The shadows looming on the wall, like Boltanski’s shadow puppets, draw me into the back room of the gallery.  As I round the corner of the dimly lit room, I am greeted by a colourful flock of knitted toys flying out towards me.  They seem to be escaping from the bottom drawer of a chest that lurches to one side, reminiscent of Robert Gober’s tilted playpen.  The knitted toys form a motley crew, some quite new, and others very patched, worn and grubby.  We are in Paula Chambers’ ‘Bottom Drawer’ at South Square Gallery at Thornton, near Bradford. 

The installation is intended to reference both teenage pregnancy and the tradition of dowries.  Traditionally the bottom drawer is a place for a woman to store her clothes, linen, etc. in preparation for marriage.  Paula Chambers’ bottom drawer is beautifully lined and padded.  The lurching chest suggests a violent incident has occurred to tilt the status quo; the emerging flock of toys suggest a childhood rapidly escaping from its padded closet.  The drawer can also stand in for the soft warmth of the maternal body.  As with all of Chambers’ work, this piece has many layers of meaning. 

Back out in the main gallery space, there are a collection of works, all of which make some comment on maternity.  A pair of marble gloves joined with a rusting chain is anything but warm and comforting.  Next to them stand a pair of toddler-sized wellington boots, cast in concrete.  The title – ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ – illustrates the hopelessly inappropriate nature of the material.  The trials of motherhood are graphically illustrated by baby clothes painstakingly knitted in stinging nettle yarn.  The title ‘For the Love of God’ prompts me to think of hair shirts and other self-sacrificing rituals associated with Christian worship.  Another Christian reference is provided by a set of nine commemorative sipper cups, carefully crafted from porcelain (another hopelessly inappropriate material).  They stand solemnly in a row, their fronts marked with black crusade-type crosses, suggesting more of a memorial than commemoration.  For me, they evoke war cemeteries with their multiplicity of identical white tombstones.  The fact that these are toddlers’ sipping cups suggests loss of children connected in some way to religion – perhaps the multiple deaths of girls in those religions where boys are prized and girls expensive.

If you are in the area do drop in, as this is a thought provoking exhibition with a good dash of wit, and meticulously presented.  Apart from anything else, there is also a vegetarian café, which serves luscious salads and reassuringly large slabs of home-made quiche.  ‘Bottom Drawer’ is on at South Square Gallery from 2 – 31 May 2009.

‘The Messengers‘ is a retrospective exhibition covering four decades of work by the French artist Annette Messager.  It is also apparently the first major exhibition of her work in the UK. Messager works with simple materials and found objects, using the kind of stuff that most of us would have around in our homes.  The exhibition guide describes her work as questioning ‘the tacit rules of art and life: challenging the roles assigned to women; subverting identity; using unorthodox materials … taking as her sources popular and folk art, the rituals of daily living, mythology and fairytales’.

On entering the first room, I was faced with a huge batlike creature painted onto the wall, its face made up of distorted photographs of human features (and not all facial features either).  This creature was surrounded by other smaller creatures, also collages of photographic features and paint (‘Chimaeras’).  The effect was both comic and disturbing, which I found to be a common feature of the subsequent works.  In a corner of the same room was a collection of drawings entitled ‘The horrifying adventures of Annette Messager, Trickster’ which depicted various disturbing and often lurid situations encountered by a mythical adventuress.  These are entirely a work of fiction by the artist, as she says in the exhibition guide – “I never recount my real life; these are never my true stories.”

An intriguing work for me was ‘Children with their eyes scratched out’, in which she had framed several found photographs of babies and children, upon which she had scribbled out their eyes with pen.  Responding to the conventional cultural expectation that all women should want to be mothers, she collected these images to form her own imaginary album of ‘her child’.  The act of violently scratching out their eyes she describes as making them more ‘truly’ her child.  Arranged in circles around these images are smaller drawings made by the artist purporting to be drawings by this imaginary child, who likes to draw ‘Mummy’ as she goes about her daily life.  For me, this piece questioned an important and often unquestioned assumption (all women want children) in a way that is playful, whilst also disturbing and disrupting ideas of conventional ‘real life’.

In ‘My Vows’, one of the pieces which explains why the entire exhibition took 2 months to hang, at least a hundred framed fragments of body parts hang suspended from strings so that the overlapped fragments form a circle.  Close to, trying to make sense of these fragments to form a whole is an impossible and fruitless project, illustrating for me the the way identities are equally fragmented and often irreconcilable.  Yet from a distance, these fragments cohere into a perfect circle suspended in space.  The effect is striking, and illustrates for me the artist’s brilliance in displaying her work to fit the exhibition space.  This attention to detail and positioning the work within the space is consistently managed throughout the show, so that you walk away knowing that you have just seen exemplary work from a top-class artist.  Full marks also to the team at the Hayward – this exhibition must have taken a lot of work, and it does the gallery credit.

