- Venue
- Serpentine Gallery
- Location
- London
If the distinction between stability and formlessness is only viable because of concepts already embedded within the spectator, can we talk of the distinction at all? The stable object, with its structures already mapped out, appears as a realized whole. It is complete. In contrast, the formless object cries out to the viewer to engage in a process of joining together its disparate parts, however irregular, into a perceptible ‘large throbbing mass’. In this way, even the most complex and uncomfortable assemblages are mended together into something that simply appears complex or formless. In terms of finding any distinction between a ‘structure’ or a ‘disarray’ it’s perhaps worth examining the internal glue that seems to hold the disarray so firmly into comprehension at all.
Rebecca Warren makes sculptures that need mending and completion. They’re informal. Even Warren has expressed how ‘…it takes quite a lot of balls to stand in front of some of my sculptures and say I made that.’ (1) Her recent clay pieces occasionally rest on plinths, but also sometimes rest on boards of dusty mdf with wheels, as if they’re still being worked on. The plethora of forms fingered into them are hard to distinguish. Sometimes there’s a bit of an arm, perhaps some teeth or a figure, but there’s the sense too that these could be accidental and that the viewer is imagining them. The clay is unbaked as though it’s not ready yet to be fired and glazed, but it has also dried out, rendering any future mutations impossible. The ever ambiguous substance has been trapped and glued into place by its own uncertainty.
Her ‘Virtrines’ seem to require assembly and resolution too. Each cabinet presents the viewer with a collection of odd bits and pieces like felt, rubber bands, neon lights, bits of clay, polystyrene and even soft toys. They flit desperately between ideas. In viewing the cabinets and their inhabitants together, sketchy patterns begin to emerge, but there’s always something around the corner to unhinge the links we’ve drawn. Their perspex lids are occasionally lopsided too – a rude ‘informality’ which merges with the ambivalence beneath the surface.
Walking around her sculptures, the tumultuous indecision occasionally becomes too much to bear, even provoking feelings of jouissance, but this quickly settles back down again. They’re never really uncomfortable to look at. A sort of pleasant numbness is even established by the dissonance. To watch a waterfall might be quite soothing too – the relentless discord and cacophony of it doesn’t require unravelling to be experienced. It is highly irregular and unpredictable but this fact gets overlooked somehow. As with Warren’s work, there is no need to consider every nuance and intricacy caused by the collision of forms – they are gathered together as a single intelligible flow and are understood together. Unlike Warren’s work however, a waterfall is not posited as a piece of art. It may be perceived as a ‘whole’ despite its formal heterogeneity, but it remains unburdened by any pre-existing framework of tradition.
Critic Yve-Alain Bois suggests an overall ‘… failure of art as hetrogeneous radicality, which is to say, as nonassimilable.’(2) Indeed, the act of displaying something unglued or heterogeneous leads to it becoming stitched up again and homogenised the instant it is perceived. This is largely because the automatic response of perception itself is so strong and instantaneous. However, Bois proposes instead that this process of ‘mending into a whole’ has much more to do with historical constraints specific to art. He writes, ‘Whatever its outrages, art is the prisoner of its ancient cathartic function and thus, despite everything, it remains an agent of social order: it is at the service of “homogeneity.”’
This leads onto what I find most interesting about Warren’s work. The allusions she draws to the past (such as the vague figure-like shapes being evocative of traditional sculpture and the very use of vitrines and plinths) seem to be themselves as half-baked as everything else. It’s as though her actual pastiche of things is formless and unfinished. The mere habits of traditional artists are shakily glued to the habits of modern artists. The use of neon signs, for instance, has become a modern art trope since Bruce Nauman deployed them in the 1960’s but Warren’s neon signs don’t say anything at all – they’re just vague little squiggles. The reference speaks out for a while but is then retracted and silenced, leaving just the ‘glue’ that should have held it all together, but didn’t.
Where plastic gains its form through accurate mimicry, glue instead only takes on its form through the other objects it has attached together. The glue ideally remains invisible with the objects seeming to miraculously hold onto each other. It’s the ‘effect’ of the glue that we see instead. Of course, while Warren appears to embrace indecision, the choice to embrace it in the exact way she does is a refined decision. Like with the glue, it’s the ‘effect’ of indecision and discord that we are left to witness instead – the true complexity being too deep to negotiate around. From this viewpoint, a disarray cannot transcend the spectator’s capability to construct a flat representation of it.
The mending that Warren’s sculptures seem to demand happens along two opposite plains. Firstly, the surface informality (such as their wonky perspex, cheap materials or unfired clay) is perhaps a revelation of what Bois calls ‘…the gluey reverse side of the figure that sticks it to the paper, the way roots are a hidden aspect of the flower…’ This surface tackiness (in both senses of the word) becomes a catalyst for self awareness – one’s own internal mending mechanisms can be seen at work, piecing together how it should have all really looked.
The opposite plain is the thematic and contextual irresolution (her ‘vague’ allusions and references to things for instance) which demands mending of a much more subliminal and disguised sort. It’s therefore immensely difficult to stumble upon any sense of a conclusion about Warren’s work, or even of criticism (such as Bois’) which appears to discuss the problems this sort of work raises. Still, I feel that since ‘confusion’ and ‘disarray’ have a power to captivate the spectator, they are significant enough to necessitate the discussion. For when gooey substances have nothing to stick onto and are left floating, they cease to have tackiness as an attribute at all.
Endnotes:
1.Dixon, E. (2006) Rebecca Warren: Three Minute Wonder, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/2006/re… [accessed 01/04/09] Tate Media.
2.Bois,Y & Krauss, R. (1997) Formless: A User’s Guide, Zone Books, p. 52, 62.
Bibliography:
Philips, S. (2009) Serpentine Gallery: Rebecca Warren, Serpentine Gallery Publishing.
