Page 10 - Art First: Christopher Cook: a chance encounter on the way down

beyond man’s control’ (‘Agitpop’, in Laura Owens, Kunsthalle Zurich,
). Cook’s
graph tes share with Owens a deep appreciation of what cannot be controlled, but
i
in works such as waterstair the topographic impulse, the desire to map and understand
what we see, is acknowledged as an implicit aspect of the spectator’s visual training,
if not an entirely adequate one.

The principles of Cook’s project in this series can now be defined more closely. The

[ ] artist stares at the space his image begins to evoke, and his practical task is to resolve it,
as far as possible: to interpret it further with adjustments, clarifications and details, all the
while withholding from the viewer any complete set of interpretable elements or associ -

ations. Tadashi Kawamata (co-curator of the Yokohama Triennale in which Cook’s
graphites were included) suggested to him ‘that you are not only creating, trying to repre -
sent something, but trying to extract some images. Trying to create a scene, then some
images are extracted from that scene’.

Sheets of paper retrieved from the studio floor or used for wiping off brushes may even
catch his eye and provide a starting point for a work. But the accidents are then disci -
plined, to a considerable extent. The motile marks, stains, runs and deposits made

by the liquid graphite must always evade his full control, but the activity of looking so
stren uously at the image as it is being worked on produces an underlying robustness
of structure. It is this that differentiates his approach from scenography. You are in the
presence of an achieved idiom, not a set of cultural juxtapositions. The contradictions
caught in these works may ultimately be social, as much as pictorial.

snare,
, graphite and oil on paper, x

cm