Art Review - March Issue - (Page 94)
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CHARLESWORTH Karen Stills from Insiders, 2006, video, 75 min. Courtesy the
artist and One in the Other, London IF YOU COULD SHINE DARKNESS FROM A
TORCH, you might be some way to describing the work of Karen Russo. In her
drawings, paintings, video installations and semi-fictional documentaries,
Russo’s explorations of the darker side of human experience open onto
scenes of occult happenings, subterranean spaces, uncontrollable impulses,
criminality and the ambiguous moral status of the artist in modern culture.
The Israeli-born artist, who relocated to London two years ago, has long
been fascinated by how society projects everything it finds abnormal,
excessive and intolerable into a whole universe of images and archetypes
that recur, almost compulsively, throughout our culture. They’re themes
that criss-cross and interlink, building up a powerful and allencompassing
worldview that doesn’t make concessions to those who want art to be easy
on the eye, or on the mind. In the video The Point of Departure 2006 [see
Martin Herbert’s review in this issue] Russo draws us from the classical
space of a nineteenth-century museum into the tunnels and catacombs of the
Paris sewers, on a bizarre journey into a shadowy parallel domain, the
“negative mirror image” as she calls it, of the civilised world above.
If the sewer is the subconscious, rotten underside of the city, then the
criminal is the negative of the civilised individual, an opposition she
explores in the video Insiders 2006 , where both prisoners who make art
and ‘professional’ artists – faces silhouetted in anonymity – talk
of the motivations and desires that drive them to produce. Russo questions
how ideas of madness and obsession lie behind our image of both criminals
and artists. Such archetypes, Russo suggests, say more about how our
culture contains di cult or unmanageable impulses than it does about the
artists or criminals themselves, the lasting influence of Romantic
thinking about art. Russo’s complex, often unsettling themes and her
against-the-grain approach to what art should be for, and how artists
might be understood, have won her a small but growing public. From her
studio in East London, she’s now researching a new documentary on
William Lyttle, the ‘mole man’ of Hackney, who has spent the last four
decades burrowing a network of tunnels and caves from under his suburban
house. Russo enthuses how she “was amazed to discover the great
similarities between Lyttle’s thinking and that of the average artist,
creating things that don’t work or don’t have a functional value, the
zen-like work process and the obsession involved in the making”.
Creativity turned to perverse, obsessive uses, or obsession and a desire
for excess as the drivers of creativity? Is Russo the authentic dark,
romantic artist, or just playing the part? Or do we look for such a
character as a projection of what we would prefer to hide from ourselves?
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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