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IMMA’s ambitious new exhibition sets out to explore questions of identity, power, sexuality and nostalgia. Visitors are greeted upon arrival with a pile of wooden boxes engraved with “taboo” topics including same sex marriage, ethnicity, mental health, abortion and, rather inexplicably, genealogy, before they make their way into the first room (or “episode”) of the exhibition. This first chapter opens with In Two Minds—Past Version [1978/2006], a mind-bending video installation by Kevin Atherton, in which the viewer sits between two video recordings, and observes the artist answering questions posed to him by his 27-year-old self. This fascinating self-portrait is part of a lifelong series of work, as the open, incomplete nature of the piece allows Atherton to re-insert himself into his own interrogation.
A couple of rooms over, punk artist Linder’s savagely amusing collage works effectively challenge media exploitation of female bodies, as she juxtaposes and overlays pornographic images with images from women’s lifestyle magazines, including giant roses, impossibly photogenic cakes, and household domestic appliances. In these photomontages, a woman’s face becomes a teapot, or her genitals an enormous oozing Victoria sponge, disturbing both fantasies of woman as happy housewife and woman as sex object, and offering a vivid commentary on commodification, gender and desire.
Jeremy Deller’s So Many Way to Hurt You is an incredible film portrait of the Welsh pro-wrestler Adrian Street, known for his flamboyant glam-rock persona. We see footage of him blowing kisses to his opponents and pinching their bums, tapping into the rampant homophobia of the wrestling world. At the center of Deller’s film is a truly stunning photograph of Street (in a typically outlandish costume) with his father, a coal miner, which Deller believes is “possibly the most important photograph taken post-war”. Unfortunately, behind the screen, a distractingly hideous mural of Street by Irish artist Ruairi O’Byrne occupies the wall from floor to ceiling. It is unclear whether this grim painting is a deliberate choice on Deller’s part, but it diminishes the tone of the work nonetheless.
Jeremy Deller – So many ways to hurt you, the life and times of Adrian Street (excerpt) from jeremy deller on Vimeo.
Each of these rooms are connected to a corridor filled with various “props” relating to the performance work of American artist Mike Kelley, along with “leftovers” from his studio. A recurring subject throughout Kelley’s career was how social institutions (particularly schools, art galleries and the church) inevitably restrain those they claim to support. This is delightfully evoked in his sculpture Primal Architecture (from which the exhibition takes its name), a response to what he believed to be the “aesthetic abuse” he suffered in his art education. The compositions in the corridor, however, mostly fall flat. They are supposedly based on Kelley’s student performances in the late 1970s, and although there is potential here for an interesting reflection on nostalgia (with a variety of stuffed toy animals and televisions scattered on the floor), the work ultimately expects too much from the viewer by leaving them without any substantial information on the performances the pieces refer to. Weaving in and out of this disappointing corridor, the feeling of inconsistency is inescapable, until you eventually arrive at the end of the corridor and Conrad Shawcross’s mesmerising kinetic sculpture, The Limit of Everything. A trinity of rotating arms gradually expands and contracts, and, for a fleeting instant, the lighted tips of the blades touch, creating a perfect spiral of light.
The visitor’s path through the exhibition could have benefitted from more direction, but perhaps this is part of the charm, as the viewer is free to explore the works in their own time and chart their own course. The result is an engaging but uneven exhibition, punctuated with moments of brilliance.
Primal Architecture runs at IMMA until 1 March 2015.
