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Review Aug 12 2010 « | »
The Moon is an Arrant Thief The first show in The David Roberts Foundation's long term collaboration with Goldsmiths curating course

Yinan Zhang

To invoke one of Shakespeare's lesser-known and more challenging works, Timon of Athens, as a point of departure for exploring "a space of reflection on the peripheries of the [conceptual art] debate", is cleverly ambitious. Curated by Goldsmiths MFA students Thom O'Nions, Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Oliver Martínez-Kandt, and marking the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between the institution and the David Roberts Art Foundation, The Moon is an Arrant Thief intrigues, but doesn't fully deliver.

The ground floor presents pieces from the 1960s alongside contemporary works, thereby recalling conceptual art's historical framework and theoretical genesis, whilst attempting to direct focus to the present context and open up discursive relationships throughout the exhibition.

Robert Barry's drawing, Silver Ring (1967), of a dead-centered ring in an exhibition space, provides a sophisticated juxtaposition to the delicate glass plane sculptures by Kitty Kraus that balance on the gallery floor. William Anastasi's pour of one gallon of industrial high-gloss down the wall, initiated by the artist in 1966, and the ten pounds of sputtering carbon dioxide entitled The Ten-Pound Seed (2010) by Bradley Pitts, initiate questions about natural forces and cosmology, as well as those relating to the residual and immaterial.

I do think that Robert Kinmont's hermetic, fragmented chair sculpture, My Favorite Chair (1969), is so detached that it provokes a coldness disrupting greater possibilities of inquiry amongst the other works. Downstairs, the The Weight of Voids (2010) by Bradley Pitts, comprising a copy of the book Voids resting on a scale, proves distracting in its obvious irony (as opposed to the inaccessibility of the Kinmont piece).

It is tempting to consider elements of the exhibition against the title's literary reference, and delve into analytic frenzy: the play and conceptual art both question the nature of art; the play's concern with the illusory nature and similarity of poetry and painting, and conceptual artists' incorporation of language in their work; the drama's authorial attribution that is not solely to Shakespeare, and the rejection of authorship in conceptual art, etc. However, such a saga is unproductive in elucidating what the exhibition does, which is generate a "space of reflection", but not necessarily serve as a conduit for overall discursive fluidity. Good title, though.

The Moon is an Arrant Thief, curated by Thom O' Nions, Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Oliver Martínez-Kandt is showing at the David Roberts Foundation until 18th September. See the David Roberts website here for details.

Amy Budd

Conceived by Goldsmiths MFA Curating students, The Moon is an Arrant Thief brings together a selection of contemporary and historical artists whose works exist "on the cusp of visibility", where a collection of ephemeral artworks negotiate the murky space between object and idea.

So far, so obscure. Yet my first encounter with the exhibtion is nevertheless underwhelming, with Saâdane Afif's series of white clock in Suspense Blanche, William Anastasi's Untitled glossy drip of black paint and Robert Kinmont's wooden fragment from My Favorite Chair appearing more like nondescript fixtures and fittings, all haphazardly installed in the gallery space, than carefully curated works of art.

Other objects in the exhibition continue to confront and confound each other, from Edith Dekyndt's ominous black rubber ball Ground Control, devised for social interaction, to Matias Faldbakken's Absurd Measurement; a muddy brown length of video tape inexplicably pinned to a gallery wall. Ricardo Cuevas' quasi-lingual sound piece 12,000 Words meanwhile fills the audible and conceptual gaps between works, mimicking my thought processes as I struggle to cohere the works presented.

At first these ideas/objects seem too formally disparate, too arbitrary in their installation to engender any meaningful reading between the lines. Yet what initially appears to be a self-reflexive exhibition by curators about curating soon transforms into something altogether obscure.

Out of Robert Barry's Silver Ring infrathin threads of connectivity begin to emerge. Modest in scale precisely rendered on A5 graph paper, Silver Ring depicts a small circle positioned in the exact centre of an imagined exhibition space. Both art object and idea, this geometrically defined installation exceeds the material limitations of its 2D form, conceptually invading the gallery space and forging opaque relationships with other works.

As a single word written at the top of Robert Barry's Silver Ring states: Perspective is key here, as the viewer is repeatedly and directly implicated in the production of meaning through an invisible network of connections. From Kitty Kraus' austere, yet delicately transparent Glass Series sculptures reflecting the movements of the viewer, to Fernando Ortega's soporific, yet emotionally enlivening Hummingbird video and Roman Ondák's voyeuristically confusing video The Stray Man.

Although dematerialised art practices are on trial here, any seriousness is playfully diluted with a wry sense of humour throughout. As Tim Etchells neon light writing Let's Pretend (continuing '...none of this ever happened') pseudo-dismissively suggests. Yet, elegant in its curatorial conceit, and understated in its material content, the complexity of The Moon is an Arrant Thief is ultimately overwhelming.

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