Mick Peter @ SWG3, until 27 Apr
Mick Peter takes a certain hard-line approach to making art that has its origin in 20th Century experimental literature. A fan of novelist and poet B.S. Johnson, who believed narrative fiction was a form of lying, Peter has been quoted as saying, “you cannot write fiction any longer, but you can write about writing fiction.”
The implications are profound to say the least. All literature written after, say, James Joyce can only ever be a commentary on fiction and never fiction itself – a mere post-script to the devastating paradigm shift enacted by modernist writers in the first half of the last century. No form of realism, he suggests, can possibly survive in the arid wastelands left in the wake of these titans of literature.
Consequently, Peter’s installation at SWG3, Trademark Horizon, is a barren landscape inhabited by the stark remnants of a lost culture. The five large sculptures, each depicting what seems to be a trademark or logo, reference 1960s and 70s graphic design. They are sculpted unconventionally, made from folded flat planes – as one might sculpt using paper – and look more like their two-dimensional forebears than solid forms.
Other than this, these flat, rudimentary sculptures give little away. Enacting Peter’s view that fiction cannot be written and only a meta-fiction is feasible, the installation makes little attempt to allude to anything beyond itself. The graphic design references are a dead end; the materials used are modern, efficient and economical; the works’ titles are at times playful but largely perfunctory.
A stark, more or less meaningless collection of objects, these works will disappear without a trace, forgotten forever. Like the rest of culture, they will be devoured by the event horizon left by dear departed fiction. [Andrew Cattanach]