Epicurus, the Hellenistic sage, constructed a philosophy upon a “life according to nature”, a materialistic and individualised existence in which pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain were the only viable tenets. This outlook had its foundations in Epicurean atomic theory, a world of constantly moving particles, which would, every now and then, randomly ‘swerve’. This ‘swerve’ reaffirms a structure-less, meaningless world.

On the floor of one of the White Cube Bermondsey’s vast clinical galleries lies a huge corroding metal book, upon which leer a number of repulsive, dead sunflowers. It’s a strange mess of seemingly discarded objects. Scrawled on top of the dull lead are the words ‘Hortus Philosophorum’ – Garden Philosopher – an epithet for Epicurus; a lonely reference, seemingly discordant with the titular themes of the other sculptures and paintings. Yet the implications of Epicurus’ chaotic theory, void of ideological significance, resonate through the cavernous halls.

The title of the exhibition, Il Misterio delle Cattedrali, derives from an esoteric manual written by the illusive alchemist Fulcanelli in the 1920s. The mystery of alchemy hovers throughout the exhibition. Strange chemicals are weighed from complicated apparatus. The first room you encounter, South Gallery I, houses five large sculptures. Each is enigmatic and strange, grappling with the metaphorical dissection of alchemical ideals. A work called Alkahest depicts an upturned bucket upon a fragile chair. From the bucket unfurls a strand of photographic transparencies, each capturing an enigmatic seascape. Waves lap on the beach. We perceive the ebb and flow of history and the tide of ages. An ethereal, shadowy figure is glimpsed in the photographs, mythical and portentous.

Alchemy is Kiefer’s point of departure, the mystical shell that draws the exhibition together into a coherent experience. Yet he is ultimately interested in ideas. Alchemy signifies man’s compulsion to dominate nature through mastering the transformative process, the vain search for qualitative progress – turning lead into gold. In the final room, scientific instruments hang in front of huge canvases depicting the wildness of nature and bleak human edifices, paralleling man’s search for hidden codes in the real world. As in all Kiefer’s work, everything is ambiguous and multi-faceted, and from this mystical base he speculates upon history.

Across all the paintings and sculptures within the exhibition there is an unsavoury corrosion or calcification, a chemical corruption of material. Enormous fungal plants sprout from the canvases and from the lead, reaching aimlessly, blackened and sordid. This process of decay seems to capture the inescapable passing of time, the inevitable, unharnessed course of change to which all must succumb. Kiefer reveals the inner frailty of man’s twin ambitions, to maintain the present state of things, and to order and direct progress. Both signify a self-nourishment within the constructed cage of existence, the aversion of the eyes from the pulsating chaotic reality beyond.

Through this, man denies also the precariousness of his situation. There is something unstable about the pieces here. Spindly slatted chairs are crushed between weighty leaden tomes. Samson depicts a heavy rock, under which is wedged a rusting miniature plane. The sculpture is confusing, the natural stone seems as though it may roll off its stone plinth at any moment, having been destabilised by the human construction. Within this allegorical work is captured the cyclical nature of history, undermining itself and contributing to the erosion of conviction in our most definite structure – time. In Dat Rosa Miel Apibus, from within the leaden pages of accumulated wisdom and knowledge stutter rusting fighter planes. Our qualitative advancement is undermined, and derided.

This instability is juxtaposed with a sense of heaviness that prevails throughout the exhibition, emanating from the physicality of the canvases. Paintings and sculptures loom oppressively; they weigh upon you, it is a burden of the past, but also the burden of uncertainty. The mind of the artist is tangible throughout, as if he peers judiciously from behind the painted canvas at our vain attempts to decipher his creations.

Kiefer’s other major thematic tract is his homeland, Germany. Within this context the formative relationship between the present and the past is endowed with greater volatility. The bleak depictions of Tempelhof, the airport designed during Nazi rule, are terrifying in their emptiness. Toy planes swarm the exhibition like mosquitoes, as history haunts the present.

Wandering through the exhibition, there is a monumental religiosity about the experience. It is disorientating. The work assaults our convictions, screws up our preconceptions, and flings them into the swirling vortex of doubt. And yet somehow this process is liberating, life-affirming: we experience the mortality of our ideas.

Following Waldemar Januszczak’s now-infamous outburst on the subject of video art (as discussed here last issue), this exhibition, from the 2007 Turner Prize nominee Zarina Bhimji, features the first major piece of video art of 2012.

