Page 18 - Art First: Christopher Cook: a chance encounter on the way down

they favour left-over spaces and half-cultivated wasteland, in which new forms are
emerging. But they do make something as disturbing, in its way, as Piranesi’s interro ga -
tions of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Part of this disturbance is the way they make

us question the simple function of a detail. The details do not explain the whole; the dots,
striations and coded marks frequently appear to describe themselves rather than provid -
ing us with genuinely interpretable clues. An isolated event positions at its centre some -
thing like a Chinese philosopher’s rock, a symbol for contemplation: the graphite has

[
] dried into an impressively reticulated, mineral deposit. But the unstable detail is the use
of horizon tal marks, that form the ‘base’ on which the stone is understood to be set. They
are repeated and fragmented around the image and float upwards, knocked out of true.
Their function as a description of a settled horizontal plane is disturbed, as is any hope

for a peaceful and singular locus for contemplation.

Cook feels an affinity for Tadashi Kawamata’s work, in which crazily improvised
wood structures insinuate walkways, tree houses and confusion into the space of cities,

in a manner that recalls (but does not repeat) the delicate balancing of human intrusion
into nature in traditional Japanese thinking. Such interventions make something more
complex than simple chaos, in that they appear to be falling apart at the same time that
they are being built. They are spirited demonstrations of collective, capable effort, and

of a kind of madness denied by the apparently rational spaces they colonise. This
co-presence of lightness and seriousness, of constructive and deconstructive thinking,
can be seen to connect with Cook’s strenuous feats of ambiguous picturing. The lack
of coherence his works demonstrate is not a simple stylistic gambit. The interpenetration

of contradictory viewpoints and values is perceived, grasped and held before us as

wistful one,
, graphite and oil on paper, x

cm