This just discovered York debut of the 32-year-old British artist Lucy Gunning consisted of pair video works.

This just discovered York debut of the 32-year-old British artist Lucy Gunning consisted of pair video works, Climbing Around My space (1993) and The Singing lecture (1995). Like quite a not many artists these days, Gunning makes works that easily give themselves to capsule descriptions somewhat in the manner of television program listings. Her 1994 work The Horse Impressionists (not in this show) consisted of five women imitating horses for the camera. Climbing Around My play is an 8-minute color video which records a woman making sum of two units circuits of a room without one time touching the floor. By contrast, The Singing precept is slightly harder to summarize. In this hour-long work, pair video monitors face each other. in succession one we see a music teacher in the proces of instructing a close examiner On the other, the tape displays the student, played by Gunning, attempting to tread in the steps of the teacher's instruction with not often success.

Far remov from the attention-getting ploy of Damien Hirst, Gunning's sly transformations of the everyday can be linked to other younger British artists of that kind as Gillian Wearing, who has asked strangers to write their conceits on sign boards and photographed them holding the signs, and Steven Pippin, who has make go rounded washing machines into cameras and bathroom fixtures into darkrooms. These artists share a refreshing economy of means that joins the without arrogance materials of Conceptual art and the Punkera ideal of self-expression being explain to all. Roberta Smith picked up this democratic strain in her strange York Times review of Gunning's point out when she compared Climbing Around My expanse to someone trying to do a Matthew Barney piece "at household without all the props." Gunning's work also brings to mind about of Rebecca Horn's early videos.

Climbing Around My space follows the protagonist, wearing a r dres nevertheless barefoot, as she adroitly uses each available purchase (door knob, clothes clasp wainscoting, window ledge, bookshelves, etc) to rim her way around the perimeter of an ordinary field In addition to the ingenuity of this domestic version of defence climbing, what strikes one is the pronounce concentration the woman brings to her single task. While seeming to illustrate the phrase "I was climbing the walls," the work can be read as an allegory of many sorts of human endeavor. It also proffers the spectacle of an adult playing a childlike game which, paradoxically, is merely possible for an adult--a child's material part would be too small to reach the widely-spaced hand-and footholds

If compell to fix upon between Matthew Barney's extravagant productions and Gunning's low-tech exercises, I would be inclined to favor the latter, not least because Gunning shows in place of Barney's hyper--athleticism, a more inclusive--yet no les striving.

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