(The Scotsman - S2 - date???)

Words & Things
The CCA
Until 23 December 2001

A week after the CCA threw it's doors open to the public after a two year 
hiatus and a £10.2 million refit, and the beautifully appointed new building hums 
to the kind of hustle and bustle most galleries would kill for on opening night. 
Judging by Words & Things, the throngs aren't just here to ogle the interior 
design.
If this show is a mission statement, those crowds should become a permanent 
fixture. In a sense, curator Francis McKee, is winking at us with his selections, 
celebrating the re-opening of an arts venue by filling it with work that questions 
the role of arts venues, ponders the nature of art galleries, and of art itself. 
This is made plain from the off: as you walk into the space, a huddle of high-
end computers emit the guttural grunts and muted explosions familiar to 
players of seminal shoot 'em up game Quake. This is JODI's contribution. The 
elder statesmen of net art wrong-foot you immediately - they are net artists, 
what in god's name are they doing in a gallery? - then bewilder with their 
presentation. Each of the installed computers contain a kernel of a computer 
game: JODI have mutated the code, and we are left with a hint of a game, but 
no means to play it. And so to Simon Starling. The arch recontextualiser has 
taken a bog-standard white van and stripped slices from it's coachwork to 
recreate a Poul Hennigsen lamp, then patched up the van with slivers of the 
design classic. Immediately, this post-readymade is a great joke, but Starling's 
point is blunt: who is the artist here, and which of the two objects belongs in a 
gallery space? Mark Dion is on similar ground with his glass vitrine. Aping the 
traditional museum - in this case his inspiration is the Hunterian - he carefully 
presents dismembered doll parts as impossible fossils. Without explicatory 
texts, it is as puzzling as any natural history display. Again, he forces the 
viewer to ask why the piece is here at all. Cheryl Donegan, at last, provides 
some answers. Her paintings are accompanied by a video presentation of the 
process behind them, flagging up her inspiration, as if to defy the viewers' 
attempts to look behind the work by pre-empting their analysis.
If Words and Things is, indeed, something of a mission statement, it's a brave 
move. The show is dripping with the ironies of contemporary art, but still 
welcomes and draws in the visitor. It is a cohesive, complete questioning of the 
words and things that fill galleries that is full of optimism, revelling in it's own 
uncertainty, laughing at the idea of itself. In it's own right, Words and Things is 
a success. In the context of the CCA's reopening, the show comes into it's own. 
There aren't many galleries that could get away with an opening show that 
questions the purpose of galleries and shows: the CCA does, and it can only be 
hoped that this is a taste of things to come. 

Jack Mottram