Nicole Wermers
Herald St, London, UK
'Public Rain', installation view (2008)
It’s easy to imagine a back-story of addiction, creation and persecution behind Nicole Wermers’ work. The artist has become known for an assortment of mock-Modernist units fitted with ashtrays, tables bedecked in sand and nicotine sticks, and a series of sculptures significantly titled ‘French Junkies’ (2002). Are these, perhaps, the by-products of a bad habit, grandchildren of Baudelaire’s odes to opium and hashish? Is art itself an addiction?
Nixing such musings is Wermers’ latest exhibition, ‘Public Rain’, which unshackles itself of the art/drug paradigm in order to directly confront the underlying resonance of such a theory: the dispersal of desire within contemporary urban life. Street decorations - lighting, hoardings, anti-slip floor plates - have, depending on your viewpoint, either a humdrum or sinister shadow. Behind every lamppost looms the dark presence of behavioural science, by-laws and the town planner’s paranoia of a litigious public. A more cogent question, therefore, would be: can such elements of control be recuperated by pleasure?
Filialen #8 (2008)
‘Public Rain’ addresses this tension in terms of a mobile experience of space. Four aluminium rectangles, Filialen #6 - #9, (all works, 2008), mounted opposite Herald Street’s large opaque windows, mirror the extramural hubbub of the ever-frantic Cambridge Heath Road, rendering the passing traffic as streaky shades of gold and silver. Formally, the Filialen works recall industrial design, both in the material, and through a scattering of surface reliefs derived from the grips on floor plates commonly used in shopping malls and event venues. Here, however, they are arranged in a decorative array, like elegantly descending autumn leaves.
Wermers’ ambivalent reference to nature is not incidental: ‘Filialen’, translates from the German as ‘branches’, in the sense of high-street chain shops. The word is civic rather than arboreal, but we are nevertheless put on guard for a quick detour around the theory of nature-as-artifice. Untitled Bench is a forked, transparent acrylic box of suspiciously branch-like form, containing three blocks of stone, which sit mutely, as if waiting to accrue meaningfulness. Deliberately deflationary, Untitled Bench rests happily at the level of ornament, glossing over the cryptic depth of Robert Smithson’s rockeries. The trick could work, but unfortunately, as ornament, both Untitled Bench and Filialen aren’t particularly alluring, and neither do the allusions to ‘nature’ seem to amount to much.
Spa (2008)
Dominating the gallery’s second room is Spa, a walk-through sculpture composed of three conjoined hoops of stainless steel, which echo the space’s three entranceways. The work speaks of alarmed shop doorways, shopping malls, concert halls and other crossover points between public and commercial zones. Like the Filialen, there is a sense of footwork involved here that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Robert Morris exhibition 40 years ago. The difference, of course, is that Wermers’ sculptures already look like art: we’re dealing with culture as a mimetic addiction of forms. The aesthetics of dependency are, indeed, a potent metaphor for art. Yet in attempting to escape this formula’s cruder renditions by substituting a hazy sense of ‘nature’, ‘Public Rain’ tended to say less about design, commerce and subjectivity than one might hope for.
Colin Perry
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