The journey from London to Newcastle is as comfortable as you might expect. Sure enough, the GNER service out of King’s Cross is delayed just outside London; Railtrack have done their best again, which is not very good and, with a passenger taken ill before Peterborough, we’re looking forward to arriving in Newcastle half an hour late. Boredom and vague hunger conspire to make me feel peckish, so I wander off to the Standard Class buffet car to find something to eat. Like most snack counters, the buffet car has illuminated pictures of the food on offer. These are always optimistic; Glowing juicy burgers served with crisp fries and dripping ketchup for the lunchtime traveller, steaming creamy cups of coffee and plump croissants for the breakfast commuter crowd, succulent chicken tikka with fluffy pilau rice for those in search of an evening meal. The cheerful illuminated pictures tell you what you want to hear, and show you what you want to see. And of course, they are lies.

Already a bit exhausted by the huge cup of cappuccino I had when I got on, I choose what seems the least pretentious; a nice ham and cheese toasted sandwich. Surely the picture can’t be that far off from the end product; the lightly toasted white sliced bread revealing the rounded corner of tasty ham slice, the melting borders of the sun-yellow cheddar oozing seductively about it. You can almost smell the combined pleasures of high-fat indulgence. And then it arrives; a limp stack of sweaty steaming surfaces, in a cellophane bag, speed-heated by microwave, it doesn’t taste that bad, but I realise to my surprise that, if such a thing were possible, it tastes like an imitation of a toasted sandwich.

The discrepancy between image and object is a familiar experience in contemporary society, where the production of images far outstrips the production of things. Images are fine on their own, just as we can appreciate the qualities of objects as and when we encounter them, but the distance between an object, its image, and back again is often a long-distance and halting journey, subject to unexpected delays and diversions.

Those mechanisms of delay and diversion are of course the core business of the image industry, and it is no coincidence that they also form the object of attention for much of the theory addressed to the experience of contemporary culture. The recognition that real experience doesn’t live up to the images that purport to represent it, or that the world of images maliciously distorts the reality it pretends to represent, is our most immediate and practical expression of our ongoing encounter with this problem. Inevitably, we are most sensitive to those moments when the disjuncture can be most tangibly felt, and our dissatisfaction most easily registered. Like my toasted sandwich and its illuminated photographic double, the tangible, close-at-hand world of things around us form the fiercest battle-ground between the ordered idealised meaning of the image, and the concrete experience of real life, especially if the two happen to be in close proximity.

However the distance between the meaning of an image and its confirmation in experience is in most instances greater than in such a local example. And it is as this distance widens that the business of manipulating signs comes into its own. The application of linguistic and semiotic theory to the study of mass culture has done much to make us sensitive to these operations, by examining representations not as unproblematic channels to the things they represent, but as complex formations of signs mobilised to communicate carefully determined commercial objectives, social norms or political ideologies. In those instances where it becomes harder to verify the reality that is supposedly represented, we find ourselves confronted with the self-evident surface of the meaning themselves, and our responses tend to be informed by the limits they offer. So for example, our reactions to world events tend to be informed by assumptions and prejudices that may have little to do with the reality of life thousands of miles away. The reaction to September 11th as one instance, quickly went far beyond the events themselves to become an ongoing reflection on our culture’s anxieties about the perceived threat of Islam to the western world. The perceived surface of things can often be identical to the reality of their substance. Yet that surface can also distort out perception of that substance and, at its extremes, replace it.

It’s this question of surface, which is put to the test in Richard Woods and Richard Forster’s installation at Waygood. Woods and Forster’s collaboration is remarkable, as it brings the question of sign and surface into dialogue with a discussion of sculptural form with an intelligence and humour that is rare in current British sculpture, and yet reflects a number of its preoccupations. There’s recently been something of a revival of interest in the look of late formalist and minimalist sculpture in the UK. This revival contains a number of differing motives; at the simplest level, it’s easy to detect an obvious nostalgia for post-war modernity common in mass culture over the past decade.

But more specific to the current context of artistic production, this return to the material and quasi-abstract dimensions of sculpture, signal an attempt to reassert the particularity and persistence of the tradition of sculptural practice in the face of a dominant sign-led culture of images. British sculpture in the ‘nineties’, one might remember, was dominated by work that functioned as a vehicle for a clearly legible signifying image, easily photographed and publicised, transferring quickly from the gallery to the pages of the mass media. One has only to think of the work of ‘young British artists’ such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn and Gavin Turk to realise that the emphasis was on the creation of the objects that bore their meanings lightly and effectively, even when those meanings were reflexive, critical or obscure. An investigation into the materials, processes and internal significance of the sculptural object, as such, was rarely an issue. By contrast the recent revival of a kind of retro-formalism has focused on the idiosyncratic presence of materials and their possible meanings in spatial combination. This new formalism is however far less interested in the programmatic agenda of its distant predecessor; the specificity of form and truth to materials is less an item of faith than an itch to be scratched, and the old-fashioned ideas of geometric form, and self-referential abstraction are playfully undermined. The ‘look’ of formalist sculpture has at one level become an art-historical image, to be wheeled out and toyed with at leisure.

