Riser (Stranmillis, December 1960)
Riser (Stranmillis, December 1960) is made up of to-scale facsimiles of paintings that formed the exhibition West Coast Hard Edge: Four Abstract Classicists, which opened in the Queens University Gallery in Belfast in December 1960. This was the only touring venue for a presentation of works by Californian painters shown earlier that year at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. The show marked the first appearance on Northern Irish soil of postwar American abstraction. It was organised by the United States Information Service, who maintained a gallery and library in the US Embassy in London, and was a collaboration between USIS cultural attaché Stefan Munsing and the British art critic Lawrence Alloway. While the exhibition is cited as having a pivotal influence on English painters its presence in Belfast went unremarked upon. Largely unbeknownst to the artists that produced them the objects included in such displays operated as vectors within a political struggle between the Soviet Union and America, and were shipped from location to location as evidence of the aesthetic freedoms afforded under free market capitalism.
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Depicting neither an overtly catholic or protestant outlook abstraction has played a specific role in the cultural context of Northern Ireland. In the mid to late 1960s, at a time of growing civil unrest in the country, eventually leading up to the deployment of British troops in the autumn of 1969, the Ulster Museum in Belfast purchased a sizeable number of abstract paintings and sculptures by American and English artists. These were obtained mainly through the Waddington and Kasmin galleries in London, with acquisitions being financially supported by the Contemporary Arts Society. These artworks sat seemingly far removed from the sectarian conflict effecting the country at large, appearing instead as a form of secular imagery.
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Until John McLaughlin’s death in 1973, colour reproductions of his work in exhibition catalogues were not obtained from photographs, but were more often than not facsimiles generated by lithographic techniques. Composed of a radically reduced set of pictorial elements his imagery was ideally suited to commercial processes such as ‘tipping in’. The individuals who produced these simulated versions of paintings by McLaughlin and others invariably went uncredited.
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Works made using aluminium treadplate from 2010 onwards collectively bear the title Riser, referring to a class of theatrical platforms that act as presentational devices for apparent content. Each of these works takes their form from an object already in existence. The use of treadplate as a material is intended to reflexively acknowledge this appropriated subject matter: with the embossed tread pattern functioning as a form of analogue watermark. Artists’ annexation of an industrial material for personal use has a venerable history, originating with minimalist sculptors’ claiming of substances such as glass, steel and compounded aggregate. As a strategy this shares much of the same ideological purpose as corporate patenting strategies.