Date: 21-04-1992
Owning Institution: Camden Arts Centre
Publication:           The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:         Now    

Yve Lomax writes, in the catalogue to ''Outer Space'', of a moment not too far in the future when ''im-ages will only refer to other images, ceasing to refer to anything outside-themselves. We will inhabit an envi-ronment of images from which there is no escape''. What a terrible thought. The idea is that we watch so much television nowadays, are exposed to such a quantity of visual imagery by it and the other big media like advertising, that we can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what is not, what is fact and what is fiction.

As Lomax puts it, explaining the title of the current show, ''No longer will there be any outer space, any space outside of images.'' The paranoid notion that secondary reality has usurped the place of actual, felt experiences is a commonplace of what has come to be known as ''postmodern'' theory. We are all lost souls in the Forest of Signs, hapless victims of ad-man and media mogul. There is already so much existing art that stems from this received idea that it is hard to believe there are any artists out there who still believe there is any mileage in it. In fact, most of the artists who have been invited to produce work for the South Bank's touring exhibition have studiously ignored its supposed theme. As a consequence, ''Outer Space'' narrowly avoids disappearing up its own black hole.

Ania Bien's installation, Hotel Polen, consists of 18 large, framed black-and white photographs hung along the sides of a narrow space so as to resemble doors leading off a corridor. A hotel corridor, you pre-sume. Each features what appears to be a memento of some sort - a snapshot of a pair of children, a piece of a map, a photograph of someone's pet dog - wedged into a silver menu-holder. Gradually, you realise that what might have been an aggrandised scrapbook is, in fact, a dirge - that all of these people were victims of the Holocaust. They may have stayed, briefly, at the Hotel Polen, but they ended up as guests in a less pleasant kind of institution; some of them are wearing concentration camp uniform, and those who are not are sepia-tinged phantoms in 1930s suits and dresses. The fragment of map turns out to be of the terrain surrounding Auschwitz.

Bien is herself a Polish Jew, which does not necessarily grant her a greater right than anyone else to her large and awful subject, but does maybe explain the sense of personal loss that her work conveys. It is as if she has assembled, in patchwork form, the fragments of people whom she can never know (but might, in other circumstances, have come to know), the dumb relics of lives that seem painfully distant to her. Hotel Polen is, clearly, inadequate as an account of the horrors of the Holocaust, but it is partially redeemed by the way in which it seems to incorporate the artist's own sense of inadequacy and incomprehension, her sense of the futility of her project. It invites the viewer to flesh out, in imagination, the lives of the people whom it pictures, which is a way of acknowledging that they can only be brought back imaginatively, speculatively. What they suffered cannot be fully appreciated. Reticence, here, is a form of honesty.

Bien probably numbers among her influences Christian Boltanski, whose brooding, morbid art has simi-larly drawn on the melancholy effects of the scrapbook, the reliquary or the archive. Susan Trangmar who, like Bien, seems relatively unconcerned with this show's supposed theme, was probably thinking of Gau-guin's triptych Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? when she titled her contri-bution. Where Are We Coming From? Where Are We Going To? is a slide-projection work that might be said to reverse Gauguin's subject - a Western artist's troubled sense of his own alienation from the South Pacific culture he had come to occupy. Trangmar's four slide-projectors whirr and tut-tut as they illumine the walls of her installation with a succession of images of Bengali schoolchildren in a British school playground. What interests this artist seems to be, not her own distance from the culture of others, but their distance from her own, into which they have been partially assimilated.

There is something extremely touching about this modest work, which is more filmic than photographic, a montage of belonging and difference. The children are seen, for the most part, as blurred fragments of clothing, silk saris alternating with stretch-nylon tracksuits, a glimpse of a pair of feet in bright pointed slip-pers succeeded by one of the back of a baseball jacket broadcasting the message that ''Quite simply, baseball enjoys a truly religious status across the USA''. Trangmar's visual flux suggests the flux of the lives she is recording, which is both the perpetual motion of the child at play and the movement of different cultures within this one, their resistance to and absorption within it. Part of the wit of the piece, though, derives from the fact that the most conspicuous evidence of these children's assimilation into British culture is a prototypically American garment.

Genevieve Cadieux is an interesting artist whose show at the Canadian pavilion in the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago demonstrated her greatest strength as a photographer: a disconcerting close focus on the body, and particularly on skin, whose wrinkles and furrows, translated to enormous scale, assume the properties of a landscape. But her work here, Blue Fear, is a disappointment. Its scale, for one thing, is too small. The subject, of two photographs of a man taken from in-front and behind, one superimposed on an-other, creates the odd sense of someone looking at his own double. As a result, it looks simply like a Magrittean idea translated into a photographic image.

''Outer Space'' suggests, among other things, that technology is no substitute for imagination. Trang-mar's and Bien's installations, which are among the most effective here, are also among the most rudimen-tary. West German artist Ulrich Gorlich went to the trouble of painting one of the larger galleries with photo-graphic emulsion, so that he could develop his images - several near life-size pictures of the new Mercedes 600 series saloon, some of them upside-down - directly on to the wall. All that effort can't disguise the weakness of the initial idea. You are meant to notice the way in which Gorlich has, as they say, ''referenced'' the Mercedes concession over the road from the Camden Arts Gentre. But this is just an alibi for silliness.

The two most technologically complex installations here are also the dullest. Jeffrey Shaw's Heaven's Gate features a mirrored plinth that looks rather like a piece of discarded furniture from a game-show studio, into whose depths you gaze to see the reflected broadcast from a television monitor suspended above it. The main feature, here, is a series of changing images of the ceilings of sundry baroque churches. Shaw has used a machine that enables him to rearrange the pixels that make up each image in variously disconcerting ways. But quite what this marriage of airborne cherubs and Nintendo tricksiness is meant to achieve, remains obscure. Judith Barry, for her part, seems quite overwhelmed by the exhibition's brief, which she does vaguely follow. Her installation consists of two walls carrying painted texts of a moderately paranoid nature - ''If communication and understanding are just an affect (sic) of information tech . . . are there still men or are there just computing, writing and thinking machines?'