by Rod Mengham
2005
A Perfect Likeness
There are three versions of Michelangelo’s David to which people flock continuously. The first is the original, now in the Accademia in Florence; the second is the copy standing in the Piazza Signoria in the same city; and the third is one of dozens of casts in the Cast Courts of the V&A. The first is the right statue in the wrong place, having been abstracted from the vital centre of Florence’s civic reality and installed in the focal position in a temple to art; the closer you get to the David, the less crowded the rooms become, until the point is reached where the competition has melted away altogether and you are left to contemplate a single sculpture, enshrined by the domed chamber it inhabits. The only context which the Accademia lends to David is that of Art. The second of these three figures is the wrong statue in the right place. It looks slightly hunkier, despite the difficulty of holding its own against the backdrop of a large Palazzo, where it stands guard like a bouncer, eying the nearby loggia with its gang of later and lesser works. But it carries art into the social setting of a large Italian city which refined the idea and practice of citizenship through its use of public space. When you walk around this David you are drawing it into the context of a social and political culture worth having but now mostly lost. You might think that the third figure is simply the wrong statue in the wrong place. But, in fact, this judgement might be wrong on both counts. The V&A’s David is the epitome of the work of art in an era of mechanical reproduction, set in the frame of the history of the modern museum, which is where most of us now come to terms with the role and meanings of art.
More than any other nineteenth-century institution, the V&A brought modernity into the museum. Its collections started by amalgamating two quite disparate groups of objects: the collection of plaster casts used for teaching in the London School of Design (founded in 1837), and the residue of the huge number of manufactured items assembled for the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was a strange but entirely appropriate collaboration between the art of industry and the industrialisation of art. The multiplication of versions of the same work of art gave an association of the production line to an activity that most people had learned to value, and even venerate, in terms of uniqueness and originality; the greatest artists were thought of as ‘inimitable’. But sculpture had always been different from painting, literature and music, in this respect. The traditions of classical sculpture had been absorbed almost entirely through imitations. Before the Elgin marbles were shown in London, few people in Britain had experienced Greek sculpture unless in the form of Graeco-Roman copies. Exhibition practice throughout the nineteenth century depended on the availability of casts. When Henry Cole brokered the convention of 1867 by which fifteen European states agreed to contribute sculpture to a series of circulating exhibitions, none of them envisaged lending anything but reproductions. Methods of display seemed to enforce the connection with manufacturing and commerce through an enthusiasm for overcrowding that made some galleries resemble warehouses. Surviving cast courts retain this look of the depository. The Accademia provides a case in point, with its long lines of nineteenth-century casts filling all the available space. The Cast Courts at the V&A have more character than this; although both rooms are visually very busy, their juxtapositions are unpredictable and revealing.
There is an important sense in which casts are more authentic than copies, not to mention fakes, of which a large number entered all the major museums, including the V&A, during the nineteenth century. The mania for casts turned it into a more expensive and laborious means of satisfying the same impulse behind the mid-century vogue for photography. Those who could afford it, had their offspring photographed, but those who could afford a lot more, had bits of their babies cast in three-dimensional form. The resulting collections of monumentalised tiny hands and feet make for strange viewing. Perhaps the most surreal is the array of miniature royal body parts now on show at Osborne House in the Isle of Wight. But this sentimentalising of a culture of mimicry touches on an aspect of casting that is specific to its condition: its relation to cultural memory. Casts, like photographs, capture a moment in the life of an object whose material form continues to undergo change, often imperceptibly, but sometimes quite dramatically. The great collection of casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge preserves the nineteenth-century condition of many archaic bas-reliefs whose originals have deteriorated quite significantly in the smog-laden Attica of the twentieth century.
The ratio of preservation and loss, of memory and forgetfulness, is one of the most powerful themes in contemporary art, nowhere more so than in the sculpture of Rachel Whiteread. Her work in the East Court provides a particularly strong focus on the use of casting as a materialisation of memory. Its faithful record of a non-descript room holds its own in the company of the Pisano pulpit and Trajan’s Column. The two bays of the original space have been reversed into two buttresses that together form a kind of propylaeon, turning a pair of blunt cul-de-sacs into the shape of a grand entrance. The room was occupied by George Orwell during his employment by the BBC, and the conceptual link this enables is with the imaginatively daunting interior of Room 101, as described in 1984. Room 101 was the locus of memory correction, the place where insidious manipulation of historical memory is transformed joltingly into the traumatic revision of a personal sense of self. That scenario is unseen and unheard, except for the nagging anomaly of a break in the seal, a tiny aperture that links inside and outside, obverse and reverse, original and copy. All plaster casts have these somewhere. In Whiteread’s work, it is one of the windows that is imperfectly closed, open just enough for a sound to escape, at least in the imagination. The cast is a figure for the way art changes its meanings in the course of history. Its real original is not an object in space but a moment in time. Whiteread shows this brilliantly. Her flat surfaces are ribbed, which means pitted, with various unfathomable scars, but the most individuating details of all are supplied by that most ubiquitous and most effacing of substances, filler, the very thing designed to be invisible. Its presence here as reminder of something we are clearly supposed to forget invites us to reflect on the scope of casts in the cultural history of the West.