The show also contains some of her later work, which is on a much larger scale, filling rooms with theatrical installations such as the one in the Liverpool Biennial.  Filling one room, large cartoon-like replicas of body organs constructed from colourful parachute fabric inflate and deflate in a choreographed dance, to the sound of whirring fans and rustling fabric.  The effect was comic but also a bit creepy.  There must be a word for ‘comic macabre’, and whatever that word is, Messager does it well and consistently.  In another room, ‘Casino’ invites the viewer to sit down on a bench (very welcome, as I’d been on my feet a while by then) and watch as a sea of scarlet silk rolls through a door  into the room like a vibrant sea.   Lulled by the waves, you then become aware of lighted objects hidden beneath the ‘sea’, like an enchanted underwater town.  Periodically, an illuminated clock comes into view behind the red silk, glimpsed through the door at the back of the room, creating for me a sense of timelessness rather than a reminder of the demands of time.  The overall effect was hypnotic.

There was so much more that I could describe, but I’m hoping that if you are reading this and can get to London, you might be inspired to visit.  It is well worth the time, and I’d suggest taking half a day to do it justice.  It’s on at the Hayward until 25th May 2009.

Picture from the BBC

 Altermodern showing at the Tate Britain until 26th April 2009 asks the question ‘What comes after post-modernism’?  Which is why I went to see it, despite being exhausted after visiting the thoroughly wonderful Annette Messager exhibition (of which more later).

There was enough there to keep me awake – even to get me excited.  The show is curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, who coined the term ‘Altermodern’ to describe how artists are responding to the globalised world in which we live.   He describes the exhibition as an ongoing dialogue, inviting the artists to respond to the question of what comes after post-modernism, and to the Altermodern manifesto .

Highlights for me included Charles Avery, who showed an installation of drawings positioned around the ‘Aleph Null Head’ sculpture shown above.  These are from his ongoing project ‘The Islanders’, in which he is creating an imaginary island through drawings, texts and objects, meticulously documenting  the islands topography, inhabitants, vegetation and creatures.  One beautiful drawing, confidently executed in pencil, ink and gouache, depicts strange dog/horse like creatures with bird legs who are in the process of catching and devouring seagulls.

In Loris Greaud’s installation ‘Tremors where forever (frequency of an image, white edit)’, a room is filled with white boxes on the floor, each with wires trailing into a perspex ‘control’ box in the centre of the room, where tiny lights flash on and off indicating some sort of activity.  As you walk into the room, you realise that parts of the floor vibrate beneath your feet, then the tremors stop again.  Intrigued, I turned to the page in the brochure, to find that the installation represents a 30 minute recording of the artist’s own brain activity.  The recorded brainwaves have been converted into electrical frequencies which are broadcast to the vibrators.  Thus as a viewer, I am physically experiencing the thoughts of the artist. 

Simon Starling’s ‘Three White Desks’ recreates an alleged story of Francis Bacon designing a desk for an Australian Writer.  The artist asks three cabinet makers to recreate the desk purely from a photograph, and the resulting desks are on display perched on top of the crates in which they arrived at the Tate gallery.  There is also a group of photographs ‘documenting the evidence’ of the original desk.    The brochure explains that Starling takes examples of early modernist design and ‘puts them through a process of transformation, relocation or manipulation, drawing out convoluted narratives about their fabrication and the network of relationships they embody.’  For me, it seemed like an ironic look at the way we construct ‘facts’ out of the fragmented stories of history, and try to recreate them as solid ‘truths’ together with all the paraphenalia of mock-ups, models, photographs and diagrams.  I wasn’t (and am still not) even sure that the original story about Bacon was true.  Even if it is, why pick on that story?  I liked it in the way it reminded me to question everything, take nothing at face value, and ask ‘why does the narrator/recreator want to convince us of this story?’

The most exciting video installation for me (and there was a lot of video in the exhibition) was Lindsay Seers’ ‘Extramission 6 (Black Maria), shown in a wooden house-type construction.  Whilst I didn’t see all of it (I do wish they would display running times on video installations), I saw enough to become entranced by the story of a woman who wanted to become a camera, and then a slide projector, told using the documentary strategy of ‘interviewing’ the friends and family of the afflicted woman, interspersed with clips of her performing her function as camera and then slide projector.  This loses a lot in translation, and really has to be viewed.

Whilst this wasn’t my favourite exhibition of the weekend trip, it did provide food for thought, and a glimpse of how artists are responding to the world beyond ‘post-modernism’.

