Big Themes for This Year’s Turner
Sonia Rolak
Fundamental
subjects are in vogue in the contemporary arts; many artists worldwide are
elaborating on and seem to be particularly fascinated with the most spectacular
and final of them all: Death.
In
London, for instance, four artists shortlisted for the yearly Turner Prize are
tackling the "big" life subjects with a more or less explicit accent
on death. Anya Galliacio attempts to show the life cycle of natural matter
through the use of fruit and flowers. In two separate installations, Preserve
Beauty
and Because I Could Not Stop (a reference to the Emily Dickinson lines,
"Because I could not stop for death / he kindly stopped for me…"),
she shows the process of their transformation by starting, not from their
natural beginning, but from their ripe and mature state. She lets the fruit and
the flowers decay aesthetically in the gallery space where they drop down with
a watery splash onto the parquet floor. The organic matter rapidly decomposes
in the heated room. Galliacio’s apples hanging from the bronze cast of a tree
bring to mind the video observed decay of a bowl of fruit by Sam Taylor-Wood,
now in the Tate Modern Collection. It is the same idea, but is less dramatic
without the smell of decomposition, and no doubt this spectacular olfactory
putrefaction is an important part of Galaccio’s work.
The
real specialists on "deathlike" subjects, Jake and Dinos Chapman seem
to have reversed the titles of two of their works; they have called an orgy of
death and decay Sex, and a simulated sexual act between two sex-dolls Death
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>. Sex
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> is a repulsive looking
sculpture based on an etching from Goya’s series, Insult to injury
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>. It is heavily
elaborated by the artists and shows atrociously mutilated bodies wearing clown
noses and ears being devoured by maggots, snakes and insects. These clown
masks are used by the Chapman brothers as a black humour device and create an
emotional distance; they are added to all the victims of the Napoleonic war in
Spain in numerous etchings by Goya displayed around the room; making it all
looks quite pathetic at first but later, deadly serious. The piece Death
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> is shown as an
ultimate perversion, sex between objects: such object-humans can generate only
death. These three works of the Chapman brothers are a very powerful and
wicked representation of the worst human instincts. After such visions, do we
have any chance of redemption?
Death
also sneaks into the works of the other two artists competing for the Turner
Prize. We can sense and see it in some of Grayson Perry’s pots and photos and
its breath can be felt in the deadly Re-run
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> by Willie Doherty.
These two artists don’t focus on death itself however, they treat it as a fact
of life in certain social-political conditions and it to dwell on the surface
of daily life.
There
are many ways to take on board fundamental life subjects. The most difficult
one is to deal with such grandeur in a subtle, reflective way, without clamour,
allowing the viewer to give the subject prolonged and undivided attention.
Leaving
London behind, on November 14th in Leeds, Caroline Broadhead presented an
elaboration of her favourite theme "Away", a garment installation at
Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery. In this version, her almost transparent
tulle dresses outline the two floor Gallery space. The installation seems to
create circles, although, in reality it follows the rectangular shape of the
rooms. Such an arrangement brings to mind the full circle of life suggested by
the completion of the installation and the use of black and white, which could
mean the beginning and the end.
Caroline
plays on the contrasts using subtle overtones of grey which merge in with the
two opposites black and white without creating discontinuity. The positive and
the negative, the visible and seemingly dissolving in light garments create a
dramatic but also ambiguous atmosphere. It looks as though something more could
be said but is being left out only to be guessed.
The
dresses, white and off-white, grey and black (almost 300 hundred) generate the
presence and absence of a woman to whom they could belong, a wardrobe for a
lifetime.
The
artist obliges the viewer to enter the circle/rectangle, touching the garments
hanging on what seem to be invisible threads, creating thus an awkward
sensation of disturbing their fragile matter. It seems that the artist wants to
provoke such physical contact with her work so that the viewer will become
aware of what a private area the centre of this work is.
The
installation is obviously a self-portrait. The intimate atmosphere reveals
little by little some truths about the mind of the artist and the way she looks
at life. It makes us wonder about the illusory disappearance of the dresses and
then about the dramatic change to black with the somewhat sinister shadows they
cast behind. But, the centre of this work does not represent the centre of the
artist, it is the world closed within, she prefers to watch from the outside,
from her four mirrored self-portraits hanging on a side wall of the gallery.
This
moving work represents life as it is lived by the majority of us, the ups and
downs, the good and bad and the grey in between. A balanced representation of
life and death, with death just hinted at in the shadows and in the intense
black of some of the dresses.
