Goshka Macuga
Tate Britain, London, UK
After spending five months rifling through Tate’s archives, Goshka Macuga left London to explore the quarries and forests of the English landscape. She was searching for natural forms to display alongside an array of artworks and found material in an installation at Tate Britain titled ‘Objects in Relation’. Most of the documents pulled from the archive were connected to the early British Modernist group Unit One, in particular the artist who played a key role in the group’s inception, Paul Nash. The group, who were concerned on the one hand with ‘the expression of a truly contemporary spirit’ (as stated in a 1933 press release, shown on the gallery wall), chose to explore this possibility by grappling with the elemental and ancient subject of the natural world.
Like much of Macuga’s work, ‘Objects in Relation’ deals with a group of artists who, as she herself puts it, are ‘not exactly core’. Despite the local prominence of members such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, Unit One appears somewhat conservative when compared to the wild European Surrealists or bold American Modernists of the time. A little too British, perhaps. For Macuga, who grew up in Poland, where official history was rewritten after the end of Communism, this is part of the group’s allure; she is interested in micro-histories and interpersonal narratives. Many of Unit One’s letters and manifestos selected by the artist were tangled in the problems with establishing and maintaining the group, rather than what they might actually do artistically.
A three-storey wooden diving board situated at the far end of the gallery provides not a jumping-off point for the viewer, but the withheld promise of an overview – a position perhaps held only by the artist herself. Macuga is not interested in crystallising overarching narratives, instead delighting in those provisional and specific relationships she sets up between people and objects, contexts and eras. Macuga explains that, during her searches through the natural archive of the forest, she was ‘looking for monsters’. The gnarled and misshapen pieces of wood shown in the gallery contrast with the idealised arcs and planes of a drawing by Ben Nicholson propped against one of the tree trunks. The freakish accidents that Macuga favours are the result of organisms bending and pushing in their attempt to share light; a fitting metaphor for the internecine squabbling of a group of determined young artists attempting to negotiate a collaboration.
Jonathan Griffin
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