Art Sheffield 2010: Life: A User’s Manual

Issue 42, May 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Various Venues, Sheffield
6 March – 1 May

By Oliver Basciano

One doesn’t see too many exhibitions that come with a hefty reading list. I’m sure the inclusion of one on Art Sheffield’s website is in the spirit of benign academia, yet for the reviewer, now programmed to project art theory on any given work, it feels like heavy baggage to carry round the streets of Sheffield. The curators of Life: A User’s Manual – named from the Georges Perec novel – are Netherlands-based Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher, and they have taken ‘affect’ as the catalyst for their multivenue jamboree. The press material breathlessly quotes from secondary papers by Jörg Heiser, Brian Massumi and Sarah Ahmed. My head’s in a spin and I haven’t even started on Spinoza. So what’s one to do? Give some kind of simplistic résumé of how slippery affect has touched art theory before moving on to the stuff itself? Or perhaps just give the artists credit, and hope the works explain themselves?

It starts off so well, too. The Millennium Gallery, Sheffield’s major space, has a cohesive group exhibition of works which appear preoccupied with the babble of language and the limits of its translation. Katarina Zdjelar’s Shoum (2009) sees the struggle of two Serbian musicians as they translate the Tears for Fears song Shout (1985) into their native tongue. The film refutes the supposed unifying power of pop, crystallised when one of the furrowed-brow protagonists mumbles, “Damn English”. This whole lost-in-translation vibe continues in Imogen Stidworthy’s excellent – and beautifully shot – film Barrabackslarrbang (2009). Various talking heads demonstrate back slang, a form of colloquialism that developed in British minority and working-class communities to resist those in authority. The language causes a rupture in linguistic orthodoxy, the limit-pushing nature of which sounds poetic, but additionally sits on the edge of madness. As mad as the idea of translating Tears for Fears into Serbian. The intermittent cacophony coming from Haroon Mirza’s installation of the audible elements from other artists’ work (Guy Sherwin’s 16mm film Cycles, 1972/1977, and Jeremy Deller’s video rushes from Memory Bucket, 2003), plus a slowly submerging and short-circuiting keyboard, nullifies any meaning, the works’ original communication strategies lost to blunt machinic noise. The obliteration of meaning curatorially highlighted in the works links the idea of art as a friction to the everyday, enabling subjective escape from incumbent hierarchies which enables the viewer – ‘life’s user’ – to affect a different way of living. All that, and without a reading list, either.

Things get a little more problematic in the other venues. Coincidently, both Haegue Yang at S1 Artspace and Nina Canell at Bloc incorporate dry ice into their installations, and the superficiality of its effect, together with the various ad hoc set pieces and props they incorporate into their unrelated installations, leave scant inroads into the works. With attempted sensory assault, both installations’ seeming aim is the same disorienting experience that the mangling of communication at the Millenium Gallery succeeds in, but ultimately here staging triumphs over content. Life: A User’s Manual undoubtedly coerces the works into the curators’ overarching essay and at times feels like an assignment for the viewer. Yet for the most part, thankfully, the artists hold their own.

See this article with full illustrations, plus the entire May issue of ArtReview magazine free on your screen, here.