Helen
Marten talks quickly and at great length, in a sort of
quasi-Deleuzian stream of consciousness fashion that's difficult to
follow and almost impossible to make much sense of. Plank
Salad at
Chisenhale Gallery, her
first solo exhibition in a UK public space,
follows a similar presentational style.
What
I can only call stuff
is everywhere. Cigarette packets, a half drunk frappuccino, one
ironed sock, a sports bag, a loaf, pizza delivery fliers somehow
mashed up with images of Gerhard Richter's hugely recognisable Betty,
fake donuts, bags of rubbish, a pound coin, some strange flat objects
that look like they could be veneered speed bumps. Loads of
apparently random stuff.
There
are a few slightly less random bits of stuff on the walls. And I
mean slightly. One wall offers what ought to be furniture. It is
immediately recognisable as a grouping of chairs. They are objects
but they are flattened down to a two dimensionality that renders them
functionally redundant. They are coded for us as chairs but they are
useless as such.
The
opposite wall gives us flattened, stylised images of a man's head
printed onto modular gatherings of stretched leather and ostrich
fabric. The man turns out to be Mozart. Oozy bits of cement appear
at various points between frame and stretcher and from the bottom
edge bottles of alcohol - Limoncello, Ouzo, Courvoisier if you're
interested - hang from bits of strings. Mozart's face, Marten tells
us, is “castrated by its flatness”, but reactivated by the
alcohol which is “a liberator and a catalyst, but also a
stagnator”. I see.
The
first thing to have hit my retina in what Helen Marten styles the
“entrance space” to her exhibition is three canisters of Greek
olive oil standing on the floor. This entrance space exists because
Marten has built a wall sectioning the white cube into two: a
smaller, introductory atrium and a larger central space. This,
apparently, is the artist playing with hierarchies, with questions of
value and worth, margins and leftovers. More interestingly, it is
also her playing with time. The wall interrupts the flow of the
viewing experience. Like a gigantic architectural comma it delays
our progress. We are, if you will, deliberately “snagged” upon
it. She is dictating our movement and in the process bringing to our
attention the element of time in connection with the viewing of
objects and images. Objects have a speed, a rhythm, a pace, she
says, that is central to what they are and the way we understand
them.
Objects
and images are so loaded with association, “pregnant with their own
suggestion” as she puts it, that all they are capable of is
“performing” themselves in space. A bag of rubbish performs our
idea
of what a bag of rubbish is or should be. The more densely overlaid
or overwrought objects become with information the emptier they are.
She speaks a lot about treachery and violence.
When
I saw the canisters of Greek olive oil my mind went to a story in
Vonnegut's Bluebeard, a
story of treachery and violence funnily enough,
in which we're told that Mussolini liked to punish his victims by
making them drink a quart of castor oil. The result of this was that
they would shit and vomit themselves to death. That's an association
peculiar to me of course and peculiar to that moment in time, but in
a way it seems to sum up something about this exhibition. There's
something rather sad at work here. It's as though content has been
deliberately evacuated and all that remains is surface and highly
informed but ultimately empty rhetoric.
written
for This is Tomorrow
