Exhibitions
Just a piss artist
Giles Auty
Those left floundering by yet another onslaught of avant-garde art at the inno- cent-looking Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park may care to avail themselves of a simple acid test. If you are in doubt about the worth or significance of such art, ignore it for the time being and simply reach for the catalogue. The rule of thumb is this: the greater and more far-fetched the claims, the wilder and more unintelligible the prose, the less the art in itself will live up to the extravagance. What is put before us may look and be quite simple but this is where the role of the new breed of female interpreter/sorceress comes in. The current high-priestesses of the cult, Lynne Cooke, Sarah Kent and Marjorie Allthorpe-Guy- ton, can associate any physical fact with any philosophical or scientific theory they choose in a form of writing I have charac- terised already as the 'steam of conscious- ness school' after the wonderful Ms Kent who can and does make extraordinary elas- tic associations, e.g a simple steam tray which questions the existence of God. Writing of the most vaporous and insub- stantial kind is now an inevitable accompa- niment to all issue-based or conceptual art. In short, the objects on display in a gallery often 'mean' little or nothing until trans- formed by some occult process. Impover- ishment of means of expression is possibly the most damaging development of art which has come to the fore in the past 25 years — but what tries to hide this most evident of facts is a miasma of verbiage. Thus, writing of Ms Chadwick's simple if smelly fountain of liquid chocolate, `Cacao', Ms Allthorpe-Guyton — who is director of visual arts at the Arts Council — offers the following: 'Pure chocolate contains phonylethylamine which induces something akin to a sexual "high", but its relation with the pleasure of excess, of wicked consumption and excretion makes "Cacao" powerfully resonant at a time when effluence poses a dire threat to the male of the species. We are, it appears, liv- ing in a "sea of oestrogens" creat^ 1 by a heady cocktail of chemical effluv from the Pill itself, to the ubiquitous use of Detail from 'Cacao', 1994, chocolate in metal surround, by Helen Chadwick oesterogenic chemicals present in oils, lubricants, plastics and detergents which migrate into the water and the food chain. Male fertility, it seems, has decreased by half over the last 50 years .. . ' I cannot imagine that such writing illuminates any- one — but this might be said of most of the art it describes, of course.
Helen Chadwick is described in the gallery's publicity as 'one of Britain's most prominent and provocative artists'. When I met her on a radio programme she seemed to me surprisingly mild and engaging. How- ever, from an early age and involvement with the Fluxus movement she has identi- fied herself with the wilder shores of radi- cal art. Some enterprising reader might care to compose an air whose first line is 'A career in the avante-garde' to be sung as though it were 'A life on the ocean wave.' Such is our fawning respect now for the apparently radical in art that such a career is probably about as fool-proof as they come. The artist is free to do the most absurd thing that she or he can think of since all irrational art claims a pedigree which goes back to such seminal museum-art figures as Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara who declared the right to urinate in different colours and that writing poetry was as natu- ral as making water. In 'Piss flowers' Ms Chadwick takes this advice not so much to heart as to groin: 'Helen Chadvyick's dynam- ic, playful, yet surgical engagement with body and matter, "Piss Flowers" 1991 – 92, were produced during a three week residen- cy at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Plaster casts were made from the cavities created when she and her male col- laborator, David Notarius, indulged in the childhood sport of pissing in the snow . . . This was not simply a return to what Freud called a "primeval period" of infantile sexu- ality, but a mature sexual act involving a dynamic of curiosity that is possibly the foundation of all intellectual activity . . . ' The text goes on and on and on like some relentless flood and we are left high and dry in the gallery with white casts which are all the evidence we are left from all this passing of physical and intellectual water.
If this were possible, the artist's series entitled 'Viral Landscape' takes her attempts to make philosophical facts out of arbitrary-seeming acts a stage further still. We learn ' "The Viral Landscapes" 1988-89 are panoramic, computer generated photo- graphic images of spectacular rocky head- lands seen through a smear of Chadwick's own body cells .. . ' Unfortunately what we see before us in the gallery looks arbitrary and meaningless, of course, in a fashion probably unique in the history of all artistic cultures. To use an awful expression of the Sixties, this particular artist seems all too excessively 'into herself. Her art is so self- conscious, in fact, as to blunt entirely its attempts to create the universal from the particular.
Such waste as we encounter at the Serpentine includes that of our time.
Previous page
