So, what about the latest exhibition at the Hayward then?
Last year I spent one of my free days during my summer job visiting the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. It was, as you can read, a mixed success, but boating on the roof of an art gallery was certainly one of the more unusual things I’ve ever done in the name of art.
This years exhibition is called Walking in my Mind and consists of installations by ten artists. The opening hall contains works by two artists – Keith Tyson * and Yoshitomo Nara. Nara’s recreation of his artist’s studio in a wooden hut in the middle of the space echoes to some extent Do Ho Su’s replica of his New York apartment in last years show but is rather less interesting. It’s OK but totally overshadowed by Keith Tyson’s installation of Locked Out of Eden and Studio Wall Drawings which, to my mind, was worth the price admission on its own. The two side walls of the gallery are covered with small works any one of which rewards examination on both artistic and linguistic levels while the end wall is a single piece in which a complex painting is the backdrop to a copy of the periodic table, each section of which references the element concerned with smaller details. We spent far too long looking at it and trying to work out the detail.
Up the stairs there is Thomas Hirschorn’s Cavemanman which is a series of caves built of masking tape and with various things stuck to the walls. I tried to like it but it left me cold. It seemed a rather too mundane interpretation of the theme. There was also the first section of the Charles Avery installation which, according to the accompanying book is part of “a philosophical allegory, an encyclopaedic investigation of an imaginary island and everything it contains – it’s people, customs, mythology, topography, human history and natural history”.
Well I liked the individual components well enough but even now that I now what it’s supposed to be about I’m damned if I can see that level of coherence in it.
Perhaps the piece that would raise the hackles of modern-art haters most was Jason Rhoades The Creation Myth, which at first sight is no more than a room full of random junk and pages of hard core pornography. There is quite a lot more structure to it than that as the “map” to it makes clear. The junk is deliberately assembled in sections that represent various aspects of human creativity. I didn’t like it much because, well because the bottom line is that no matter how much I know on an intellectual level that it is deliberately assembled, it still looks like a pile of junk.
Bo Christian Larsson’s work winds up the stairwell and consists of quite a lot of small, quirky items – statues of owls, boots with viciously sharp knives sticking out of the tops, more boots made of chains, a small “forest of trees with gold paper on one side. Again they are individually moderately interesting but there is an overarching “concept” involving several characters who apparently created a “performance without spectators; part spontaneous happening and part private ritual” in an empty gallery. Seems to be a rather pompously self-indulgent concept to me.
By far the must unpleasant installation was another one of these high concept pieces, Mark Manders’ Self Portrait as a Building. This is another (possibly specious) attempt by an artist to tie everything he does together under an umbrella concept. And it works even less well than either Avery or Larsson’s pieces. It gets the “unpleasant” label for the subject matter of the individual pieces. A dead and bisected cat does nothing for me.
Yayoi Kusama probably does nothing for most people but I quite liked it. She has an obsession with polka dots and the installation starts in a room full of large red and white polka dot balloons, moves out onto an astroturf covered terrace with similarly decorated pieces and spills down onto the embankment of the thames where the trees have been wrapped in matching polka dots.
Two pieces remain. Chiaru Shiota has created a tunnel out of lengths of intricately arranged knotted black string which circles round a group of giant white dresses like the worlds most complicated spiders web and immediately produces the comment “this must have take days to set up” from almost everyone.
And finally there is the hypnotic Extremities from Pipilotti Rist (an anagram of “Pilot, I strip it”). This is a video and audio installation in which the display creates a disorienting 3D effect by projecting through curtain onto a wall. Balls of light form a background against which disembodied body parts float around while a poem is repeated endlessly over a mesmerising soundtrack. Quite beautiful inits way.
And that’s it, out into the gift shop to try to find a poster of Keith Tyson’s work. (There isn’t one but there is a lot of it illustrated in the exhibition’s official book.
All in all a little less successful than last year but certainly one that I enjoyed in part. The Hayward’s annual summer exhibitions are turning into a bit of a mandatory visit for me. I wonder what next years will be.
