(Yes, twice in a row! Reviews of art exhibitions which are still on!)
”I want the work to have a
strong formal presence, and through the physical experience to
activate a psychological and emotional response.”
- Mona Hatoum
The Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum is
effectively a double exile. Her family had been forced to flee
Palestine for Lebanon before her birth. Then, visiting London in
1975, an outbreak of civil war effectively cut her off from home.
Such themes, it's generally held, pervade her work.
Which they do. But rather than the
polemical artist this might suggest, her work is actually strongly
influenced by Surrealism. Of all Modernist art movements, Surrealism
may be the one of which people have the most skewed impression. As
it's most successful self-publicist Dali came to characterise it
after himself, portraying the idea that it's something frenzied and
shrieking. Yet Hatoum has none of this in-your-face shock but is
instead quietly disturbing, to the point it's sometimes hard to work
out how her works have their effect. For example her frequent use of
domestic objects, in the show's words, “find the unsettling within
the everyday... making the familiar uncanny”.
And at the same time as it unsettles
Surrealism can be genuinely funny. It is to society what the Joker is
to Gotham city, looking at a mad world and deciding the best response
is to laugh. Her performance pieces do sometimes seem set to shock.
Her notes for 'Live Work for the Black Room'
(1981) even promise “DEATH, DISASTER, DOOM & GLOOM”. But many
works have the Surrealists' impish humour, for example with titles
which echo their love of wordplay.
'Grater Divide'
(2002, above) for example is a food grater blown up to the size of a
room divide. While 'No Way' and 'No Way
II' (1996) are respectively a colander and sieve with the
holes uselessly plugged, form's link to function broken. Both are
reminiscent of, for example, Man Ray or Meret Oppenheim. While a
chair conjoined with a desk, part of the installation 'Interior/
Exterior Landscape' (2010), recalls Magritte.
Put together these two influences and
what results is art which has a political impetus without being
politically assertive. It may be relevant that the scale of her work
can vary, from large-scale room-sizes installations which can look
like grand public statements to very small pieces which we more
associate with personalisation.
Hatom herself has said “I’m never trying to make a direct
political statement. There are issues in my head, but they’re in
the background; they’re not foregrounded in the work, and they’re
not specific to my own history... The tension is between the work’s
reduced form and the intensity of the possible associations.”
Or “each person is free to understand what I do in the light of who
they are and where they stand... I don’t want to pin a single
meaning on each one.... I want to make use of... contradictions, play
on ambiguity, never take anything for what it appears to be.” And
to be political without polemical is in itself a hallmark of
Surrealism, as in for example their response to the Spanish revolution.
In the early performance piece 'The
Negotiating Table', (1983, a still above) she lies prone
and plastic-wrapped on a table, surrounded by empty chairs. It's akin
to Gilroy's classic cartoon 'The Plum-Pudding In Danger' but here the
artist has substituted her own body as the prize to be carved. Her
becoming Palestine (and by implication all occupied territories)
makes the point in a visceral way – for many, this is a
flesh-and-blood issue. It's common for Hatoum to place her self
physically in her work in this way. Even in her more conventional
artworks, where she's not personally present, she'll use her hair and
nails as materials.
But the chairs being empty, that's as
significant as the table being full. The politicians and diplomats
who decide our fate don't occupy the same space as us, they are
absent from our lives the same time as they devour us. The chairs
become totems of power, magnifying it through absence, like the
master’s boots in Strindberg's ‘Miss Julie’.
And in general in Hatoum's work, the
absence of the human body can be as significant as its presence. Take
for example, 'Homebound' (2000, above). It's a
domestic situation, kitchen utensils scattered on the table,
children's toys on the floor. But nobody's home. Even the clothes
rail is bare of clothes. With the empty hangers and mattressless
wire-frame bed, it looks like some kind of bare skeleton of a
dwelling. This is perhaps the closest to her signature work, the
domestic situation shot through with something defamilarising until
the scene becomes menacing. And in this case, it's literally true. An
electric current runs through the scene at intervals; it's hum rising
to almost a shriek, the lights building to a glare them dimming away
again. You hear that hum before you encounter the scene, like the
thunder of an oncoming storm.
The show states “the title plays on
ideas of domestic confinement or house arrest”. And perhaps the
bare bed does suggest torture by electrocution. While a small cage,
for a pet mouse or gerbil, is recursively placed within the scene.
(And watch out for that cage motif.) But overall I think the
opposite. Literally, our perspective is outside, looking in. Of
course we can't enter the scene, at least not without getting
ourselves fried. But the bars between us and it seem less required
health-and-safety initiative than part of the work. Many Palestinians
have been driven out of their homes in precisely this way. In some
cases it has been forced on them so suddenly they have had to leave
almost all their belongings behind, creating a scene not unlike this
one.
The video work 'Measures of
Distance' (1988, still above) explores similar themes. In
the soundtrack, Hatoum reads out correspondence between herself and
her mother. Voices in Arabic can be heard beneath, apparently a
conversation between the two. The video images are of her mother, but
they're indistinct, not the equivalent of the neat and arranged
family snapshots you'd stuff in with a letter. (Her mother's actually
in the shower, but you only know that once told it.) And, much as the
soundtrack is layered, they are then placed behind a screen of Arabic
writing.
