By Charlie Fox
Clik here to view.
Lismore Castle, County Waterford, Ireland
‘Outlandish’ would be the best word for the whole trip. First, let’s note that nothing beats the Gothic thrill supplied by receiving an invitation to a castle: as soon as the thing arrives, I have visions of vampires and ghouls. In fact, this invitation makes a much sunnier but still-bewitching proposition, asking me if I’ll fly to County Waterford, on the south-east coast of Ireland for the opening of ‘The Persistence of Objects’. Masterfully curated by Katrina Brown and Kitty Anderson from Glasgow’s The Common Guild, this exhibition includes works by eight contemporary artists and sprawls throughout Lismore Castle and its environs, including Carthage Cathedral, which nestles in the grounds, and into the streets beyond. Festive marginalia: this exhibition marks ten years of events arranged under the auspices of Lismore Castle Arts, which has built an annual tradition out of setting energetic shows within this rural space. It’s the stuff of a rather strange contemporary fairytale in which a Gothic castle is haunted by sculptures, installations or, as per 2013’s ‘Monuments’ show, a curious architectural folly by Pablo Bronstein. The moral is obvious: we should cheer on reality’s accommodation of such implausible things. I follow the breadcrumb trail and find myself, a few days later, approaching the castle.
Clik here to view.
Hayley Tompkins, Satellite (detail), 2015, mixed media installation. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd.
Orange, green, gold, brown: the landscape whips past on the journey, luscious and undulant space checkered by the occasional pictograms of distant houses; wizened trees with antler branches and rough manes shake in the breeze. Over a summer day’s radiant span, the contents of the exhibition cause all kinds of trouble inside my mind. What follows from studying these things isn’t knowledge but its opposite, a dizzying and fruitful state of incomprehension where various perceptual certainties are exploded. Remaining in the cognitive wreckage is an abundance of bizarre possibilities and riddles to be unravelled. Even the most stubbornly ordinary stuff is regained as enigmatic and bristling with oddness. Laid out as though for clinical examination, the objects in Hayley Tompkins’s Satellite (2015) (snapshots of the moon, a mobile phone from the early 2000s, a shirtsleeve licked with acrylic paint) radiate a discreetly heartbreaking pathos even as their juxtaposition makes them feel somehow alien. Beyond the castle at Lismore’s austere Heritage Centre, Images, or Shadows of Divine Things (2005–ongoing) by Gerard Byrne passes off photographs shot in the last decade as lustrous street life tableaux from the middle of the previous century, scrambling your temporal bandwidth by indicating how the past ghosts through the present. These are the first pieces I see and they provide an early dose of the weird and soon-to-be inescapable sensation that I’m playing the anthropologist within a fictional world.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Lismore Castle might comprise a world by itself. Roving around I take inventory of some of its magical contents, including a greyhound with a ghoulish physiognomic resemblance to Samuel Beckett that was carved in a honey-coloured wooden wave by the 17th-century sculptor Nicholas Johnson. There’s also a Flemish pastoral tapestry redrafting a scene painted by David Teniers the Younger, in which hearty drunks conduct a makeshift trampoline game. (Everyone, even the watchful donkey, has exactly the same face.) In the dining room there were two earls painted by Van Dyck watching the guests from the walls. At breakfast there’s enough meat laid out on the enormous table to roof a house. Later, when the Gothic pile’s shadows turned jagged across the grass and the midsummer night’s sky is flaming red, I started rubbing my eyes: under an arch of entwining trees I half-expect to glimpse Ryan O’Neal and Leonard Rossiter repeating their Georgian-era duel scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). In fact, these well-groomed lawns date much further back – to 1650 which, trivia fiends might like to know, makes Lismore’s the longest continuously tended garden in Irish history. The Dukes of Devonshire have counted Lismore among the jewels in their estate since 1753. Evidence of nature is everywhere in the exhibition but frequently in unsettling forms. Wolfgang Tillmans’s long photographic romance with bruised fruit continues apace in ‘Fruit Logistica (I–V)’ (2009), which combines shots of peaches, food packaging and cross-sections of the architectural mechanisms within high-grade printers, providing a slick commentary on how our sense of reality gets warped by endless image reproduction.
Clik here to view.
Wolfgang Tillmans, from ‘Double Exposure (Fespa Digital / Fruit Logistica) I – V’, 2012, inkjet prints mounted on aluminium in artist’s frames. Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London
Much else in ‘The Persistence of Objects’ basks in the pure textural disorientation that a range of materials can offer. The Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri’s sculpture Platform II (dish stack) (2012) makes unexpectedly menacing use of concrete, wire mesh, a blanket, ‘sponge sheets’ and gravelled latex. Few things express sheer material persistence with the same gnomic force as weatherbeaten rocks, but the real feat of Kuri’s installation within St Carthage Cathedral is to imbue them with fresh and baffling unfamiliarity. The vessel for the first monstrous rock is a tilted rubbish skip. Almost attached – this infinitesimal gulf is painful – to a slope on its other side is a powder-coated metal plate, mirroring the skip’s stance and kept in place by another rugged chunk of stone. It’s title, .)(. (2012), provides a slick diagram of the arrangement but doesn’t account for the oddly tender feelings it induces. I didn’t see the Sunday morning congregation in situ with Kuri’s piece but according to reports the response has been warm, with churchgoers expressing intrigue and attraction. For an assemblage marked by its junkyard scuzziness, the piece looks curiously at home within the cathedral’s stone walls, as if they welcome such a gruff visitation. The rocks (flown over from a Turin quarry) are wonderfully intractable facts, a big physical mystery dragged into fractured communication with other, more prosaic objects. In the cathedral’s light they seem like an oblique account of faith and its perplexities.
