Suppono Subpono – Fish Slides –

One of the nice things about God, apart from being a kind and benevolent father-figure, was that He was always there to talk to. He knew us completely, which is something we imperfect beings could and cannot. The problem is that God never let us in on any of His bloody secrets. At most He was – or is – a mirror. In a recent review of the Modern British Sculpture show, Brian Sewell berated the Royal Academy for failing to tell its audience a whole and simple truth. It really made my day. Get with the programme Brian!

It seems to me that so much of the work made in the last couple of centuries is a response to God’s death, man’s erstwhile protector and companion. There is simply nobody to talk to anymore. In our interpreted world, there’s no perfect understanding, no perfectly-delivered message. In one of the most prominent Existential novels of the twentieth century – Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea – Roquentin is faced with the irksome figure of the Autodidact, a serious and apparently pious young man who is working his way through the contents of the municipal library from A to Z. Like Victor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this type of study can prevent a man from experiencing life, render him a bore, or worse, send him hurtling down a path of social and psychological destruction.

Suppono Subpono (two forms of the Latin verb ‘to substitute’) presents new and recent collaborative work by Joe Devlin & David Osbaldeston, The Provincial Forge (2009–11), alongside a responsive piece by Lawrence Leaman. Each of the works on display might be productively explored in relation to ideas of experience, dialogue and the degrees to which a work of art sets up, or embodies, a number of communication breakdowns.

Sartre’s Autodidact might have read but, arguably, he has not fully lived. Reading may be a singular, personalised act but there is a strong sense in which it is less effective than lived experience in enabling us to understand the world or our own existence. Devlin & Osbaldeston take printed matter to create new objects. Reviews, adverts, features and articles from Britain, Europe and America are reduced or elevated to the status of material. Part-way through the exhibition, craning your neck to read ten-point type upside down, you suddenly find the experience funny. You chuckle. Perhaps you laugh out loud. There’s no particular shift or revelation – no disclosure or punch line – but all at once you realise the artist’s tongue is firmly in his cheek.

Misinterpretation, or the potential for it, is a productive aspect of The Provincial Forge. The now defunct project webpage documents the objects as if they were Modernist sculptures, sunlight pouring in from the side of the frame, the shadow of a palm and the tantalising suggestion of a studio with a view. In fact, much of the work was originally made for three mock-Victorian display cabinets at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, an institution that contains and makes public important historic documents where the objects were presented in dimly lit and hushed Gothic-revival surroundings. There are probably quite a few Autodidacts in there. In any case, it’s a far cry from the Riviera and the ateliers of great twentieth-century sculptors.

In the library, as at E:ventGallery in London, a passing observer would see that the objects are magazine pages, some fixed together with little Frankenstein-like strips of surgical or masking tape. On closer inspection, a viewer might read snatches of a text and build its references into his or her interpretive experience. Once a carrier of text and meaning, the pages of the mechanically reproduced art magazine are mined for their graphic decoration, colour and texture and returned to the interpretive circle as sculptural forms, sculptures constructed to look like sculptures (some from the Modernist canon, others entirely fictional). In this sense the project refers not only to the institutions of power and learning, but also to that of art history. The Provincial Forge doesn’t just represent miscommunication, it is miscommunication.

At a recent exhibition at OUTPOST in Norwich, Lawrence Leaman showed a series of Adobe Illustrator drawings in Floreat Salopia (literally ‘May Shropshire Flourish’), an editioned pamphlet that was available to visitors for a modest fee. Here at E:ventGallery, a concertina pamphlet combines found PowerPoint slide backgrounds with new drawings of a curiously anthropomorphic desk tidy, knee-high boots and a comically long clay pipe, among other things. Leaman’s Suppono Subpono – Fish Slides (2011) is both a meditation on sense and nonsense and a further layer of (mis)interpretation with regard to Devlin & Osbaldeston’s project. Leaman’s Illustrator drawings are suggestive of surrealist cartoons, the ambiguity of a Raymond Pettibon drawing or the sixty-second sketches of Rolf Harris. There’s a French connection in Leaman’s work that might be described as ‘Surrealism Lite’; the digital drawings, for example, are at once easy and difficult, silly and serious. Boots and feet speak of clowning and the everyday while the desk tidy suggests a lobotomised head.

The pamphlets are laid flat on a custom made shelf, above which two other works are hung. One of these – Atlantean Technology (2011) – is a piece of handmade paper that was intended as the support for an Illustrator drawing. The coarse texture meant the page simply wouldn’t go through the artist’s printer. If it had, the digital line produced – and potentially endlessly reproduced – would be the ground, the handmade paper the ‘work’, an interesting inversion of the two-dimensional norm. Leaman’s drawings, paintings and sculptures have a tenderness and humour that also reminds me of the romantic vagaries of the narrative fiction of Milan Kundera or Antal Szerb. Miscommunication in these novels is both tragic and comic – the ultimate absurd moment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is, of course, the moment of epiphany slash destruction.

What the projects in Suppono Subpono share is the problematisation of a divulgence of meaning that might be said to take place at the point of encounter. Here you are truly alone but somehow you’re in a friendly place. Post-God, it’s not actually a case of having nobody to talk to, but a situation where we must find others to talk or present to, abandoning the self-undermining ideal of the perfect conversation.

Part-way through a text about art you might find what you are reading funny. The basis on which you had been taking the text seriously seems tenuous, fleeting and – now – history. The prose might have been ever so slightly formal, the choice of vocabulary a touch pompous or idée recue. Whatever the trigger you now get it… …but are you sure you get it? There follows a slightly uncomfortable moment where you look over your shoulder to see if the person next to you is laughing. You question your sense of humour. You question the author’s intentions. Why look over your shoulder? There’s nobody there.

Text by Amy Botfield, commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition Suppono Subpono.