I’m very very busy at the moment; a busy-ness that seems to primarily consist of impotent, stress-driven flailing & stasis. On Saturday afternoon I took some time off & went to see some art. I feel like I’ve really neglected this since moving to Bristol – bar the Jamaica Street Open Studios, I’ve scarcely seen a thing. On the one hand, I don’t necessarily mind this: I’m a notoriously Bad Artist; a stay-at-home who finds the structures, choreographies & rhythms of the world as it is far more exciting, generally, than anything found in a gallery. Equally, I’m aware of how dulled & lazy this can make me, and I love that particular feeling of inspired serenity I get when I emerge from a space, having just seen something beautiful, something moving, something challenging, something great.
I went to the Arnolfini to catch The Sea Wall on its final weekend. This was an exhibition with an ambitious remit, aiming to present a conversation between the practices of Felix Gonzales-Torres and Haegue Yang. I’m not entirely sure this was successful: since only one Gonzales-Torres work – the stunning Untitled (Water) – was included in the whole exhibition (which utilised all 5 gallery spaces across 3 floors), the “conversation” was rather one-sided, and it seems facile to claim that a single piece, however breathtaking, can speak for an artist’s entire body of work in this way. Untitled (Water) was used across locations, mostly as a divider, creating liminal and transitional areas between Yang’s work. While I think that this was intended to reflect Yang’s interest in communities and the invisible, porous, yet containing boundaries that run through society, it was a real shame, to me, to see such a powerful work treated almost as a prop.
Yang’s work is sprawling, and not always successful – but when she gets it right, it’s wonderful: subtle, playful, challenging. Her Mirror Series transforms the mirror from passive receiver to active transmitter in often surprising ways; and Certificates, a series of sales contracts committing the artist to provide personal details such as her Gmail password, raise interesting and sly questions about ownership and documentation. Elsewhere, the collage series Trustworthies turns envelope security patterns into rich, textural 2D works reminiscent of seascapes. Down on the ground floor, 186.16m3/372.32m3 provides the most striking link with Gonzales-Torres’ work – just as Untitled (Water) invites us into the space with a promise of water, of a broken surface, of the freedom of the swimmer (or the drowner), a few paces behind it, barely visible, razor-thin lengths of red thread span the space at equal distances. The effect is shocking and experiential – expectations confounded, we find ourselves in a regimented and enclosed space with no way out but to turn back. Visually, too, 186.16m3/372.32m3 succeeds: its two-colour, minimal, near-invisible frailty creating a sense of precarious order and calm. However, VIP’s Union, a collection of furniture donated by various Bristol luminaries, is lumpen and flat, and Yang’s experiments with domestic objects, enclosed spaces and porous borders (Site Cube #1; Rue Saint-Benoit) are repeated too often to have any real impact.
Too often, this exhibition felt incoherent and unedited; too often it seemed insular and inward-looking. Its use of a single piece by Felix Gonzales-Torres, set against curatorial claims of a dialogue, a conversation, appear to assume prior knowledge of Gonzales-Torres’ work, an art-historian’s awareness of the common themes and threads shared by he and Yang. There were only two or three instances where this reciprocation was clear; elsewhere, the show was muddled and bizarre. In this way, the exhibition carried its own theme forward – something resistant and exclusive masked as something inviting and inclusive.
