Jamie Shovlin: Aggregate
Talbot Rice Gallery
Edinburgh, UK
20 Jan – 10 March 2007

Review by Rea Cris

For its first exhibition of 2007, the Talbot Rice Gallery has collected together a series of new commissioned work by Becks Futures nominee Jamie Shovlin. Shovlin has been described as a collector, archivist, and manipulator. His work revolves around the precise methodology of collecting, classifying and displaying information, complete with museum conventions of labels, models, diagrams, and scientific documentation, all of which are meant to be taken as true. Shovlin uses these assumed coveyors of objective, unquestionable truth in order to create and manipulate the data of his installations. His fabricated fan archive of the equally fabricated West German Band Lustfast is a prime example of the power of persuasion that museum archives hold. The archive fooled many into believing in the existence of the band, with their Wikipedia entry and MySpace page.

In this exhibit, he presents a painstakingly neat map of Great Britain, indicating with string where and in what condition he bought road maps, all neatly documented in specially made index cards in “Landrangers Map’s Map”. Add this to the intricate colour wheel accompanying “In Search of Perfect Harmony” indicating which Crayola crayon was used for which jigsaw, and the blatant misinformation in “The Birds in her Garden,” with its scientific names such a ‘Roger the Wood Pigeon’ and ‘Evil Bastard the Magpie’, one finds Shovlin is an archivist/collector/deceiver extordinaire.

But the exhibition does not equal his work; the show is still very much based in the white cube tradition of art galleries, rather than the scientific glass case displays of musuemology. Half the charm of scientific or, more specifically, wildlife museums and their displays of maps, drawings and taxidermied specimens, is their stuffiness due to the lack of space, their displays dusty and forgotten. Shovlin’s own imitation is too spacious, too self-aware of its own parody. The walls are too white, the displays too free of dust, everything is crisp and clean. The spacious white cube exhibition style makes it feel more like art than a scientific fact, which ruins the illusion Shovlin worked so hard to create. The accompanying information leaflet arouses further suspicion. The amateurish and cheap nature of the leaflet reminds me of the makeshift activity sheets teachers handed out to use during school trips to museums. The Talbot Rice leaflet has floor plans and indicators of where each piece can be found, as it has decided to opt out of the information placard. But more interesting is the accompanying diagram, resembling the categorization of animals (think back to science class, with class and kingdoms). The exhibition has been chopped and broken down into categories, the most bizarre being ‘Selected text from Exhibition Catalogue’. The descriptions are full of words like ‘systematic observation’, ‘recorded everything’, ‘meticulous method of display’, ‘classification’, ‘labels’, and ‘obsessive accumulator’. This further destroys the illusion that Shovlin’s displays are to be taken as true fact. There is no indication of who made or produced this chart, it confuses and irritates me. It is too amateurish compared to the impressive work of Shovlin and too random to be beneficial either. The chart is a hindrance to the rest of his carefully accumulated and displayed work.

Focusing on Shovlin’s panache for deliberate misguidance is missing the more interesting aspect of his work. The aesthetics of his work is just as important as the act of accumulation and content. Shovlin’s“The Origins of Species” is Darwin’s book with large sections of text blacked out, revealing only what the artist finds relevant and making you realize that you never had the intention of reading the book until that moment. This piece is presented on mounted boards with windows displaying the single pages. Different editions of the book are mixed in, some boards alternating the editions from page to page, while others are complete mixtures. Looking at these mounted boards from afar they begin to resemble town houses, sombre and serious, all perfectly lined up in a row.

The aspect I found most interesting about Shovlin’s work is his mother’s affection for jigsaw puzzles and what it means in his work. Strangely enough I believe to have found the answer in the Aggregate resource room; a room filled with additional information about Shovlin’s work, newspaper reviews and, for the children, photocopies of the birds that can be coloured in. What is also available are multi-coloured office stickies that can be written upon and stuck directly onto the wall. A more charming specimen asks whether cowboys have back gardens. Someone has responded ‘we ain’t got no garden, we ain’t got nowhere but our saddles’. The stickie that most caught my eye was one declaring, on classic yellow: ‘I have the beautiful view of a perfect garden from my flat without having to keep it’. This statement is obviously referring the Shovlin’s work “The Birds in her Garden”. And this is what got me thinking about Shovlin’s mother and especially her jigsaws. In Shovlin’s work it’s just as much about the labour of collecting and creating than the final result.

www.trg.ed.ac.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk:80/leicester/content/image_galleries/ jamie_shovlin_gallery.shtml?1
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/jamie_shovlin_biography.htm

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