Last year I spent one of my free days during my summer job visiting the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. It was, as you can read, a mixed success, but boating on the roof of an art gallery was certainly one of the more unusual things I’ve ever done in the name of art.
This years exhibition is called Walking in my Mind and consists of installations by ten artists. The opening hall contains works by two artists – Keith Tyson * and Yoshitomo Nara. Nara’s recreation of his artist’s studio in a wooden hut in the middle of the space echoes to some extent Do Ho Su’s replica of his New York apartment in last years show but is rather less interesting. It’s OK but totally overshadowed by Keith Tyson’s installation of Locked Out of Eden and Studio Wall Drawings which, to my mind, was worth the price admission on its own. The two side walls of the gallery are covered with small works any one of which rewards examination on both artistic and linguistic levels while the end wall is a single piece in which a complex painting is the backdrop to a copy of the periodic table, each section of which references the element concerned with smaller details. We spent far too long looking at it and trying to work out the detail.
Up the stairs there is Thomas Hirschorn’s Cavemanman which is a series of caves built of masking tape and with various things stuck to the walls. I tried to like it but it left me cold. It seemed a rather too mundane interpretation of the theme. There was also the first section of the Charles Avery installation which, according to the accompanying book is part of “a philosophical allegory, an encyclopaedic investigation of an imaginary island and everything it contains – it’s people, customs, mythology, topography, human history and natural history”.
Well I liked the individual components well enough but even now that I now what it’s supposed to be about I’m damned if I can see that level of coherence in it.
Perhaps the piece that would raise the hackles of modern-art haters most was Jason Rhoades The Creation Myth, which at first sight is no more than a room full of random junk and pages of hard core pornography. There is quite a lot more structure to it than that as the “map” to it makes clear. The junk is deliberately assembled in sections that represent various aspects of human creativity. I didn’t like it much because, well because the bottom line is that no matter how much I know on an intellectual level that it is deliberately assembled, it still looks like a pile of junk.
Bo Christian Larsson’s work winds up the stairwell and consists of quite a lot of small, quirky items – statues of owls, boots with viciously sharp knives sticking out of the tops, more boots made of chains, a small “forest of trees with gold paper on one side. Again they are individually moderately interesting but there is an overarching “concept” involving several characters who apparently created a “performance without spectators; part spontaneous happening and part private ritual” in an empty gallery. Seems to be a rather pompously self-indulgent concept to me.
By far the must unpleasant installation was another one of these high concept pieces, Mark Manders’ Self Portrait as a Building. This is another (possibly specious) attempt by an artist to tie everything he does together under an umbrella concept. And it works even less well than either Avery or Larsson’s pieces. It gets the “unpleasant” label for the subject matter of the individual pieces. A dead and bisected cat does nothing for me.
Yayoi Kusama probably does nothing for most people but I quite liked it. She has an obsession with polka dots and the installation starts in a room full of large red and white polka dot balloons, moves out onto an astroturf covered terrace with similarly decorated pieces and spills down onto the embankment of the thames where the trees have been wrapped in matching polka dots.
Two pieces remain. Chiaru Shiota has created a tunnel out of lengths of intricately arranged knotted black string which circles round a group of giant white dresses like the worlds most complicated spiders web and immediately produces the comment “this must have take days to set up” from almost everyone.
And finally there is the hypnotic Extremities from Pipilotti Rist (an anagram of “Pilot, I strip it”). This is a video and audio installation in which the display creates a disorienting 3D effect by projecting through curtain onto a wall. Balls of light form a background against which disembodied body parts float around while a poem is repeated endlessly over a mesmerising soundtrack. Quite beautiful inits way.
And that’s it, out into the gift shop to try to find a poster of Keith Tyson’s work. (There isn’t one but there is a lot of it illustrated in the exhibition’s official book.
All in all a little less successful than last year but certainly one that I enjoyed in part. The Hayward’s annual summer exhibitions are turning into a bit of a mandatory visit for me. I wonder what next years will be.
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