An Ontology of the Object
The Mackintosh Gallery
Glasgow School of Art
March 2000
On entering the main hallway of the Glasgow School of Art the visitor is surrounded and quite literally enveloped by a most tangible set of signs that remind her or him of a key moment in the history of Scottish art. That moment was the formalising and re-housing under Mackintosh?s then new roof - just over one-hundred years ago - of an institution that was dedicated to study and debate into the role of the arts, crafts and architecture within society. Debate, however, is never simple and the uneasy relation that exists between a nostalgia for tradition and its opposite force, that of regeneration, is evident at every turn in the building. It is very clear in the way that the daily life of a working art school collides with the quite necessary demands to conserve the building as a part of the heritage industry. But tradition and regeneration can function as two equal if opposed forces that engender a creative cultural and philosophical dynamic.
This is a point very clearly made as the viewer leaves the dark enclosure of the entrance lobby behind and climbs the main staircase that leads up towards the light of the Mackintosh Gallery itself. Towering above the stairway and visible from the moment one ascends the stairs is a life-size nineteenth century plaster cast copy of the winged Nike of Samothrace (circa 300 BC). This enormous, beautiful and ?all too solid? form speaks from deep within its core of the history of sculpture and its wings appear to reach out so as to lift the viewer not only into the light and air of the gallery but into the transformatory world of sculptural possibilities.
The installation of works both drawings on paper and sculptures that comprise Paul Cosgrove?s An Ontology of the Object seem to meet, debate, diverge and return to their sculptural source as symbolised by the Nike. This is no easy job but Cosgrove has achieved a great degree of balance between ideals of a contemporary sculpture and those symbolised by the cast?s shadow. Where the winged figure?s outline ends Cosgrove has metaphorically continued it. Spreading his works out on either side of the plaster cast across the walls and into two island groupings set on either side of the main stairs.
Underpinning the whole show is a series (literally hundreds in number) of small computer generated drawings on paper which trace the various evolutions of a group of what appears to be related geometric forms. These drawings hang feather-like and in rows on either side of the Nike?s out stretched wings. They spread across three walls of the gallery. In this strangely delicate and almost gravity-defying gesture it is as if the span of the Nike?s wings have been increased to encompass all the works in the space.
The computer drawn geometric forms provide an almost limitless pattern book of sculptural permutations around a theme. In each sequence one shape evolves, or is it better to say metamorphoses, into the next. But in attempting to read these works we must first question the difference between the terms ?evolution? and ?metamorphosis?. Where the former word implies a linear and progressive trend the latter can suggest a more ambiguous and poetic process of change and movement (we need only look at Ovid?s complex literary work, The Metamorphosis, to find evidence of this). Geometry and mathematics pursued by the Greeks and later European cultures as an underpinning to truth and meaning losses its absolute purity here to become a staging post for the sculptor to suggest a complex set of readings that lie somewhere between the real, the rational and the symbolic. We find ourselves swept into a whirlpool of possible readings, and into a state of vertigo that de-stabilises us. In the face of these countless images we seem to loose any sense of our own gravitational stability.
At such a moment rather than rising on the Nike?s wings we attempt to re-ground ourselves by turning to the actual sculptural objects themselves. In the spaces on either side of the main staircase Cosgrove has grouped together fifteen inter-related works. The two (complimentary) assemblages are made up of individual units that interlock, rest, balance or support one another to create a whole. They do not stand directly on the floor, rather they are separated from it by a thin skin of scarlet painted MDF. This low platform creates a space that is not only set apart from the room but from us as well.
We become observers - removed from the sculptures it is true - but still we are in a close-enough physical proximity to them to sense and to be affected by their gravitational pull. The interplay of forms, all derived it would seem from the drawings that nearly surround the viewer, is reminiscent of cosmological constellations. There is a real shock in this realisation as the objects themselves are quite literally things with a real weight and mass. They are made from sheet MDF a fact that the artist has not tried to hide. They are also objects that reveal many of the signs of the process of their making, the traces of pencil lines, the fixing screws, etc. Most surfaces are left in their raw state, but three individual components have been coloured and then sanded back to leave vestigial, almost fleeting, traces of colour fixed into the surface.
It is finally this sense of the fleeting, of the temporal and impermanent that lingers in the viewer?s memory. Its not that the work is inconsequential far from it in fact. Cosgrove?s powerful works set up complex layers of dialogue that shape themselves, on the one hand, around the gravity and 'gravitas' of sculpture. On its apparent permanence suggested by the various weights and masses as they are played against a complex understanding of the limits of balance and placement to suggest instability and movement. Whilst on the other hand, the artist reveals his implicit understanding of a dynamic metamorphosis of forms that is suggestive of a state of being in the world that is both physically and conceptually restless.
Jim Harold