- Venue
- Whitworth Art Gallery
- Location
The Hayward touring exhibition: ‘A Secret Service’ features a cornucopia of secrets. Fragmented and somewhat hard to follow, the layout and curator-ship mimics the theme; ‘Art, compulsion, concealment’.
From Schwitters organic ‘merz’ work to the highly contrived perfomance of Tehching Hsieh, this exhibition explores themes on secrecy, outsiders and information.
Schwitters work is the contextual peg that the other works
hang off. Photographs of his Hanover home show huge living constructions, every corner inhabited by sculpture and the light bringing them to life.
Like Schwitters’s work Sophie Calle employs objects from the outside world to create personal and rather introspective art works.
Both work is contrasted by the commissioned work of Mike Nelson. Nelson’s installation takes a leaf straight out of Schwitters book but confronts the viewer in an entirely different way. Conflicted, with connotations of violence, Nelson’s work lacks the quiet of Schwitters but features the same issues of oppression, violence and conflict. Here we are not asked to be comforted but rather arrested by the vast array of clothing, trophy heads and Iraq memorabilia all spiked brutally onto the metal railings.
Idea’s about location and threat is further contributed to by ‘The speculative Archive’ and their; ‘In possession of a Picture’.
This set of images examines the people who are detained whilst videotaping or photographing potential target areas. Here seemingly innocuous photographs take on new meaning when taken by non-officials.
The black box represents the photograph as taken by the detainee and the twinned representation is an image sourced from the Internet. Here lies an interesting link between how we are presented with images rather than us becoming the original viewer.
In ‘The hotel’ we see personal belongings as representations of unknown identities. It is not with malice that Calle renders her subjects familiar, more a study on the areas between private and public identities.
In the way that Calle’s subjects are laid out intimately, we see the individuals in Mark Lombardi’s drawings as a tiny statistic in a large corrupted web.
The curator, Richard Grayson explains: ‘There is a generative logic at play in many of the works in A Secret Service where cosmologies are developed and mapped. These are often expressed in terms of the paranoid, the utopian, the visionary and the counterfactual.’1.
Again, with Lombardi’s obsessive, somewhat paranoid diagrams and Kataryzna Jozefowicz’s incredibly intricate ‘Games’ we see the physical manifestation of secrecy and corruption.
Jozefowicz’s sprawling sculpture takes on a new significance when it becomes evident that these are products of unsolicited post.
The exhibition is of course a paradox; exhibiting work intended to be private or concealed. However, I think this voyeuristic element is successful due to the universal lure of secrecy.
In a world where our private identities are more explicit than ever, where: ‘There are more than four million CCTV cameras in this country, one for every 14 people’, 2. It is hardly surprising that an exhibition such as this is as relevant as ever.
Annabelle Williams
1.http://www.ensemble.va.com.au/Grayson/texts/SecretService.html
2.http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2494230.ece
