05.05.00 -25.06.00
CUBE
Rawlinson's sculptures take the form of cubic chambers, drawing on the traditions of Christian tomb sculpture, memorials and sarcophagi. The sculptures are adaptable, modular constructions, whose permanent sense of incompletion is at odds with the functions and meanings of the sepulchre. Whilst Rawlinson’s work is allied to an international minimalist aesthetic, the artist engages with a form of ‘social minimalism’. He describes this as a reinscription of minimalist ideology, which crucially operates in relationship to the built environment. By this, Rawlinson destabilises the purity of intent that was the hallmark of Judd, Flavin et al.
"There is quite a tradition now of sculpture", states Dr Richard Williams, "that makes formal reference to Minimalism - symmetry, geometry, materials, a certain scale - but imbues it somehow with subjectivity, in the form of personal memory, or history; Rachel Whiteread's work being perhaps the best-known example. (There is also, it might be said, a parallel art historical enterprise which is trying to do the same thing for Minimalism itself, recovering a subjectivity allegedly present, but repressed in its original, 1960s, presentation.) Rawlinson's sculpture clearly fits into this scheme, as he recognises in his gallery text, calling what he does 'dirty Minimalism', but it differs from it in that his materials are found objects. The result is to give the work some of the character of the ruin. The main material is the perforated metal shuttering once used by Manchester City Council's housing department to seal empty property in Hulme. This history is legible to anyone familair with the material, and Ian has left visible the council's arcane reference numbers on the shutters, each one referring to the size and character of the object in question. It's thankfully not an issue made central, as the tragic comedy of Hulme deserves more direct treatment than an exhibition of sculpture. But it is present. The other material, the curved neon striplighting came from an abandoned Barclays bank.
"What Ian has made from these materials has obvious references to Minimalism, but is also - as he notes in his gallery text - like tomb sculpture. Unlike Minimal sculpture, these objects literally have interiors. Michael Fried thought spectators apprehended Minimalism as if the works were hollow, but that's not the same thing. Here we are presented quite explicitly with interiors, lit by neon light, and big enough to hold a body. In size and presence they look like chancery chapels, although if we pursue this further, their emptiness suggests chapels of a secular and peculiarly modern kind.
"If there is a liturgy associated with these things, then it is provided by the drawings exhibited alongside the sculptures. Formally they resemble engineering drawings describing a manufacturing process, and in fact this is precisely what they are, describing the manufacture of the sculptures. But they are not plans to enable the manufacture in the first place, but drawings made after the event describing in effect what has occurred. They are not without humour, turning the serious business of manufacture into a pointless ritual. The fact that they do not account for the actual manufacture of the object is underlined by the absence of clear explanatory texts or symbols, other than a few highly ambiguous arrows to indicate the movement of one panel to another. The clarity is illusory: to use these drawings to make the sculptures would be reckless. Loss, ritual, the ruin: these are issues that are central to sculptural discourse of the past thirty or so years, and Rawlinson's work is profoundly, and productively engaged with these things".
Organised and curated by Graeme Russell