Art review: The Connoisseurs, Dundee Contemporary Arts

Published on Sunday 21 March 2010 13:13

We only catch a cheeky whiff of Alex Frost at an exhibition that overlooks his more resonant self portraiture, finds Moira Jeffrey

THIS month in New York opera-goers are experiencing a new treatment of Shostakovich's opera The Nose. The work is based on Gogol's fantastical short story about a nose that becomes detached from the face of its owner – a St Petersburg civil servant – and assumes a troublesome life of its own.

This week, in Dundee, there must be a whole room full of empty faces in an office somewhere in the city bureaucracy, as a crop of noses have come untethered and are floating across the floor of the main gallery at Dundee Contemporary Arts.

These are The Connoisseurs, large-scale sculptures in fetching shades of pistachio and terracotta, originally created to float in the cooling pond at the Glenfiddich Distillery on Speyside.

Glenfiddich's international artist-in-residence programme is well established, but few resident artists have produced anything as striking and cheeky as Alex Frost's The Connoisseurs.

The whisky industry makes much of both quality and provenance, and Frost's sculpture celebrated and satirised the process of "nosing" the product, whilst also suggesting that the whole thing might be a metaphor for questions of taste and historical style in art.

All in all, The Connoisseurs looked very fetching in situ – although the resident ducks, apparently, were pretty fed up.

The show at DCA is the Glasgow-based artist's most significant exhibition in Scotland to date. In his mid-thirties and represented by the Sorcha Dallas gallery, he has an international profile that needed a showcase at home.

It was probably wise to base it round this large work. It's one of his most instantly accessible pieces. Much of the rest of the show is given up to Frost's recurring interest, a kind of pop art where he remakes brand names, trademarks and the packaging of consumable products in unlikely materials.

There's WiFi Swimming Pool Mural, a massive wall of smashed crockery and tiles reconfigured as the kind of mosaic you might find in a swimming pool.

The mosaic pattern bears the trademark for wi-fi, the water perhaps a kind of metaphor for both the sense of all that invisible information we're swimming around in, as well as the aspirational values of mobility and that melancholy pursuit of freedom among the middle classes that John Cheever captured so well in his story The Swimmer.

Then there's Young Adults (replacers and substitutes), a plinth, with a series of small freestanding sculptures, made from a polymer that is not far from the kind of home-baked clay with which you might have made bad jewellery as a child.

Each is a lumpen, squat package reminiscent of a visit to a health food store in 1985, when soya milk and packets of vegeburger mix were all the rage. Indeed, anyone who ate too much textured vegetable protein in their youth will feel quite queasy at the sight of a large mosaic sculpture, bearing the Vegeburger logo, that Frost has placed in the garden.

There are a series of drawings: bland portraits quoting everything from Benetton advertising to Coca-Cola and still lives that turn Giorgio Morandi's earnest paintings into kitsch. These are made using one of Frost's self-developed techniques – not unlike fresco, where you puncture holes in paper and apply pigment – intended to distance the making of drawings from the expressive hand.

With some of these works you wonder what the target is here: is it the craft community, the kind of hapless community art that makes mosaics and murals, the world of advertising, or some kind of sad futurism where we will all eat soya? It doesn't quite add up to biting satire.

The notion of connoisseurship, though, gets to fundamental questions about art-making. Is it a matter of taste or style, or something more deeply invested? Frost's work has often veered consciously into the camp. Perversely, his brand of pop art, a kind of pastel kitsch which celebrates the earnest and the ersatz rather than the overtly mass market, has a kind of resonance in public spaces. One of his most important works of recent years has been Maverick, the giant egg-shaped sculpture that bore a mosaic image of the artist on its colourful surface.

It's in these, his successive and often highly androgynous self-portraits, that I think we get a clearer sense of the artist complicit and connected with the world around him, rather than simply a cool observer of other people's folly. That's only hinted at here, in a single drawing showing the artist's ear and jacket, on one of his ceramic vessels, which – in a favourite motif of the painter Jasper Johns – reveals his profile in its contours.

This is a timely and necessary show for Frost, but I think the emphasis on very recent work is a bit of a missed opportunity. He needed a far more searching exploration of the resonance of his self-portraiture. The Connoisseurs risks suggesting that rather than a man with a sharp nose for his times, he is simply a bit sniffy about the rest of us.

Alex Frost, The Connoisseurs

Dundee Contemporary Arts

Until 23 May, www.alexfrost.com

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on March 21, 2010