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Reviews |
John Goto |
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When Colin Powell announced from the United Nations building in New York that the American army was to invade Iraq, the tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica, the artist’s reaction to Franco’s atrocities, there to remind all nations, was covered by a blue cloth. Although art has not yet stopped a war it has the power to undermine our responses and reveal our hypocrisies. John Goto’s New World Circus currently showing at the OVADA gallery is capable of doing just that. Using complex digital manipulation and setting his images in the brash, colourful environment of the circus, Goto has created work that is a powerful personal response to the invasion of Iraq in particular and the cruel and phantasmagoric nature of war in general. This is an important point for Goto is an artist who has turned to digital photography to build his images, and thus his work, because of his own aesthetic awareness, operates both as political comment and artistic vision. It is able to disturb and unsettle while also intriguing and entertaining.
Juggler
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Using digital imagery to mix toy figures in a toy circus with real people dressed as circus performers Goto has created a ‘New World Circus’ in which the vicious acts of inhumanity in war are also reduced to the absurdity of not just a circus but a world inhabited by plastic figures that obviously have no moral response to their actions. The series begins with ‘Grand Parade’ where the performers are presented full of strength and pride. The last image, Grand Finale, shows them, dirty and dishevelled and interspersed in a ring of skeletons. In between we experience the circus acts: an armless juggler, a ballerina on a pyramid of pigs, a strong man lifting a terrorist-like figure aloft and much more that cannot be easily described including two crowd scenes: ‘Shock and awe’ and ‘Mission accomplished’ which are particularly telling given the present state of Iraq.
Ballerina Goto, an artist with an international reputation for committed and unsettling work has here produced some of his most direct work. The exhibition toured Britain before coming to OVADA where it showed with a remarkable sound track by Michael Young. |
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Fotonet is funded by Arts
Council England |
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Eye Division