One of the recurring sensations I've had while looking at new art over the last five years has been a bittersweet feeling—as pleasurable as frustrating—of recognising something familiar without quite being able to put my finger on what it reminds me of. The work of the 35-year-old Scottish artist Charles Avery is a perfect example. Since 2004, he's been developing a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk of an imaginary island in drawings, objects, texts, models and creative taxidermy. His project to date might make you think of a 19th-century ethnographic museum, Gulliver's Travels, a John Buchan novel, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Alice in Wonderland, 1940s Readers Digest illustrations, a fustily-written 1950s tour guide, the Natural History Museum in the 1970s, the wildlife of Australia or Madagascar, and maybe even Narnia.
Avery is one of the new gilded youths of contemporary art. His exhibition is showing at the Parasol Unit in London until 8th November, before opening at the Edinburgh Museum of Modern Art at the end of the month and then going on to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 2009. There's a growing weight of serious (that is, curatorial not billionaire) art-world muscle propelling him forward. "The Islanders: An Introduction" is an ambitious, syncretic project, consisting of both an exhibition and a book, whose mixed-media storytelling marks out a new kind of art close to film and literature. But it is not without faults—no one is going to option the film rights just yet.
Avery has made an entire fantasy world whose every detail is produced by philosophical ideas: a kind of surrealist project. It's a step beyond Giorgio De Chirico's incongruous scenography of classical motifs, shadows, boulevards and geometric forms, into an entire biosphere of concepts. Avery's philosophy circles around the notion of no fixed meanings. He is obsessed with unresolvable dualities. One of the island's gods is an animal composed of the bodies of two dogs (pictured, above), without heads and joined at the neck, who spend all day fighting each other. The "cosmology of the island" includes "the fifth postulate" that "a perfect dichotomy of opinion on all propositions that have only two possible outcomes is a fundamental characteristic of the island." There is a forest of trees which are so identical that once you enter it you lose all your bearings and can never escape. (These are painted intriguingly like one of Paul Nash's scenes of first world war battlefields—trees with stumps of branches and no leaves, many of which are fallen over.) Even doubt is doubted—"The islanders are necessarily perfectly divided on all matters of doubt," Avery writes, "Objectivity is seen as weak-minded and not philosophical."
I'm not a big fan of such reductive epistemology. In some of the drawings, people smoke very fat cigarettes, like reefers, which made me wonder if the project wasn't produced by a philosophy undergraduate who smoked too much dope. Still, as long as art looks good, it doesn't have to make too much philosophical sense, and Avery's objects are beautiful. There's an evocative globe on an old brass stand, painted black with the landmass of the island and its surrounding archipelago in white. An imaginary animal, a "ridable," has been crafted with some deft hybrid taxidermy—it's like a llama with half its hair shaved off and large eagle-like claws for feet. And the Palace of the Gulls is spectacular. It's a hexagonal cubicle about the size of a Portaloo. The outside is decorated with reliefs of seagulls, while inside a floor of equilateral triangles in primary colours is reflected to infinity in mirrored walls. This temple-like structure, designed to give anyone who steps inside the experience of eternity, was built as part of a cult around an old man who received a revelation from a seagull. Avery records the revelation in a poem—"The wall is the horizon of everything… It is between you and that which is not you /It is forever before you aye you are blinded by its ubiquity."
Elaborate, yes. Comprehensible, not so sure. Luckily, Avery has a get-out clause. The man who heard the seagull went mad, and the poem attempts to distil something coherent from his rantings. Avery's explanations are bizarre and convoluted, but that may be the point—creating a fantasy world that satirises the esotericism hidden in Britain's remoter urban communities.
