- Venue
- The Hayward Gallery, London
- Location
- London
Aside from a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century when abstraction and minimalism ruled and anything vaguely figurative was pointedly ignored by the art world, the human figure has been the most timelessly familiar and most frequently rendered of sculptural shapes – artists have been variously moulding, carving and bashing it together since prehistoric times. This latest show at the Hayward aims to ‘…survey how artists over the past 25 years have reinvented figurative sculpture, looking back to earlier movements in art history and drawing on contemporary imagery.’
So, does it manage it? Well, there are undoubtedly some lovely, important, even occasionally seminal works here (I’ll come to these in a moment.) Unfortunately, some significant curatorial clangers have prevented all of them from shining as they could have done and stopped this show from being what it wanted to be – a top-notch, comprehensive exhibition of contemporary figurative sculpture. Too many of these figures feel as if they’ve been arbitrarily juxtaposed in order to shoehorn them into a curator’s narrow vision, with little to no regard for the artists’ original intentions. I can’t quite get my head around the curatorial process at work – apart from the blindingly obvious fact that every piece has, well, a human figure in it, why are some of these works occupying the same physical space in the gallery when they inhabit such vastly different conceptual ones?
One of the downstairs spaces, for example, appears to have had a tenuous narrative thrust upon it by the Hayward’s team of curators, with Martin Honert’s sculptural renditions of photographs from his own collection; Jeff Koons’ Bear and Policeman; and Katerina Fritsch’s Cook and 6th Photo (Black Forest House) all eyeing each other up and creating links that feel like an uncomfortable step too far away from the works’ intended implications. Many of these are also hemmed in by museum-esque ropes and an exceptional security presence (for this we can blame the Koons I think), both of which immediately short-circuit the sculptures’ presence by slicing into the space around them and messing with their potential impact on the viewer. Given the artistic punch of the works involved this is a particular shame.
Fritsch – she of the blue cockerel that’s currently installed on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth – has several pieces from the same series of works included here, and I enjoyed pondering on them very much. The one installed in this particular space features a terrifyingly smooth, life-size cast of a chef constructed from yellow polyester, placed in front of a huge black and white photographic backdrop of a German-themed restaurant. Though the pieces elsewhere in the show with sufficient space left around them are installed to much better effect, the German artist’s big concerns with the ‘point where you start to wonder about the existence of things’ is still creepily evident.
Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001) is one of the more considered in terms of its installation – there’s plenty of that essential space around it to allow it to have as full an impact as it can. What appears to be a small boy kneels alone in a room with his back to us, and it is only on closer inspection that we realise who ‘he’ is – a little-ish model of Adolf Hitler kneeling in prayer. This work was previously installed in the former Warsaw ghetto in 2012, somewhat contentiously as you can imagine, and with an entirely separate resonance to that it creates here. Paul McCarthy’s hauntingly realistic platinum silicone sculptures of the actress Elyse Poppers have also been given room to breathe. Each model shows the LA-based artist’s latest muse sitting provocatively in slight variations on the same pose, legs apart and in startling detail, on glass tables that could suggest medicine or architectural display. Walking round them it feels like witnessing a slowed few frames from a film, and much calmer and as far away from exploitative as it could possibly be – a serene meditation on the nature of porn and voyeurism that could only have been made in the home of such things.
Other works that have been divorced from a previously resonant site include Pierre Huyghe’s female nude with a beehive as its head – originally installed in scrubby parkland at the 2012 Documenta in Kassel. It operates very differently here among the concrete expanses of the South Bank, though to my mind no less effectively. I did find myself wondering why Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999) – so fantastically impressive as the first commission for the fourth plinth – couldn’t just live on in cultural memory in the space it was originally intended for. It just doesn’t work in the same way in a gallery setting.
Playing with the scale of the human form is as much of a preoccupation for many of these artists as it was for those working in the Classical era, from Paloma Varga Weisz’s elongated, broken-looking female form suspended from the metal rigging in the gallery ceiling by the grey lengths of fabric that it’s wrapped in, to Cattelan and Honert’s child size characters, and Ryan Gander’s recreations of Degas’ ballerinas at 60% their original size. Gander’s When we made love you used to cry and I love you like the stars above and I’ll love you ‘till I die (2008) is a much more pithy and humorous piece than its longwinded title suggests. On first sight the only evidence of the existence of an artwork is an empty plinth. We then catch a glimpse of art’s most famous ballerina hiding from us, leaning against the back of it while casually smoking a fag. This is the kind of witty commentary that Gander does so well – a succinct comment on the idea of the iconic in sculpture that remains for me one of the most memorable pieces in the show.
