Marcel Duchamp remains a fascinating and inspirational
figure to contemporary artists for the daring way in which he turns the world
upside down. Nothing was sacred to him and all established systems open to
deconstruction. He plays with language and meaning more deftly than most
thinkers. It’s even possible to regard him as a philosopher working in concrete
form rather than a more conventional artist who happens to manipulate
materials. So it’s a rather inspired idea of Blain/ Southern to curate a show,
‘Tell Me Who You Haunt’ in Hanover Square exhibiting Duchamp alongside artists
engaging with his concept of the ‘readymade’, a pre-existing object translated
into art through the artist’s selection and translation through the act of
exhibiting it as an ‘artwork’. This strategy is now well established and
prevalent today. We take the idea on trust and it remains a founding principle
of conceptual art. But the exhibition is also exploring how reading a
‘readymade’ may change depending on how it is shown and its relationship to
other objects. Therefore a ‘readymade’ is always in flux and never fixed.
Paradoxically, Duchamp’s use of a men’s Urinal to exhibit a
work he called ‘Fountain’ at the New York Armoury show in 1917 directly
challenged the claims made for an artist’s creative vision and technical
mastery. The gesture carried satirical and destabilising assault on traditional
values of art, but arguably the power of the act and its audacity has arguably
transferred more power and authority to the artist and galleries. However, this
exhibition illustrates that today’s ‘readymade’ has become a worn down from
conceptual overexposure. Much of the contemporary work exhibited alongside
historic Duchamp objects like ‘50cc d’Air de Paris’ do not possess the same
potent ambivalence and ironic thrust. Jimmie Durham’s ‘Heaven and Earth shall
Pass Away’ has a theatrical impact as a boulder pins an anonymous jacket to the
floor. While it is made from two found objects it’s not strictly a ‘readymade’
and neither is Jota Castro’s Leche y Ceniza comprising an infant’s playpen with
a mirrored floor. It is an engaging work touching on memory and the troubling
sight of seeing your own face returned to as a psychoanalytic jolt.
Perhaps only Nasan Tur’s ‘Fortuna’, a roulette ball from a
casino placed archly in a vitrine on a pedestal carries that uncanny presence
we expect from a successful ‘readymade’. As you leave, David Batchelor’s balls
of monochromatic electrical cord straddle the gap between being pure ‘readymades’
and sculptures that are re-fashioned from pre-existing objects.
Down the road at Hauser and Wirth, Savile Row, Sterling Ruby
is enjoying a solo show where he is exhibiting a range of theatrical sculptures
employing poured urethane that creates a glossy, gloopy effect over large scale
forms that resemble visceral organs and sinews but also double as mechanistic
objects like ramped up cars, built in a domestic garage. These enormous,
horizontal fleshy things are also inverted vertically so that they resemble
stalagmites found in caves from solidifying minerals. There’s a feel of
‘goth-pop’ here, a range of cultural references heightened by a touch of the monstrous.
An entire room is indeed dedicated to a vampiric theme when Ruby hangs several
soft sculptures form the wall indicating open mouths with two prominent fangs
dripping blood. Acting like absurd stags’ heads lined up as trophies of hunting
prowess, these sagging mouths quoted from contemporary culture possess an
absurd ‘attitude’. Sewing has emasculated Dracula.
Less successful are the large collages of waistbands ripped
from branded underwear and fragments of blankets. Following an American
tradition of quilting, these large pictorial assemblages imitate the scale of
‘important’ painting but feel lifeless and inconsequential. Even worse are the
flattened boxes used to create the urethane sculptures, which are then framed
alongside banal labels taken from beer and pharmaceutical packing. These works
pay homage to the tradition of Picasso’s Cubist assemblages or Kurt Schwitters’
Merz constructions, but again feel limp and lazy.
After seeing Ruby’s erratic and dizzying assault on
contemporary American culture, Alexander Calder’s mobiles, stabiles and
standing mobiles are guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.
Each Calder sculpture, whether floating in free space
suspended from the ceiling or sitting deftly in miniature on a plinth and
stored in a re-conditioned cigar box, finds an intrinsic co-ordination of
colour, line, materials and flow. Their slow, bobbing search for equilibrium is
entrancing and satisfying, lulling you into an art-induced reverie.
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