Yellow Patch, which is currently showing amongst 25 years of her work in the Whitechapel Gallery, could not have come at a better time to question his rather small-minded assertions. Over its 25-minute span, the audience is drawn into one arresting image after another, each of which potently captures the themes of post-colonial loss and destruction (most explicitly shown by its final, defining image of a weather-beaten statue of Queen Victoria in India).  Although conceptually a sequel to her first truly acclaimed piece, 2002’s Out of Blue (also in the show), it is definitely from The Dark Knight school of sequels, with Yellow Patch far outstripping its predecessor.

This is in part due to new technology; whereas Out of Blue, shot on Super 16 film, occasionally resembles camcorder footage of an exotic holiday, the HD of Yellow Patch gives each of its set pieces a wonderful clarity that adds to its haunting absence. We can see every crack, crevice and cobweb in the abandoned colonial palaces.

Bhimji says that it “is not about the actual facts but about the echo they create”, and this is apparent throughout the photographs that make up her later collections. Although many of these stem from real events (for example, the trails of anti-malarial drugs in Britain, the slave trade, or her expulsion from Idi Amin’s Uganda when she was 11, which arguably has influenced all of her career), these are left implicit, leaving their impact upon the viewer purely by association.

In photos such as 2007’s Memories Were Trapped inside the Asphalt (a title that for me could epitomise the exhibition), we are confronted with two pairs of presumably abandoned shoes. No context is given, allowing the shoes to act as a focal point for the themes of abandonment. Clearly, we are dealing with an artist of great composition skill – in scenes so bleak and sparse, she ensures that every item or blemish tells a story.

That said, her earlier works, also displayed here, show that she has not always been this devastatingly effective. For example, 1987’s She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence (inspired by the tests used in Heathrow in the 70s to determine whether those who claimed to be Indian wives were really virgins), very effectively uses scattered turmeric and chilli powder to enforce its themes through sight and scent. Nonetheless its final frame, which features a pair of what looks like bloodstained latex gloves, feels slightly heavy-handed compared to the subtlety of her later pieces. Even so, it would still work as a standalone piece.

1998’s Cleaning the Garden series is also flawed. The use of mirrors etched with advertisements for runaway slaves work well, but the accompanying lightboxes just aren’t sufficiently interesting images to complement them, especially when compared to Yellow Patch and the series of photographs the gallery visitor will have seen just before them. Her juvenilia, however, does have its moments of greatness. The giant Polaroids she made for the V&A are beautiful examples of what might have been had Bhimji taken an interest in photographing the human form. All in all, then, this exhibit shows an artist currently at the top of her game, and as such is certainly worthy of a visit.

Image Captions:

Zarina Bhimji
Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over
2001-2006
Ilfochrome Ciba classic print
121.9 x 154.4 cm
Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

Zarina Bhimji
Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt
1998-2003
Transparency lightbox
130 x 170 cm
Courtesy the artist and DACS, Londo

A Very Human Desire for the Metaphysical

I had every intention of rocking up at some ungodly hour in Trafalgar Square to queue with the rest of the world for my Da Vinci prize. Only, as if by Immaculate Conception (a friend called John), was I delivered the Golden Ticket. Described as a “triumph in diplomacy and enlightened scholarship”, I was feeling privileged to hold a ticket to the National Gallery’s Leonardo once-in-a-lifetime show.

Of the confirmed fifteen of his paintings, nine are exhibited here in London, four of which are incomplete, but that is beside the point. If Rachel Campbell Johnston, the Chief Art Critic for The Times, posits that the National Gallery has achieved the “near impossible”, perhaps this really is a case of Roald Dahl witchery.

Only I’m certain there were originally only five Golden Tickets and Charlie had only four companions: entering the exhibition space of violet shadows we find ourselves shuffling with swarms. Leonardo would be delighted! I stand for a moment just left of Boltraffio’s Portrait of a Young Man, and catch the whispers of a group of elderly women, flocking in veils of Chanel No.5, squinting at the portrait one turns to another and gossips, “He looks as if he’s had Botox.”

