Introduction

Esther Schipper is presenting REDUX—an exhibition introducing new works by Angela Bulloch. With 10 works on display, the artist carries out a systematic survey of her own artistic repertoire of forms. REDUX resembles a laboratory. Earlier works like the Rules Series and the Pixels are starting points for a test arrangement, questioning Bulloch’s iconic work groups by explicit references, as well as by alienation and escalation of well-established elements. REDUX is Angela Bulloch’s tenth exhibition at Esther Schipper.

“In this new exhibition REDUX, Bulloch has chosen to go forward while casting a glance back over her shoulder. The premise of the exhibition is as its title REDUX suggests a kind of revisiting and new extension of ideas and materials and formal approaches from past works—including the idea of the pixel box—but re-sampled, re-mixed, reconstituted and re-reflected. Thus from various prototype and errant pixels arise new pieces with designer extensions, floor to ceiling chords or tails and other individualized augmentations and surface treatments. These new singular pixel box pieces present less like artful media carriers and more as quirky self-contained sculptures paying little heed to the idea of function. Other new sculptural works question what happens if the pixel or the flat modernist square were somehow a surface that extended vertically into a sculptural space?

The new tiered '3D contraptions’ are based on clusters of coloured squares whose tones sample the early groups of work Construction Tables (1998). As sculptures they seem abstractly ambivalent enough to be read both as pure and corrupted by the idea of interior architecture and design for instance. Early works such as Formation Dancing Bench (Virtual Hmmm) (1996), Grand Stand and the Marxist Myth - A light lowered, A floor raised, and a sound bounced (1996), and Happy Sacks (1994) have long been places where negotiation between the art and the viewer can take place in Bulloch's work and where posturing and time count. One '3D colour field contraption’ thus springs on in response to movement and plays a recording of the artist Karl Holmqvist reciting infamous Mae West-isms—some kind of 'cover version’ of another early Bulloch work using different objects and a different sound delivery system (Round Table with Mae West, 1995).

Another striking aspect of this exhibition is that it has a clear top and a bottom half or an above and a below. Emphasizing rather than thinking away the height of the room is a frieze-like wall piece made up of square colour fields overlaid with 'rules' relating to various definitions of triangulation with few conceptual artists’ beards thrown in. Bulloch's collected Rules Series (begun 1993) has its own rules incidentally but here they are not strictly adhered to. It is also a rule of tongue even in ongoing conversations that we keep interrupting ourselves with asides, referring to things, going back and forth between a remembered past and an imagined future.”

Dominic Eichler