Mark Hosking
Lisson Gallery, London, UK
All the works in the show - three painted wall reliefs and two free-standing floor pieces constructed from steel - are based on technical papers produced by the United Nations and other humanitarian organisations. The original designs are for easy to manufacture, basic equipment for use in third world countries. These are simple enough to be made from salvaged metal and are intended for the most impoverished people in the most desperately poor parts of the planet. In the original sense of the word, the objects are literally life-saving, comprising unmotorised mechanical foot- or hand-operated water pumps and storage tanks, simple plumbing devices for bending water pipes, and a bicycle-ambulance. In the beautiful space of the Lisson Gallery, the utilitarian functionalism of the objects is placed in a deliberately uncomfortable relationship with their formal aesthetic values - they look like Caro-esque sculpture.
As if Cadbury’s were to introduce a new chocolate product in the shape of a starving African child, Hosking’s is a brilliantly horrible, provocative idea, which is all the more successful for its deathly silent, deadpan presentation. The works induce a painful anguish in the viewer; an acutely discomfited Western liberal guilt. These pieces inhabit a wider current context in which political incorrectness is ground into the face of political correctness. Recent workings of fashionable fuck-off political incorrectness, in art and cultural entertainments, have variously included post-feminist depictions by female artists of women reduced to greasy sexual organs; the fashion industry’s heroin chic and sexualisation of underage children; a recent show, in one of the better London galleries, predicated on the ridiculing of people affected by Downs Syndrome; the eroticisation of torture and physical violence, and desanctification of liberal abhorrence to it by artists and film-makers; as well as the fashionable slang use of words like ‘nigger’, ‘queer’ and ‘dyke’ by the urban cool, who are neither black nor gay, but also (presumably) neither racist nor homophobic.
Hosking’s Living Sudanese Workshop 1, and Living Sudanese Workshop 4 (all works 1997) are plumber’s pipe-bending machines, basically identical, but decoratively wall-mounted in slightly different configurations and painted varying colours. Untitled is an adaptation of a bicycle intended as a tricycle ambulance, and in its original sense is deeply poignant. In the gallery though, it is also, on another level, deeply sick, its compellingly corrupt aura co-existing with its considerable formal interest.
The works operate on several levels: they are utilitarian tools that have an unintended aesthetic that originates in their function and makes them look like something interesting from the Science Museum; they are formally purist works of art that appear ironically like those of another more innocent generation; and they are also works of the present, replicating the ironies and sterilised spiritual detachment of certain contemporary art practices. In a more final reading though, all these possibilities must be qualified by the works’ intention to display, with dignity and honour, a deliberately considered self-indictment.
Running through, over, beyond and underneath all this, there is a migraine; a prism-splitting of moral and amoral values. The disparities of wealth and privilege, enjoyed by the artist and gallery, are illuminated in conspicuous contrast to those of the Sudanese and other suffering poor. This necessarily forces upon the artist and gallery some earnest, hand-wringing rationalisations and sweaty justifications in the trouser pocket department, as the works are for sale and are not cheap. In other respects though, this is a painfully honest, in-situ, self-criticism of the process of determining art’s value and ethos.
Unlike other recent works of more conspicuously attention-seeking provocation, Hosking’s allow value-meanings, or absented value-meanings, to be transparently, silently, free-floating and still. Thus, he is not condemned by his own cruelties, except in the larger sense in which we all are. In this important sense, his works are educational and allow for the possibility of a more redemptive understanding. Hosking’s construction of basic life-support equipment from salvaged metal can then be seen to become, if we wish, a sort of moral salvaging, indicating the need to rescue us from ourselves and our over-belief in art and other related fashions. His work shows that the Olympian confidence of artists to determine that plumbing is art if so deemed by the artist, may not translate so well if you and your children are dying of thirst.
Neal Brown
