Some Thread and A Hand

The Work of Gary Bolam

Jac Mantle, 2009

Like Martin Creed’s self-explanatory work ‘Some Blu-Tack and A Wall’, Gary Bolam’s art is significantly the sum of its parts and begins to be born when an understanding of these entities both as discrete and as relative to each other is established. This is first begun by the artist during the creation of the work, then by the viewer in a process which seems simultaneously to be one of deconstruction and accumulation; Bolam isn’t into illusions but one begins nevertheless by asking what exactly the different bits of his installations are. A TV monitor. A plinth, unpainted. Some dead (but intact) flies. A glowing red light bulb. These are necessarily seen item by item before any thematic links between them can be made, and, equally, before we can process what it is that we are looking at: what is the sum of the parts?

Bolam doesn’t begin with a subject or theme; that’s secondary. Instead, he begins by collecting materials: some out of the artist’s studio whose usage in the production of artworks is established and historical, others from a more specialist field; medicine or plumbing; and through these others, he alludes to these worlds outside art - although they are not the “meat” of his subject matter. The subject matter is really the nature of the aesthetic and thematic relationships set up by the particular aesthetics of these disparate objects. He has a set of “house” materials to which others may be added and alternated, often swapping one source of very potent subject matter for another - illness, death, flesh, terrorism. But the allusions to these remain just that; allusions; and horrifically, they appear interchangeable. They’re apolitical, as if used only for their looks – exploited. Or if they do touch politics in any way at all, it is merely the abstract idea of politics, and a musing of what it might be like if one were to create something serious or painful. The sense of Damien Hirst cannot be overlooked, but the lack of drama and of physical bulk generated by a slab of butter hosting a single fly downplays it sufficiently to distinguish it from Hirst. “My intentions are genuine,” it seems to say.

Often, the work seems devoid of subject matter, or that this is somehow nullified alongside the aesthetics. Only as an afterthought does the viewer reflect on whether Bolam does, in the end, settle on any profound truth. And does he mean to? The potent subjects that he merely touches on without exploring in more depth maybe serve to suggest simply that they could be pursued, that there is profound thought out there in the ether. Whilst the reason often given for people’s dislike of Hirst’s work is that his aim is to shock and he does so by sensationalising things (a cheap tabloid trick), the potential of Bolam’s work to elicit distaste is, conversely, in its trivialisation of themes that seem vaguely grand and sacrosanct, like “life” and “mortality” – though this may be an over-simplification of Bolam’s work, just as it is invariably one of Hirst’s.

Is the work, then, all about looks? Every decision made an aesthetic one? To take an example: Ham, signifying flesh, the physical body, man and animal, meat, butchery, food and cruelty, organic, living, chronological time and mortality, and the man-made (processed) versus the natural, hasn’t been used primarily for its aesthetic qualities. However, as soon as it’s introduced into dialogue with other materials, the ham represents something, assumes a certain position aesthetically, that’s necessary in order to balance the whole work, so aesthetics immediately – and unavoidably – come into play.

Viewing Bolam’s entire practice as a balancing act, in which all the elements require continuous maintenance and attention, could explain the wide-ranging, extensive paraphernalia of items that come to co-exist in the name of his art. Working attentively but very much by instinct, Bolam plunders first the wood workshop and then the warehouse as well as the school artroom for his media. His palette contains plinths, odd rough-cuts of wood and coloured light bulbs, recalling Arte Povera though without any historical sense; those works have aged, but not aged. A bit of wood is a bit of wood is a bit of wood is a bit of wood. Close observers of the work may feel a certain familiarity, almost recognition, with a particular piece of timber, since materials are readily re-used and reconfigured in different combinations: the apparent provisional quality to the look of a metal rod leaning against a wall is due to the fact that, often as not, it’s held there only by gravity.

In this world of open-endedness and approximation, the viewer is encouraged to notice the nature of construction, replay it in their mind’s eye, and imagine an alternative. Once functionally “spare parts,” none of the items brought together remain so, yet they nevertheless retain some subordinate status, each one chosen or designed for the sole purpose of complimenting or contrasting with another, in the manner of IKEA furniture. In the same vein, there is the same feeling of randomness and hesitation about it as can be heard to escape as a sigh from a room that has been gutted and subjected to a complete DIY TV makeover by strangers in the course of a day. The red and pink Indian shawls are absolutely accountable - they accent the turquoise and pine furnishings - but could equally have been substituted for just about anything else; nothing in the room has any history or meaning now. Or not until it is seen as being simply part of a whole. Now, imagine you’re Martin Creed and consider the possibilities of a needle, some thread and a hand…