- Venue
- White Cube
- Location
- London
So another trip to London and I find myself at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square, a gallery space that needs no introduction. Approaching the venue on a cold, gloomy winter afternoon, newspaper headlines declaring the end of the world, I can't help but notice the ever so slightly chilling work of Rosson Crow though the window. Art imitating life perhaps? Let us pray the same is not true of Andreas Golder.
Crow is graced with the larger of the two galleries, and her large canvases fill the space well. The generally muted palette creates an unnerving atmosphere, the obviously human environments, strangely devoid of people, evokes an unsettling morbidity as we are forced to ask ‘where have the people gone?' Crow subverts her own loosely realistic painterly style with Pollock-like drips and splatters, adding a sense of spontaneity to the work and perhaps also expressing Crow's desire to represent these as 'un-perfect' environments.
The first image ‘Lincoln's Funeral' has the atmosphere of a fair ground in an old horror movie, oddly deserted at dusk when young children approach it to inevitably meet their doom. The man-made environment is at odds with the complete lack of human activity, creating a sense of suspicion, foreboding and anxiety. This feeling is amplified in the next piece, ‘New York Stock Exchange After Rally, 1919.' The white ‘Pollock splashes' in the previous work are replaced with finer red splashes, evocative of the appearance of blood spatter. Thick white lines, perhaps representing streamers settled on the floor, take on an ominous dual interpretation as abstract body outlines, like those drawn around dead bodies in classic American crime thrillers. While strong, dark diagonal striations of the canvas create a sense of action, fury, contradicting the seeming calm of the depicted environment. Both images present the feeling of viewing a stage, a crafted quasi-reality, only we have missed the performance. There are the remains of what has happened, an indication of habitation, of action long since departed, and we are left wondering ‘what exactly happened here?'
This feeling is exhibited, to various degrees, in all the other paintings on show here, they retain a dream-like (or should that be nightmarish) atmosphere. There is a reference to reality here, but it is distant. The inclusion of animal carcasses in ‘Queens Butcher Shop – 1910' draws obvious comparison to works like Bacon's ‘Figure with meat (1954)' and ‘Painting (1946),' an allegory for death and consumption perhaps? Yet, unlike Bacon, and most of the other works on display here, there is very little sense of foreboding here. The other images present the threat of violence, the suggestion that it may have happened, this piece is more blatant, more blood-thirsty and yet far less shocking, or frightening, for it. Displaying the action rather than the consequences removes any fear in the viewer, we are not left doubting, wondering what atrocity may have been committed, we see it, and perhaps because of Bacon and his artistic legacy, we are de-sensitised to it.
The theme of dead animals is repeated in several of the other works here, the plethora of dead birds in ‘Poverty Party at the White House,' is particularly obscure. Quite what these are intended to symbolise I'm not exactly sure. ‘Taxidermy sale at Sotheby's,' the final image in the exhibition presents the seeming culmination of the animal symbolism. Presumably stuffed tigers growl at the viewer, deer heads hang from the walls, birds hang from the rafters, the scene is dark, disconcerting, and in some ways over-whelming. While, the first images of the exhibition were eerie, dream-like, they retained some cohesion; there were points of reference that allowed us to make sense of them on some level. However through the course of the works, these markers seem to have become as convoluted as the rest of the image. It is almost as if Crow is subverting herself, creating a framework for us to understand her deformed reality, only to deform this as well.
This is either an extremely impressive manipulation of the viewer, or completely unintended. Either way the outcome to me is much like the ending of Kubrick's film version of ‘The Shining,' it just doesn't make sense. Around the time a man in a pig costume starts performing oral sex on whoever that man is, we suddenly realise that we don't really have a clue what's going on, or what is real. The same is true of Crow's paintings, after the initial suspense and curiosity, I leave this exhibition in a state of confusion, wondering exactly what it was all meant to mean, just like ‘The Shining.'
In terms of atmosphere, Andreas Golder's exhibition upstairs is probably more like ‘The Shining.' The four paintings and one sculpture that make up ‘Surgite mortui venite ad Judicum,' are more pictorially horrific than Crow, while the dark abstract environments and morbid ‘partial bodies' present a definite nod to Bacon once again. In some ways Godler's pieces act as a counterpoint to Crow's paintings. Where Crow showed the environment and implied the body, Golder shows the body (or at least a grotesque representation of part of it) and implies an environment; dangling ‘lights,' a table give the illusion of space without depicting it.
I look at these images, and I feel like I should find them disgusting. These ‘part bodies' – skeletons dripping blood, organs hanging without skin to contain them, flesh seemingly ripped or shredded, and dismembered seemingly phallic objects and testicles – seem to embody the deepest horrors of Golder's psyche, a kernel destructive urge. Freud would call it ‘Thanatos' – death instinct – and in that way perhaps we can be glad that Golder found art as an outlet for these morbid, perverse feelings, else he may have ended up like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining.' However, just like the more morose elements of Crow's work, despite this obvious representation of something horrific, these images, and the accompanying sculpture, stir up no feelings of disgust, or even a vicarious pleasure.
On a fundamental level these images just aren't that interesting. Crow's paintings are curious enough to at least hold my attention, but with Golder's I find I have to force myself to give these images a second glance. The sculpture too I find barely attracts my attention, quite why my view towards these pieces is so apathetic I am not sure. Perhaps it is a lack of subtlety; these images are un-assumedly grotesque, a horror laid bare, but it is no horror we haven't seen before, and frankly no horror we haven't seen better depicted. Perhaps it is a sad sign of our times, that we have become so de-sensitised to such images because we see these and worse on a daily basis that images such as these no longer faze us. Perhaps I have missed the point and these weren't meant to scare us in the first place. Either way, upon leaving this exhibition I find myself with far more questions than answers.
