- Venue
- Spike Island
- Location
- South West England
Three artists are showing separate visions of a not so pleasant future for the 21st century at Spike Island in Bristol. The first gallery is filled with Georgie Hopton’s plinths topped with various flowers and plants. Her sculptures, some painted, some looking like slabs of clay newly cut out, are not pretty, nor are the paintings, around the wall, framed in marquetry, colourful.
Presented in this way the deadening effect of the juxtaposition between the conventional idea of flowers, and the mausoleum quality for the display, suggests artefacts made in a world of no flowers. There is one exception – the single photograph, where the colour of the pink flowers is as bright as the blue polythene wrapping. Is this a sign?
Hopton’s paintings are interspersed on the wall with dark and disturbing paintings and drawings of a distorted humanity by Esteban Igartua. It’s a world of no time, a tribe of deformed human beings with similar squinty eyes and sinister teeth, stabbing/fellating and clinging together. The vision is one of where contemporary civilisation has ceased to exist for whatever reason.
The video installation the Chomskian Abstract, by Cornelia Parker, is the third response to the idea of Prophet. The installation shows a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky without the questions. The interviewer is absent, or merely glimpsed in the reflection of the interviewee’s glasses, as he listens intently and then proceeds to give his views on aspects of the contemporary era. His nods, shifts of position and faint smiles are the visible expressions of human thought in process. Then the answers come – for example the Iraq war (wrong and illegal), nuclear holocaust (possible annihilation of the species), and the nature of work (people can be pleasant at home while planning for environmental destruction at work).
The visuals are restricted…one man listening and talking…but this particular man is already known and famous for his academic pronouncements on linguistics as well as his political polemics. As such the audience is in listening mode to what the ‘prophet’ has to say..what does he mean and is it true/relevant/appropriate? Unusual questions in a contemporary art context.
For example, were we really being asked to believe that the US had purposely planned for Iraqui cultural sites to be looted as Chomsky suggested?
By presenting such detailed arguments for examination Parker examines the nature of prophecy/false prophecy, and the dangers of unthinking belief in what prophets say, however convincing it might seem.
Georgie Hopton is based in London and upstate New York, Esteban Igartua, from Lima, is now based in Bristol, and Cornelia Parker lives and works in London.
