Robert Rauschenberg’s Jammers at Gagosian, Britannia Street

What a pleasure it was to see an exhibition in King’s Cross that reinvigorates one’s love of art with its potential to engage the senses. Such a show has just finished at Gagosian on Britannia Street with a collection of Rauschenberg’s Jammers available to see as a group of sculptures largely made with textiles arising out of his travels and changes in his life. Taking inspiration from Jammer sailing boats in Florida and fabrics that he saw on a residency in India during the 1970s, the artist shifted direction from his seminal combine paintings.

These soft, draping sails dispense with Rauschenberg’s early humour found in the rather jaundiced and ironic assemblages. The Jammers feel more invested with romance and an unrestrained enthusiasm. As such, they seem more instinctual and less premeditated. The hand seems to determine the outcome rather than a thought process. Stemming out of twin activities of sailing and weaving, the works assume an autonomous quality without wholly dispensing with reference to practical activities. Essentially, these works possess an open inquisitive quality that invites you to simply enjoy their material richness of texture, colour, overlay, crease and rhythmic threading. By turns limp and taut, the Jammers cross the line between image and object. In assembling materials together such as muslin, silk, rattan, tin cans and mud, Rauschenberg begins to construct assemblages of spare rigour and aesthetic power. On a cold, bleak day in central London these Jammers hint at tradewinds and spice, of tropical life determined by movements of the sun and wind and colours derived from earth and plants.

Perhaps the most seductive piece shown in London was a ‘jammer’ made from moulded grass and mud that carried its organic origins in the scent gently emitting  from the object propped against the gallery wall like a talisman. It hinted at farmyard dung but Rauschenberg has crafted this unidentified base material into a sculpture redolent of the elements of earth, wind and water that retain their raw presence in the gallery despite the sculptor’s intervention.

Gerard Byrne's A State of Neutral Pleasure at the Whitechapel Gallery

Is it possible to resuscitate the past and re-animate it? Gerard Byrne is interested in trying to restage forgotten conversations. He makes films with actors speaking the text of old seminars and debates retrieved from publications. The film ‘ A Man and a Woman Make Love’ reproduces a conversation among male Surrealists in 1928 which was first printed within their magazine, ‘The Surrealist Revolution.’ Examining erotic and romantic love between the sexes, these avant-garde dandies veer from analytic curiosity to the smutty humour of a team changing room. All through this re-enactment Byrne signals the contrived quality of the project. Sometimes the camera shot pulls back to reveal a live audience in a Dublin television studio. The actors stray into the declamatory ‘hammyness’ of amateur dramatics.

I saw this film at Documenta last year staged within the modest space of a post-war hotel ballroom erected in bomb-damaged Kassel, temporarily hosting Byrne’s enquiry about how a contemporary audience might consider Surrealist theatrics. In Whitechapel Gallery’s largest room, the film lost some of its incongruous peculiarity. What connects the film to Byrne’s other work in the show is the artist’s consistent curiosity about attitudes and belief across recent history.

Upstairs, two further films revive old discussions from Playboy magazine addressing sexuality in the 1970s and futurology from 1964 leaving the viewer to witness the ironic predictions of an era long since overtaken by the anticpated future. Accompanying these Playboy re-enactments is an advertorial conversation between Frank Sinatra and the Chairman of Chrysler published in National Geographic Magazine in 1980 and presented on the page as if it were a piece of genuine journalism. We see the new car carrying the hopes of a company struggling to survive. But Byrne shifts the action within the film to a grimy New Jersey diner. The aspiration symbolised by the luxury car bearing the latest technology is undermined by the industrial decay lying around the performers. Hopes for the future may well become ambushed by crisis.

These films suggest an easy flow of ideas but the audience is ‘alienated’ in a Brechtian sense by their artificiality and awkwardness. Byrne revels in the tension prompted by these debates re-offered to us across time. Perhaps the most successful works in the exhibition are the three black and white photographs of newsstands in Paris evoking the timeless romance of the city’s characteristic street design. Each work is titled according to the gap between the moment they are hung and the date when they are photographed. So the images are permanently in flux and are intrinsically unstable. They suggest a timeless and unchanging Paris sought by the tourist and the hunter of ‘authenticity’ but these photographs will continue to slip away into the past on each occasion they reappear on exhibition.

Byrne is one of the most intellectual artists working today and demonstrates a genuine enthusiasm for opening up a dialogue with history. We accompany him on these disorientating excavations. As we watch these films, the content recedes further away from us across an unbridgeable chasm and yet we can’t quite pull away.

Michelangelo Pistoletto at Luxembourg & Dayan

Historical conflict dominates this exhibition of work made in the 1960s and 1970s when Italy faced the emergence of armed guerrilla groups. Michelangelo Pistoletto does not offer ideological positions but instead examines intense passions and high stakes during Italy’s  ‘Years of Lead’. Employing his now familiar polished steel panels, the artist incorporates and implicates the viewer within the charged image. As the context recedes into the past, he establishes a dramatic irony whereby the viewer is increasingly removed in time but remains formally present on the surface of the picture and thus our place within a social discourse becomes explicit.

