VISUAL ARTS: As many people know by now, Sebastian Horsley is an English artist who, in 2000, took part in a crucifixion ritual in the Philippines, paying £2,000 to have himself nailed to a cross. Although the annual ceremony takes place within a religious context, Horsley is an atheist and his motivation for his extreme act of self-mortification was artistic rather than religious, writes Aidan Dunne.
His ordeal was recorded on video by Sarah Lucas, one of the "Brit Art" pack associated with shock tactics. You can see the logic of Horsley's approach. Damien Hirst dissects and displays dead animals, Tracy Emin's work takes the form of an on-going, sensational confession, Marcus Harvey constructs a portrait of Moors murderer Myra Hindley from children's hand-prints - and Sebastian Horsley records his own crucifixion.
The exhibition that addresses this experience, The Butterfly Pinned, at the Lead White Gallery, consists of a video, video stills and other photographs, "crucifixion nails" cast in silver and editioned, and a series of paintings. To say that the video is the best element in all of this is not to endorse his project, which is surely questionable on several grounds. Still, shot in an informal, amateurish way, like a slice of reality TV - though accompanied by quite a cinematic musical score - the video is concise and compelling.
It makes for uncomfortable viewing. Horsley's apprehension is palpable, the crucifixion itself is quick, offhand and incredibly casual, in a way that offers a disturbing insight into acts of organised violence, and there are a couple of excruciating moments. One comes as the nails are driven carefully through his palms and the other, unscripted, as the platform holding his weight gives way and he falls painfully from the cross. Lucas, filming, passes out and drops the camera. Thereafter Horsley seems to be in a state of shock for a while, understandably enough.
In the accompanying material, much is made of the contrast between Horsley's cultivation of a dandyish persona, his theatrical foppishness, and his pitiful plight as victim, stripped and pinned to a cross. Lucas and photographer Dennis Morris capture his doubt and uncertainty very effectively. Yet the experience seems to leave him at a loss. One feels that he is not by nature one of the "Brit Art" pack. He is not in tune with the language of neo-conceptualism and in offering himself up to a raw, difficult experience he is unprotected by the buffer of irony. It doesn't matter whether he means it or not, he has put himself on the spot and it is going to hurt.
Having gone through it, he doesn't quite know how to deal with it as art in a contemporary way. The paintings are an illustration of the difficulty he has rather than a serious bid to get to grips with this problem. In them, he settles for expressionistic swirls of pigment and variations on a cruciform symbol, all of which are glaringly inadequate to the objective reality of the event and to his own subjectivity.
Casting and editioning the nails is another admission of being at a loss, a glib art-lite response to something intensely personal and troubling.
The various photographs are documents that do come close to conveying the idea of some serious self-questioning, opening up the possibility that the experience has been as intense and difficult as the video recording suggests. It is odd in a way that the kind of artistic rhetoric he presumed would be equal to tackling extreme experience is completely outshone by a documentary account of his own doubt and pain, by something as close as possible to direct, pitiful fact.
In a world where people are tortured and killed every day, it seems presumptuous, to say the least, to make something called art from your own carefully limited, elective pain. It is the evident fallibility, the pure doubt in Horsley's eyes that is, in the end, his saving grace. He did not make great art from his experience, but nor did he pretend to.
In his paintings, Andrew Bick uses wax and other materials to interpose a cloudy screen or screens between surface and image, establishing successive, interlocking layers in grid-based compositions. At the Rubicon Gallery, he and Patrick M. Fitzgerald are both showing, not paintings, but drawings. The exhibition was made in co-operation with Luger Do Desenho, a foundation in Portugal dedicated to artist-curated drawing projects.
Like his paintings, Bick's drawings are layered images.
In them, he employs glassine bags, that is the smooth, semi-transparent bags commonly uses to protect photographs.
Applying ink and markers in line and blocks of colour, he builds up busy, multi-layered compositions that evoke several graphic processes and practices to do with plans, diagrams and networks.
Fitzgerald's coloured drawings are disarmingly simple.
They have a playful, casual air. Working on a small scale, he marks out a series of sketchy, mostly hard-edged, jagged abstract compositions in coloured pencil on paper. One could say he makes a set of variations, except that he seems in each drawing to try not to do the same thing again. Still, given their easy, improvisational air, they would probably best be seen marshalled in a large group.
Reviewed
The Butterfly Pinned, Sebastian Horsley, Lead White Gallery until Feb 15th (01-6607500) Andrew Bick and Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, Drawings, Rubicon Gallery until Feb 15th (01-6708055)
