“Examine the subtle ways in which societal norms dictate”: Playing By The Rules — Reviewed

Jack Roe finds cartoons, CAPTCHA bots and children challenging our notion of rules and rebellion at The Royal Standard…

One aspect of art that makes it so compelling, and in some cases tiring, is the questions it inevitably raises regarding its use, its meaning, and its context. To view art superficially without any attempt to discern a deeper meaning may not be completely missing the point, but it does take some of the fun out of it. It is in these reflective moments where it becomes necessary to sometimes make grand statements; broad-stroke arguments that can easily be discounted.

Here is one of my own: Art, being a creative departure from the norm, is a form of rebellion. A sentiment shared between myself and Tom Emery, curator of The Royal Standard’s current show, Playing By The Rules. According to Tom, the show’s inspiration comes from “that line between the frustrations of the limitations existing in the first place, contrasting with how they can function positively by providing a framework within which to work.”

And so to The Royal Standard. The first thing that strikes about the show is the suitability of its location, tucked away in a post-industrial expanse of concrete and repurposed warehouses in Everton, Liverpool. At the top of a vertiginous climb, the space seems almost abandoned, deemed surplus to requirements, and yet here against the run of progress some former office space has been brilliantly reclaimed and put to use for that least practical of causes: the creation and presentation of art.

The show itself is necessarily compact, each of the five pieces allowed ample breathing room and dissimilar enough to provide several different variations on the theme. Andy Holden‘s pseudo-scientific video installation Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (developed from an ongoing performance lecture with Tyler Woolcott) is excellent. By expanding and emphasising common tropes of children’s cartoons, he presents a wilful subversion of the laws of physics, and thus highlights perhaps the only set of rules that may not be broken, certainly not very easily. Aside from anything else, seeing such a juvenile format stretched and presented in such a surreal context is enjoyable in itself.

Elsewhere, Simeon Barclay‘s Gatefold Series: I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now (2016) effectively invokes an essentially English sense of wistfulness. In marrying a brazen moment of unpunished deceit, Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’, with a title suggesting the curse of hindsight, there is a suggestion here that playing by the rules is not always the most effective course of action. The contrast between the rigid and reinforced world of professional sport and the freeform expression of art is also particularly effective.

In the work of both Peter Sweetman and Carly Bainbridge, there is an element of transmutation. In Bainbridge’s recycling and reviving of a pre-existing piece of work, she continues a conversation about the nature of ownership and the rules surrounding appropriation in a concise and effective manner. Sweetman’s use of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) in Fires, Shipwrecks, Catastrophes (2016) brings to mind methods and forms of regulation used on the Internet, a sphere that has proliferated largely outside the traditional modes of rule-making and abiding.

Ane Hjort Guttu‘s film, Freedom Requires Free People (2011), is a documentary that focuses on a young boy as he expands on the arbitrariness he sees in the day to day operation of his school and the effect that it has on his peers. It is this child’s channelling of Louis Althusser’s ideas on state apparatus that truly encapsulates the theme of this show and, more than that, asks some very important questions. In its most effective moments, it comes somewhere close to exposing the more hollow aspects of our society, as in the scene where the cherubic protagonist is taught that the correct response to someone asking how you are is to return the gesture, for the sake of manners rather than any genuine compassion.

If it has been a while since you have been given cause to examine the subtle ways in which societal norms dictate the pace and direction of your life, then you owe it to yourself and to these artists to see this show.

Jack Roe

See Playing By The Rules at The Royal Standard Gallery & Studios, Liverpool, from 12 March until 27 March 2016 — FREE

Visit from 12-5pm Wednesday-Sunday