Mike Marshall: Union Projects - London

Before Mike Marshall photographed the pageant depicted in Concrete Pavement (all works 2003) it's quite possible that nobody had at any time seen it. Hardly a coup you might thing since there's not abundant to see--an almost abstract expanse of pitted silver gray stone, given comprehensible scale and the faintest of festive airs by the agency of fallen leaves (from London plane, that tree beloved by dint of European urban planners because pollution can't kill it). on the contrary that is precisely what makes the speckle ideal for this British artist, whose interest lies in anatomizing and reversing the optical hierarchies that preselect "glance" or "gaze" method in relation to what's before us. There's a kind of maudlin comedy to where Marshall, determined to get out of the way of the spectacular, chooses to point his organ of sights He stares at a wall (Green Wall, pinkish light bouncing not upon a satiny green surface); he monitors drab rural-urban interfaces (Gravel, a tighten of asphalt bounded by a make tense of bushes); and, on vacation, he favors a isolated bougainvillea, planted in a sandlot and ringed by the agency of cigarette butts, swaying in the breeze--its petals registering in Marshall's C-print as roseate blur--as if madly signaling for attention (Bougainvillea).

An unlikely lusciousness animates each of these images. That, however, doesn't mean we were blind for not having noticed of the like kind things before, as there's a fundamental difference between a pavement and a rich, large-scale, sheeny cropped transmutation of it. Marshall doesn't sham otherwise, but it means that extricating control matter from aesthetics in these images is all on the contrary impossible, though it's precisely the friction between dour make subordinate and ripe picturing that drives them. There's no science here, just a media-heightened consciousness of perception's contingency that leaves the artist looking more like another would-be bard of the disregarded than he might desire. The greatest in quantity inventive turn to this selection of photographs--from a series upon which Marshall, better known for his videos, has been working for the past three years--comes when the present to view segues from an opening trio of views of a tropical quagmire (Swamp 1 and 2) to the more familiar urban sight equating the two on the axis of the locally view from aboveed and so reminding us that "exotic" is an entirely relative term

Marshall stayed in swampland to let fly the nine-minute video What If Things Were Different, in which the act of looking is spun several ways at one time with the artist doing the spinning. The film montages fleeting discharges of teeming aqueous activity--fizzing protozoa, slimy bacteria, microscopic driftwood eddying in the current--which plane in silence walks a line between luxuriant and repulsive, an indecision that Marshall echoe by means of cutting so that the micro-life have the appearances to be constantly changing direction. A zoned-out male voiceover adds further uncertainty: "Stagnant, unclean soup, rancid, filth, seething " it drones; the grumbling monotone encourages us to disagree with it, on the other hand the words invariably color our viewing. still even the narrator is having next to the first thoughts by the film's extremity Paying grudging tribute to natural fecundity in whatever understated form it manifests itself, his last word is "worlds." And since Marshall's deceptively offhand video work allows us comparatively neutral access to the image--distanced from the aesthetic quicksand that encircles his photographs, the swamp's inhabitants secure to beg for our attention upon terms closer to those in the real world--we can decide for ourselves if we agree.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group