John Wood and Paul Harrison have been working together for more than 30 years. Although they acknowledge that they – and their works – are now ‘a bit middle-aged’, their output still demonstrates a remarkable freshness. This is due in part to the conversational directness and frank tone of their works. It is also a factor of the stripped-back shapes and reduced colour palettes they use. Beyond this, the artists have a knack of whittling down philosophical and conceptual conceits and conundrums to the barest minimum, so that they speak for themselves without any need for explanation. What others might devote paragraphs, nay chapters to, Wood and Harrison deliver in a single paradoxical art situation: a painted text piece that firmly contradicts itself; a pair of shelves hung face-to-face and so close they cancel out each other’s utility; a tilted painting that is undeniably both crooked and straight. What you see is what you get, but you do have to look.

Drawing has always been a cornerstone of Wood and Harrison’s artistic practice. Their drawings exist as works on paper in their own right and as preparatory sketches for sculptures and videos. Conversely, their videos and slide projections also operate like ‘3-d working drawings’, animating ideas and phrases in wry spliced narratives that are at once ambivalent and inescapable. To date they have created tens of thousands of drawings and more than 65 video works. It is their none too morbid ambition to make 100 videos before they die. In text pieces they reinvent drawing as writing, using words and phrases to sketch lines, forms and figures of meaning.

Although there are distinct currents running through Wood and Harrison’s work (physical and linguistic humour, acceptance and transcendence of boredom or despair, etc.) each work also operates according to its own logic, which is dependent on its colour, materials, and position within a series. The logical consistency of a piece is also frequently reliant on performed physical interactions between the two artists, their dynamic filmed or drawn within the works. As a consequence of this constructed logic, each work develops a sort of existential resilience that, far from being solipsistic, stands up to scrutiny from different perspectives.

What I am trying to say, without wanting to spell it out, is that there is a potentially universal validity to these works. They capture experiences shared across diverse individuals and communities: the uncanny feeling of witnessing repetition without apparent cause; the joyful audacity of foiling expectations; the bitter irony of being condemned to separateness in our togetherness; the absurdity of language employed to designate what sits plainly before us. The way, sometimes, we are just sheep staring at each other for entertainment. These things don’t need explaining, just showing.

Wood and Harrison’s games with language and gesture often combine deftness and dumbness in such a skilful way that you might not notice what is really at stake. We can discuss whether a neon sign spelling out the word ‘WALL’ hung on the wall is an inane tautology, but while we do that the world continues to convulse around other, more sinister language games. Their works use the innate rhythmic and performative properties of language: ‘A Large Piece of Paper on my Wall’ is both a work on paper and a statement asserting its own physicality and even, perhaps, its positionality. Exploiting the slippage of categories that can occur when spoken language is transcribed into text, the artists invite us to play as part of our training for reading the real world. Is it just a white painting or ‘A Quiet Word’? It’s both, providing you can see things from more than one point of view.

In the 2020 video ‘Demo Tape’, Wood and Harrison hold up a series of placards to create a chain of words and phrases that take the viewer’s mind into areas both personal and political. After leading us down a joined-up chain of associations, they abruptly change course, redirecting meaning in unexpected ways. They add ‘TESTER’ to ‘PRO’, and later preface ‘ANT WORK ETHIC’ with ‘PROTEST’ in an unbroken sequence of puns, permutations and poetry. It’s a bumpy guessing game for the viewer, in which anticipation of the next word is either rewarded or disappointed. Such games are fun, but this one has added potency: there is a sense in which it is operative in addition to being entertaining.

As an exhibition, Everything Is Black And White distils the murky realms of greyness into the stark extremes of tone and meaning. Clarity is an elusive virtue. It is also, ironically, a precondition for irony: without the acuteness of opposites, it would not cut. The work entitled ‘Here it is in Black and White’, which is rendered entirely in white paint, whispers the words “here it is in black and white”, a statement about something that ought to be clear, but which clearly contradicts itself.

The fact that Wood and Harrison’s work regularly elicits laughter may be its most subversive aspect. Laughter in the contemporary art space violates the etiquette and cool power of modern art, which prefers hushed awe to guffaws. A sculpture consisting of a fire extinguisher coated in white oil paint hangs unobtrusive in the corner, available for misting out any unsolicited hysterics. The truth is that we don’t have to know anything special to laugh at this exhibition of contemporary art. Nothing needs to be explained for the work to do its work on us, to transform us in the most imperceptible of ways before we return to our daily lives.

— Ellen Mara De Wachter

John Wood (b.1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b.1966, Wolverhampton) make things that move and things that don’t, things that are flat and things that are not, things that are mildly amusing and things that are definitely not. They make works that form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you. Even though you don’t need them to. This attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of the everyday, started in 1993 after they met at art college.

Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Bored’, Gallery Cristin Tierney, New York (2021); ‘Words Made of Atoms’, Gallery von Bartha, S-chanf, Switzerland (2020); ‘As logical as possible’, Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Fresh Window’, MUDAM, Luxemburg (2019); ‘On Struggling to remain present when you want to disappear’, OCAT Museum, Shanghai, China (2018); ‘[Re]construct’, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2017).
Selected solo museum shows: CAMH, Houston, USA; Mori Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Frist Centre, Nashville, USA; Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; Chateau de Rochechouart, France; Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary.

Selected group shows:  ‘Art Now’, Lightbox, Tate Britain, London; ‘Slapstick’ Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany; ‘Private Utopia’ British Council Touring, Japan; ‘Super 8’, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; ‘Open Space’, ICC, Tokyo, Japan; ‘Mardin Bienali, Mardin, Turkey; ‘Made in Britain’, British Council Touring, China; ‘Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, England; ‘You’ll never know’, Hayward Gallery Touring, UK; ‘New British Video’, MoMA, New York, USA.

Selected screenings: MoMA, Queens, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; De Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands; National Theatre, London.

Selected collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Arts Council Collection; British Council Collection; Centre Pompidou Collection; FNAC, France; Government Art Collection; Kadist Foundation, Paris; Ludwig Collection, Aachen.