Sidesplit
Scott McCracken: Sidesplit
Borough Road Gallery, London South Bank University
6–8 September 2018 (private view 6 September)
Part of the Borough Art Labs programme
Sidesplit brought twelve recent paintings by Scott McCracken into conversation with A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection. It was part of Borough Art Labs, a programme that invites contemporary artists to work alongside the permanent collection.
McCracken's practice is concerned with what makes a painting a painting. Clement Greenberg, in his essay "Modernist Painting," described the conditions with which "a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture." For Greenberg, modernism turned away from painting's long project of representation and put the picture itself first. Many artists took up abstraction as a way of separating painting from other media. McCracken has been looking closely at post-war painters, such as Ernst Wilhelm Nay, whose work makes that shift visible.
McCracken, however, starts from the view that all painting is abstract and figurative at the same time. He works against that division through movement, both within each canvas and from one canvas to the next, and through loose, painterly handling inside sharp, graphic forms. His works are compact oils, many at 60 × 40 cm, with titles such as Sharpshooter, Backbreaker and Parallel Parker. They gather, recycle and rearrange the building blocks of modernism, and they read as both contemporary and deeply connected to twentieth-century painting.
The anti-dualistic position McCracken takes can be found in Greenberg too. Greenberg argued that the more the limits of painting are pushed back, the more clearly we can see them, and that this reveals continuities between past and present as well as breaks. The Borough Road Collection shows exactly that kind of continuity. Bomberg's teaching at the Borough Polytechnic, and the very different directions his students went on to take, trace a long conversation about form, space, colour and what painting is for. Hanging McCracken's work beside that history let visitors see his paintings as a new turn in that conversation, not a departure from it.
The essay
The exhibition was accompanied by Excavation: Scott McCracken's Paintings, a commissioned essay by the artist and writer Phil King, co-editor of Turps Banana magazine. King reads the paintings as having a hidden, underground life beneath their bright, solid surfaces. He is drawn to McCracken's textured blacks, which he compares to coal faces and the dark sides of moons, and to his sharp, acid colour contrasts. He imagines the works as if painted by a lost 1930s British modernist, somewhere between Paul Nash and a young Graham Sutherland, while their titles give away a contemporary humour. Taking up Hans Richter's early dream of animating abstraction, and Walter Benjamin's writing on Mickey Mouse by way of Esther Leslie, King suggests that the series works like frames of a cartoon. Each painting stands alone, yet together they seem to flicker with a movement that no single canvas contains.
List of works
Three Strikes, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Sidewalker, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 45 cm
Sharpshooter, 2017, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Numbercrunching, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Cornercutting, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Sidesplitter, 2017, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 × 45 cm
Headscratcher, 2018, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Phantomriding, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Striker, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Punchplease, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Backbreaker, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
Parallel Parker, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm
