Forget the prosaic archaeology that is Picasso at the National. Mythologies is surely the most ambitious shebang in London for a long time. The Haunch of Venison has got new digs. Very swanky new digs indeed. Round the back of the Royal Academy has always felt like strange aristo-ghetto. Where Hackney replicates the warfare of Bloods and Crips, this postcode is a no-man’s-land of Blue-Bloods and Quentin Crisps. The threshold of Cork Street leaves students feeling unwelcome, and les petits bourgoises a little dishonest, however well dressed they thought they were when they left the house.
Yet as of this week, the courageous few that traipse north of Piccadilly, either thoroughly invigorated by the Academy and craving more, or too poor to get in, will find a free admission palace where everything is for sale, yet nothing is as trite as another bloody Cork Streety, Barry Flanagan rabbit.
This luxurious space was once the Museum Of Mankind, and HoV is now seeking to reference this inheritance by mounting a show that explores ethnography, anthropology and creation myths. Not in a British Museum way, exactly. This is a big league statement show, featuring the likes of Damien Hirst, Tony Cragg, Keith Tyson, Mat Collishaw, Bill Viola, Sophie Calle, Noble and Webster, as well as a lot of artists that still have a lot to gain from this kind of exposure. There are over forty artists shown here, and yet it all feels strangely coherent. Sure, many artists have produced work especially for the theme, but I also get the feeling that these issues have been gestating in the post-YBA universe anyway, maybe as a form of cultural rebirth, since our hitherto irony-saturated art culture was surely beckoning death.
Ever since Damien Hirst’s For The Love Of God became yet another wave in his ceaseless domination of the art world, selling for £50m in 2007, the art sages have wondered about the differences between shark and skull. While the shark felt, even at the time, like a smartarse playing the system, the skull instantly has archaeological associations. As though it had been found in a crypt in an Incan temple, or indeed might one day serve as a relic of our own civilisation. An artist that gets someone to pickle a shark for him has become a millionaire who commissions diamond-setters to cover a human skull: an altogether vainer act, worthy of anthropo-historical documentation. Hirst, for me, is less artist now, and more emperor or shaman.
The skull isn’t here, but an enormous pair of photo-portraits of it, one straight on, the other in profile, lacquered and then studded to recreate the diamond effect (but presumably without the ludicrous expense) hangs in the upper galleries. They stand out as being iconic, but they are by no means in a league of their own here. And it’s also a factor that, as you’ve never been here before, you have no idea how big the place is. It’s big. And grand. Saatchi must be pretty jealous now. He may have lush grounds, big spaces, good light, and he’s very close to a Pizza Express, but the new HoV has class, design, flow, shape, and grandeur galore. You take this show in phases, with phase one being No Idea How Grand It Is, and phase two being Still No Idea…
In phase one, I saw Jennifer Wen-Ma’s work for the first time in my life. She is showing two works, one a video and the other a stone sculpture with projection. The sculpture is a beaut. It just sits there on its plinth, a raised open hand, with smoke spewing fom a slit on front of it, and a line-drawn staff-wielding Monkey King doing smoke-distorted cartwheels in the palm, projected from above in a vivid electric blue. As the first thing I saw here, this boded well. It’s international. It’s vibrant, vital and defiant. Leaping into the air and kicking my heels, I marched on to investigate, holding my imaginary martial weapon aloft.
Behold, a palace of treats: A John Isaacs cuboid of human flesh, tiled or bricked in at the edges, heart limply sat atop, reimagines the essence of our earthly form. It’s as though God were preparing man for the kiln. A fantastic 2-sided video projection by Carlos Amorales provides a narrative of human creation, rent by flocks of birds, expectant mothers in silhouette with uncertain postures. Are they lost? Are they intimidating? Are they resigned to futile fate? Bloody womanflesh is inhabited by tree-dwelling monkeys. And all in a palette of black, white and blood, with a dozen undulating wave-like lines in algorithmic tandem as a backdrop, or matrix. It’s called Useless Wonder. Probably best leave it at that, then, Carlos?
Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s new piece is one of their best. Wall Of Shame is a set of wall hangings, flat white-painted brass figures of lust and frustration, dangling a couple of inches from the wall. As ever, it’s the floor-based light projector that converts these little doodahs into flickering gremlins of your id and ego. They are toy-like, yet also figments of the real, as though you found a voodoo mini-me in a Kinder Egg. Shadow-puppetry pops up again later in a Christian Boltanski piece. A whole room has been given over to a work of his from 1986. Tiny figures laughingly dance an evil Rite of Spring, or Wicker Man jig, their shadows cast hugely across a room the viewer cannot fully enter, but merely view from a high walkway, while strolling between two rather more ordinary galleries.
At some point around now, you’ll be grasping that the space is big, and there’s a lot of show. Not all of it is first rate. There are a few pieces that I found weak or unremarkable. But I’d still say it’s one of the best shows I have seen in a long time, and certainly a very important mount. Curatorially, it is very bold, with the vast majority of the work compellingly aligned to the same magnetic north, and some skilful use of the space and corners to bring out the best in the work and create surprise. Finding the Boltanski is an obvious such treat. In a later gallery, a luscious gasp of awe meets the corner you turn into Ed & Nancy Kienholz’s huge collection of crucifixes. These ornaments have been made at once more and less real. More real by the addition of doll arms and painted facial portraits of Jesus set in place, less real by the ridiculous number of them. The connection between viewer and events on Calvary are stretched here, as the viewer looks into Christ’s eyes, and then into another Christ’s eyes. And another, and another, until utter hateful banality wins out.
Another sharp intake of breath accompanies Jannis Kounellis’s installation. Dark overcoats arranged neatly on the floor in a rectangle that fills a large room, bordered by an orderly single-file of shoes. All these garments look a bit tired or trampy, yet they are laid out very neatly. The gallery blurb says that the work speaks of warmth and protection. I couldn’t help but imagine a Heaven’s Gate cult of movie-extra vagrants calmly vacating their worldly garments and hitting the great flaming trashcan in the sky.
The standout pieces would have to be Keith Tyson’s The Block series (which is a fairly comprehensive story of the Universe and Life, flippant yet poetic: whimsical, but with a hint of sinister intent on the part of the forces of Creation), Hyungkoo Lee’s gorgeous museum skeletons of Sylvester and Tweety, some cleverly cute and creepy taxidermy works by Polly Morgan, Tony Cragg’s giant multi-profiled bust, and I should also mention Jennifer Wen Ma’s other piece. This video shows another of her linear animations projected on smoke puffs, this time over Tiananmen Square. Like much Chinese art, it disarms with its earnestness.
The biggest disappointment is that it’s only running to April 25th. Though I should be opposed to a show with overt capitalism coursing through its veins, I rate this show as a healthier and worthier successor to Sensation certainly than Apocalypse was. It should be a summer blockbuster, not a round-the-back showcase for those in the know. There should be billboards involved. The HoV call it “one of the most ambitious group exhibitions ever mounted in London by a private gallery”. Truly. Hoi Polloi could overwhelm this free venue, and would do little to serve the ultimate need of a gallery which is now the contemporary wing of Christie’s; sales. It will be interesting to see what, if any, commercial upshot will be, coming at a time when you can hardly shift Banksies with two-for-one vouchers. In a perfect world, they would have sold tickets at £6, slapped a few posters across the Jubilee Line, and baited the Daily Mail with a shock-piece. But this is a show that’s about being good, hoping to shift a few units, and is thus unprepared for a huge audience. I only hope that when a contemporary art summer blockbuster finally does come along, it’s as good as this.
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