Modern Ruins
Kate MacGarry, London, UK
‘The past is never dead.’ William Faulkner said, ‘It’s not even past.’ For the four artists in ‘Modern Ruins’ the past is also omnipresent, but as a rag-bag collection of detritus and borrowings rather than some looming monolithic concept. It is out of bits and pieces that we reconstruct histories.
Perhaps the most striking and disquieting piece in the show is Goshka Macuga’s War Memorial Study (2009). Encased in a petrified tree stump is a blown-up photograph of the upper body of a man who gazes out at us as if in a trance. Head cocked to one side, he wears a vacant smile and his outstretched arms are held in an almost balletic pose. It’s as if the figure is rising gloriously out of the ashes. Yet there is something haunting about his posture – and, slowly, the infamous image of the tortured prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison comes to mind (a picture that was, of course, also reincarnated in Richard Serra’s 2004 oil-stick drawing). Macuga’s passion for collecting remnants of the past to find poignancy in the present led her to the personal archive of Tom Pripish, a Vietnam War veteran, which the artist bought on eBay. Pripish’s own story is fused with a 10,000-year-old piece of wood to create a monumental geological hybrid.
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Atlas Poster (2009)
Another source of inspiration for Macuga’s work is cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg, whose study of icons and symbols in art has been influential for Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, also shown here. Atlas Poster (2009) is a compilation of photographs that Cruzvillegas took whilst on a Smithsonian Fellowship at the Natural History and the American History museums in Washington, D.C. He combines images of actual exhibits and archive material with pictures of the museums themselves, so that every surrounding element of the exhibition, be it prehistoric dinosaur bones or modern bollards on street corners, is incorporated into a cabinet of curiosities. A photograph of a wooden box, presumably containing objects ready for display, with ‘American History’ sprayed on the side in red paint is a playful comment on our inclination to preserve and present history, and perhaps also a more political comment on our frequent attempts to suppress or forget the past.
David Maljkovic, ‘Parallel Compositions’ (2008)
‘Parallel Compositions’ (2008), David Maljkovic’s series of 13 photomontages, continues the theme of suppressions, mutations and absences. There are no people. Chairs without legs, with their seats torn away, look like stranded UFOs dropped into a Zagreb residential estate. In each photograph the chair is in a different position and a cutting from an old architectural magazine has been pasted on, like traces of a physical past or a map forever changing its shape. This in turn evokes the tumultuous geographical and political dislocation of the former Yugoslavia.
Dr Lakra, Untitled (Arcimboldo I, II, III) (2009)
Dr Lakra is best-known for his tattoo-style embellishments of vintage magazines, usually drawn onto pin-up girls. Here he has looked to Giuseppe Arcimboldo for inspiration, and the three featured works, Untitled (Arcimboldo I, II, III) (2009), are very similar in style, comprising collaged heads made from vintage book clippings. They are beautifully executed, if rather spookily reminiscent of 19th-century fairground grotesques: one is compiled from anatomical cut-outs, its features a web of brain matter and intestines; another is formed from fungi (though it could be rhinoceros skin), from which a Dalí-esque eye stares out accusingly. Although Lakra cuts from images of flesh and even adds familiar human features, his portraits look much more monstrous or plant-like than those of Arcimboldo, who himself only ever used vegetables and books for his compositions. In this well thought-out exhibition, Lakra is the odd one out. His imagination is certainly gothic, and, like the others, he makes use of the past, yet his work feels light-weight alongside Macuga, Cruzvillegas and Maljkovic.
Whilst the exhibition’s title suggests the death of the modernist utopia, this is not its most interesting theme. After being the subject of a number of exhibitions (last year’s Berlin Biennial, which featured both Macuga and Maljkovic, being the most prominent example), the assumed failure of modernist ideals has become a rather hackneyed theme. Despite this, ‘Modern Ruins’ proves both refreshing and thought-provoking. The artists function together as archaeologists, treating the past as a landscape of souvenirs, thus bringing ideas about archives and personal and public collections into an interesting light.
Florence Mackenzie
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