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<\/a>It is also about paint strokes. Only there\u2019s no paint here. This is vinyl tape, applied incredibly precisely to the floor (note: \u201cvinyl\u201d, a cipher for LPs and \u201ctape\u201d, for music tapes). It is not permanent\u2014at the end of the show all the tape is ripped up and thrown away. It is also site-specific. Lambie plans these installations minutely, obsessively. The patterns are determined by the space they occupy. In early multi-colored works such as \u201cZobop\u201d (1999), the tape fastidiously echoes the wall and colonnade plan of the Duveen Galleries in Tate Britain, London, turning the staid hall into a zinging electric dance floor just begging for John Travolta to put his white suit back on. Lambie himself has said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor me something like \u2018Zobop\u2019, the floor piece, it is creating so many edges that they all dissolve. Is the room expanding or contracting? \u2026 Covering an object somehow evaporates the hard edge off the thing, and pulls you towards more of a dreamscape.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lambie is making the room thrum with the resonance of its own architectural structure, amplified by vibrating color, and the elemental experience involved in walking on-to and in-to a space. And he is making you pause and remark your presence in that space, and the action and experience of moving through it\u2014to see more precisely, to hear more acutely, to be more aware of your existence in a certain place, at a certain time\u2014the zero-gravity of a dance-club beat, the panic-joy hyperventilation, the light on your eyes, the sound in your head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Glasgow<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lambie (b. 1964) was never part of the infamous YBA brat pack, which always tended to be more London-focused. Lambie was born and grew up in Glasgow, a city renowned for being the toughest in Britain but also Scotland\u2019s creative maelstrom. In the 1980s, Lambie was already getting into the Glasgow art scene, but he was just as involved with its music scene. He even shared a flat with John \u201cJoogs\u201d St. Martin, a then-member of Primal Scream, and he was himself a member of the proto-Teenage Fanclub band, The Boy Hairdressers (he played the Xylophone). Art won out though, and from 1990\u201394 he attended The Glasgow School of Art. Perhaps Lambie\u2019s knack for infiltrating serious spaces was helped by the fact that Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the leading Arts & Crafts movement architect, designed the Glasgow School; but it was certainly a crucible of major artistic talent: among others, Douglas Gordon (1984\u201388, winner of the Turner Prize 1996), David Shrigley (1988\u201391, nominated for the Turner Prize this year), and Richard Wright (1993\u201395, winner of the Turner Prize 2009) were all students. Lambie was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Op Art<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/strong>These floors\u2014there have been quite a few now\u2014are responsible for putting fun into Op Art\u2014not \u201cback into\u201d though, because it wasn\u2019t there to begin with. Op Art protagonists including Bridget Riley (b. 1931) and Victor Vasarely, like their Minimalist cousins, earnestly worked to establish the intellectual bona fides of their cause, so no smiling was allowed. Maybe Bauhaus color-tsar, Josef Albers, and his vast magnum opus tome, the Interaction of Color<\/em> (1963) are also to blame, maybe just an unwelcoming public. Either way, unfortunately, it meant Op Art had a tendency to stultifying self-importance (just ask Lambie\u2019s contemporary Tobias Rehberger, who is being sued by Riley for plagiarizing her work by inverting it and blowing it up as a permanent installation in the reading room of the Berlin State Library\u2014the work looks like a checkered open book). No smiling? Jim fixed that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n China<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/strong>Pearl Lam\u2019s eponymous gallery in Hong Kong traces its roots back to 1993 when it opened as Contrasts Gallery, holding pop-up exhibitions around Shanghai before obtaining a permanent home in 2005 near the Bund. Since its re-launch as Pearl Lam Galleries, there has been added drive and zip to the program. It has a redoubled focus on China\u2019s modernist and abstract painters (Zhu Jinshi, Su Xiaobai and Li Xiaojing) and, at the same time, a desire to bring Chinese and international abstract art into conversation (Jason Martin exhibited at the Hong Kong gallery in 2013). One of the interesting things about the gallery\u2019s choice of Jim Lambie is not only the connection with (color) abstraction but also the element of