Immediacy: Art on the Edge of Design and Architecture
One of the defining features of the early modernist agenda was to re-incorporate art into its architectural setting. Whether it was through the integrated painting/building of Theo Van Doesburg, the situated sculpture of Brancusi or the total design vision of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, early modernist discourse sought, in effect, to reclaim the pre-renaissance context of an art embedded, or at least aware of, its immediate surrounds. More than just a rejection of academic conventions, this was a return to a tradition of art that extends back at least as far as the caves of Lascaux and the Kimberley. Closer to our own time, such an expanded model of art has come to be better known as installation, a critical mode of art-making that has influenced successive generations of artists since the 1960s. For better or worse, the effect of this development has been comprehensive. The location of art is now intrinsic to its meaning.
Immediacy, Craig Flood’s exhibition at Logan Art Gallery, is an installation that seeks, at times too strenuously, to foreground this interdependency. Taking formal cues from the gallery’s architectural features, Flood makes a series of interventions in plexiglass that derive their forms and placement from the particularities of the architecture. Logan Art Gallery’s barn-like rear space is a notoriously difficult site for any work that depends on a neutral ‘white cube’ for its effect, so Flood’s compositional strategy is a wise one. For Flood, the projecting rafters and beams that rib the ceiling of the space, and its two protruding bay windows, become an intrinsic part of the ‘gene’ of the site—an organising principle that determines the compositional possibilities of the space. Flood’s response to this