Nathan Coley's photographic rituals

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Rosalind Ormiston viewed some original photographic work at a recent London show

The new generation of painters, sculptors and photographers are challenging conventional perceptions of art.  This autumn former Turner Prize nominee Nathan Coley had a London exhibition ‘Nathan Coley: A Place Beyond Belief’, curated by Tom Hunt, in which the ‘ritualised nature of public protest and public mourning’, was explored with unexpected results.

Coley’s If the Young.., three large-scale news-item photographs downloaded from Wikipedia, shows images of a National Park; the 2011 London riots; and Tate Modern’s public expression of support for the imprisoned artist Ai Wei Wei. Underneath each Coley appropriates the text of an African proverb reprinted in the Guardian newspaper in 2011, ‘If the young are not initiated into the village they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.’ In a large-scale illuminated text, A Place Beyond Belief, Coley appropriates the words spoken by a New Yorker during a radio interview on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, when she recalled in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, an ugly public reaction to an individual during a subway journey, highlighting human tension exposed by cultural difference.  The expression, ‘a place beyond belief’, was her positive hope for the city of New York and its citizens. This vast artwork is the fifth in Coley’s series of appropriated text works. Further examples were included in a display of over 30 photographic and sculptural works by the Glasgow-based artist.

The photographs in Coley’s ‘The Honour Series’ depict both individual and group public protests, with the wording on the protest banners and signs covered in gold leaf to conceal key information, thus concentrating the viewer’s imagination on the protestor(s) and the immediate environment rather than the message. This is replicated in a series of photographs of memorial sculptures, political, religious and social, again gilded in gold leaf to focus on the structure and environment of the memorial rather than what is memorialized. Complementing the series is Choir, a sculptural work in painted steel. The close group of white hand-held placards placed on a table await signage to give them a voice.

Perhaps the most controversial body of work from Coley is Untitled (Gravestones), an installation of ‘recycled gravestones’ with related drawings. Following on from his public sculpture In Memory, made for Jupiter ArtLand sculpture park in Edinburgh, with its visual comment on how we mark lives that are passed, here in Coley’s group of original gravestones (how does one obtain original gravestones?), he has erased the names of the dead to concentrate on the remaining texts: family messages of love and condolence. This individual loss of identity creates a void where one expects to learn more; and it is unnerving to see that some of the dates and messages refer to people only recently dead, old and young.

The work creates a mixture of emotions; one asks oneself who were these people? Where are their families? Why are they forgotten now? (And, how has their personal memorial become a work of art?). In essence, the work relates back to ‘The Honour Series’, in Coley’s deliberate blocking of key information to concentrate the viewer’s thoughts on the collective expression of memorial, and of protest and, ultimately, an enduring faith in humanity.