Granted, the musculature of the human body is seemingly wrought to severe verisimilitude. Yet Leonardo and his contemporaries didn’t study the human anatomy to affect a corporeal paralysis. I assure you, there isn’t anything remotely inactive about the works exhibited at the National Gallery. They rather ooze energy. Energy so enigmatically charged, one struggles for words. But how do you begin to describe what you see? Of course the majority of visitors are listening to audio guides; assigning their senso comune to an infiltration of sober insights by Luke Syson, the exhibition curator. A concept that Leonardo himself would have most likely been hostile to. The artist admonished the science of words and poetry as infinitely inferior to art, as it cannot “compose a proportional harmony”. We, the adoring viewers, thus owe it to this most fascinating of polymaths to remove our audio headphones and quash our public prattle: we need only to look. His message is a mute vernacular.

As are his subjects that embody paradoxes. At once the artist depicts movement and poise, composure and tension, eyes that both seek you and resist you. Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronniere is the seeming paradigm of his play with paradox: the white glint of her stare pierces your gaze, yet she is forever looking over your shoulder. Her ornamental attire draws her demarcations, yet there is a blurring of lines essential to the artists principal goal of creating relievo (from rilevare, ‘to raise’), she is suspended above a parapet that becomes a sort of plinth, yet she does not possess the volume of a sculpture, she merely conveys volume; she appears perfectly solemn yet the emotions of her mind are exposed by the slightest of facial idiosyncrasies. Set against a lamp-black background, her swollen mien flushes hues of Terra Rosa, disclosing deep-seated passions.

Through painterly technique alone Leonardo sculpts subtle shades of irony to propose that her ascetic countenance is but a façade. Yet his framing is not quite lucid enough to tear her mask completely from her. The little jewel on her forehead, held on a chord around her head, pins her in place. You walk away feeling unbearably excluded from her secrets. You will turn to look again. She will stare defiantly past you.

We cannot divine Ferronniere’s thoughts, as is the case with Leonardo’s Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. While their depictions are static and flat, there is an implied motion. The artist’s refined application of oil paints shapes spatial volume, allowing for mobility. Indeed both women look as if they are about to move. It is this subverting of the medium, paint is static after all, which lends them their quietly subversive air. There is waywardness about them, an inferred naughtiness that finds its apogee twenty years or so later in Florence, with Mona Lisa’s smile.

The exhibition’s ultimate success is of course the reuniting of the two Virgin of the Rocks, whose notorious story not only haunts Renaissance history but to this day, sparks heated dispute. The Franciscan church in Milan commissioned the initial painting in 1483, which now belongs to The Louvre. It was to be an altarpiece for the chapel of Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception; only it was delivered 25 years late, and in the interlude another version was conceived.

The two renderings of the same picture now hang at either end of an exhibition room in the National Gallery. The affect is delusional. At first you’re waltzing through a fairground hall of mirrors, animating double takes. Until their opuses appear quintessentially different, denoting quite dissimilar philosophies. I find myself infinitely more attracted to the later version. Like a moth to a flame, I flutter to its illumination of the Platonic Ideal. Why is it that I’m quite literally drawn to the light?

Art historians and budding art critics alike would toss Italian terms like relievo and sfumato at you. Technique aside, there’s no denying that pictures that embody something of the immaterial charm us. While England, or the world for that matter, is becoming increasingly secularized, humanity shyly adores the metaphysical. I asked my friends in halls to pick their favourite of the two. The latter ranked more votes. Why I asked: “You see the light.”

Image Captions:

Top Left: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
The Virgin of the Rocks, 1483 – about 1485
Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département des Peintures (777)
© RMN / Franck Raux

Top Right: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
The Virgin of the Rocks, about 1491/2–99 and 1506-8
© The National Gallery, London (NG 1093)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Portrait of a Woman (‘La Belle Ferronnière’), about
1493–4. Oil on walnut, 63 x 45 cm. Musée du Louvre,
Paris, Département des Peintures (778). © RMN /
Franck Raux

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. Royal Academy (Jan 21-Apr 8.)

Our year of superstar art kicks off with Hockney’s latest exhibition, including his recent pieces, ‘painted’ on the iPad. Eschewing the Los Angeles setting of his most famous works, Hockney has painted giant landscapes of Yorkshire in his typically vibrant style especially for this show. A must for fans of ‘Britain’s Favourite Artist’.
See also: Andy Warhol Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Some of Pop Art’s most famous works, alongside lesser-known portfolios such as his ‘Famous Jews’ collection, at Dulwich from June.