The screen becomes not a portal but a
membrane, likened by the show to “a curtain or veil”. With her
mother speaking of her “being born in exile”, it seems a much
more personalised work. But perhaps, like 'Homebound',
the point is that we the audience are outside the picture. The
distance to us is immeasurable, the experiences unknown and
unknowable, the English translation only marginally more
comprehensible than the Arabic.
But, as is common of Hatoum's work, at
the same time it hints at a universal experience. As Thomas Wolfe
said, “you can never go home again”, and so it's significance
takes on a positive feedback loop with it's inaccessibility. The more
we can't get back, the more we want to
look. We all have Fall myths about how we lost our
close connection to things, whether religious or political. But
perhaps they all come down to the personal, our veneration of our own
childhood perpetuating the sense of that childhood being external to
us.
'Light Sentence'
(1992, above) is formally reminiscent of Conrad Shawcross' 'Slow
Arc Inside a Cube IV' (2009), shown as part of the Hayward's 2013 Light Show exhibition. In both a light bulb is remotely moved
within a wire cage, to change the play of shadows on the walls. Yet
beyond that formal similarity the works are entirely different, as
different as two canvases might be while still using oil paint.
Shawcross uses a much smaller cage,
across which the bulb travels proportionately further. The effect is
almost like a simulated fairground ride, as the shadows fly around
the walls you have the feeling of hurtling through space even as you
stand stationary. In Hatoum's work the bulb moves slowly, up and down
between two banks of wire-mesh lockers. And what's evoked isn't a
ride but an entrapment. The cages suggest containment without refuge.
They reminded me of the way soldiers are given their own kit to look
after, but are expected to have it not just arranged in a determined
way but available for inspection at any point.
Similarly, the title suggests at
imprisonment. The shadows playing on the walls around the viewer
create a double layer of wire mesh, as if we the viewers are being
enclosed by the work. But it also suggests the modern open-plan
office, granting you a small square of territory but at the same time
opening you up to scrutiny. As with 'Homebound'
the absence of the human figure creates menace, as if we're looking
at a space created for people which gives no consideration to them.
When an artist's biography is, to us,
exotic there is a temptation to turn it into their Rosebud. This may
be exacerbated when that artist is Palestinian, due to the drastic
nature of their situation and the media's tendency to reduce them to
either terrorists or victims. Our antennae can be out for
'Palestinian voices', who might interpret the situation for us.
Yet exile is a double-edged affair, and Hatoum has said quite explicitly that her work is as informed by
arriving in London as it is by leaving Beirut; “My first impression
was the control on the individual, the surveillance issues, cameras
pointing at you all the time. That’s why these things came into my
work right from the beginning... At the Slade, my first encounter
with a big institution, I was shocked by the coldness, by all the
rules. I was this chaotic person who wanted to find space. But they
wouldn’t give me any.” And sometimes it takes an outsider to show
your own country to you. She's also commented that the Slade contains
the mummified body of Jeremy Bentham, deviser of the omnipotentPanopticon.
'Cellulites'
(2012/13 above) in many ways reprises these themes. Open metal
'cells', something like metal lobster pots, echoing the wire mesh
lockers, contain glass-blown red hearts. The hearts look as though
their shape may be conforming to the imprint of their cages. Or
alternately they may be squishing themselves through the gaps, unlike
their prisons unconfined to a fixed shape. And then the
biological-sounding title suggests at another possibility – the
human heart is kept in a cage, we even call it the
ribcage.
'Performance Still'
(1985), as the name might suggest, is a still from a performance work
where she walked around Brixton dragging Doctor Martin boots behind
her which were tied to her feet. It feels as internal as
'Homebound' and 'Light Sentence'
are external. Perhaps analogously to the proverbial monkey on the
back it suggests that we can never really remove our boots – we
always drag behind us the dead weight of ideology.
The exhibition shows us both this still
and a video of the performance, but strangely at quite separate
points. And perhaps ironically the close-up still is much more
effective than the video. The video cannot help but highlight the
difference between her and everyone else on the street. Some laugh at
her, while she's straightfaced. But even when they just ignore her
it's still too reminiscent of the Jesus-like suffering artist,
bearing the world's sins on behalf of others more concerned with
frivolous things.
'Impenetrable'
(2000) is again reminiscent of the wire mesh cages. A block of thin
rods appears to float etherially, reminiscent of marsh reeds or a
bamboo forest – simultaneously substantial and insubstantial. It's
immediately aesthetically enticing, in a way that's unusual for
Hatoum. It's only when you go up to it do you realise that the
smooth-looking rods are barbed. I kept trying to parse this and
finally realised the point was that you can't. As the name suggests,
it calls to the eye at the same time a meaning can't be hung on it.
If this is not a perfect show, Hatoum
is not a consistent artist. Some of her work does stray into the
post-modern. (For example, 'Don't Smile, You're On
Camera', 1980, a performance piece where she video-scans
herself and then members of the audience.) And too many pieces are
commentaries on another artist's work, when that work is not even
particularly well known.
Plus the show is over-reliant on boards
to document her performance pieces. Which reminded me of when museums
just line up broken bits of pottery along a shelf. If Hatoum has
spoken of the effect upon her of the cold, institutional world of
Britain some stills of her work place them in haunted institution
surroundings. These work so well it suggests the best place for this
exhibition would be the peeling paint and exposed piping of some
disused post-war office block, rather than the neat and clean tourist
trap of the Tate galleries. The above does focus on the highlights.
But then the highlights... well, they're high...
No comments:
Post a Comment