- Venue
- Serpentine Gallery
- Location
Clay is the stuff of humans, and feet of clay wear high heels. Finally, human is female. Rebecca Warren’s sculptures have incited plenty of comments about female sexuality and primeval chaos. Her at first glance inchoate unfired clay pieces straddle two sides of sculpture: add-on modelling and chiselled excavation, the latter once described as requiring the capacity to imagine 3D forms inside out. But Warren couldn’t be further from Anthony Gormley. She jokes about tits, bums, weight and mobility, women on pedestals and women on display, while at the same time creating figures whose grace creeps into the corner of the eye but only after it’s blinked.
Indents, cracks, thumb marks, penis head prints, pockmarks, petals, protruding lips and sea-scapes: The Mechanic, mounted on a revolving plinth, drags you into the multi-surface and apparent squelch of it in your quest to find its form. You move around the piece both with and counter to its own direction. Then the torso of a woman in very obvious doggy position and stubby high heels emerges. She’s kneeling over a probable man whose erection and head have got lost in, or haven’t quite made it out of, the grey muck.
Warren piles breast on belly on buttock on calf. Even heels are lusciously rounded. The small heads and weighty bodies of A Culture and The Other Brother aren’t just curvaceous; they’re globular. Her now famous Helmut Krumb is two high-heeled bulbous legs whose thighs end in rounded joints like drum sticks, the bits of the chicken you really want to lick and suck. Strung between the thighs, an abstract sex organ, a nice globe, sports a slit and a hole, thoroughly ambisexual. Underneath is a smaller pair of women’s legs, less abstract but high heeled again, knickers round knees, buttocks provocative but ending there, so that, like a chicken cradled in polystyrene and mantled in cling-film, this woman comes already in bits but she’s by no means consumable.
There’s a riotously random air to Warren’s work. Shortlisted for the 2006 Turner Prize, she’s been praised both for her referencing – to
Rodin, Degas, Giacometti and de Kooning, among others – and for her freely original and arresting work. MD, a three metre by one metre or so clay column is impaled at its midriff by a twig: single, small, silly. Like many of her nearly figurative pieces, this one is top heavy. The base has the surface texture of cake mixture that a spatula has done a fairly good job on but the finger has yet to smooth clean. Sculptural phrases like rough hewn go out the window just as MD’s base line mini erection hoves into view.
Pastiches on male metal ‘n rust sculpture don’t work so well. Function-V is all spiky planks, angular joints and spindly but strong supports. A small white pom pom aesthetically balances one steely extremity, but doesn’t, of course, physically. If the thin grey line between form and chaos, malleability and solidity, is one of Warren’s hall marks, then the joke – you could have knocked me down with a pom pom – is a bit unsubtle.
Any number and variety of grizzly museum display cabinets hover in the background of her wood and perspex wall pieces. Journey Into The Heart Of The Night contains, variously, a clay human skull decorated with eye worms, clay woolly toys somewhere near dogs and cats, a real fluffy powder blue toy rabbit, and two miniature plastic bottles, one called absinthe. By virtue of its wonky plank support, the cabinet is in eternal collapse, whereas the front of another one, displaying Warren’s hallmark neon lights, far too crass for museums, is fixed in eternal slippage.
Assured of her place in the Saatchi-sponsored YBA pantheon, Warren has said she wants her sculptures to look "like they'd been made by a sort of pervy middle-aged provincial art teacher who'd taken me over". Look beneath the jokes, however, and a wonderfully serious artist emerges.
