Here and Now 2015: Sculpture in an ever-expanding field: Shannon Lyons: I’m always looking around (you’re always looking away).
This is part of a small (and what will be incomplete) set of thoughts on
Here and Now 2015.
By Graham Mathwin
Positioned in the same room as Alistair Rowe’s work, Lyons
work operates on many similar levels, to the benefit of both.
Lyons work is, typically, extremely subtle and highly self-referential.
The structures of the world that support us, and that we
depend on, often go unseen. They pass beneath the surface, or simply unnoticed,
and we don’t often look back to appreciate or reflect on them. It is this space
which Lyon’s installation investigates - the unremarked structures that inform how
we encounter the world. The installation probes gently at the edges of our
conscious perception, and undermines our certainty in them.
The ‘expanded field’ of Krauss’ essay was a response to the
development of Land Art. The absence of any actual works of Land Art in this
show is something that Lyons has perhaps picked up on: the disappearance of the
landscape paintings in her curation-within-a-curation forms a parallel ironic gesture.
Land Art is often presented as landscape’s culmination, and progression into a
more engaged field of practice. Yet Lyons’ choice was deliberately not to present - not only a piece of
land art - but landscape paintings themselves. In context, this move seems highly
appropriate – Land Art, which is quite inaccessible, is usually presented
through landscape photographs. The similarity of this language to painting, one
of the languages that Land Art sought to escape from, exposes a certain failure
in the movement into an ‘expanded field’. The gallery space, rather than other
spaces, became the final resting place of the movement, as with so many other attempts
to leave it. Lyons, clearly familiar with the histories (amongst others) of
institutional critique and Land Art, positions her own interventions in what is
arguably the more important structural space. Rather than intervening in the Landscape
in what are often abstract, arbitrary, or rather naïve ways, she is complicit
in, yet concurrently challenging and revealing, the systems of the structure of
the gallery.
This is not to suggest that Lyons work rests solely in
institutional ‘critique’, a bad label if ever there was one. The work is not
explicitly critical – it is much more subtle, and much more engaged, than
presenting a critique of what it is inherently implicit in. Lyons does not draw
any easily read judgements for us. In a way, the non-didactic nature of her
work is one of its strengths. Though it deals with the structures of spaces and
systems, it does not attempt to signify and represent this, rather it seeks to
embody its own becoming. This permits us an access to the work that is not only
intelligible, but also sensible. It is here that the work comes into its own: it
presents us with an experience that asks us to examine our experience of a
structure. It is quite different from experiential light and space art, as it
is about a certain structural experience,
accessible through the sensory. This means we are given something much more
engaged in the politics, rather than just the experience, of the space.
Experiential art takes, often for granted, that by
foregrounding our experience of space we will become aware of our operations in
space in our everyday. Lyons seems to suggest a case for an understanding and
experience of the systems that inhabit and inform spaces. The function, not just
the experience, is brought to the fore. Perhaps, in our world, where the
functionalist doctrine of spaces is so powerful and pervasive, this attitude
bears more relevance to how we comprehend ourselves. To uncover systems is to
give them room to be understood, and then perhaps critiqued or upheld, but
primarily and importantly, to become aware of them. As we inhabit a world that
is made predominantly of systems, this strikes me as highly appropriate. It is
a shift in another direction, away from (whilst still pertaining to aspects of)
the subjective, relative nature of phenomenological, experiential art, and into
the relational, negotiated, structural world that exists in tandem with it.
The principle difficulty in understanding the complexity and
intelligence of Lyons’ work is that it rests in the very subtlety of its
production. The wall plugs made of bronze, the cast plaster blu-tack beside the
information panel – a significant part of the richness in Lyons’ work is to be
found in its subtlety, in its elusive materiality – yet these elements are what
is perhaps most difficult to perceive. The translation of materials, and their
respective properties, is highlighted; yet rarely encountered without close
observation. Perhaps it is this difficulty that Lyons’ title refers to? It also
seems appropriate. Many people walked by the bronze wall plugs, embedded in the
wall with only their tips visible, and remained unaware of their subtleties.
The bronze though, when it is seen, adds to the work a
material understanding – for it is the material of monuments, reduced to a wall
plug. Yet it is simultaneously a monumentalisation of the act of plugging a
wall. It is both a dissolution of the values ascribed to traditional sculpture,
and their recapitulation into valorising a wholly different language. It is as
if Lyons is suggesting that it is the systems of production, and systems of
operation that we now should prize, or recognize the value of, rather than
their objects. Yet the objects of the production of this system are what she has monumentalized. The object that is
valued, and given weight, is the tool, the operative object. There is then a
troubled relationship with the object present in Lyons’ work. It is skilfully,
beautifully, and imperceptibly crafted, yet it seems to suggest that we should
value a system of production, negotiation and presentation rather than what is
presented itself. Perhaps then, it is the crafting of these systems that Lyons
places importance on. If they can be created well, if they can be applied with
deftness and technical precision, perhaps they become something more than
simply systems of use, but also systems to appreciate, and ways of being in the
world that are beneficial to us on a sensory and structural level.
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