Tom Burrows: Introduction to Dialectical Totems

The exhibition of the work of artist Tom Burrows represents a period of creation from 1983 to 1989. We take great pleasure that the City of Cambridge and the Library & Gallery are able to welcome back a native son and that we have the opportunity, during the months of April and May, to reflect on his stimulating and provocative art.

The closing of one decade and the beginning of another is an arbitrary point in an ongoing continuum. We think of decades, however, when we consider the quality of individual and social growth. We speak of our 'teens and our twenties in the same way we speak of the fifties and the sixties. For Tom Burrows it may be only coincidental that the turn of the decade arrived at the same time as he was in the process of closing a chapter on the image making process that had carried him through the 1980's. That this work represents some of the significant developments in the art of the '80s, however, there is no doubt.

Burrows' formative art education took place during the 1960's. As a student of Anthony Caro he was excellently placed to learn the formal requirements of modern sculpture: abstract, basic forms, which were defined by the combined phenomena of material quality, placement in space and proportional relation to the viewer. For many artists, the rigid formal canon

of modern art appeared to be a reductionist dead end during the 1970's. While some artists retreated to more traditional techniques and art ideologies, others pursued a renewed anti-art in the tradition of European Dada of the 1920's. Tom Burrows' work stands squarely in the latter camp. Word puns that form titles and appear on the surfaces of some of the pieces are only the tip of an iceberg of visual puns (the foot of the bed . . . get it?). Political, art historical and personal references abound for those knowing or willing to dig for them as Peter Culley's essay amply demonstrates. But the references in the end, don't add up, they only pile up. In the end each of the pieces retain an unsettling humour and a thoroughly enigmatic presence. The solution to the riddle is the riddle itself.

Mary Misner and Gordon Hatt

April 1990