EXHIBITIONS / ALAN JOHNSTON

26.03.2009 to 18.04.2009

There's something very beautiful about the idea of the cube. It must have something to do with its irresistible correctness and logic. When you come across one in a broken, overgrown landscape it appears as inescapably human, a product of a willed desire to bring order to what appears (though often is precisely not) disordered chaos. Such a mark on a landscape, like a human mark on a wall, gives us pause to think - and the thoughts that follow are likely to be at least as much about the surrounding context in which it is placed as about the object that prompted the consideration in the first place. Why, you may think on seeing the geometry in its location, does the landscape hereabouts appear in this way? What plan, or lack of plan, caused it to be just so and not otherwise? And once the word 'plan' is let out of your head, you start a long journey into the night of the orderly mind, and what it has produced or forced itself upon in our imperfect, human world.

Johnston's art, while often adopting the relentless of the cube as its basis, is always searching or deliberately placing the small indication of human possibility into the straight lined thinking of the plan; just as the plan itself is a necessary part of an endlessly inventive human aspiration to make things better. This is why the small nervous scrawls on his well known wall drawings must be done repeatedly by hand, and why this work also includes the human in a very literal sense through the mirroring of the natural and human environment in the central space of the sculpture.

The mirror of course is simply a reproductive tool, it picks up all existing imperfections, without plan and without edit. It is the means by which we can somehow enter into a world beyond our reach, but one that only consists of what is already around us. In this sense, Johnston's work is saying with elaborate, spatially poetic care that 'This IS it'. The place where we are and the things that we have around us now, ARE what we need when we want to aspire to something here. New forms of heightened awareness replace the planning instinct at this moment of discovery, when we realise in a substantial way our own responsibility for our perception. This is a magical moment for a viewer, yet it is delivered in a way that is profoundly materialist and of its site. Being right here and right now, surrounded by the vague anonymity of disused or barely used land and celebrating the fact that it could suddenly become the site of an event, makes perfect sense. Especially as the awaited event is not planned at all but spontaneously arises out of the circumstances that exist - undermining and the same time confirming the significance of the cuboid shape and reflective material that attracted us here in the first place.

Charles Esche, Alan Johnston: This is it, 2007 [extracts]

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