Grayson and Dorothy.
When this thing happened to me that I will tell you about shortly, I was in standing in a gallery filled with an installation by Dorothy Cross called Connemara at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. It is a thrilling mix of Steam-punk zoology, gothic anthropology, darkly Darwinesque with a spiritual otherworldliness. Anachronistically and ecologically speculative Cross explores the human/nature relationship sometimes with dashes of unexpected wit in a theatrical, properly immersive environment.
I had become deeply engaged with a piece on the wall of lost footware retrieved from the sea and cast in rubber and bronze and just at that moment I saw another work in another room across the way, from a distance. It caught me off-guard and I made and un-made snap judgements about it as I struggled towards processing its possible meaning.
It went something like this:
Oh look there’s an easel with a torpedo-bomb-type-thing stuck on it. I suppose that means it’s about art being powerful or shocking or something-Perhaps it’s anti-war? Like a slogan: War, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing. Well that’s been done before-surely too illustrative? Is she trying to shock us? Grayson Perry was talking about art not being able to shock us anymore…
“…art has lost one of its central tenets: its ability to shock.”
I walked nearer to the piece in the other room and discovered that the “torpedo” was in fact a model submarine of Lilliputian proportions with a delicious gilded surface. The easel was elegantly old and had been modified to “cradle” the submarine. Forced to re-interpret I read the notes:
Shark-Heart Submarine 2011 19th century easel, model submarine, laminated wood, oil-gilded in white gold, shark’s heart in glass jar with alcohol.
It was the opposite of what I had first thought, Cross was transforming the cultural identity of the shark from monster to beautiful, stream-lined, mummified, deified icon. From Jaws to Tutankhamun.
And then it all made sense (to me) in a slow-motion, quietly, reverse-shock way and again I mused over Grayson Perry’s ideas about art not being shocking anymore and that we are all too sophisticatedly bohemian. I think that the art world has been locked into a binary dialogue of Shocker and shockee a pairing that no longer serves us. Perhaps now we the audience, released from our constraining role, can allow works like: Shark-Heart Submarine to disturb or enlighten us, leaving us open to a re-arrange our thoughts but quietly, to shock us in reverse so that the experience will be less like Ian Drury’s Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick and more like the strangely reversed drum sounds in Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. So that rather than an initial hit or swift pun, the effect of the art would be to fracture and ripple outwards and stay long in the psyche.
“…to detain and suspend us in a state of frustration and ambivalence and to make us pause and think rather than simply react.”
Grayson Perry (paraphrasing Professor Charlie Gere) in the 2nd Reith Lecture 2013
I like the quote above and think that the Installation by Dorothy Cross does exactly that but more discreetly and less sensationally than before.
Transcript of Grayson Perry’s 2nd Reith Lecture http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/reith-lecture2-liverpool.pdf
Connemara at Turner Contemporary http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/connemara
