetry in motion with this piece, exacting machines that allow words to move in space. Personally I found the piece represented how we as a species use language - exchanging words back and forth from one mouth to another. He has used the work to add new definition to the idea of onomatopoeias, signalling the motion of an ocean by bobbing the green balloon up and down. This nods to a material language capable of mirroring the space and movement of the objects these words represent - each balloon is dedicated to an individual word and mimics the necessary motions of each of them.
As for the work from Houedard, I was delighted by the inventive use of letter arrangement and proposition to subvert conventional poetic imagery into something tangible, and to observe how the visual representation of words and phrases adds to the style and rhythm of written words, as well as deepening the derivation of meaning it gives to this progressive notion of poetry, later coined as Concrete.
Houedard created all of this using an antique Olivetti Lettera typewriter, printing letters onto paper and playing with the rigid and varied settings on the machines to combine colouring and spacing techniques to create abstract imagery. His use of typography was revolutionary in print at the time, given the limited abilities of graphic tools available. His work was later given the name typestract, a compound of type and abstract designed to describe the medium his images fit into, and the abstract nature the wording confounded and as a result what brilliant and extraordinarily absurd ideas it allowed him to explore.
Performing No Thingness is an exciting show, recommended not only for its visual pleasure but also the knowledge to be gleaned from its rich historical tapestry. It shows us the origins of an art movement so we can observe the pioneers that began the journey of forming the world of art we are familiar with today.
The show will be running until the 29th October, in the East Gallery. It is open 12- 5pm Tuesday to Saturday and all entry is free.