design in his work, most apparent in the floor installations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Flowers of Romance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/strong>This show was a small but perfect retrospective of Lambie\u2019s work, including a blue and white version of \u201cThe Strokes\u201d. The all-over floor work has the effect of uniting the different pieces in a modernist labyrinth. It includes the totemic \u201cPsychedelic Soul Stick 75\u201d, the latest iteration in an ongoing series of \u201cself-portraits\u201d (one for each solo show) that involve tying ordinary but personal objects\u2014such as odd socks and cigarette packets\u2014to a bamboo cane, all of which is then bound with colored thread. It conjures images of tribal fetishism and magic, but its name leads us to think of music and percussion (Lambie is still a musician and DJ). In the 2013 show, it commanded a corner to itself\u2014corners being one of modernist iconography\u2019s ritual places\u2014waiting to be picked up and twirled and hit and used as a microphone\u2014egotistical, free, sexual, or whatever you like, really. Or just Jim, leaning against the wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Corners appeared again, actually incorporated into two recent aluminum-sheet wall-works, \u201cMetal Box (Istanbul)\u201d (2013) and \u201cMetal Box (Hyacinth Orchid)\u201d (2013). Lambie can be anti-intellectual, or rather an anti-snob. He uses and adapts ordinary things, whether vinyl-tape, old records, odd socks, or simple aluminum sheeting. In \u201cMetal Box (Istanbul)\u201d, seven colored square sheets, one on top of the other, are folded symmetrically at the corners as if a child had been playing with colored paper at school. It is an origami homage to the square, to the first square modernist, the Russian Suprematist, Malevich, and undoubtedly to Albers too. And its metal-folding recalls somehow, too, the battered sculptures of John Chamberlain, only Lambie\u2019s are all shiny and new, and Jeff Koons\u2019s shiny perfectionism. I cannot help but wonder if Lambie isn\u2019t having a bit of a laugh at the expense of both these artists. \u201cMetal Box (Hyacinth Orchid)\u201d takes these games a step further, with a bank of two rows of three squares, but with the final sheet mirror polished, creating a kaleidoscopic eye-crash, twisting the room into a joker\u2019s hall of mirrors. Lambie undercuts pomposity deliciously\u2014surely something that nags at Angela de la Cruz, whose sculptural medtiations on painting and its supports got her nominated for the Turner too. Oh well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the sea of \u201cPaint Strokes\u201d float half-submerged concrete cubes with old record albums embedded in them\u2014\u201cSonic Reducer\u201d series (2008): these are not so much islands, but flotsam and jetsam for you to cling to as you flounder in Lambie\u2019s Jackson Pollock \u201cin-the-painting\u201d experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The jokes keep coming. Lambie\u2019s own version of a Damian Hirst spin painting is called \u201cVortex (Into the Void)\u201d (2013), simultaneously taking a poke at Hirst, Vasarely and Riley (compare Riley\u2019s \u201cBlaze 1\u201d from 1962). Appropriately, Lambie\u2019s critique is headache inducing. Meanwhile, there were canvases crimped and furrowed by floating lines of safety pins\u2014only these Punk pins are not so much about safety but transgression and menace, a threat to the supposedly sacred painting surface like body piercings were by UK punks in the 1970s, only now it\u2019s no longer transgressive at all, just fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim Lambie did the cover for Primal Scream\u2019s album \u201cMore Light\u201d. In the middle is a black and white photo of lead singer Bobby Gillespie, holding his hands to his head like insect antennae, and surrounded by all sorts of collaged flowers. The cover is from a series, several of which were also on display in Hong Kong. The music, the old photos, are instances in Lambie\u2019s personal history, the music that marked his development as an artist, musical and visual. It is a deliberate drop in tone from the fizzing, boggling visuals of Lambie\u2019s floor-works and sculptures. He returned us to the real world, the quiet after the concert, the moment the headphones are removed. And we hear the silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following \u201cThe Flowers of Romance\u201d and subsequent exhibitions in Edinburgh, London and Tokyo, Lambie\u2019s work is currently on show in Sydney at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery: \u201cZero Concerto<\/a>\u201c<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Put your headphones on\u2014on high. Daft Pun … Continue reading <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>