Mick Hartley

The latest exhibition, The Shape of Things to Come, is fun if you don't take it too seriously. A show devoted entirely to new sculpture in perhaps London's most congenial gallery space; free entry with just £1 for an exhibition guide….you can't really go too far wrong. 

In Gallery 1 Kris Martin has these megalith-like boulders:

Hmm. Quite effective as an installation, but surely a little light on the creative side as these are "found objects", and nature's done all the work. 

Then you see the tiny crosses on top:

Which neatly changes your perception and your sense of scale. And, at minimal effort, turns them into art. Perhaps. The catalogue blurb here is an object lesson in how to extract the maximum significance from a mildly diverting effect:

A small paper cross crowning each peak indicates that they have all been conquered, and by using a charged symbol whose real-life application connotes a range of meanings – of man conquering the limits of awe-inspiring nature, of a civilisation conquering another civilisation, of death conquering all – Martin sets in motion a stark thinking process. 

Within the artist’s visual pun there’s also perhaps a metaphor for the importance of process in art-making itself. “The top is nice when you haven't reached it,” Martin has said. “But once you get [there], the potential is gone. Dreams are what keep people going.” 

Martin’s conceptual installation, repeating the same conceit eight times over, is a comment both on the futility of human ambition – what is left once seemingly unreachable summits have been conquered? – and also on the oppressive and absurd spread of consensual, hegemonic belief. 

Sticking a tiny cross on top of a rock becomes a critique of "consensual, hegemonic belief"! The things you learn in art college, eh?

Keeping with the guide – which, let's face it, supplies much of the fun – I also very much enjoyed the write-up of Peter Buggenhout's deeply unappealing work:

A pile of junk on a table, you may think. And you'd be right. But listen:

At first glance, Peter Buggenhout’s large fuzzy masses, seemingly covered in thick layers of dust, look like readymade objects, rubble found in the aftermath of a building site, an archaeological dig, or at the scene of a cataclysm – an earthquake, explosion or other force of violent destruction (natural disasters or terrorist attacks?)….

In fact, this and Buggenhout’s other works are incredibly realistic renderings, carefully made in the artist’s studio but suggesting unidentifiable ruins. In confusing viewers, Buggenhout’s sculpture raises questions around the subjects artists choose as their models and the strong influence of projection on the way art is perceived.

The objects here intimate the theme of the ‘ruin’ that surfaces through art history, but in its more direct and subversive mood. These works convey an organic, blurred relationship between representation and abstraction that breaks down perceived assumptions about the way objects are classified and understood.

So…these look like pieces of junk, but it turns out that it's us viewers who are fooled, because in fact these are "incredibly realistic renderings, carefully made in the artist’s studio" – with the express intention of looking like pieces of junk. Ha! They're meant to be crap. And because they're meant to be crap, they're….not crap! They're art! See? 

Is this, perhaps, the equivalent of Marcel Duchamp actually making that urinal in his studio, instead of buying it as a ready-made?

I don't know. It's all making my brain hurt. 

Moving swiftly on… 

David Altmejd's The Healers is the kind of bad-taste piece done with a wit that Tracey Emin could only dream of: an extraordinary exercise in polymorphous perversity, with grotesque figures doing all manner of obscene things to one another. Not one for all the family. I'll spare you that, but here's The New North:

Folkert de Jong is perhaps the most bizarre of the lot. The Dance, for instance:

Five vaguely Rembrandt-ish grotesques:

Or The Shooting Lesson:

I have no idea why anyone would make these things – and the information that de Jong's work deals with "the ghosts of colonialism and imperialism" frankly detracts rather than adds to the pleasure for me – but I'd have to say I was amazed at the sheer absurd imaginative effort that went into them. Art for art's sake, I suppose, though we're a long long way from the Aesthetic Movement.

And then, Berlinde de Bruyckere and Marthe:

Deeply strange and unsettling. I have close-ups, but…no, maybe not.

Few of these sculptures could exist outside of an art gallery. They couldn't be displayed in a sculpture park or in the street. Nor, surely, in a private residence, except perhaps as a conversation piece…if you had a very big house, and were very short of conversation. They're really little more than visual jeux d'esprits.  Or, as Brian Sewell would have it (and what a grumpy review!), self-indulgent child's play. Does that matter? I don't know.  

Fun, though.

[BBC slide show here]