Jamie Shovlin 'Family Album' installation view

For Mythologies, the Haunch of Venison have taken over a fantastic building at 6 Burlington Gardens in London.  This used to be the Museum of Mankind, housing the British Museum’s ethnographic collections from 1970 to 1998.  Responding to the history of the building, Mythologies turns the whole building into a kind of Cabinet of Curiosities, using the paraphanelia of the ethnographic museum to re-present and reflect on the stories of our lives.  Wandering around the exhibition, I was encouraged to peek into spaces, gasp at detail, wonder at the inexplicable and make up my own stories.

Highlights for me included Jamie Shovlin’s ‘Family Album’, a dark room containing a wooden crate in one corner; in another corner an overturned vintage Pampers box with junk spilling out, lit up by a clicking slide projector; and some shelves above head-hight with more vintage ‘junk’ piled around a box.  I wandered around them in the dim light, wondering what stories the various items could tell.  Then I noticed light shining out from a slit at the bottom of the Pampers box, and I wondered whether I could see in.  The picture is what I saw – a tiny, jumbled bedroom, looking as if someone had just left the room.  It reminded me of Tracey Emin’s bed in its dishevelledness, and in my feelings of intruding.  On further exploration, I found lights shining out of tiny corners in the crate and in the box on the shelf, both of which revealled tiny interiors, dimly lit and dreamlike, or more like something out of a horror movie (an impression further enhanced by fragments of a movie soundtrack playing in the background, and by the click of the slide projector).  It was entrancing, but also disturbing.

Also entrancing, but in a different way, was Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s ‘Wall of Shame’.  On a plain white wall, etched white brass cut-out shapes like paper cut-outs hung suspended from nickel wires.  A light projector on the floor, slightly to the side of the hangings, cast a light across the wall, casting shadows.  The effect was to make the brass plates almost invisible, throwing the focus onto the shadows which looked like drawings on the wall.  Some were sketchy, some were very graphic.  Little scribbled figures cast their own shadow in the ‘drawing’, literally drawing attention to the process of their making.

Then there was Polly Morgan’s ‘Carrion Call’ – a battered wooden coffin, which from a distance appeared to have barnicles or fungus growing from various crevices.  On closer inspection, these resolved themselves into tiny hen chicks, beaks open, clamouring to get out.

Almost everything in the exhibition stimulated some sort of wonder, and I was particularly spellbound by Bill Viola’s ‘Incarnation’, a video portrait in which a naked man and woman walk towards us, viewed in a kind of fuzzy focus as if the channel was not properly tuned.  One of the figures puts out a hand towards us, and a flow of water breaks around their hand.  In slow motion, their bodies move towards us through a wall of breaking water, until they stand before us naked, vulnerable and dripping.  As they meet our eyes, we feel we are intruding, and become hyper aware of their discomfort at our gaze.  It spoke to me of Adam and Eve, the way we survey each other, and of our own vulnerability.

I won’t spoil any more suprises.  If you possibly can, go and see this exhibition for yourself.  It’s on until 25th April 2009, and it’s FREE!

The Subversive Spaces exhibition now showing at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester explores what lies below the surface of our everyday spaces.  Cosy domestic interiors become places of considerable unease, whilst city streets become places of escape, dreamscape, and hidden landscape.  The works on display show connections between the early Surrealist artists such as Andre Breton, and contemporary artists such as Sarah Lucas.  An upended sofa treads on the body of a mannekin upon which is projected the face of a woman telling us ‘it’s so beautiful’ (Tony Oursler ‘The Most Beautiful Thing I have Never Seen’).  Perhaps this alludes to women’s insistence, particularly in the past, on presenting an outward appearance of everything being just great in the home, even though the domesticity of cooking, cleaning, and childminding weighs them down.  A video piece (pictured) shows a woman literally ‘climbing the walls’ of her room, illustrating the potentially stifling experience of being a woman confined and voiceless to the domestic spaces of the home.  Mona Hatoum’s steel cot with a bed of thin wires hints at the violence of feelings in childcare.  The Surrealists wanted to bring out the hidden narratives of our everyday living spaces, interior and exterior, and this is being continued by contemporary artists.

The exhibition also includes ‘Kinderzimmer’ by Gregor Schneider, which has been specially commissioned, and apparently contains a replica of a child’s nursery from a German town that was destroyed to create an open cast mine.  Unfortunately I was unable to view it, as it has to be viewed one person at a time, and all the tickets had gone (in fact the last one went to the person in front of me – damn!)  So if you do visit, go early and go straight to the entrance to the ‘Kinderzimmer’ and get your ticket to avoid disappointment.

For my friends (and any readers) living around Warwickshire, this exhibtion will be moving to Compton Verney, showing from 13 June – 6 September 2009.