Uto(no)topo(place)
While this brief piece of writing has as its base two recent group exhibitions, it is not a "review” of these exhibitions and is only peripherally about them.
I am not going to provide any verbal descriptions of the works, nor provide lists of names of the artists involved. So, in the light of this exclusion of both the artworks and the artists, this piece of writing could well be perceived as yet another instance of "theory” usurping the place of art, the critic ignoring the object of criticism, or of the words somehow failing to represent what might really have been going on.
The problem I want to deal with here is primarily concerned with this last point; the difficulty of representing what really is going on. In part, this may well be a question of description, of working out a way of fitting writing to images. However, the problem is compounded by the fact that the images themselves may also suffer from a lack of fit.
Clearly, the difficulty that is being constructed here turns on the issue of representation, or at least a particular way of characterising it. What is of interest is not just the way individual works of art might be taken to represent some object or emotional state, but the manner in which specific exhibitions are taken to represent a particular style of working, theoretical perspective or geographical location.
There are a number of ways this process of representation might occur. For example, in the exhibition The Politics of Picturing, the works stood as representatives of something that might be generally termed "political art". However, there was no necessity for them to exhibit