Stuart Brisley. Courtesy the artist

Katie Alice Fitzgerald discovers how conceptual artists Atkinson, Brisley, and Head pack a punch at The Fieldgate Gallery, London, exhibiting until July 13 2008.

The Fieldgate Gallery is in the throws of its final exhibition before its mystery re-location. It is currently based in an old mailing house just off Whitechapel High Street, tucked behind Whitechapel Mosque.

Such a location is prevalent within contemporary art. Hubs such as these found across Shoreditch smack of Harry Potter – touch a brick in the wall of some non-descript building you could swear never existed the last time you walked down this street and a cavernous space ticking with art-life, is revealed.

The art-life currently on show, until July 13 2008, at the Fieldgate Gallery are works by prolific conceptual artists Terry Atkinson, Stuart Brisley and Tim Head.

Unlike most other galleries of this ilk whose exhibitions are driven by the commercial need for sales, the Fieldgate Gallery is a not-for-profit organisation. The exhibitions therefore are more considered and the artists are able to show together in an arena which lacks competition.

In-house artistic competition is not something which naturally springs to mind when looking at Atkinson, Brisley and Head, all of whom have been creating art since the 60s and 70s. They each have back-catalogues of work which forcibly shun the cycles of art and commerce - things actively courted by many artists today.

Terry Atkinson. Courtesy the artist

The exhibition is built on this non-comercial premise and its aim is to draw attention back to these forefathers of the Young British Artists' set and away from the contemporary offshoots of conceptual art.

Instead, the purity of art is emphasised, particularly as a means to making statements and to express political opinion, something which each of the artists seems to feel is lost today somewhere in the realm between art markets and celebrity.

The works chosen for exhibition by Atkinson are from his large body of Irish works from the 80s and 90s – the Greasers and the Mutes. Sadly, visual images of modern warfare continue to be relevant to our contemporary society as we gear up to send yet more troops to Afghanistan.

Atkinson’s works dance between the cartoonish charm of his drawings and the heavy-hitting larger works which substitute paint for axle grease. In today’s oil crisis the political conscience of these works is unavoidable.

Brisley’s work chosen for this exhibition also packs a punch. Brisley is notorious for his physical and mental stamina during live pieces. Two of the works exhibited which show his Zen-like commitment are Sweating a Black Hole (1996) and 10 Days (1972). In the former, what we as viewers see is a video of a live piece by Brisley where he uses an amalgam of sweat and charcoal to carve, rub, spread a black hole into the paper around him. Watching this ritual of movement and physical commitment is totally mesmerising.

After pulling oneself out of this hypnotic state, you realise you have been watching a strategy of human behaviour – it might not be an activity we can all relate to but it is a physical cycle which references many repeat patterns and rituals, along with endurance.

Ritualistic behaviour is human nature. From early morning routines to routes to work, we all have specific patterns to which we adhere. On a larger and more generalised scale, patterns of repetition can be identified for instance in war and all the monstrosities affiliated with it, regurgitated generation after generation. Brisley uses his own body to play out these ideas in a variety of metaphorical ways.

10 Days shows Brisley during the Christmas period sitting at a table having food brought to him, eaten by others, then scraped on to the table to decay. The documentary style and narrative issued by Brisley engages the viewer. We are consulted through film and walked through ten days of changes in appetite, decaying food and, again, physical endurance.

Tim Head. Courtesy the artist

This piece references the hunger strikes during the 70s of those in Armagh Jail, and indeed is pertinent in a different way today, highlighting how in our society food is taken for granted in terms of both what we eat and in what we throw away. Brisley also submits a new work, Psychocleaning, which is open to suggestions of ethnic cleansing among other things.

This, unlike the other works, is an object-driven installation where we see random unidentifiable objects placed among what looks like faeces – a medium well associated with Brisley.

When looking at Head’s work among that of Brisley’s and Atkinson’s, there are different statements being made. The digital age is brought into the spotlight particularly in terms of how much we now rely on technology for decisions and how the execution of those decisions can be uncontrollable. In Head’s work, a computer randomly selects colours and places them on the screen in tiny digital dots. This has then been printed out onto huge screens.

If nothing else, this cold clinical touch of technology highlights how warm and emotive original art is, whether it is painting or performance, thus the thread of statement continues through the exhibition. What is it to be an artist? What is it to be a human and how are we losing what ever ‘it’ is - through commercial enterprise, warfare and technology.

For more information see www.fieldgategallery.com.