The long sweep of the Duveen Galleries has been taken over again, although nothing in it has quite the visual impact of the Jim Lambie/David Batchelor floor and tower combination from 2003's, 'Days Like These'. Instead, the North galleries have been turned in to a 'plaza' space for a series of live performances, beginning on the 1 April with Linder's 'The Working Class Goes to Paradise 2000-06' and including a puppet extravaganza by Lali Chetwynd and interventions and performances by Liam Gillick, Pablo Bronstein and Daria Martin, among others.
At the Southern end of the galleries are Rebecca Warren's unfired clay sculptures, crude representations of female bodies reminiscent of Lucio Fontana's lumpy ceramic pieces and full of energy and visual references to Degas and Rodin. 'Fido', for example, marries ruffled ballerina skirts with a prominent bare breast in an accumulation of clumped clay, while 'Come, Helga', with its huge platform shoes from which legs emerge halfway up the calves, tweaks a more modern vision of female sexuality. 'Hostess', meanwhile, towers over the viewer like a piece of religious statuary.
Warren's grotesque figures contrast with the classical lines of three columns by Ian Hamilton Finlay, inscribed with poems that impress the mutability of form on the reader. They allude to Classical myth and ships, two of Finlay's abiding themes. 'Nymph/Ship' reads 'Ships/Nymph/Nymph/Ships/
Bark/Barque/Barque/Bark'. The reference is to Book X of the Aeneid by Virgil, where, as Aeneas' fleet steers to battle in Italy, so in Dryden's translation:
A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood,
Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood;
But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep,
As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep.
The way in which sea and wood, and wood and boat are all infused with the same spirit is made manifest by typically economical parallelism and wordplay. The smooth stone columns themselves support this metamorphosis, invoking both trees and masts. Nearby, both thematically and physically, is Cerith Wyn Evans' neon palindrome, a circular Latin inscription hung from the ceiling of the Octagon.
Yet another artist working with text is Liam Gillick, a Triennial veteran. This year he is showing pieces relating to his ongoing project 'Construcción de Uno', a fictional story about a group of former factory workers who return to their closed factory and 'improvise new modes of production using redundant factory signage', according to the gallery label. None of this is discernable from the hanging signs that constitute the work, as Gillick has condensed the font until the letters overlap and become almost illegible, instead forming a screen of serifs, lines and holes, a form of sculptural calligraphy cut with precision machinery. It will be interesting to see how his performance, scheduled for the 22 April, relates to this project and his wider interest in bureaucracy and the world of work.
The curators have attempted to find an overriding theme for the third Triennial, and have tentatively come up with the idea that many of the artists focus on the 'reusing and recasting of cultural materials'.1 This perhaps explains why some of the artists selected are exhibiting work that reaches directly back into the 1970s. Marc Camille Chaimowicz's installation piece 'Here and There ...' (1976-2006) uses three slide projectors and an arrangement of Marcel Breuer armchairs in a shadowy room to create an environment suffused with the past. Images spanning 30 years, slides of the artist in his home, a projected portrait of himself as a young man staring in the mirror and the shadows cast by a vase of wilting flowers and the viewers themselves, all overlap, to create an experience analogous to almost-remembering: the superimposed images remain hermetic and unfamiliar, but recurring shapes and themes seem recognisable.
Another exhibit that evokes a very particular time is Cosey Fanni Tutti's 'Magazine Actions' (1973-80). This reprises the theme of her notorious 'Prostitution'exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1976, in which she attempted to show pages from the pornographic magazines in which she was depicted, having entered the sex industry, as she writes in one of the works displayed, 'to create (and purchase) my own image for use as collage material in my work and to gain firsthand experience of being a genuine active participant in the genre'.2
We might tell ourselves that society has changed a lot in 30 years and, certainly, the Tate has not felt the need to censor the work as the ICA did in 1976, but increasingly liberal attitudes towards sex and censorship seem to have done little to alter the issues that still make pornography contentious. These, it seems to me, are not questions of obscenity but rather of power, exploitation and an individual's control over their own body and its representation. This is why 'Magazine Actions' retains its power as an experiment in reclaiming what has been sold (a woman's control over her own image) and in using re-contextualisation to overcome fictions created for the purpose of straight male arousal. If there is a question about the work's inclusion it is not over its contemporary relevance, but rather its age, in a show entitled 'New British Art'.
