Mythologies
Haunch of Venison, London, UK
Christian Boltanksi, Théâtre d’ombres (Shadow Theatre, 1986). © Haunch of Venison 2009. Photo: Peter Mallet
Six Burlington Gardens is a hugely impressive building. Designed in 1867 by Sir James Pennethorne, also responsible for East London’s Victoria Park and the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, it served as the Museum of Mankind between 1970 and 1997, an outpost of the British Museum holding its extensive ethnographic collections. In 2005 it was taken over by the Royal Academy of Arts, and has since been occupied by temporary exhibitions and events such as Zoo Art Fair and the wannabe-funky ‘GSK Contemporary’ season. Now Haunch of Venison, seemingly oblivious to the existence of a recession, has moved into what are probably the grandest premises of any commercial gallery in the world.
Acknowledging the building’s history, the opening exhibition wisely passes over the building’s more recent incarnations and casts back to the days of the Museum of Mankind, an institution that, like the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, was a rich source of imaginative nourishment for the city’s artists. As an anachronistic attempt to collect and interpret icons of indigenous cultures of four continents, it had the paradoxical effect of making the world seem stranger, more arcane and unknowable. ‘Mythologies’ sets out to explore and, in some part, to recreate that cabinet of curiosities.
Accordingly, ‘wonder’ is the keynote response that the exhibition tries to invoke. Unfortunately, both the installation of the work, the flummery – including the quasi-encyclopaedic catalogue that shuffles entries for Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, ritual and unicorns with those for the artists – and most of the art itself attempt to invoke said wonder by trying to impress, and in doing so gets it dead wrong. What is compelling about ethnographic artefacts is that they don’t care about you, the viewer in a western museum. They weren’t made for you – their role is in some distant and now mysterious world from which they were ripped and which you can never hope to comprehend.
‘Mythologies’ (2009), installation view. © Haunch of Venison 2009. Photo: Peter Mallet
By and large, ‘Mythologies’ forgoes this aura of authenticity for a phony and overwrought performance of the spectacular, the spooky or the uncanny. London’s most persistently tedious provocateurs Tim Noble and Sue Webster have installed steel cut-outs of dragonflies and genitalia near the show’s entrance, creating a wall of shadows that, like Christian Boltanksi’s Théâtre d’ombres (Shadow Theatre, 1986), reminds us of the Indonesian shadow plays once shown in the Museum of Mankind. Jennifer Wen Ma’s stone sculptures of hands hold miniature projections of the mythical Chinese figure of the Monkey King, magically cavorting in clouds of steam. While I know that the work connects to a complex folklore of which I am ignorant, I was reminded of the kitsch table-top fountains sold in garden centres. It was not a huge surprise to see work by Bill Viola (pseudo-spiritual plasma-screen portraits titled Incarnation and Small Saints, both 2008) and two massive, pointless photographs of Damien Hirst’s diamond skull upstairs.
‘Mythologies’ (2009), installation view. © Haunch of Venison 2009. Photo: Peter Mallet
Other examples of ornamental kitsch were to be seen in the recurrent use of taxidermy, in works by artists Jochem Hendricks (pictured above) and Polly Morgan. Taxidermy has become an especially vapid and voguish medium; the use of dead animals offers a thrilling frisson of repulsion, a momento mori that still manages to look aristocratically louche in the contemporary home. The combination of existential horror and desirability attempted by Morgan’s boutique trinkets is particularly cynical.
‘Mythologies’ (2009), installation view. © Haunch of Venison 2009. Photo: Peter Mallet
It was not all dreadful however. The more successful work kept itself to itself, retaining some dignity amongst the spotlighting, coloured walls and the pretentious wall quotes. Egyptian artist Tarek Zaki’s collection of mysterious round objects (The History of O, 2009), Guy Tillim’s photographs of Mai Mai militia, and figurative sculptures by Jean Hérard Celeur and Guyodo, both artists from Haiti, all achieved the double-whammy of enigma and familiarity that the show seemed to be pitching at. Sophie Calle’s haunting photographs of the defaced faces of Christian statues wormed themselves unpleasantly into one’s consciousness, and Heather and Ivan Morison, artists whose work is consistently intriguing, hung two huge kites in the main stairwell, physical echoes of the floating CGI crystal that turns in an Arizona desert sky in their nearby video Dark Star (2007). One kite – in silver mylar – was titled Kind, Wise and Loving; the other, which was black and larger, was called The Opposite of All Those Things (both works 2008). I have no idea why. These are artists who are not toying with ethnographic or museological tropes, but who create genuinely mysterious images and objects that are wholly indifferent to the foppish affectations with which ‘Mythologies’ surrounds them.
Jonathan Griffin
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