Lucian Freud Portraits. National Portrait Gallery (Feb 9-May 27)

A commemorative retrospective celebrating Freud’s essence-capturing and captivating portraits, this show will feature one hundred of his works, both painted and drawn, including portraits of: January highlight, Hockney, many of Freud’s lovers, and, perhaps most excitingly, his final, unfinished, Portrait of the Hound.
See also: Edvard Munch at Tate Modern. A painter at his best with portraits, like Freud, Munch is reassessed by the Tate in June.

Picasso and Britain. Tate Britain (Feb 15 – Jul 15)

February looks set to be (unusually) exciting, with Picasso following hot on Freud’s heels. Featuring 60 Picasso works covering all of his periods, this show aims to demonstrate the connections between Picasso and British painters such as Bacon, Wyndham Lewis and (he’s getting around a bit) Hockney through 110 of their paintings.
See also: Picasso’s ‘Vollard Suite’ etchings at British Museum. His most important set of etchings, and the first full set in Britain, from May.

British Design 1948-2012. V&A (Mar 31 – Aug 12)

The exhibition most fitting with the ‘great in Great Britain’ mood of the jubilee/Olympics, this will feature everything from the E-Type Jag, through ‘70s Punk, to the designs for the 2012 Olympic stadia, as well as (you’ve guessed it) the work of David Hockney. Judging by their strong Postmodernism exhibition, this should be excellent.
See also: Bauhaus: Art as Life at Barbican Centre. Comparing the UK’s finest design with arguably the most eminent period of German art and design, from April.

Damien Hirst. Tate Modern (Apr 5-Sep 9)

You already know all of the works: embalmed animals, spot paintings, medicine cabinets… See all these and more at what promises to be a major retrospective of the seminal Young British Artist’s work, from Goldsmith’s to his present multi-million-dollar incarnation. It’s a pricy exhibition, but worth it to see the work of, perhaps, the most famous of living artists.
See also: Rachel Whiteread at Whitechapel Gallery. Hirst’s YBA contemporary is creating a new work for the façade of the gallery, on display from June.

Image Captions:
David Hockney, Winter Timber, 2009. Oil on 15 canvases, 274 x 609.6cm. Copyright David Hockney. Photo credit: Jonathan Wilkinson

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS 2011. Photo: by Prudence Cuming Associates

Before giving more detail about the nature of the exhibition, and the history of its contents, it is pertinent to go back to the red energy that is the Tatlin Tower. The Tower is, as the cliché goes, one of architecture’s great, unrealised plans; that is to say, the Tower was never built. It remained only ever a pipe dream, something always to aspire to create and never to begin building, never to consider in earnest the practical tasks of construction … Of course, all this ‘idealism’ of spirit shown by Vladimir Tatlin himself as well as Soviet Russia is ripe for pseudo-historicist interpretation and political platitudes: “Doesn’t the fact that Tatlin never got his Tower off the ground show us that Communism was always something, by nature, impossible? A glorious idea that never concerned itself with practicalities, an idealist’s dream that never confronted the brute reality of human selfishness and realistic outcomes?” and so on ad nauseam.  Well, fine. One can easily take that step. But what this exhibition shows is quite the opposite: that the Tatlin Tower was very much the exception to the rule; while the Tower only ever remained a blueprint, or a scale-model, throughout all the USSR hundreds of building projects were realised that fully integrated the ‘idealist’ spirit of Communist utopianism with architectural realities.

The forerunners of modernist architecture flocked to Russia to have their designs built, and Russians themselves drew upon the likes of Le Corbusier to design all manner of the most mundane, practical buildings imaginable: the Dnepr River Hydroelectric Power Station in Ukraine features turbine rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the dam itself, so that the machinery and its attendants are bathed in light and seem to sit upon the dam like an ocean liner; an automotive factory in Russia (designed by Melnikov) is enthused with sheer avant-garde bravado, a huge circular window leading to the main chimney, suggesting the very motion of the wheels of the cars manufactured within; a Workers’ Club, a place of sheer recreation for the working class, juts out of the landscape like some three-pronged modern-day contemporary art gallery and contains a scrupulously planned auditorium; a communal apartment block reminiscent of the Bauhaus School’s wide corridors and open planning. Yet all these architectural flourishes do nothing to hobble each building’s functionality. Indeed, the entire aim of the Constructivist school of art, which so dominated in this period, was that form was to meet function; a building’s beauty was to arise from its perfect fulfilment of its function, not in unnecessary embellishment (one building was even decried for having sensuous curves to its exterior, since these were supposedly designed to appeal to emotion rather than to fit the function of the building).

