After visiting the Serpentine's sister gallery, the Serpentine Sackler, on Saturday to see, with my friend Valia, Patrick Staff's On Venus show I can only reiterate that sentiment and underline it. The geese, coots, moorhens, swans, and ducks of The Long Water had a far more edifying affect on me than any of Staff's art and the debrief, and seven year friendship celebration, in the charming Mitre pub afterwards was certainly more enjoyable.
It's probably how Staff would want it. His art doesn't seem to be something you're supposed to enjoy. Endure maybe. He certainly seems out to shock. But, the thing is, I'm fifty-one years old, I've seen a lot of stuff. People trying to shock me is passe, it's boring, and, mostly, it's anything but shocking.
An information board as you arrive in the gallery, working your way through a fairly lively and refreshed wedding reception crowd, promises, or threatens, interrogations of "notions of discipline, dissent, labour and queer identity" and an installation that explores "structural violence, registers of harm and the effects of acid, blood and hormones".
What you get is a shiny, reflective floor (which is actually quite nice), some faulty pipes leaking into barrels (I've seen better barrels in this area), some stuff about child murderer Ian Huntley's tabloid treatment, a film of animals being killed, and a photo of a man with his cock out apparently pissing (surprisingly clear water) into his own face. That one, handily, is right by the door to the bogs.
What we're supposed to think, what we're told to think, is that Staff has transformed the exhibition space into 'a leaking, rudimentary body' and that, by doing so, this says something of interest about 'the ways in which history, technology, capitalism, and the law have fundamentally transformed how we define the body today".
Which seems like a fair, noble, and interesting aim and one that might inspire some powerful art. The trouble being that the actual art didn't even come close to living up to that promise. One thing's for certain. I won't forget On Venus for a while. It was memorable but, mostly, for all the wrong reasons. There must be so many artists out there doing much better stuff than this and getting nowhere. The Serpentine Sackler is a respected, and popular, space. It felt like Patrick Staff was taking the piss. In the case of that photo near the toilets, quite literally.
The outer edges of the gallery are given over to the barrels, floor, and pipes and there are two interior spaces devoted to installations. The first consists of acid-based intaglio etchings relating to a 2017 tabloid news story (one that, thankfully, passed me by) about how Ian Huntley, the convicted and notorious child murderer, was hoping to transition from male to female in prison.
A story which turned out to be completely untrue. It's hardly news to anybody that the tabloids make shit up to sell newspapers and some of the victims of those stories have had their lives ruined but when it comes to sympathy, Ian Huntley (of all fucking people) is about as low down my list as anybody gets.
To be fair to Staff he's highlighting how the tabloids, when their stories are proven to be untrue, simply run tiny clarifications or even go back and edit online content as if in denial. It's a rotten way of behaving and it's always worth highlighting. But why chose Huntley to make your example? Unless in a pathetic attempt to shock?
It's not like the work is even any good. Staff has blown up these tiny, mostly unnoticed, clarifications for us to read. But they're in such a dark room that's barely possible and, also, I'd wager less people will attend this exhibition than would buy the Daily Star anyway. Then there's the fact that Ian Huntley wanting, or not wanting, to transition isn't the bad thing about Ian Huntley is it? It's not even a bad thing. Whereas murdering children. That's pretty bad.
If they'd made up a story about somebody murdering someone (like they pretty much did with Christopher Jefferies following the murder of Joanna Yeates by Vincent Tabak in Bristol in 2010) then that would be way worse than saying a convicted murderer wants to undergo a medical procedure. I wonder why Staff didn't pick a case that might have made us more sympathetic to his point and, once again, I suspect he's done it to be edgy.
But it's all such pseudo-edginess, such sixth form shite. We've heard Throbbing Gristle singing songs about Ian Brady, seen Marcus Harvey's painting of Myra Hindley, you can buy paintings of Fred and Rose West, and Charles Manson has long been treated as some sort of counter cultural icon despite being a vicious racist who arranged the murder of seven people including a woman who was eight and a half months pregnant.
I'm bored, and sickened, by the veneration of these people. Of course, truly transgressive behaviour is fascinating and it's worth studying it to try to understand why it happens and to, hopefully one day, stop it from continuing to happen. But I don't see how this kind of art brings anything worthwhile to the conversation. It's not art's job to provide answers but Patrick Staff, to me, isn't even asking any worthwhile questions.
I've been a vegetarian, and advocate of animal rights, for over thirty-five years now so his second installation, about our mistreatment of animals., ought to be something I'd be able to get on board with. But the video work, that had at one point attracted quite a crowd, of industrial farming and fairly graphic close ups of animals coming to their end interspersed with images of urine, semen, skin, fur, and meat also seemed to be an attempt to try and shock people into changing their ways.
Those three and a half decades at the coal front of vegetarianism has taught me that those methods don't seem to work. Those you're trying to convince are put off by your militancy and those already on your side - well, they're already on your side. So it's another case of preaching to the converted. It's more noise in the already near deafening echo chamber. It's more art that divides instead of unites. Animal cruelty and child murder are really really crap things. I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that. Making crap art about them doesn't make them less crap, it doesn't give us any insight into why these things happen, and a leaky pipe dripping fluid into a barrel is only interesting for about five seconds.
While I was waiting to meet Valia at Marble Arch I saw about one hundred pigeons fighting over a load of frozen carrots. That was ten times more interesting than a photograph of a man hiding a hosepipe behind his dick to give the illusion he's pissing in his own face. It also made me think a lot harder about what is to be alive in the world than any of Patrick Staff's art did.
It's not so much that you can't get the Staff, these days. It's that you can get him very easily and it's hardly worth getting. Luckily, this disappointing exhibition doesn't do justice to what was actually a really nice day with a much valued friend. It seems quite apt that after attending an event that seemed primarily designed to repulse and make us feel bad, the day should end up as a celebration of friendship and kindness.
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