Andrew Kötting
Dilston Grove, London, UK
The glow of 65 televisions outlines the nave of a deconsecrated church, the sound from each jostling in the musty air. It is dark and overwhelming. What looks like a discarded tarpaulin suddenly hums to life: a ten-foot inflatable effigy is erected in seconds, featuring a serious and bespectacled man. He looks down sternly, like an oversized Bozo the Clown punchbag cast as some attraction for a business-themed fairground. Another starts to inflate, taller than the first: this time the face is frozen in maniacal laughter. From the television immediately next to these giants, we see that the beaming man is performance artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting’s ‘deadad’. The accompanying film shows him straight-faced and bearded both on his deathbed and in his coffin. The shorter man is the artists’s ‘deadad’s deadad’, the two looking down on the expanse of dancing lights before them.
Kötting’s father passed away in 2000, an event which he responded to by creating this air-filled figure, travelling to emotionally charged locations around the world and documenting the erection of his image in each place. Each screen represents a year in his father’s life, presenting a short snapshot dealing with Kötting’s impressions of his deceased parent, from ‘Of the office where he earned his living’, to ‘Of Pyrenean pastoral and my life he could never understand.’ I encountered Kötting’s work earlier this year though his short film Offshore (Gallivant) (2007), which documented a bungled attempt to swim across the English Channel, narrated by his daughter. Kötting’s films feature multiple formats and narrators, usually following a loose travelogue structure, an approach which the installation at Dilston Grove stretches almost to breaking point. Walking among the miniature narratives, the viewer is left to put together a personal versions of the lives, personalities, and legacies presented; we continually watch Kötting enter carrying the deflated effigy, dressed in a suit like his father, and inflating the figure once again.
The sombreness expected of grief, here carried by the exhibition’s setting and the religious connotations of the artist’s literal carrying of his father around the world, is poignantly balanced by the relentless slapstick of the journey. Trips they never made to Mexico, the discovery of an estranged, illegitimate uncle in the Faroe Islands, and the beach where Kötting lost his virginity are all visited by this goofy, grinning icon. It is overwrought and sometimes confrontational: a side room features a series of kitsch animations from the deadad’s collection of pornography, with Kötting’s face imposed on the actors. Yet at the same time it is often courageous and touchingly embarrassing, as in ‘Of the bath at our house,’ where Kötting inflates his father beside an outdoor bath, and proceeds to undress and wash under his (and our) gaze. In ‘Of the garden he nurtured,’ Kötting mimic’s his father’s stance and expression, as it is erected beside him. While neither praising nor damning his father, there is an untraversable distance that he is addressing, in open exploration of his family (both deceased and living) and their ongoing part in his life.
Chris Fite-Wassilak
