Turner Prize 2011
Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw
BALTIC Newcastle Gateshead
to 8 January 2012

click here to read my review for The Economist

In the darkened ante-chamber of the Serpentine Gallery a little drum plays itself. Nobody wields the sticks that whisper it's gentle, ghostly rhythm. They're held in the hands of time.

The next room is more deserted still. Not even a drum here. No paintings or sculptures, just blank grey canvas hinting at nothing and curious oblong holes punctuating the exterior walls so I see out into the park, hear its noises and feel its breathe on my face. I sit on the floor whilst the time passes, certain that something, at some point, will occur. It's a magical pause, a hole in time, a moment of conscious not knowing.

Then the low resonant notes of a saxophone ripple towards me. I turn to see a lone, romantic figure, staring out through one of the small perforations of the gallery wall, playing these long, melancholy, haunting notes. A film starts. On the wall another solitary dark haired man, this one carrying a musical box through the quiet semi-urban streets of a place that could be anywhere, slowly turning the handle that creates an unlikely version of Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Clash twinkles, childlike.


I follow the saxophonist's crepe shoes into the domed atrium like he's the Pied Piper of Hamelin, mesmerising. Here another film starts to play. An empty white room leads my eye to an open window outside which an ambiguous object is suspended. The camera creeps forward and the riddle is solved. A man with white hydrangeas adorning his black dreadlocks hangs mysteriously, suspended high up a residential tower block, an angel from the Gods. He also plays the saxophone. It turns out to be Berlin, the high rise known locally as The Long Sorrow, the man noted free jazz musician Jemeel Moondoc.

The images in this exhibition are exquisite, suspenseful, celestial, but the real power lies in the music and the silences. The sounds and the absence of sounds. The artist, Anri Sala, has worked closely with musician and experimental composer Andre Vida to create a living exhibition through music and performance in which no two days will be the same, no two performances will match. Andre Vida will share with the audience, or not as the case may occasionally be, a marathon nine live saxophone improvisations a day, seven days a week, over fifty-two days. And within that creative, performative, non-fixed space questions will arise that may, or may not, find answers.

Sound is the ultimate poignant manifestation of the impermanence at the heart of life. The very second it is heard is the very second it disappears. This improvised music is not recorded, written down, or planned. It exists in the moment and nowhere else. Vida says: “when you're improvising you have to be as open as possible to the moment, to your responses to it, to what you can actually achieve but also to what you can't achieve, to what you don't know about yourself.”

Vida is responding in an immediate, instinctual way to the music of Jemeel Moondoc, to the space and to the ever changing tide of people around him. The question is, during the course of 468 live performances, will the departure point at some stage cease to be an inspiration and start to become a prison? Will the relationship begin to sour or can the love, the focus, and the openness be maintained? Will the fixed slowly strangle the fluid, wrapping around it like poison ivy? Or will it provide a stable and grounding platform from which the fluid may flourish? Every moment will be a question. Every moment will be unknown.

As I wander round back to the start of this intriguing looped echo of a show, Should I Stay or Should I Go? continues to reverberate around the space at different speeds, on different films, played by different people. I'm in a strange magical wonderland where nothing exists but this very moment – all and nothing. The drum taps out one last heart beat to me as I push open the gallery doors and head back out into the cacophony of London, feeling like I've just dipped my toe into eternity.


Anri Sala
showing at Serpentine Gallery, London
until 20 November 2011

Pipilotti Rist
Eyeball Massage
showing at Hayward until 8 January
Article commissioned by Artwrit whose much more professional edit you can read here: artwrit.com.
My unedit filed here just for a laugh and by kind permission of Artwrit...


Strings of greying underpants hang like washing on a line. A smoke filled bubble emerges from a machine that turns out to be Nothing, and wobbles away, goalless and gentle, seemingly out of place in this brutal environment. It bursts, a peace bomb or, in the artist's words, like a 'fart from within the trousers'. In a moment another one appears to take its place.

At first glance Pipilotti Rist's work appears fun, playful, a little absurd. On one level it is all of these things, on another it engages a meaningful existential investigation into what creates barriers and the ways in which those barriers may be peaceably transgressed. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's assertion that a serious philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Rist is a video artist who's working method is to transgress boundaries in terms of both the content and presentation of her work. There is an atmosphere of something deeply imaginative, free from the usual ways of being in and perceiving the world. “I tend to feel the video pieces inside myself,” the artist reveals. The statement inspires me and I want to know how these works feel inside me if I attempt to break the habit of a life time and engage them as much through my body as through my intellectualising, controlling mind.

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) is a five minute video played inside a conical structure protruding aggressively from the wall by several meters and into which I must insert my head via one of several holes. The encasement is entitled, significantly, A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East. The film shows what appears to be a semi-clad Rist frenzidly gyrating her body as though in trance-like ecstasy, chanting the words of the works title. The film speeds up, slows down, speeds up again, the image is variously distorted, the time continuum illusion well and truly messed with.


As with mantra the repetition of a single phrase over and over eventually tricks the power crazed discursive mind into releasing its vice like grip on our experience of the world and for a few moments the body is revealed as the existential mediator it is. Conversely, at that moment, my body is outside my experience of this world of the girl who doesn't miss much. My head, tucked safely inside the cone, my body elsewhere, missing. A sensation of dislocation arises in which I feel, curiously, safer, estranged from the vulnerabilising corporeality of my body's very apparent and very alarming, to the ego at least, impermanence. Je pense donc je suis, leaving me free to ignore the hints given by the slow disintegration of my body and those bodies around me, that this state of affairs will not continue indefinitely. Like the air bubble, I will soon be gone, replaced by another.

Blue Bodily Love Letter and Red Bodily Love Letter are two films in which the camera travels over a naked female form. For Rist the female body symbolises humanity, not so much sexuality, more innocence and a sense of coming home to oneself. This pair of works concern themselves with Love. Rist points out that in German to 'fall in love' is verlieben; liebe translates as 'love' but comes from the word lieben which means literally 'to embody'. The German speaking world then recognises, in the very structure of its language, that love arises and takes place within the body. Far from being a dangerous, contaminated place, the body is the very source of all that is good.

If the viewer seeks to interpret Rist's work on a purely intellectual or theoretical level he may find it lacking. Such a lack is not inherent in the work but in the method of engagement. This work gives most when it is engaged in the manner in which it was created: through a sensory, real-time investigation into the body. It seems to suggest that by embracing the wisdom and vulnerability of our bodies we may go beyond our corporeal, existential fear and thereby break down some of the barriers standing in the way of joyful inter-relationship.