On the opening night of Paul Edmunds’ latest show, Tone, a hipster bicycle store across the windswept Sir Lowry Road is also having its opening party. Rumour has it that it is owned by an artist and I imagine it as a place seeking to sell that moment of modernist clarity that is the hitching of an industrial, mathematical aesthetic to the wagon of tooled technological beauty.
A cursory visit to the store reveals that it is just selling bicycles — to a soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix and a Cape Town gale appropriately simulating the chopper blades in Apocalypse Now.
The music puts me off. It over-determines my relationship with the merchandise, forcing me into a mode of engagement that, frankly, pisses me off. I don’t want the cult of cyclist as muscled hero — I want the cyclist as anchor to the religion of technology.
The above has nothing to do with the actual store, which I’m sure sells some great bicycles (I didn’t even bother to find out its name), but everything to do with trying to understand Edmunds’ art. The works on show are grouped in series, called Tone, Pitch and Field. There are also works called Solid, Tone and Timbre. Any reader with an ear will have picked up that music features largely in the conceptualisation of this show.
Assembling meaningful experience
Edmunds’ blog explains it: ‘Many of us have a long and close relationship with music. From elements that are often non-narrative, mostly repetitive and largely abstract, we extract or assemble meaningful experience, repeatedly.
‘In a series of pencil drawings, a linocut and two sculptures, I use only line and its sculptural analogue, edge, to explore visual correspondents for music and sound, and their constituent parts.”
Sometimes the way he leaches all meaning from his work frustrates the viewer. Is there a point to just being beautiful? Of course there is. But that’s not the point: with Edmunds, there is no inappropriate soundtrack to his work, no frame or visual element choosing a primary colour for your perceptions.
With him, what you see is not what you get.
So what is one to make of works such as those in the Tone series? They’re described as ‘drawings made with a stencil revolved around a centre which sometimes shifts in the course of a drawing … Each line builds in tone and then fades away, which, in accumulation, results in blurry-edged rings and discs of tone which vary both radially and around the circumference.”
An accurate description, if one that doesn’t describe the delightfully vertiginous beauty of being sucked into the lovely, tingling tonality that is the artwork.
Glorious constraints and limitations
Edmunds’ own explanation of his work is peppered with phrases like ‘the works [afford] an undistracted experience of limited variables” and ‘[they] are evocative and allusive, and invite the viewer to construct their experience of the work”.
Now nobody is suggesting that this doesn’t happen with all art, where, truly, everyone has to know eventually what they like. But with Edmunds, and specifically this show, we’re enduring something that is very like absolute freedom, with all the glorious constraints and limitations that implies.
Tone by Paul Edmunds is on at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, until May 21