“Absolute Vision” at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Subtitled “New British Painting in the 1990s”, Absolute Vision is a refreshing departure from the installations and sculptures that so many of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford's touring exhibitions tend to comprise, and is a collection instead of challenging but reassuringly vertical wall-mounted artworks representing British painting in the 1990s.

These are all examples of not only the craft of painting, but the role expected of the artist in this last decade of the 20th century, where having fought two world wars and landed on the moon, the human race is now wondering whether it really does want to dip its toes into the future or actually stay safely on the shores of what it understands. 

Scale and variety mark out this exhibition and the voluminous galleries of Oxford’s MOMA are put to good use. Although all standalone works of art, there’s a division between paintings that are about the act of painting, and works with recognisable figurative themes. 

In the former category are the monochromes of Clem Crosby and Jason Martin, the reductive wash-outs of Callum Innes and the additive pouring of Ian Davenport. 
Simon Callery's work is very large and almost monochrome; on the face of it nothing appears much to be happening. It appears on closer inspection to consist of meticulous hours with something like a scalpel scratching horizontal lines into the beige to reveal the colors behind it.

Fiona Rae, Jane Harris and Mark Francis bridge the gap with abstract works featuring strong patterns, and then getting into the figurative arena we have more intellectually challenging works.

Peter Doig presents Lump/Olin, a baffling, naive representation of somebody skiing on what looks like a dry ski slope. Meanwhile Glenn Brown's work, “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” looks like a traditional old master with chiarascuro and lots of expressive putty-like brushwork, but as you get closer, it's almost mirror-like in its flatness.  

Richard Patterson and Lisa Millroy top the charts in terms of technique in stark contrast to the monochromes with lifelike representations of Kimonos and minotaurs.

Elsewhere, Chris Ofili’s vibrant works attack both your vision and nostrils with their elephant dung additions, Richard Wright stands out by painting on the wall of the gallery, there's some slightly shocking work from Marcus Harvey, something from Gary Hume, and of course, everybody's favorite Young British Artist, Damian Hirst with a circular two metre diameter spin painting.

As everybody suspects, these probably aren’t made by Damian Hirst, and yet the fact that he’s the reason why they are created and the fact that they do give us a link to the darling of the young British artists remains worth going to see the exhibition for.

All of the paintings in the show have placards next to them where the artists have a chance to contribute something to help the viewer understand the works. In many of them there's an element of what feels like forced irony. Some are long lists of cliquey influences, some appear to be conversations with no context. Some appear to be witty quips revelling in a self-conscious naivety, and none of these do contemporary art much favors in terms of the “my kid could have done that” crowd. 

But whilst there is an abundance of scoffing and a knowing “can-you-believe-we-actually-get-paid-to-do-this?” artiness to much of this collection of new British paintings, there is nevertheless hope that the verticality of wall-hung art is not dead yet. The honesty of the still-lifes of the past may be absent, but there is still life in painters, brushes and pigments. 

Review by Francis Bookwood.

“Absolute Vision” at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford runs from 10th of November, 1996 to the 23rd of February, 1997.

Blooming in Arms, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Heri Dono's installation at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford is a chilling reminder of the realities of war, but also the transformative nature of war.

It occupies one gallery in Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art and when you enter, the space is lit with only red lights. Camouflage netting hangs from the ceiling and the room is filled with a selection of hanging human-like figures made from camouflage netting, prosthetic limbs and elements of militaria.

These are a horrific concoction of humanity and terror, personifying war in the invasive presence of gigantic, ugly amorphous creatures that seem literally the stuff of nightmares, whether that's for the civilian population or the soldiers themselves.

One thinks of landmines and their ability to mutilate. Then there is the horrific power of war to change the landscapes it permeates, turning fields that grow the crops for life into battlefields of death and destruction.

In the center of the room is a brick construction filled with soil. It is not clear whether this is a grave or a monument, but its smell permeates the gallery, adding to the unreal and unpleasant atmosphere generated from the monochromatic lighting and the discarded, mouldy smell of the camouflage netting.

Part of the exhibition is a persistent, muffled radio transmission, hinting at the voices of State propaganda, perhaps the sound of the parents of the nation telling its children that war is necessary; destruction and terror are what we must face almost in the way we're told we have to go to school.

With the gallery attendants also wearing military uniforms it's a horribly effective way to encapsulate war, and made all the stranger because over here in Western Europe the struggles of territories like Indonesia are not simple foreign wars. The guilt of colonialism is never far away.

But even without in-depth understanding of any of the politics, the lighting, the sound, the smell and spectacle of the prosthetic limbs and the size of the horrific statues are so unwelcoming that the urge to escape is high, and in that gesture we are reminded that we can walk away from this. 

Just outside of the gallery the shops and the comforts of life in our own country that isn't suffering from war. We should be glad of that.

But if you have time to visit the exhibition, there is ample food for thought about how lucky we are to live in peace and the mystery of why war is ever seen as any kind of solution.

Review by Francis Bookwood. 

Blooming in Arms by Heri Dono runs from 14th of January to 11th of February, 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art in Pembroke Street, Oxford.

Marina Abramovich. Objects, Performance, Video, Sound. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

One of the great things about the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford is its modus operandi of either instigating or paying host to touring shows. Despite the name museum, the institution has no permanent collection, instead choosing to provide the citizens of Oxford with a varied selection of exhibitions five or six times per year.

In the case of Marina Abramovich, a Serbian conceptual artist and performer, visitors to the gallery are presented from the very beginning with an exceedingly strong statement. After buying your ticket, you enter the gallery straight into literally the firing line of a sound installation called “War”.

To enter the exhibition, you pass through a dark corridor, rather like a tent, whilst the very realistic sounds of gunfire appear at you from either side. It's a very stark and effective way to illustrate the terrors of war and in particular the harrowing nature of the spiritual attack that comes with the sounds of war. Gunfire has to personify the uncertainty of living and surviving in such an environment.

Elsewhere, the exhibition lives up to its name. There are examples of objects, performance, video, and sound. We can see photographs of past performances, objects installed in situ, and of course video art. 

The most striking of these is “Cleansing the Mirror”, a tower of television sets showing Abramovich ritualistically cleaning a dirty skeleton. The tower of television sets is as tall as a standard adult and we're presented up close with a metaphor for how history leaves a mark on the individual.

Abramovich embraces the skeleton like she would a child, scrubbing at it with soapy water and attempting to restore an emblem of death to some sort of pristine state. This isn't the act of an embalmer or a technician working as a taxidermist. 

It is instead almost a caring, nurturing exercise, cleansing, as the title implies, the skeleton of some kind of unknown burden that it had to endure, and that this somehow will help all of humanity, not just the lone individual for whom the skeleton represents.

Elsewhere there are crystals, puddles of pig's blood and whips made from Korean virgin's hair. The meanings behind these works are multiple and deep. To try and summarize them here would be discounting the experience of seeing them in person. 

I would urge anybody curious to visit this exhibition whilst it's on show at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford between 9th of April and the 2nd of July 1995.

Review by Francis Bookwood