Art review: The Dirty Hands

Published on Friday 6 February 2009 16:29

Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson CCA, Glasgow

BULGING codpieces, a little bit of pick-pocketing, street violence and a lot of posing. Glasgow's CCA is setting itself up as a den of iniquity this month with the pairing of two artists whose professed areas of interest include "drag queens", "outlaws" and "criminal gestures".

If this sounds a wee bit risky then worry not. Not only does this kind of stuff have a solid cultural pedigree – the exhibition blurb emphasises Jean Genet, though far more mainstream figures such as Caravaggio and Dickens immediately come to mind – but one also gets the firm impression that one shouldn't take all this too seriously. This show is a little bit Robin Hood: Men In Tights, a little bit Blackadder, and a little bit Madonna in the "strike-a-pose" era of 'Vogue'.

This is a two person show. Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson are both represented by Glasgow dealer Sorcha Dallas and are part of a group of artists and writers in their thirties who cut their teeth on the committee of Transmission, Glasgow's artist-led gallery. Both usually use traditional media including pencil and paint, and in Pollard's case bronze. Both have been investigating what happens when you plunder art history, looking at art works as diverse as medieval stone carving, 18th-century portraiture and art house film.

Stephenson studied sculpture at Dundee and is known for tight and intricate drawings culled from unlikely sculptural sources. Pollard studied painting at Glasgow, and in the past decade has gained increasing attention for artworks that have playfully questioned the nature of art making in general and painting in particular. As one of three artists selected for the Scotland and Venice project at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Pollard pulled off a considerable tour de force, featuring an unlikely sequence of wall drawings, paintings and eerie facsimile objects, confusing the eye about what was mass-produced and what was painstakingly handmade.

At CCA the artists have put together their two discrete bodies of work in a sequence of three rooms of highly theatrical presentation. Stephenson has created a series of exotic female figures that look like fashion plates, but are created by collaged photographs of medieval and baroque sculpture. A carved shell becomes a fan. A dress is crafted from disembodied limbs. Fancy hats and hairstyles are crudely carved out of random masonry.

These images look their loveliest in a series of small-scale collages, but they have been deliberately blown up to the point of absurdity in a series of giant photocopied figures, where solid matter dissolves into those coarse printed points known as "benday dots". These works are a parody of figurative art-making. They are teetering supermodels, who would soon keel over on their Westwood heels should they try to walk, but for all their absurdity, they reveal a real zest for art-making.

The show starts in relative gloom, a charcoal-coloured room where Stephenson has installed a series of long shuttered doors, decorated with collaged figures, cut up and reconfigured. On the wall, dramatically spotlit is a tondo, or circular painting, of a warped figure, covered in a red wash, as though seen through a red lens. The figure at the centre is Jack Sheppard, a notorious 18th-century London thief who became a folk hero for his ability to outwit the authorities and escape from prison.

In a further work, by Pollard, placed on the centre of the floor, we see Sheppard as portrayed by one of the most establishment artists of his day, Sir James Thornhill. The criminal was a promising carpenter who fell into the low life. His story and eventual death on the gallows in 1724 became legend: inspiring everything from a biographical essay by Daniel Defoe to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Dickens' Oliver Twist.

Pollard has also made a sequence of paintings that show the distorted and repeated figure of Robin Hood, in a dramatic woodland chase that might be a medieval hunting sequence. He also quotes extensively from the art of Richard Dadd, an established painter who fell dramatically ill on an artistic excursion to the Nile in 1842 and who returned gripped by a "madness" that led him to stab his own father to death. Dadd spent the rest of his life in the Bethlem Asylum and Broadmoor but was allowed to continue to paint.

The criminal as a kind of artist and the artist as criminal have been ancient and rich seams in cultural history. In Dadd's case there is an added and complex notion of time. Dadd existed in a kind of timeless suspension during his 40-year incarceration, a man once at the centre of things who became divorced from the endless rotation of fashion and the march of history.

Both these artists seek to remove themselves from the understood historical sequence of things. In Pollard's case through liberal quotation from other artists and eras, and in Stephenson's case through extreme and eccentric restaging of subject matter that is physically and historically inflexible: medieval and baroque sculpture.

What might it mean to make art that stands completely outside history or time? Is the work freed up or constrained by its remove from everyday structures and concerns. Dadd's work veered between bravura and decorative fantasy to acute anxiety and psychological insight. Pollard has filled the third gallery at CCA with a sequence of four paintings based on one of Dadd's lesser known but most interesting works, his Shakespearean history painting, The Death Of Richard II, of 1852.

A scene of ambush and murder by sword, it's tempting to see the subject as a rehearsal of Dadd's own tragic and murderous acts. The original painting is also, by virtue of its men in tights costumes and weird fleshy tones, a matter of high camp.

This painting is often described as Dadd's only use of the colour scarlet. Pollard has amped up the red and pink in these paintings in a sequence that starts as fairly focused investigation and dissolves into fetishistic sampling. One painting is a crotch shot of a bulging codpiece, another a warped set of legs in which the emphasis is on fancy footwear.

Quite where all this gets us, is elusive but interesting. Much recent art has focused on a kind of emptying out of subject matter through the extensive quotation or self-conscious re-staging of earlier art works. Pollard and Stephenson's work suggests that the cycle of recycling and re-appropriation through which art renews but also exhausts itself might at least be seen in a more spirited light as theft: a kind of wilful and joyful criminality.

There's a playful attempt in evoking "secret languages" such as drag and gay polari to suggest that art-making itself might be a mysterious coded practice carried out among secret self-selected elites or disenfranchised underground rebels.

Then, of course, there's the good old-fashioned lure of decadence and bad behaviour. These are ideas which are knowingly overstretched in this show. They are also themes which the inventive Pollard in particular may be close to exhausting but, in the meantime, The Dirty Hands has plenty of brio.

• Until March 21 cca-glasgow.com