‘La Gabbia’ (The Cage) 1965 survives as four panels from of a former New York exhibition of 29 pieces on which prison bars are screen-printed. Paradoxically the viewer assumes the role of both prisoner and guard. The eyes gazing at this sequence of bars are reflected back from beyond the grill. As our physical presence animates the work, ‘La Gabbia’ entraps us in ideological and political debate.

Within ‘Comizio’ (Rally) 1965, a newspaper photograph of two middle- aged men in suits standing amidst an invisible crowd is copied onto tissue paper and applied to the polished stainless steel. Such scenes would have been familiar to Pistoletto within his native Turin. One figure holds a red flag crowned with a star and such iconic images of revolutionary agitation will undoubtedly resonate for an older generation. This appropriation describes historic struggles for a better world but which now seem anachronistic and tainted with failure. Moving from the street to domestic life, a found armchair (Mobili Capovolti) is turned upside down and a mirror is attached to the underside. What is usually hidden is violently exposed to scrutiny while the viewer is pulled into something that can no longer be narrated at a distance.

Mounted on a modest scale, this show revisits Pistoletto’s incisive use of contemporary motifs to analyze social crisis. Today these loaded artworks have become oddly estranged from their origins as they sit within a commercial setting offering the promise of lucrative investment.

Light Show at the Hayward Gallery

The cavernous size of the Hayward in ‘brutalist’ concrete lends itself well to that aqueous quality of light that fills a room and becomes tangible when it hits the wall. This is an exhibition that aligns the material of art to its temporary site. The exhibition includes phemenological encounters of the body and eye with more conceptual processes that open up consideration of light’s status and functionality.

This primary conversation is established in the first room where we meet Leo Villareal’s ‘Cylinder II’, suspended, multiple strips displaying tiny lights that turn on and off to produce kinetic patterns without any coherence. Villareal’s cylinder resembles high street design by employing computer-generated erratic sequencing. Here technology meets desire. It suggests an ironic comment on an ever-growing demand for ‘conversation pieces’ within the home, but his real interest lies in using software to operate a machine within the gallery. Adjacent is David Batchelor’s ‘Magic Hour’, a series of recycled lighting boxes taken from shops and takeouts. Now the original illuminated message or logo is obscured through reversal. We only see the boxes from the rear with all their electrical anatomy exposed while the deep colours are only visible as projections on the wall only hinting at their origins as commercial messages. These colours are vulgar and clash together on the wall, redolent of city streets and the familiar assault on the eye as shops compete for our pound. Villareal’s  achromatic  moving points of light is too strategic by comparison, lost in a world of immense technical potential but without much purpose. Perhaps this dystopian quality is the focus but the artist seems too dazzled by his own technical effects.

The exhibition is staged as a series of progressions so a work may sit architecturally within a space and is sometimes placed within their own environments. Anthony McCall’s cinematic beam of light is projected within its own darkness and Doug Wheeler’s Plexigas square is described as an object by neon lights which articulate the edges. One stands rather reverentially in the blue haze waiting for enlightenment much like standing before Rothko’s solemn canvases. Wheeler’s work has a pleasing, ambient glow but can’t match Cerith Wyn Evan’s ‘S=u=p=e=r=s=t=r=u=c=t=u=r=e’, a series of three floor to ceiling columns that throb with heat and light. They have an organic quality, illuminating slowly and tentatively so that you can almost hear them breathe. When the light arrives it’s reminiscent of the warm sun touching your face on a winter’s day.

A show exploring light wouldn’t be complete without the inclusion of James Turrell or Dan Flavin and the curators suitably oblige. Turrell’s ‘Wedgework V’ delivers all of his stagecraft in setting up illusions modelled out of projected light. Having navigated a pitch-black corridor you enter a ‘viewing’ space with seating from which you observe a ‘sensing’ space consisting of a triangular void given a sense of solidity. We are conscious of witnessing an illusion that toys with certainties of perception. As such is an actionless event and still-life, both ambient and objectified. This is a sensory experience that washes us in sanguinary and sticky colours of the spectrum associated with procreation and regeneration, orange, scarlett and magenta. Returned to the womb, you are encouraged to linger for fifteen minutes. There’s an invigorating rush like having a multivitamin shot. However, this headiness passes and what one remembers is something very aestheticized and fleeting.  Turrell’s work feels rather controlling as if we are being compelled to connect with the sublime. Having emerged from the strict parameters of the installation, the visitor leaves with a queasy feeling that the piece is not entirely honest.

By contrast, Flavin’s work is directly engaging. Such formal simplicity sits in sharp contrast with Turrell’s box of tricks. Using fluorescent tubes, Flavin made sculpture that openly addresses the ambivalence of light. Without investing them with a predetermined mystery, the naturally enigmatic quality of light is explicit. The austere integrity of minimalism is fully embodied in these works made from bare light strips. ‘The Nominal Three’ makes reference to ‘Ockhams Razor’, a philosophical principle of succinctness. Flavin creates a work that expresses the room’s dimensions and becomes an articulation of physical and numerical facts. The curators have included ‘Untitled (To the Innovator of Wheeling Peachblow)’ which blends colours emanating from a square sitting in the corner in order to match the peachy hue of an historic American glassware.

