Walking In My Mind
Hayward Gallery, South Bank

23rd June – 6th September 2009

 

When visiting the Hayward’s current show, I hardly felt blameless in being reminded of the exhibition here last summer, Psycho Buildings. Does a group of internationally dispersed artists presenting an assortment of large-scale, site-oriented works sound familiar at all? The two shows are most certainly cut from the same cloth. But in the end, this proves to be no bad thing; Walking In My Mind (tediously populist name aside) has just as much appeal and ambition as its predecessor. Its point of departure is the curatorial premise – an ‘expedition into the mysterious mental processes of creativity; about what goes on inside the artist’s head.’


The first work is that of Keith Tyson, a series of his Studio Wall Drawings butted together to form a three-walled installation. These marriages of image and text flit between the diaristic (‘Today I realised a reversal in the polarity between fact and fiction’) the pseudo-scientific (‘Given the universe is isotropic it would be by implication infinite’) and the poetic (‘It runs through the woods at night, unseen by human eyes). Tyson’s work brims with conceptual and formal energy; so far, so good.


Its immediate neighbour, however, is less inspiring. Yoshitomo Nara has made a wooden cabin that purports to be a site of private, childish creativity; peering through its windows, we can see countless drawings, cartoons and models tacked across the walls and spread across the floor. With Nara’s hermetic childhood in mind, we are probably supposed to play at psychoanalyst-voyeur, but it’s all far too lightweight and mawkish. (What did interest me was seeing Nara’s production line extend itself as far as the gift shop, where I discovered some astonishingly overpriced keyrings, diaries and notebooks.)

Up a level, and there are two definite highlights. One is Thomas Hirschorn’s Cavemanman, a labyrinthine series of spaces, the walls glistening, wet like some unspecified intestinal canal, until closer inspection reveals they are covered with hundreds of metres of parcel tape. In each little grotto stands a group of cardboard cutout people, all connected to one another by long ropes of tin foil. Books on shelves are rigged with wires, seemingly ready to explode, didactic and dangerous. Photocopied clocks are pasted on the walls, the names of cities are spray-painted around them, Toronto, Minsk, Liverpool. Laddish posters cover the ceilings – in Hirschorn’s tunnelled world, Abi Titmuss sits side by side with Noam Chomsky. With far less of an overt political content than I have seen before, his piece is immersive in every sense of the word, highlighting an inherent global symbiosis without identifying or assessing it.

Then we find Jason Rhoades’ The Creation Myth, an unmitigated delight. His sprawling work, - all buckets, chutes, workbenches, wires and monitors - has the appearance of a hastily assembled workshop, its main product being a series of timber logs covered in printouts of porno stills: a new kind of 21st-century totem for the Silicone Valley. The piece is shot through with the kind of puerile dick-and-pussy humour so redolent of Rhoades and his West Coast peers (he was tutored by Paul McCarthy); holes cut in sheet wood with jigsaws take on all kinds of bodily connotations. This is a chaotic piece whose parameters are hard to define: rather than working as a specific metaphor of psychological activity, it feels far more of a springboard off which we can examine our own metaphoric structures. I found this artwork to be the most interrogative in the show. ‘Careful, kids,’ one can practically hear the wonderfully vulgar Rhoades whisper, ‘look too close and you may not like what you find.’ Positioned between this and Hirschorn, Charles Avery’s framed drawings and vitrine-bound sculptures are precious and underwhelming, trapped in their own objecthood.


What arises, as with so many thematic group shows, is the problematic mutability of the artworks: inevitably, they struggle to stay within the paths of discourse in which the curators wish to position them. Yayoi Kusama, for instance, has for over 50 years been filling the world with the polka dots that take over her vision during extreme hallucinations that she suffers as a result of mental illness. In this exhibition they cover enormous inflatable forms that dominate a mirrored room. Reflected and duplicated unto infinity, the installation is not unlike some trippy Selfridges display. Out on the Hayward’s terrace, more of the red and whites shapes are dotted across an Astroturf lawn – and looking out towards the Thames, there they are again, adorning the lampposts by Festival Pier. It is difficult to think about Kusama’s dots without thinking of Daniel Buren’s stripes; they work to similar relational effect and, to me, any talk of ‘mindscapes’ and such seems to fall by the wayside.


It is the same with Chiharu Shiota’s work, an expansive pattern of fractals forms made by interlocking webs of black thread, cocooning three crinoline dresses. As an illustration of her psychological/emotional state, it is actually rather leaden and simplistic. The piece seems far more to do with the act of drawing being developed into a spatial process. These discursive jumps are not always beneficial to appreciating Walking In My Mind.

Of course, art should, and will, spark any number of conversations; this isn’t really the issue.  The problem is when the presence of an artwork is either arbitrary and uninspiring, or tenuous and unconvincing: it serves to undermine the show-as-concept. And I can’t quite buy the Hayward’s premise, of investigating ‘what goes on inside the artist’s head … the mysterious mental processes of creativity.’ It is a frustratingly broad proposition and, I feel, impossible to adequately map out with any selection of practitioners, however eclectic, however focused. It was the same, if a little more permissible, with Psycho Buildings.


At the risk of sounding a little sanctimonious, far better to respond to this show in terms of sheer entertainment value. Walking In My Mind is expansive, ambitious, immersive, and on more than one occasion, quite brilliant. The Hayward, so eccentric and heterogeneous a space, is the perfect site to present a body of work such as this and a fantastic opportunity to see the work of several individuals who do not enjoy a great representation in the UK. Dubious, self-hindering thematic conceits did not start here, and certainly will not end here either. I can only advise one pays a visit and forms their own, experiential, conclusions.


Matthew Breen
matt_breen@hotmail.com

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