Lucy McKenzie's 'Untitled' (2005) shares this concern for the way in which context frames the reading of sexually explicit material. Her painting depicts an incongruous situation, with a young woman eating alone in a restaurant, immediately below a large cartoon of a masturbating woman. The fictional narrative this evokes is a labyrinthine story of changing contexts: an erotic cartoon has been found, appropriated and placed in a gallery; the artwork has presumably been bought by a restaurant and hung there; and the imagined juxtaposition thus created has been painted by McKenzie and brought back into the gallery.
Elsewhere, Eva Rothschild's 'Knock Knock' is beautifully simple: a series of branching steel tubes plaited over with leather and hung like a bare inverted tree, the colour of the leather shading from red to black, and the free tassels barely scraping the gallery floor. Its constituent materials of leather and steel, and the relative simplicity of its construction, link it to the history of industry and craft; its sculptural exploration of space, meanwhile, offsets its totemic associations.
John Stezaker also does unexpected things with minimal materials; in his case, found photographic images. Three pieces from the 'Reparations' series use photos of the aftermath of the storm that devastated South-east England in 1987, adjusting their angle so that the trees and pylons depicted appear miraculously upright - the only problem being that the rest of the world is tipped at a crazy angle. The 'City' series takes small shots of densely built-up urban areas, and inverts them. For the 'Mask' series of collages, Stezaker has superimposed landscape shots - of romantic chasms, waterfalls and caverns - over the faces of film stars from the 1950s. His simple, honed techniques produce arresting results.
Angela Bulloch's 'Disenchanted Forest x 1001' occupies a room of its own: like much of her work, it relies on the mood-altering qualities of light, but also features a kilometre of string tied between a raised floor and suspended ceiling, 1,001 metal discs used by Berlin's environmental agency to number trees, and an ear-splitting electronic soundscape courtesy of Florian Hecker. The overall effect is harsh and discordant - a departure from the gentle minimalism of works such as her 'RGB' spheres, and the glowing 'pixel box' structures whose shifting colours derive from film scenes such as Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Michaelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Bulloch's 2005 exhibition at Modern Art Oxford was installed in such a way that these last two pieces ('Fundamental Discord' and 'Z-Point') overlapped and interfered; here, at least the installation has a room to itself, a space in which to create its own environment.
Also worth mentioning is Daria Martin's film 'Wintergarden'; a colourful interpretation of the Persephone myth relocated to the iconic Modernist structure of the De La Warr Pavilion. There are some particularly lovely moments as the Persephone character scales the interior of the pavilion's spiral staircase in an abseil harness, the only sounds the clink of karabiner on steel handrail and her feet slipping on concrete.
Many of the painters at the Triennial have had their work hung together in one corner of the gallery. Of them, Michael Fullerton's two portraits stand out as politically punchy takes on Gainsborough. They owe much to the latter's technique, but subvert the political subtext of 18th-century portraiture by depicting not members of the land-owning classes but Stuart Christie and Beatrice Lyall, an anarchist and a survivor of domestic violence respectively.
Constraints of space mean that no more than a handful of the artists exhibiting at the Triennial can be mentioned here. Not all of the works are especially memorable, and there were points at which I wondered if the Triennial's expansion, from 21 artists in 2000, has not stretched it too far. As Ruf herself says, a Triennial 'cannot provide the same detached, retrospective review of trends and directions in contemporary art as, say, Documenta and the British Art Show, which take place every five years'.3 It's worth persevering, though, to experience the highlights, including Tino Sehgal's sung intervention 'This is Propaganda', which echoes beautifully through one of the galleries.
James Wilkes
References
1. Ruf B. Revised Narrations. In: Ruf B, Wallis C (eds). Tate Triennial 2006: New British Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2006: 10-13.
2. Cosey Fanni Tutti. Confessions (extract) 1975-2003.
3. Ruf B. In: Op cit.
