Monday 13 December 2021

Rusty Shovels and Rampant Rabbits:Heather Phillipson @ Tate Britain.

"Charged ecosystems, maladaptive seasons and unearthed lifeforms" promises an information board as you enter Heather Phillipson's current commission for the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain. But is that what you really get?

Grand claims for art, not least contemporary art, can often over promise and under deliver and some times it seems it would be best if they were not made at all. Certainly not by the artist themselves.

But Phillipson's oddly titled RUPTURE NO.1:blowtorching the bitten peach is fairly impressive even if it doesn't do exactly what it says on the tin. The "mutant creatures" built from "technological remains" might not kid even a child but strangeness is, as promised, cultivated. I wouldn't go so far as saying that I had an 'ecstatic experience' looking at it but I was satisfactorily diverted for a short period of time and it all looked very nice.


If that's faint praise then so be it. There's clearly a lot of work, at a very difficult time, gone in to creating this installation and that work is impressive. I guess I'd like to have been just a bit overwhelmed by it but then I'm not quite sure how that could have happened. At least within the realms of legality. I don't suppose the staff at Tate Britain handing out LSD or MDMA as you enter the gallery would float.

So, instead, I took in the exhibition with nothing stronger than a cup of tea inside of me (even if I did relax with a beer in Camberwell afterwards). I loved the red light that filled the room, I was mildly discombobulated by the screen of animal eyes looking out at me, and I couldn't help but notice a rather phallic 'flower'. That's either lipstick, a giant pink vibrator, or a dog's cock.



Elsewhere there's papier mache giant women looking ready to give birth, a pool of stagnant looking water, some industrial machinery, some stuff up in the rafters that reminded me, a bit, of the xenojellies that Anicka Yi has bobbing around in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern at the moment.

Perhaps that's intentional? I don't know. Nobody tells me anything. As you walk further into the gallery things get a bit more spacious but they're still equally interesting and, ultimately, equally meaningless. Art doesn't have to have a meaning, at least not all the time, and if you're going to make something that is ultimately about just looking a bit weird then this is a decent stab at that.




I looked at a screen of some kind of sunrise and then I listened to the gamelanesque sound of rusty shovels banging against gas bottles in a cast iron shed. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean but I quite liked it anyway. That seemed to some up the exhibition for me. I'm glad I went though.



 

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