- Venue
- Barbican Art Gallery
- Location
- London
Bunker?
[Superrealism] It is a subterfuge against the real, an art pledged not only to pacify the real but to seal it behind surfaces, to embalm it in appearances. A quote from Return of the Real, by Hal Foster, that graces the beginning of the blurb that accompanies the installation. Bunker, by Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski, has transformed the Curve Gallery at the Barbican in to a recreation of a WW2 bunker. It’s almost brilliant. What it actually was however was mediocre. It wasn’t even bad, it just didn’t get you past the point of being pacified, as the text by Foster suggests true illusion should.
You walk in to the Bunker through a huge set of rusty metal doors and initially I was impressed by the ominous entrance. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so ready to be impressed in general. The blurb then stated that you’re “forced to negotiate a precarious bridge”. Really? I walked across a very steady, easy to manage bridge that gave one the feeling of walking through a museum exhibit trying very hard to get children to learn, if not a specific something, at least anything at all. Or worse, the entrance to a very theatrical Disneyland ride. The problem with blurbs I believe is that they can sometimes get a little bit over excited about the work. So when you see it and it’s good, but not the brilliant masterpiece the blurb describes, there’s a very strong feeling of flat coke and you leave feeling robbed of a good piece of art.
Kusmirowski’s Bunker is a dimly lit passage full of paraphernalia from a bygone era; sacks of coal, old generators and electrical gauges, wooden crates, empty tin cans. The trail leads you past rooms strewn with old documents, photographs and other curiosities while a set of train tracks wink in and out of existence throughout the length of the gallery. On the surface of things the Bunker is successful in that (despite the initial feeling of a museum exhibit) it invokes and eerie loneliness with its dim lighting, uniform grey/brown and the utter stillness of everything. The atmosphere doesn’t shout out what it wants you to feel, it quietly and subtly creeps up on you. The illusion is almost, as I said before, brilliant. However, it all starts to crack as you make your way through until finally at the end it is completely shattered. On closer inspection I found that everything felt too contrived, too conveniently placed. You can’t help but note that behind the doors left ajar is just wall and exploration of the rooms was the real shock back to reality. At first I was just annoyed at how this photograph or that book was placed just so, conveniently easy for viewers to find. It dispelled the atmosphere somewhat. Annoyance grew into frustration when, instead of maybe taking some time to chisel out and partially fill grooves where the mortar holding the large concrete bricks would be, the artist had instead blobbed grey paint on something like a ruler and made straight paint marks on the wall to create a bricks-in-a-wall look. Everything became slightly shallow then. It felt like the greatest effort had been made with the big things- the props, lighting, railway, scale ect-but it’s the little details that make up the depth of any exhibition. It is in this that the Bunker is lacking.
The last room at the end of the trail was possibly Kusmirowski’s biggest failure. The train tracks come to a somewhat bland end whereas before there was a mystery surrounding where it led when it disappeared into various tunnels. This could have been effectively continued if it had maybe disappeared into a final darkened tunnel. The space was also rather empty and lacking in anything of much interest-so much for ending on a high note.There are more doors slightly ajar which would hint at further secrets had you not been able to see the wall behind them and then there was the ceiling. It is the highest room of the exhibition and therefore you automatically look up and around you and I was slightly incredulous at what I saw. The grey of the walls continued for about a foot all the way round the ceiling but it was mostly white, because of this you could clearly see that the artist had been using spray paint to colour the ceiling grey. It’s almost like he couldn’t be bothered to do the whole ceiling and stopped, it’s not a clean finish line either, it’s erratic and looks very unprofessional. The illusion was thoroughly shattered.
It’s an exhibition that invites you to explore and to fully immerse yourself in the artist’s creation of the past, so why would you not put every effort in? I have to wonder why an artist so concerned with “immersive installations”, “meticulous attention to detail” and who is known as a “master of forgeries” (quotes from the blurb accompanying the exhibition) has ultimately failed to create a convincing bunker by neglecting the little details. Kusmirowski takes so much time to research the past, takes so much care in finding and making objects to include in his installations and yet his lack of obsession with the actual space makes the Bunker shallow and lacking anything significant. It relies too much on the paraphernalia littering the space and the scale of the project. I can find no relevance as to its being a piece of art. In the end it feels like a very theatrical history lesson but nothing more, a kind of ‘by the way this is what it would have been like back in the day’.
