Nottingham Contemporary’s spring 2024 mixed media installation unearths and dissects the dimensions of modernity, technology and human connection across two distinct artscapes that invite us to re-examine our own opinion of what constitutes modern art.
In Gallery One it is the artwork that ushers the audience across its space. We circle around an extensive collection of LA Based Artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography and whilst progressing through the studio, the distinct, digital character of Sepuya’s style comes to the foreground.
Amongst Contemporary photography there is an increased reliance on technical editing as means to amplify a photo’s aesthetic character, Sepuya’s incorporation of cellular and digital imagery certainly signifies this. Against minimalist backdrops, complementary colour schema and a calibrated camera composition, digital devices repeatedly reappear, first the camera, finally the mobile phone. The advent of cellular aestheticism has inarguably impaired our ability to accurately infer what constitutes a good photograph. Sepuya’s nod towards standardised digital beauty plays on this idea but interestingly diverts from the tired narrative that it is necessarily a bad thing. His photography ushers in glimpses of genuine intimacy that imbue the camera-subject relationship with tangible warmth and authenticity.
Sepuya locates himself as a background value in his own work, by subtly interweaving himself into different frames, he invokes the connection between the camera’s gaze and creator in a particularly striking manner. Through the digital evolution of photography, the camera has become calibrated and fixed, and thus it has become increasingly easy to forget the artist engineering its aesthetic composition. Sepuya deliberately reminds us of his own value in and amongst his works, providing a fascinating layer of artistic integrity across the Gallery’s photographs.
Gallery two is composed of a projected video, swirling up, down, left, right, situated against a barren wall aside a few chains lying on the floor. To introduce and contextualise this; a collection of seemingly half completed brown boards glued into a wall, alongside some abstract material collages. On first reflection Budor’s scene is indicative of modern art's proclivity to centre itself inside of layers of abstraction and confusion. Much of modern art’s ‘beauty’ arrives in abstract symbols, and hidden metaphors poking fun at the society it is birthed from. Budor’s work is no different. Budor claims that her art array is an expression of the ‘psychosocial control that urbanisation induces in the world.’ From an intellectual standpoint it resembles the fragmentation of modern culture and the developing cultural inertia toward genuine action and political uprooting.
Budor’s installation places intellectualism as a prerequisite for its artistic appreciation and in doing so illuminates a continuous debate in the contemporary art space. Birthed from the philosophy of 1920’s Folk Craft in Japan, it was widely held that ‘in order to touch art's essential nature, intuition must precede cerebral discrimination’. But Budor’s installation is bound up by symbols of abstraction, and to appreciate Gallery 2 in its totality the audience must engage in the task of cerebral comprehension. To grasp Budor’s work then, it is useful to tackle the intuition versus intellectualism debate in Contemporary Art. It is a divisive piece of art that provides space to reflect on the wider implications of modern art that, in consistently seeking to subvert current hegemony, place intellectualism over aesthetic appreciation.
The expectation of Contemporary art is that it is to present itself as both spectral and political. The audience wishes to be wowed, and expects to be engaged. Both Galleries do this but in almost entirely opposing ways, the first balances human authenticity with digitism and the latter fosters a reliance on intellectual discourse to support its materials. And thus the artwork of Nottingham Contemporary’s spring feature imbues our aesthetic appreciation with intellect, making it the ideal exhibition to visit and discuss with other people.
Nottingham Contemporary’s exhibition of “Again” and “Exposure” continues until Sunday 5 May 2024.
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