Yet despite this almost ascetic self-denial of beauty, one only has to look at Constructivist artwork to see that, of course, beauty is impossible to eschew – it returns again in ever new forms, always finds a way back into creative life. Broadly speaking, Constructivist artworks are separated into two forms: ‘constructions’ and ‘compositions’. A construction, however, is not something purely functional, despite any remonstration perhaps forthcoming from the ghosts of Malevich et al. These constructions, which can perhaps best be described as beautified blueprints, could never be admitted as purely practical designs, even though they seem to be an attempt to render some dream-like machine real. Rather, they seek to rephrase their utopian longings into a concrete mathematic-artistic language. Therefore, even when the title of the piece may be Design for the Construction of a Radio Tower, the accompanying drawing leaves us in the dark as to how these purely geometric shapes could ever become reality. These constructions, then, become so many Tatlin Towers. Yet the beauty of the phenomenon of the Tatlin Tower is that, despite its unrealised nature, it had more of an effect on the Russian people than any ‘real’ object ever could.  In early Communist Russia, works of art (which these constructions undoubtedly are) really took on the form of opinion-shaping objects, objects that the man on the street could identify with and cling to. One should praise these Constructivists for achieving what the modern work of art today fails to do, perhaps can never do: to resonate with the public. Perhaps all this is because, in those heady days of early Communism, there was a very true sense in which the entire nation was involved in some collaborative project. There was no self-satisfaction in achieving the Revolution; soon, reality made itself known, and a whole wave of architects and artists set to work to find a new creational language that would somehow give artistic and spiritual reality to this new state of affairs. One could no longer rely on the old bourgeois art to give any sense of substance to everyday life, a radical new way of thinking meant a radical new art.

This is why, for instance, in the monumentally beautiful works of Aleksandr Rodchenko, we can see pure works of art, devoid of any purpose, yet which still echo the functionalism of the Constructivists’ constructions and buildings. It is as if, even in expressing the subject’s innermost creative spirit, the spirit of the age, with all its geometrical and scientific allusions, still manifests itself. Thus in Rodchenko’s Linearism (1920), we get pure circular forms (which can only have been drawn with the aid of a pair of compasses) trailing off into a void; a picture whose meaning is impenetrable, but nonetheless reminds us of half-remembered mathematical theories, economical tenets and philosophical speculative logic. If Beauty, as Kant says, is a symbol of the Good, then perhaps what these Constructivist works of art amount to is a yearning, a striving even, to create a beautiful object of art which forms a symbol, a symbol that allows us to contemplate this new Good. A Good without precedent – the Communist utopia made real.

Image Caption: Richard Pare Shabolovka Radio Tower, 1998. Richard Pare, courtesy Kicken Berlin. Copyright Richard Pare

Amongst the forty selected is RCA graduate Leah Capaldi whose performance-based works have also been part of the Catlin Prize final (Allure) and Exposure 10 (Peplos). On the opening day, I talk to Leah about her participation in Bloomberg New Contemporaries. “I’m thrilled to be in it,” Leah says as we discuss what it means to her to be selected for the show. “It’s a great show to be in and it’s great to know you’re being taken seriously.”

As I enter the show the first thing that strikes me is the curator’s subtle, spacious arrangement of works and sensitive treatment of colour. In the first room, I find myself staring into Selma Parlour’s Room,a square oil painting on linen. The depth of the piece is strangely disorientating, with a dull and dirty orange centre, surrounded by flat and soapy pastels. Opposite, the plinths that David Buckley’s curiously distorted bronze and plaster sculptures sit on, mirror Parlour’s colours in similar hues of spearmint and soft greys. Buckley’s sculptures reflect the light at moments: flickers of bronze peering through black patination and remnants of colour flashing across plaster-white. Even here, at the beginning of the exhibition, it is clear just how considered the curation is. When discussing it with Leah, she says: “There’s a real sense of energy to it.”