In the rest of the exhibition, there is a range of variable work that examines the properties of light including a lyrical quest in by Katie Paterson’s ‘Lightbulb to Simulate Moonlight’ to capture lifetime’s supply of moonlight. Jenny Holzer quotes a series of disturbing national security documents at dizzying speed across several stacked monitors and Fischli and Weiss satirise our fascination with light by using a small torch to project patterns from a mass produced plastic cup against the wall. Olafur Eliasson transforms water fountains into ice crystals with strobe lights, which has a ‘Willy Wonka’ charm, but quickly becomes impossible to watch and echoes the weakness of many pieces in the show that dabble in the theatricality of light.

While it might have been advisable to offer more structure to the exhibition by putting the work in historic context, some of the artworks manage to express those elusive but beguiling qualities of light human beings have always looked for in the natural world and managed to reproduce for practical, spiritual and cultural ends.

Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman at Hauser and Wirth

‘Oomamaboomba’ is a suitably unpronounceable title for an enigmatic work, displayed amongst other reliefs made by Eva Hesse on a 1965 German residency. Sung aloud, it might sound like a musical riff. These works at Hauser and Wirth on Savile Row anticipate her mature and final sculptural pieces, famously described in a 1966 exhibition as a manifestation of a particular feminine ‘eccentric abstraction’ by contrast with the muscular materiality of sculptors like Judd and Andre. But this particular title has a suitably musical quality for a work that employs hot pink and lime shapes arranging themselves into snug fitting forms within the rectangular frame. ‘Oomamaboomba’ has a jazzy quality made from textured papier mache from which a curving handle of twisting twine rises into real space, from rose-pink at the foot to a wider indigo at the top edge of the picture. Another relief, ‘H + H’ juxtaposes acidic-lemon against fleshy-pink thereby evoking  a sixties’ trippy, hedonism. Across it flows a meandering wire, establishing tensions between shape, texture and colour.

Lent a room within a texile factory for her residency, Hesse plunders the found scraps of metal and cord to create fantastical reveries that possess a satisfying self-sufficiency. Alongside the reliefs are a series of drawings that combine the organic and artificial. Random parts seem to cohere into logical and complex interdependence. These line drawings of ink  on paper then evolve into more elaborate coloured paintings that resemble nesting boxes or compartments of imaginary objects which settle into co-existence. Description verges on the edge of elusive abstraction. All we see with certainty are linear forms of unidentifiable objects that appear to serve some functional purpose akin to the guts of a machine. But it’s the reliefs that seduce the visitor with their dichotomies of sharp and soft, line and form, flat colour and stripe, surface and relief. While demonstrating a self-possession that is difficult to penetrate, these hybrid painting/ sculptures suggest a pleasing reverie in which Hesse takes these materials on an adventure away from specific narrative, time or place.

Bruce Nauman exhibits his restless teasing in a companion show called ‘Mindfuck’ using neon, architectural installation, and a revolving carousel all dating back to the seventies and eighties. There are distinctive contrasts of subject and style with Hesse’s practice and it is inspired programming to place their two shows side by side. Nauman’s provocations test one’s mental boundaries. Apparent certainties of physical space and language are cunningly subverted. A giant box within the gallery operates as the facsimile of a room but in order to enter the visitor must walk down a tapering corridor until the body touches the walls and then is forced to twist ninety degrees to squeeze into a large space. Here you are steeped in green light resembling vomited bile or pickling acid. Skin becomes the colour of morbid ill health and hints at gangrenous decay. And so Nauman introduces a phenomenological encounter of the body with extremity. Instead of detached contemplation, you are immersed in an oppressive environment.

But there is little relief outside. A giant illuminated board neurotically states over fifty simple phrases that resemble ‘affirmations’: ‘I was a good boy, you were a good boy, we were good boys’. These statements momentarily light up and then disappear. On this giant neon, circuit board, we chart the randomness of life accompanied by an search for structure. The result is to feel anxiously out of step, persistently behind the flow of lit words that jump around. Cast as passive readers, we are trying to keep up with a language that begins to collapse under the weight of repetition. To watch this fluorescent messaging is to experience a symbolic nervous breakdown. Our grip on language as a thread of civilized communication is broken.

Finally, as if our bearings haven’t been disrupted enough, Nauman presents the visitor with a carnival of cruelty. A carousel of animal bodies and severed heads is held up by wire in a never-ending circular procession. It is almost unbearable to watch as their feet drag on the floor to make deep, scratched incisions, evoking hellish torture. With relief we read a darkly comic word piece above, ‘run from fear, fun from rear’, alluding to instincts of escape and sexuality. In Nauman’s world, letters merely need to slip out of place and we tumble into rhyming incoherence.