A New Path

When we lived in modern times

Sam Gathercole, 2010

In 2000, the writer Linda Grant published When I Lived in Modern Times, a fictional remembrance of one woman’s participation in the formation of the modern state of Israel. The content of the novel is not significant here, but the title is, in that it so simply and eloquently describes a relationship to ‘modern times’ that locates the ‘modern’ in the past, as a fond memory. Toby Paterson’s work articulates something of this relationship also: whilst retaining the positivity of the ‘modern’ and delighting in its dynamic language of form, he also – seemingly contradictorily – plays with the ‘modern’ as an obsolete ideal and as a persistent aspect of our built environment and visual culture. In Paterson’s practice, the ‘modern’ surfaces in the way that all that has been repressed, inevitably, does.

Toby Paterson’s work for BBC Scotland at Pacific Quay, Poised Array, has, in the artist’s own words, a “ring of familiarity”. It alludes to now historical features of ‘modern’ art and architecture – to particular ideas of ‘time and space’ and ‘image’ – and also to the topography of the Scottish landscape. As such, the work is consistent with Paterson’s wider body of practice that regularly dislocates and isolates (sometimes even deliberately misreads) ‘found’ source material: on occasion, his work represents whole buildings or structures – albeit released from or relieved of their original context – but, more regularly, the artist juggles details and fragments that appear truncated and suspended. The Pacific Quay site replicates several conditions that Paterson so regularly constructs in gallery contexts: the expanse of space affords Poised Array (and the building that it ‘fronts’) a visuality and visibility that makes multiple viewpoints and readings possible. Paterson has himself spoken of a variable and inter-changeable sense of complexity and simplicity in the ‘roles played’ by the work and David Chipperfield’s BBC Scotland building.

The dialogue that Poised Array joins is not only with its immediate architectural neighbour, but also the ongoing history of British modernism. This history is one that tells of the adoption and adaptation (even the misunderstanding) of imported ideas and practices: a narrative so willingly maintained in Toby Paterson’s art. Being ‘modern’, one would take a considerable pleasure in a certain symmetry – a ‘dynamic equilibrium’ – that can be traced in British modernism’s eighty-year history: in the 1930s, the ‘modern’ was (on the pages of books like Circle, published in 1937) idealistically imagined in the future; in the 1950s, the ‘modern’ was ‘now’ as artists and architects took the opportunity to participate in the formation of the new social spaces of the Welfare State; in the present, we look back at the ‘modern’ in much the same way that it was once so keenly anticipated. Poised Array will have its own legacy, but it is inextricably bound up also with that of the ‘modern’. However obliquely, Paterson’s work is an invitation to register, and continue to engage with and participate in the ‘modern’.