But the re-use of formalism this time isn’t the same as the cynical simulation of modernist appearances that one finds in early post-modern sculpture. Then, the question was to reveal the conventional nature of what modernism supposed to be a self-explaining purification of aesthetic form. Now, it is significant that the current return to questions of sculptural form revives the idea of specificity and material intransigence in response to a critical orthodoxy that pays attention to the legibility of the surface of signs, rather than the physical reality and presence of the object. However the separation between the two cannot in practice so easily be made. Sculpture, like all forms of art, can be reduced to a set of conventional forms and habits, and has no particular immunity to the pull of stylistic repetition. As a body through which representation can be achieved, and as the subject of cultural and aesthetic attention, the sculptural object is already bound up in a web of references and signs that make any pretence of aesthetic purity and autonomy - the keystone of the old formalist agenda - a continuing lost cause. It is because of this that the style of late formalism can be retrieved as style, yet the irony here is that it is now done for the purpose of connoting the aesthetic agenda of formalism, and not simply a general sense of affection for the utopian appearances of a bygone modernist age, though this no doubt play a part.

What is interesting here is that a style or set of signs, is retrieved with some degree of allegiance to past attitudes regarding the autonomy and purity of form. But more significantly, the retrieval of the conventional image of formalism has the effect of provoking a reengagement with the unresolved problems of its agenda. What this engenders is a rediscovery of material, spatial composition, abstraction and connotation, that whilst rejecting a simple return to formalism’s reductive closure of these aspects, nevertheless exploits them as tools to set against an equally reductive image and sign-led interrogation of the artwork-as-surface.

Woods and Forster’s installation at Waygood takes this dichotomy to its extremes, and at one level serves as a corrective to the manner in which the retro-formalist revival oscillates without resolution between the desire for an autonomy of form and the attraction towards representation and reference. Forster’s use of wood-effect Formica, and Wood’s cartoon reduction of ‘wood-effect’ in his MDF flooring sections, immediately set the scene for an elegantly comic discussion on the surface and substance not only sculpture, but of representation and authenticity in culture more generally.

Woods’ flooring, with its lurid yellow and black wood grain design, seems to take issue with the urban culture of surfaces, from the metal tread-plate cladding of your local Pret a Manger, to the great wastes of IKEA flooring being fitted to living rooms and kitchens throughout the country, to the traditional redbrick pretence that conceals the concrete and steel shell of countless out-of-town supermarkets. Truth to materials, that great modernist defence against the falsity and dissimulation of signifying surfaces, of the disjunction between signifier and signified, is nowhere to be seen. The field of its defeat is memorialised across the expanse of Woods’ floor, and yet in its pointed revelation of its own less-than-adequate attempt at simulation, it offers the chance that the battle may not yet be over.

It’s across this field that Richard Forster makes his counter-attack. Central to the Waygoods’ gallery space and to the artists’ installation are three supporting pillars; around each Forster has arranged three sets of Formica slabs, each in different states of collapse about the central pillar. Again, the events of September 11th serve as an unwanted surplus to their implicit narrative of rise or collapse; rather than act as discrete individual works, Forster’s columns make the point that although specific elements not only signify through formal issues such as spatial relation (an old formalist preoccupation), they are also caught up in wider, more unpredictable networks of association and reference.

Around this central axis, Forster orchestrates a series of works that feed in and out of the central space, articulating the installation’s pivotal concern. His geometric monumental Formica forms, absurd in their inadequacy (they look like marble, but No Surprise! You can pick them up), failed representations of real objects, find themselves depicted by a large Formica tableau, whose job of representation is itself so limited that it is already metamorphosing back into geometric Formica abstraction. Opposite, the linguistic sign ‘BLUE MONOCHROME’, cut out in black acrylic, replaces the ‘real thing’, whilst two anthropomorphs complete the group.

What should one make of the incursion of these two human figures into this otherwise abstract terrain of surfaces and solids? One, a stick man drawn in white fluorescent lighting, lies on the floor, as if having fallen from the fluorescent gallows described on the wall above him. The other, an ‘Action Man’, sits waist-deep atop a mound of glittering stars, impotently regarding his own reflection in a vanity mirror. Perhaps they recall with ambiguous nostalgia the male heroes of late modernism (Pollock? Flavin?), only to dismiss their futile isolation and introspection and the austere and hopeless autonomy of their art. But beyond this, they might also hint at the troubled business of human experience, in which our capacity to act is circumscribed by the surface of signs through which we have to try and apprehend the real, in a culture where fantasy and falsity combine. Forster and Woods perform a farce in which the slick surfaces of cultural consumption slide away to reveal, scandalously, the post-industrial world of abandoned spaces that Waygood itself now occupies. Regeneration through culture seems here Formica-thin.

And yet the point for sculpture, as with art everywhere, is that it can sometimes offer an experience of things that falls outside the surface of signs that normally cohere them. In the case of recent sculpture, it may call for the return of a sensibility that seeks to put the formal particularity of things in opposition to their subordination to already established messages, already coded signs. It won’t be the arid old formalism again, but an attitude that acknowledges the special nature of the experience of art, and of the contingent and irreducible nature of lived experience, even as it looks outward to the world of images and signs beyond.

Copyright JJ Charlesworth