Art

This show draws comparisons between artists examining often convoluted processes of image production and embedded journalists working with the British and US military in the Middle East. It doesn’t really wash as a curatorial premise; the embedded news reporter, while granted access to unfolding situations, doesn’t usually draw explicit attention to the devices used – framing, editing and so on. If they did, the news might look like Johannes Maier’s ‘The Editor’s Cut’, a film of BBC journalist Shaun Ley providing a voiceover for a story about the smoking ban featuring a busy media professional called Pete who, in between popping out for fag breaks, happens to be editing said BBC film. It’s a confusing, amusing ricochet between real-time and recorded footage, best illustrated by Pete’s line, ‘Oh fuck, what’s happened there?’

Much of the work rakes over the coals of what in the 1960s Lucy Lippard called ‘the dematerialisation of the art object’. In ‘Four-Four’, Woodrow Kernohan reprises Robert Morris’s 1961 ‘Box with the Sound of Its Own Making’. A chair, door, box and briefcase have been drilled with a circular arrangement of holes, behind which speakers play the sound of the holes being drilled; Kernohan complicates things further by also showing silent footage of the drilling. Abigail Reynolds presents wall-mounted webs of crochet whose colours may or may not refer to a nearby chart. In summary: a range of pleasurable diversions and knotty propositions to unravel.