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The Last Resting
Place of the Anonymous Citizen: Ian Rawlinson
There
is quite a tradition now of sculpture that makes formal reference to Minimalism
- symmetry, geometry, materials, a certain scale - but imbues it somehow
with subjectivity, in the form of personal memory, or history; Rachel
Whiteread's work being perhaps the best-known example. (There is also,
it might be said, a parallel art historical enterprise which is trying
to do the same thing for Minimalism itself, recovering a subjectivity
allegedly present, but repressed in its original, 1960s, presentation.)
Rawlinson's sculpture clearly fits into this scheme, as he recognises
in his gallery text, calling what he does 'dirty Minimalism', but it differs
from it in that his materials are found objects. The result is to give
the work some of the character of the ruin. The main material is the perforated
metal shuttering once used by Manchester City Council's housing department
to seal empty property in Hulme. This history is legible to anyone familair
with the material, and Ian has left visible the council's arcane reference
numbers on the shutters, each one referring to the size and character
of the object in question. It's thankfully not an issue made central,
as the tragic comedy of Hulme deserves more direct treatment than an exhibition
of sculpture. But it is present. The other material, the curved neon striplighting
came from an abandoned Barclays bank.
What Ian has made
from these materials has obvious references to Minimalism, but is also
- as he notes in his gallery text - like tomb sculpture. Unlike Minimal
sculpture, these objects literally have interiors. Michael Fried thought
spectators apprehended Minimalism as if the works were hollow, but that's
not the same thing. Here we are presented quite explicitly with interiors,
lit by neon light, and big enough to hold a body. In size and presence
they look like chancery chapels, although if we pursue this further, their
emptiness suggests chapels of a secular and peculiarly modern kind.
If there is a liturgy
associated with these things, then it is provided by the drawings exhibited
alongside the sculptures. Formally they resemble engineering drawings
describing a manufacturing process, and in fact this is precisely what
they are, describing the manufacture of the sculptures. But they are not
plans to enable the manufacture in the first place, but drawings made
after the event describing in effect what has occurred. They are not without
humour, turning the serious business of manufacture into a pointless ritual.
The fact that they do not account for the actual manufacture of the object
is underlined by the absence of clear explanatory texts or symbols, other
than a few highly ambiguous arrows to indicate the movement of one panel
to another. The clarity is illusory: to use these drawings to make the
sculptures would be reckless.
Loss, ritual, the
ruin: these are issues that are central to sculptural discourse of the
past thirty or so years, and Rawlinson's work is profoundly, and productively
engaged with these things.
Text by Dr Richard
Williams
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