- Venue
- Kettle's Yard
- Location
Andrew Lanyon, son of Peter Lanyon, has curated a confounding exhibition of non-sequiturs and misappropriation of history: Not just the insidious story of Von Ribbentrop’s holiday visits to St Ives before he went on to become Foreign Minister in Nazi Germany, but also many other stories running alongside. The exhibition demonstrates parallels between different histories of pivotal importance to St Ives around the period leading up to World War II.
For Lanyon the most poignant part of the story about Von Ribbentrop is the collections of Cornish seaside postcards found during his research in German invasion handbooks with notes underneath describing the aspects from which they have been photographed with a view to attack, attributed by Lanyon as having probably been collected during Von Ribbentrop’s holidays there. This leads to a rich series of stories about possible greetings and recipients that such postcards could potentially have told, through facetious invention trying to emulate the irrational thought-patterns and connections created in a time of war.
This slippage between anecdotal story and a real perceived feeling of threat recorded from the time as well as in retrospect, is reflected in a lot of the works on display commissioned by Lanyon from a set of artists predominantly hailing from Cornwall themselves. It’s unclear how much is to be credited to Lanyon in their commissioning or the artists in their creating. The models such as Paul Chaney’s Glove in head and Chris James’ Praxinoscope become like props. By Lanyon’s own admission, they exist to demonstrate the narrative rather than to develop it. Derrida, Magritte and even Darwin are credited as creators of some of the maquettes, confusing the roles of authorship and created object even further, the objects becoming describers of their alleged creators rather than the other way around.
The parallel that Lanyon draws between this threat on the land during wartime and the threat on the pastoral perceptions of art at the point when the modernists arrived, namely Ben Nicholson et al, is also explored through ponderings on the threatened position of those European artists labelled as degenerates after the Nazi exhibition Degenerate Art. This incidentally brings the story round again to Von Ribbentrop, as his wife is credited with convincing Hitler to sell the works rather than destroy them, in order to raise money for bombs to destroy the cities in which these artists’ patrons and collectors were living. This real threat in wartime on art and freedom of artists in Europe is translated into an image by Lanyon of art dropped as bombs onto London.
Such digressions and absurd narratives take our perception of history into areas of our peripheral vision, provoking responses from all our senses. Lanyon wants us to be in a heightened state of perception. Each model and display case has its own idiosyncracies and even the walls themselves have hidden cavities behind them, just visible to the curious visitor: Heath Robinson-like assemblages operated by wires, elastic and curtain rings bring the interwoven narratives to life as you are guided through the maze of tableaus, documents and captions.
There is a thoroughness and obsessiveness to this representation of the many parallel narratives which carries through a very singular voice in their telling. Even works that cannot be shown in their actual selves are shown in reproduction instead. The ones which we do actually see – Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Alexander Calder, as well as Peter Mates’ models of Wallis’ boats and Carlos Zapatas’ and Paul Spooners’ carved kinetic figures, become absorbed into the whole, buried beneath a wealth of written asides and interconnected web-like to the exhibits surrounding them. It is a work of theatre brought to life by its audience. We even operate the puppets ourselves, laughing uneasily at their jerky movements. A family exhibition – curtain rings at child height – and yet many of the works seem alarmingly frail, on the verge of collapse.
Further mythologies include the story of Radon’s discovery as well as other radioactive elements in Cornish mines, alongside allusions to fairy folk and an inherent creative energy of the land, illustrated in an expansion of the exhibition called Radon and his daughters. This also has an accompanying book which adds further layers still to the absurd narratives at play, self-published and printed by letterpress in limited edition.
There is an innate questioning of where things come from, explored through ideas of being attacked from many angles and through different elements. This all relates back to the story of the incomers. Small incidents are enlarged. The sound of the train door closing as Von Ribbentrop left after his visit in 1937 is explored as a moment of betrayal. The stature of Alfred Wallis reversed with that of Ben Nicholson in one of the many illustrative paintings by Lanyon draws attention to the fact that Nicholson took valuable influence from Wallis’ work, aligning him with Nicholson’s other influences: Mondrian, Gabo and Calder. The incomers are pitted against the innate primitive power of the land – the radioactive earth and its dramatic scenes, stolen by an ambitious German visitor who imagined he could win St Ives and even Cornwall as a kingdom of rich spoils, not to mention the many others who sought to lay claim to it each for their own gain.