I ask Leah which work might be her favourite in the show. “I really like Joshua Bilton’s photographs and Minae Kim’s piece,” she replies after a little thought; Minae Kim’s work impresses me also. Her subtle intervention is easy to miss, yet commands a sort of dependency from the space when noticed, as if the space the piece occupies and the space around it needs Kim’s work to stay stable and not collapse.

In Leah’s own piece for the show, Allure, a group of men and women, each doused in entire 200ml bottles of the Chanel perfume ‘Allure’, enter the gallery space, dressed casually, wandering through the audience. “There are a few issues and questions I hope to challenge and raise through Allure,” Leah explains as we begin to talk a little about the ideas and reasons behind the piece. “One being gender divides: the different attitudes towards a woman wearing too much perfume and a man wearing too much perfume are striking. If people encounter a woman with too much perfume, people feel embarrassed for them, as if the woman’s trying too hard. She appears as being desperate, whereas if a man wears too much perfume, it’s like fox territory; it’s masculine.” Leah pauses. “And then there’s class, elitism. It’s ludicrous that an £86 bottle of perfume even exists!” The performance of Allure is the only artwork in Bloomberg New Contemporaries that doesn’t take up any consistent physical space. “In a way, although it is completely ephemeral, the piece does act as a quiet and subversive way of declaring space.”

Tomas Downes’ steel wall piece downstairs commands space in a different way; a frame-like sculptural object turns the gaps between itself flat, the light which bounces off the metal appearing like a natural, slowly moving shading of a pencil drawing. Another striking piece in the show is Nightworker, a video piece by Se-je Kim, hung in the corner of the first upstairs room. Kim’s piece seems to transform the idea of night as a time into night as a place. The protagonist in the work moves through eerie empty spaces with a noticeable slowness as the harsh white of fluorescent light reflects off her face as she stares into the camera.

A lot of the work in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 that I find myself most attracted to deals with space and its transformation and manipulation, such as in Minae Kim’s piece and Tomas Downes’ piece. Being in the presence of a work that commands the space around it, in a way, commands the viewer also. Continuing to discuss Allure, Leah says: “I hope to challenge where people are located in the work. If a visitor to the gallery comes wearing ‘Allure’, they immediately become part of the piece. It’s about incorporating the viewer without asking their permission.” Other works in the show also manage what Leah talks about in different ways, enveloping the viewer in strangely buzzing colours, in the controlling of space and in obscure narratives through ambiguous places. The selection of work in this year’s exhibition is incredibly varied in subject and impact, and beautifully and sensitively put together. As I leave, I feel a pull of intrigue which will no doubt take me back to the exhibition before it is over: an intrigue which is present in a lot of the work, but also an intrigue of what the show is saying about, not only now, but the future. Bloomberg New Contemporaries is, in a sense, the beginning of things to come.

‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011: In the Presence’ is at the ICA from November 23 2011 to January 15 2012. Leah Capaldi’s Allure is performed 4 times a week on Thursdays 6pm-9pm and Friday-Sunday 2pm-5pm. For more information visit http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/

Images: David Buckley’s sculpture, Marie Angeletti’s photographs, Samuel Williams’ video, and Selma Parlour’s Painting. Photo by: Steve White

Whilst this procedure no doubt correlates with the symptoms of Student-Accidie-Disorder, it wouldn’t be amiss to associate its course with the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), medically identified in 1984. With the nights drawing in, and with the morning’s withdrawal altogether, one’s exposure to light is fleeting, and fluorescent tube lighting fills the gaps between. In the winter months, our lives are somewhat light deficient, yet unlike hedgehogs we humans are incapable of hibernation, so we must feast on minced pies to vivify the nocturnal lull.  James Yamada however, delivers a more slimming solution with his uplifting installation, The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees.

Just off City Road, in the backyard of Parasol Unit’s vibrant contemporary art space, one can take refuge under a roof of ‘full spectrum light’, unashamedly surrendering to light rays of a therapeutic rather than UV breed. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recognised exposure to such wavelengths as a highly beneficial treatment for SAD. So I put it to the test. Sitting for half an hour under Yamada’s construction, I watch black clad journo’s waltz in the periphery of its glare, swinging their complimentary glasses of wine in the night’s tie-dye darkness of cerulean blue. Their à la mode auras assume luminous hues, disclosing rogue hairs and fibres that protrude from their shiny skins.  Everything is stripped naked by the artist’s 10,000-lux light elements, as photo-stimulation gives birth to imperfections. Blots and blemishes multiply. The crowd soon disseminates into lamp black corners, cowering from the flicker and flare.