2006
Not Him
The title of the exhibition now running at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin is ‘I not I’, which proposes a symmetry non-existent in the Beckett title it is alluding to. The show is organised around filmed versions of three Beckett texts (Breath, Act Without Words I and Not I) and features both direct responses to Beckett’s work, and imagined associations with it, in videos and sculptures by Bruce Nauman and canvases by Philip Guston. It may be that the assertive doubling of the first person pronoun is intended to emphasise the curator’s desire to find resilience rather than defeat in Beckett’s work, even in texts where these qualities and outcomes are held in unbearable tension. The real gamble of this exhibition involves the encircling of three distinct interpretations of Beckett’s work with the parallel enquiries of Guston and Nauman in order to ‘offer some companionship’ to the writer’s vision. Companionship, or at least ‘company’ of some sort, is often hinted at in Beckett’s post-war oeuvre, but it is effectively fended off in Neil Jordan’s filmed version of Not I (2000). Apart from a few seconds at the start of the film, the camera stays glued to a close-up examination of the mouth of the actress Julianne Moore. This makes it impossible for the viewer to be aware of the mysterious ‘auditor’ present in the stage productions. In Beckett’s original conception, the mouth was faintly lit within a large area of surrounding darkness, with none of the rest of the face or body visible. In Jordan’s version, the actress walks into view fully lit and sits down in a seat with headrest and armrests that look like they have been designed for restraint. From then on, the focus stays on the bright Hollywood perfection of Moore’s lips and gleaming teeth, which form a curious barrier to identification in the experiencing of a text that pivots on questions of identification: suspendin
g it, leading towards it, hesitating it. Beckett’s ‘Mouth’ cannot keep company with herself, but is pushed to the brink of doing so, and the audience is meant to accompany her in this struggle. Not I and Act Without Words I are among Beckett’s most Sisyphean works, but on the page they seem to keep in balance the opposing forces of prohibition and resurgence, the reasons for ‘not going on’ and ‘going on’ simultaneously. Karel Reisz’s filmed version of Act Without Words I (2000) tips the balance in favour of prohibition, converting neutral stage directions into facial expressions of despair and chagrin. Strangely enough, it is in Damien Hirst’s account of Breath (2000), perhaps the most reductive text in the entire oeuvre, that the spirit of resurgence is reflected. The static point of view of a theatre audience is replaced by the dramatically mobile vector of a camera in orbit over the tableau of rubbish, with at least the suggestion of a diurnal rhythm of renewal.
Of the two artists whose work is juxtaposed with these three versions of Beckett’s vision, Nauman is the more direct in his response to the writer’s example. The earliest of his films and videos being screened, Slow Angle Walk (1968), is actually subtitled ‘Beckett Walk’. The later compositions, Good Boy, Bad Boy (1985) and Clown Torture (1987) are much more ambitious in conception, and provide lurid magnifications of typically Beckettian scenarios, but their tone and address are much more brutal and less complicated than anything in Beckett’s prose or drama. Clown Torture focuses on apparently endless repetitions or prolongations of the same kind of hopeless Sisyphean impasse, without any glimmer of alleviation or any approximation to Beckett’s use of humour. This spectacle of endurance is one of several Nauman works in which the experience of the viewer is one of mild torment. With Good Boy, Bad Boy, the antagonism is pronounced; the address to the audience is full-frontal and increasingly aggressive. In Beckett’s texts, the relationship between speaker and reader or listener is often managed with sarcastic wit, not with splenetic confrontation. Guston’s mordancy seems more Beckettian than Nauman’s angry futility. His use of cartoon-like figuration has an edge of humour equivalent to Beckett’s use of sarcasm to encrypt trauma and catastrophe. Interestingly, the images on display include that of Aggressor (1978) which bears a superficial resemblance to Nauman’s scenarios of confrontation. However, the two figures in this painting oppose one another literally eyeball to eyeball, with an absurdity that recalls the mirroring, doubling and symbiosis that Beckett renders so poignantly throughout his oeuvre. In the end, it is a closely similar variety of tones, ranging from the deadly to the ludicrous, that Guston and Beckett seem to share – that Nauman’s more schematic portrayals of alienation seem powerless to reflect.
