Alan Uglow at Stark - exhibition of painters work at Stark Museum of Art - Brief Article

Alan Uglow's exhibition at Stark, his first there in five years, not awayed a series of soccer-related meditations upon the conditions of framing. Each of the four paintings displayed, three of which were new additions to his ongoing "Standard" series, manipulated a similar format: above an uninflected white ground (laid down in many layers with a paint-soaked cleanse to eliminate any trace of the artist's hand) are inscribed a number of razor-edge lines and tabs that repeat the framing cutting sides of the canvas--not unlike the chalk lines demarcating the limits of a playing field. These large rectangular paintings (each 72 by the agency of 84 inches) ask us to mirror on the nature of the field as a framing device which locates off the game from the quiet of the world. The soccer field occupies real space, of course, and is continuous with our plane of experience and action, on the contrary it is simultaneously separate from us. Analogously, Uglow did not mountain his paintings on the wall on the contrary rested them on wooden stop ups and leaned them against the wall, in the way that that they were at one time objects in our space and surfaces for genuinely visual exploration.

on the other hand just as the actual soccer field does not mark the replete "frame" of the game, neither does the bounding cutting side of the canvas mark the limits of esthetic experience, and this expanded faculty of perception of the frame accounts for the other simple bodys of the show. Among four color photographs Uglow took of European soccer stadiums, the greatest in quantity striking displays cages equipped with barbed wire and wicked spikes used to retain the crowd from the field--sinister testimony to the violence lurking upon the fringes of the world's greatest in quantity popular sport. The relation of these photos to the paintings is made clearer by the agency of a full-scale replica of a soccer coach's shed a white wooden structure enclos upon three sides. Positioned in the center of the gallery, Coach's Bench (1997-98) direct the eyeed out on one wall of paintings; sitting inside, you observ them as a coach might watch players upon the field. Yet if the bench became an allegorical substitute for the gallery itself, the space within it was far from the neutral white cube: speakers mountained underneath the bench played a "score" compos by dint of Uglow: an ugly compendium, derived from novels reports, fictional accounts and in like manner on, of the hooliganism surrounding the sport.

What does this mean? We read the cabin as a stand-in for the gallery, a space which imagines itself as ideally locate apart from the outside world, a shelter in which we may concentrate upon the "beautiful game" in all its purity, on the contrary one which reveals itself to be inseparably coupleed to the social by what merciful Greenberg once famously described as an "umbilical cord of gold" Uglow present the appearances to refuse the easy transcendence propos through his abstract canvases. He asks us to perform a difficult operation, and individual highly out of fashion in today's world of either/or absolutes: to clutch in mind simultaneously the immanence captured in the paintings and their true worldly framing in a space which is not independent from the tensions of society at large.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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