At the nucleus of the exhibition I sit alone. Scribbling diffused notes on the back of my press release, my writing suddenly becomes self-conscious. My complimentary glass of wine shivers in the installation’s undulating heat waves. Yamada’s construction seemingly becomes an altar of exposition, as my being is laid bare. I beg to differ with the press release’s preposition that the installation offers “some privacy” to the visitor. Rather, in a city of anonymity, Yamada stages a very public encounter. Perhaps the artist’s maxim is that of an exposé itself, and how long one may chance to paddle in its illumining waters.

I personally embrace winter and gladly laden myself with layers of clothing, taking refuge in my knits. It is the time of year when the ‘English Rose’, Britain’s euphemism for a sallow and pasty complexion, willingly wilts in her wardrobe-warren. But perhaps I’m already suffering ever so slightly from SAD, already assuming the role of Don John as the “canker in a hedge”. Perhaps half an hour of 10,000 lux light exposure just isn’t enough. For a truly therapeutic and transforming aesthetic encounter, Yamada’s exhibited phenomenon of light needs to be revisited, revised, re-examined.

Image: James Yamada: The Summer Shelter Retreats Darkly Among the Trees. 2011 Parasol Unit installation view. Photo by: Stephen White. 

Over the last forty years McCarthy’s works have explored the authoritarian underpinnings of commercialisation and media, particularly the American ‘cutesy’ culture, and this exhibition is no exception.

Exhibited at Hauser and Wirth’s galleries, McCarthy’s latest work is placed provocatively amidst the well-suited and booted topography of Savile Row, Piccadilly and St. James Square. Shamelessly apparent from the ‘respectable’ Savile Row street is Pig Island, McCarthy’s amass of carefully contrived chaos on polystyrene plinths. Shopping trolleys, food cartons, alcohol, emaciated dolls and sculpted presidents. It’s an obscene and grotesque inversion of the American theme park or film set, reminiscent of a landfill site, although admittedly one full of multiple pregnant George Bush’s giving anal to pigs in brogues.

Pig Island is the culmination of seven years of “stuff” congregated without intent in McCarthy’s studio. It was only later, once it had begun to majorly monopolize the studio space, that McCarthy began to think of it as a work, and its accompanying large-scale sculptures followed: Train, Puppets, and T.G in the South Gallery and a massive outdoor sculpture, The Ship, in St. James’s Square. The more organic, random means that led to this body of work forms my reasoning behind thinking that its politics’ are somehow less thought-out and coherent than McCarthy’s earlier installations and Disney/TV mainstream parodies. Historically McCarthy’s work was a criticism and problematisation of boundaries; presented as the contamination of the symbolic into the real, and the increasing ambiguity between the two in our society. Pinocchio Pipenose House Hold Dilemma required the audience to wear duplicate Pinocchio outfits to the one worn by McCarthy as he performed an array of disturbing and dubious actions. It was a performance that surveyed the degrading effect TV has on its audiences; dumb puppets, numb and benighted, yet simultaneously mapped onto and manipulated by the content. It’s an extreme view, but one that causes pause for thought about just how much seemingly simple and inane mainstream viewing proscribes our behaviour and social structuring.

The adaption of real, political celebrities into this most recent work, (Paula Jones makes a special guest appearance in Puppets) prohibits this symbolic dimension and interplay. The exhibition is closer to a frenzied rage at American politics and culture than a considered conceptual piece with multiple layers of interest, and it falls dangerously close to the category of ‘Once you get it, you’ve got it.’ It would be easy to say that McCarthy probably doesn’t really care, but I think the list of plausible theoretical associations, and frameworks immediately conjured by his earlier work demonstrates an astute thinking, that understands what separates good conceptual art from the stuff that exists simply for the sake of shock and oddity.

I would recommend the show, especially if you are unfamiliar with McCarthy’s work. It’s free and a nice size for an exhibition (small), and needless to say the geographic position of Hauser and Wirth makes a lovely juxtaposition, but to get a fuller picture of McCarthy’s work, check out his stuff on Youtube as well.

Images: Paul McCarthy. Train, Mechanical.  Savile Row, 2011 ©Paul McCarthy Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Alex Delfanne

Paul McCarthy. The King. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Alex Delfanne