Transmission, Glasgow
Errantly over determined high definition digitally manipulated images bearing their Photoshop scars as fangs parade the Transmission like Tretchikoff dinosaurs. Tales of the expected, they look like paintings but aren’t. In the main gallery, these huge LaserJet prints ape the scale of history paintings and New York School prairie canvases. Backstage, smaller versions of the same images mounted in light boxes, all hung salon-style, wait in the wings.
On the face of it, these works aren’t encumbered with any strategic pretexts, their pun-poetic titles deferring meaning. At the same time, all the images simulate art historical genres, splicing them with more contemporary images. Prophesy: Devil’s Dictionary (2005) constructs a crucifix from fresh cuts of finger flesh and flips the bird to make a blasphemous middle-finger fuck you gesture. The identical digits are digitally distorted in ways that are palpable, cut and pasted to create a profusion of proximal interphalangeal joints. Comparably, Hand idea: Phantasies of Realism (2005) represents three bloody carved-off hands as an idolatrous corpus, each with a big nail hammered through it. A fourth hand is substituted for a big Mr Whippy.
These images recall Russell’s contributions to the artists’ group BANK (1990-2000) with whom he organised Zombie Golf (1994) and Cocaine Orgasm (1995). Their garish, saturated aesthetic is still prominent, one rooted a mix of religion, sex and gore culled from commercially exploitable Tigon British horror movies made in the early 1970s. It’s a period gothic genre recently revived in comic parodies such as Steve Coogan’s Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001) and the spoof 80s pulp horror Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004). As an artist, Russell has made it his own, publishing Frozen Tears (2003) and Frozen Tears II (2004), 800 page ‘bestseller novels’ containing pulpy narratives from an array of contributors.
Idea: Ornate/Circular [Low budget mysticism] (2005) more readily recalls the violent surfaces of the performative paintings that Russell produced in collaboration with Fabienne Audéoud in 2000. Echoing the commercialism of tie-dye and chaos patterns, this work’s heart has slipped from its sleeve, replace by the mysticism of a new age website. Constructed from bits of the new flesh the image looks alchemical, but, being digital, lacks any factural chemistry. It jostles for attention with a larger work Ornate Idea: Meat Doesn’t Travel Well These Days (2005) that is rooted in allegedly more reputable forms of mysticism, namely Abstract Expressionism (via the Viennese Actionists). Perhaps both these images have real depth in that they literally allow us to look inside?
To continue to read Russell’s new work an exercise in mischievous quotation may miss the obvious. Orgasms of entrails, blood and organs are what Russell terms ‘ecstatic uses of flesh’ which are performed rather than simply represented. They are explicitly sensuous images brimming with colour, emotion, rhythm and speed. In this, they are a welcome break from the good decorum that Transmission has tended to exhibit of late, but they don’t perhaps quite match the odd true blood beast digital terror of erstwhile Transmission exhibitor Albert Oehlen.
