Page 10 - Art First: Jack Milroy: INterVENTIONS

John and Ann Tusa, writing of Milroy’s work ahead of his 2001 exhibition Hive, make this
point succinctly:
‘Unlike a mere visual joke or the worst kind of conceptual art, these works do not pall.
They create a world into which one is drawn. Milroy is not afraid to take mass images,
or use ordinary everyday materials. We suspect that he loves working with calculated
simplicity in a world of increasingly furious artistic gestures.’

Likewise the new works in INterVENTIONS deftly incorporate narratives both existing and imag-
ined, and effortlessly combine the earnest with the irreverent. The hauntingly luminous qualities
of the suspended and cut prints on translucent film in Ophelia II provoke a sense of the wrench-
ing tragedy in the tale, whilst the palette of the work and garlanding of a symbolic bou quet
of flowers above the water’s surface offers a nod to the appropriation of the story as a tragi-
romantic favourite of Victorian painters.

Works such as The Cranes are Flying are less specifically tied to a story, but still conjure entire land-
scapes and the sense of a broader picture. The cranes take flight amid falling leaves and incon-
gruously placed goldfish that look unsurprisingly surprised to be there. Set against the golden
disc of a setting sun, the work is a strange and exotic tableau upon which we can project our
own narrative.

This sense of ambiguity in the work, of fascination with where a story may lead, is noted by the
author A.S. Byatt–a collaborator of Milroy’s–when she writes of his 2003 exhibition Falling
and Flying:
‘Like all Milroy’s work, these pieces have a wit that is their own, and not easy to place . . .
This is a world put together by bricolage and happenstance–ephemeral as cardboard
and paper–but full of thought and visual curiosity.’

So, Milroy the artist is first and foremost a collector, but a collector is not just a hoarder: a charac-
teristic of a collection is that it is built and nurtured rather than simply accumulated. As with
the eponymous Utz in Bruce Chatwin’s 1988 novel, a collection can become such an extension
of the collector’s personality it is hard to know which has the greater influence over the other.
For Milroy this influence extends to the nature of attraction in new visual material. A key part
of maintaining any kind of large collection is cataloguing and codification–and it is with books