Clik here to view.
Gabriel Kuri, Platform II (dish stack), 2012, wooden pallet, blanket, steel rods, concrete, perspex, wire mesh, ceramic crockery, sponge sheets, gravelled latex. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
But the more modest things can be equally startling. Carol Bove’s sculptures operate on a similar frequency. Her weathervane-like assemblage Neptunea Constricta (2015) attaches peacock feathers, seashells and what might be desiccated flesh to its steel antennae and concrete plinth. These are lifeless things, but in Bove’s careful arrangement they acquire a disconcerting power. Aleph (2012) consists of shelves crammed with magickal texts from Aleister Crowley, Jorge-Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe, alongside a handful of numinous found materials, including needles, stones and a mink-coated button. For additional illumination, consult this passage on the aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, from On The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, by Gershom Scholem: ‘The Kabbalists always regarded the aleph as the spiritual root of all other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet and hence all other elements of human discourse.’ Which means, perhaps, that we should treat the dense syllabus and the other ephemera Bove has chosen as an arcane personal index, a fiendishly concentrated codebook to aid our navigation of all her other works. Caveat lector: Kabbalah’s famous impenetrability is also in play here. It’s an ancient tradition where esoteric methods are used to parse sacred texts, which also maintains that genuine knowledge of its revelations is impossible. Such a beguiling sliver of Jewish mysticism allows Bove to arrange a thorny and paradoxical installation, hinting at the occult erudition that shapes her work whilst indicating that the substance at its heart is nevertheless unknowable.
Clik here to view.
Carol Bove, Aleph, 2012, wood and metal shelves, books and periodicals, steel, brass, stone, feather, mink button, found objects. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London
Navigation remains hazardous in the Egyptian artist Basim Magdy’s film The Many Colours of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness (2014). A background hunt for facts reveals that it was shot somewhere in Germany, which is never obvious because this lush conundrum maps out its own dreamy territory. Taxidermy animals and statues remain as the mute witnesses of an unknown political trauma. History has crossed over into delirium: waterfalls are described as ‘the devil throwing up’. These skeins of futuristic folklore provide a route into a bracing meditation on objects as memento mori, carrying premonitory knowledge of death. The film itself appears in an especially sumptuous phase of decay that’s crucial to its fantastical climate, coating the screen with hot sparks, irradiated fur and explosions of psychedelic light.
Clik here to view.
Steven Claydon, Animated Wavelength (via Harald Bluetooth) (detail), 2015, galvanised steel, stone, radar reflectors. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Steven Claydon’s sculpture Animated Wavelength (via Harald Bluetooth) (2015) looms in a high and shady recess of the castle’s garden. Three haggard stone busts are fixed above a galvanized steel frame and a trio of black radar reflectors are strung beneath them, creating a neat sequence of non sequiturs. According to corporate lore, the Bluetooth symbol originates from a Danish rune used by the eponymous 10th-century king whose last name commemorated his hellish dental situation. Ambiguous signals abound: the radar reflectors could be relaying data from the dormant brains of those furious busts, acting as the regal symbols for a lunatic dynasty or picking up communicative detritus from the atmosphere. A master trickster when it comes to the provenance of his objects, Claydon sneaks in a twist: these heads may look as though they’ve spent nine hundred years frozen in rage but they were, in fact, carved a few nights earlier by a local stonemason.
Clik here to view.
Steven Claydon, Animated Wavelength (via Harald Bluetooth) (detail), 2015, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
If you need a name for the intoxicating epistemological dislocation that Claydon routinely pulls off, ‘sojestiveness’ is unbeatable. Coined by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939), it melts together ‘suggestive’ and ‘jest’ just like Claydon’s works, taking the familiar purpose or history of his objects and turning them to more anarchic ends. For a solo show in 2007, the artist invented his own country (‘New Valkonia’) and exhibited his works as if they were deranged native artifacts, freshly unearthed.
You have to climb through the frame to see the face of the second bust, which is turned, glaring, towards further acres of majestic land. Eyeballing this object I’m just another thing within the landscape for a few moments, gawping. If I were smarter I’d sketch the metaphysical gulf between us and pinpoint exactly where it collapses; I’d adequately express the vertiginous thrill caused by thinking about our twin fate as nothing but dust. It’s more appropriate to stay mute: knowledge is shaky; mysteries are indestructible.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.