Gary Webb
The Approach W1, London, UK
Gary Webb’s sculptures are genetically hyperactive, each work bifurcating into cascading sub-references like cells dividing by mitosis. Look closely at the high-gloss coloured surfaces and you’ll see the West Coast Minimalism of John McCracken, stand further back and you could be facing a fusion of Barry Flanagan’s nutty figuration and Phillip King’s 1960s’ Pop hedonism. At a further remove, they are deluxe gadgets that one could easily imagine adorning a playpen for the rich and famous – gauche items fit for Graceland, the Playboy Mansion or Liberace’s bathroom. What is one to make of such confused signifiers?
Certainly one ‘thing’ reviewers tend to make of Webb’s baroque manifestations is a taxonomy of materials: ply, aluminium, rubbery plastic, wood, mirrors, neon, chrome, painted and raw surfaces, and even recorded sounds. It’s equally tempting to enumerate art movements and practitioners: from ‘60s New Generation sculptors to contemporaries such as Jason Meadows, Evan Holloway and Tobias Rehberger – the list goes on. Webb is both elusive and allusive, which is, of course, the great pleasure of his work. But I do tend to find that the joy of crossing off the references quickly wears thin; at some point the dandy appears naked in the face of the reality principle.
Indeed, Webb indicates a degree of unease in the exhibition title, ‘Revolution Oil’. In the eponymous sculpture (all works 2008), an oily black ‘K’ and some colourful lava-lamp blobs are encased in a translucent slab of resin, propped upright by some Sol LeWitt-style beams. Yet any attempt to drag this lumpen item into the realm of socio-political engagement would fail – the ‘political’ here is simply another item ticked off from Webb’s seemingly inexhaustible list.
Instead, the totem-like sculpture Diamond Brain seems like the exhibition’s real mission statement. Composed of blobby, gene-like segments variously spray-painted in lavender, khaki and mushy-pea green, this work is the very illustration of Webb’s wonderful obtuseness – a muddled helix of cultural DNA. All Right Bob is a similar miscegenation of forms: three frantic limbs made of wood and brass mix seamless Modernism with Edwardian ungainliness. Curlicues of whimsy erupt from Loose Me’s off-kilter aluminium frame, whilst The Penny One remixes elements of British coinage, along with automobile culture and an Ikea desk lamp.
Along the walls, three large mirrored pieces (Blue Split, Orange Split and Green Split) form a sombre contrast to the freestanding works. These rows and columns of tinted mirrors make clear what is veiled elsewhere by Pop-overload: Webb’s psychedelia is actually more like formalism viewed through the looking-glass. Indeed, it’s hard to discern a clear line of attack from Webb, who takes on a subject tackled with far greater directness by Isa Genzken in her formless-yet-politicized exhibition ‘Oil’, staged in the German Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. Webb’s latest works are, as we’ve come to expect, a dazzling refraction of superstore culture. Yet ‘Revolution Oil’ stakes claims it simply cannot meet: it’s a pleasurable pharmacopoeia, but no more than that.
Colin Perry
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