A quick nip into White Cube, Bermondsey, which is no more than a 10-minute walk from my house. As I sat in the large cobbled courtyard which prefaces the sleek ‘White Cube’ of the gallery, sipping my appropriately trendy ‘Fat Wife’ (a.k.a a cleverly named flat white) from the nearby appropriately trendy cafe FUCKOFFEE, I thought about how the gallery has created an aura of ‘cool’ that somehow propels it far beyond a space to see art, and instead making it into a destination to be seen at. A busy Saturday afternoon, the gallery spaces and outside courtyard were bursting with young, slickly dressed gallery goers, who melded right into the sleek gallery spaces.
Done grumbling about the overwhelming ‘coolness’ of it all, and having downed our coffees, we enter. Its always remarkable how overwhelming the enormous spaces are. We pass through the double height glass-pane doors into a wide central corridor, which is like a massive central artery with gallery spaces off of each side. The first room [9x9x9] on the left has a single photographic work by Andreas Gursky. Titled Rückblick (2015), the photograph shows the backs of four heads, posed in a fictional scene looking onto Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51), a bright-red wall sized painting by Barnett Newman. Already, I am dreading my plans to spend an entire afternoon at the Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery later on. This gallery is special because of its cubic proportions, and its especially tall 9 m ceiling. A single print hung in the space felt underwhelming, and was difficult to view given the sharp reflection coming from the light box ceiling fitted in the room.
We move across the corridor, into He Xiangyu’s mini-exhibition Evidence. The first room shows two video excerpts from The Swim (2017), which is feature film being presented in the back room. The Swim shows the artist’s uncanny experience of re-visiting his childhood home of Kuandian, a border town on the Yalu River which demarcates China from North Korea. Teal remarked that showing the videos in such a grandiose scale perhaps embellished the quality of the work itself, forcing us to pay attention simply because the presentation was so overwhelming.
In the adjoining room, there is a quiet installation of around 250 small metal sculptures, hung in a neat line which wraps around the room, just above eye-height of the average viewer. Hand-made by the artist as remnants of his filming journey in North Korea and China, these beautiful little objects entirely take on a life of their own. The soft copper metal wires have been largely sourced from the black market, and were historically traded between North Korean and Chinese for small amounts of cash. Each piece has the soft glow of a shimmering copper patina; the twisted forms bring to mind the effort of the hands that lovingly bent each stiff wire into place. The little bundles tied together make me think about trust and security, a small piece of comfort that could so easily be melted away into nothingness…
The third and final gallery displays the pièce de résistance: the utterly confusing and slightly irritating Concrete Pitch by artist Eddie Peake. Its one of those exhibitions that immediately makes me scream “what am I looking at!”, or more perplexingly, “why do I study art?”. We enter the massive room: there is a flood of soft pink light that makes you feel you’ve stepped into Peake’s constructed womb. In front of us, there is a small cabin-like DJ booth. A DJ from radio channel Kool FM stands behind the glass window and broadcasts ‘oldskool jungle and drum and bass from East London tower blocks since 1991’. Teal remarks, “he looks trapped in there. I want to get him out”.
A long chain of medical looking metal trays snakes in an S-curve, cutting across the space. The trays are occasionally covered in an odd array of objects: neon lights, found flotilla, candy covered surfaces, and an extension of small tweeters and speakers, that emanate sounds made by the artist, who stands plum in the middle of the snake-chain, conductor of his orchestra of weird. He’s dressed in all-white coveralls, his face bi-focated by halves of red and white paint, his lips and eyebrows exaggerated by thick black lines of colour. Pom-poms in bright, primary colour pops of red and yellow hang from the chest of his bright white suit. A line of people stand directly infront of him as he continues to produce screeching sounds, enthusiastically snapping photographs. I am one of them. My head spins. WTF is going on?!
Along the walls of the gallery are large-paintings, which show layers of pop and graffiti inspired neon shapes and forms. From the galleries website: “In several new series of paintings, techniques of layering and masking are used to create vivid abstract compositions on canvas or hard, reflective stainless-steel panels. In one group, overlapping, spray-painted rectangles recall the urban patchwork of fly-posters, while in others, graffiti-like mark-making recedes into a bright void.” Whatever.
Over to the left, on my way out of the dizzying experience, there is a some respite. Long white curtains hang from the ceiling, forming a spiral which enters you in a narrow curving path of curtained space, and finally deposits you into a little viewing room. I liked walking through the curtains. The material was soft and imbued with the pink hue of the room. As you walked, the curtains moved to allow your body, and you could see delicate traces of fingers and forms of other bodies on the other side of the fabric. Inside, a two-channel video showed four dancers performing, possibly filmed within that very same curtained space where we now stood. The dancers: two black bodies, two white bodies. Two male bodies and two female bodies. They were completely in the nude and pirouetted and pranced across the screen in an impressive feat of acrobatics.
I leave. Back through the curtained spiral, and once again forced to exit the gallery through a dark, narrow corridor. Maybe obsessed with the idea of giving birth, or maybe the artist just wants to offer a quite moment to calm down after the viscerally overwhelming experience of being in his space.
FYI. Gursky exhibit at the Hayward was blissfully sold out.
invisible bricks 