2006
Birth of a Mountain
‘I am standing on the summit of Berlin, a mountain of rubble two miles long and four hundred feet high.’ The words are not taken from an account of the city’s destruction in 1945, nor from a dystopian fiction of the future, but from a journal entry for the 20 November 2006. The huge massif of the city-mound is known as Teufelsberg, ‘the devil’s mountain’, and is only one – by far the largest – of a dozen artificial hills created after 1945 to enclose the ruins of the historic centre, eighteen million cubic metres of it. In the sixty or more years since work began, entire forests have advanced from Grunewald to colonise its slopes, now quartered by wild boar and joggers with hunting dogs. At the highest point, still shut in behind a double wire fence, is the Cold War radar station, the outer skin of its main tower now pocked and torn, a flimsy canvas cladding dropping away from a steel trellis. Anything more substantial might break up when the underlying clinker starts to shift and subside. As it seems to do in the last two hundred metres of the ascent – loose bricks, Belgian blocks and shattered stones slide underfoot where the soil has been washed downhill. A weathered placard flaps in the wind, arguing that the site has been reserved for development as a ‘resort’, planned to open in 2002: a project long since shelved. To the north-east of the main summit is a slightly lower, table-topped slag heap where groups of men gather with fighting dogs.
The rubble mountain sits, like a Middle Eastern Tel, several kilometres from the city centre. And yet this is now the physical location for much of historic Berlin. Meanwhile, in the geographical centre, there are still large areas of empty land undergoing sporadic development. On Zimmerstrasse, near a waste lot the size of a country field, with meadow grasses and saplings up to six feet tall, a hot air balloon representing the corporate emblem for Die Welt is tethered and hesitating. It does not fly on windy days, according to a measurement that disqualifies nine days out of ten. Which may be why Zeppelin have diversified into the titanic concrete weights used as ballast for high-rise cranes, which are ubiquitous. Ubiquitous also the tall yellow cylinders filled with cement that have become an important element in the city’s architecture, seen to best effect opposite the Polish Apothecary’s on Friedrichstrasse. They already seem more permanent than brick and stone. As you walk south towards the source of ambiguous winter daylight, passing a ham-fisted old man, in the squared shoulders of a communist-era leather jacket, pummelling his mobile phone, everything starts to look temporary. All the outside museums – museums to the history of the Berlin Wall, to the Nuremberg trials, to the ‘Topography of Terror’ – all are mounted on temporary structures. The city of disposable buildings is speeding up its replacement cycle. Even the new Hauptbahnhof has been closed temporarily after nuts and bolts started to fall out of its cranial vault.
The city centre, no man’s land for much of the post-war period, is now a vortex of clearances, displacements – a mechanism for the conversion of waste. Close to the fiercely transformed area of the Potsdamer Platz is the Martin-Gropius-Bau, now housing a major exhibition of the works of Rebecca Horn. Right at the centre of the building, right at the conceptual centre of the show, is the monumental new commission, ‘Birth of a Pearl’. This is a highly stylised arrangement of lenses and containers that represents a gigantic filtration system, reminiscent of the conditions that allow for the creation of a pearl, starting from an irritation that consolidates waste at the very centre of an organism. Both this installation and the exhibition as a whole insist on radial action and radial organisation as their most obsessive principles of construction. There are a couple of rooms devoted to the props and photographic records of long extinguished performances – blueprints anticipating something lost in the past, dusty masks and abandoned stage costumes in a performance morgue. The kinetic sculptures, which first alerted me to the strange, unsettling brilliance of Horn’s work, are mostly switched off. And this presents the opportunity to focus on the series of large crayon drawings, vividly full of movement, like energy graphs, sections through the vortex that show both whirling intensity and geometrical control. ‘Blau in Zwischenzustand’ (pen, pencil, acrylic and Indian ink on paper) is a good example of this genre, the two-dimensional evocation of an entire hemisphere of simultaneous but various trajectories, ballistic flight-paths bending the laws of gravity. The drawings are like blueprints for the creation of a planet, a surplus of flying particles beginning to acquire a sense of the atmosphere that forms around an absent sphere. Like the pearl contraption, these diagrams are all about waste, not as a residue that is extruded or dispersed, but as a resource that is polarised, focused on, the act of concentration on waste becoming the most vital activity of art and indeed its very reason for being. Perhaps the most poignant of all the exhibits is the arrangement of ‘Wounded Stones’, boulder fragments stranded on vertical planes like the art-house equivalents of broken erratics, left after the departure of pigmented glaciers.
