An iconic brutalist office block on The Strand becomes the perfect
venue for the Hayward Gallery’s new pop up space. This concrete maze offers up
a weird, engaging, moving, and hilarious assortment of installations down each
disorienting dark corridor. The Infinite
Mix is devoted to experimental video, image and music, blending these
elements to achieve total celebration of diversity. The feeling of entering a
dystopian, futuristic universe is appeased by the nostalgia yearning of many of
the installations, commonly rendering the bygone times hyper-modern, infinitely
mixing past and present, concept and vision. This is an emotional and cerebral
gallery experience that demands and rewards immersive intraction with all of
its components.
A self-confessed Martin Creed fan, I was already delighted to be
edging slowly down the first dark corridor towards the pop-punk sounds of the
artist bellowing his song, “You Return”. Work
No. 1701 lands us at a crossing on a New York intersection as we begin to
watch people battle their way in various ways across the busy street. A guy
with a prosthetic leg crosses nimbly, absorbed in the delicate dance of forward
motion and instability. A woman crosses with the rising and dipping of a
palsied gait. A man hops agonsingly over the striped crossing, foot waddled in
a vast bandage. Themes of Creed’s sculptures reappear during this poetic video
of the everyday - a celebration of motion, endurance and fortitude with an
injunction to pause and see the world with fresh eyes.
Staying in New York for the next installation, we are catapulted
into Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kishasa -
a painstakingly recreated 1970s recording studio. There are some brilliant
musicians in this fictional jazz-funk session, that seems to loop endlessly.
The sound mix highlights each player, clad in a costume so meticulous it feels
as though entering a sepia-toned time-capsule. The endlessness is simply a
construct, each variation carefully edited and remixed by Douglas, the seeming
improvisation nothing but a clever trick, the infinite fusion of sound and
culture provoking feelings of timelessness and endurance, in a strange parallel
with Creed’s overarching theme.
The third room, for me, is worth the visit alone. Ugo Rondinone’s Thanx 4 Nothing, featuring beat poet
John Giorno, is humorous, compassionate and engrossing. Four large screens
surround us, with tv monitors placed on the floor like stage footlights,
providing different views and profiles of Giorno, standing strikingly in the
proscenium of Paris’s Palais de Glace theatre. Elegant in black suit, white
shirt and black tie, his feet stranegly unclad, he begins an affecting
performance of an autobiographical spoken word piece thanking past lovers and
friends for good sex and wild times, their intimacies and betrayal, the
depression and joys of an underground life. Accompanied by glorious immersive
music, Giorno is mesmerising, in equal parts funny and heart-breakingly
poignant. Everybody who entered was enraptued by this bare-footed poet until
the final puff of his contemplative cigarette.
Perhaps the most incredible use of space was Dominique
Gonzalez-Foerster’s Opera in which we
are confronted with Maria Callas flickering in a narrow alcove of the building,
behind an almost invisible barrier. A holographic apparition, Callas is played
by the artist who lip-synchs to arias from Cherubini’s Medea, Verdi’s La
Traviata and Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. The echoes of the cold, concrete space
around is threaten to absorb and overwhelm her plaintive howls, heightening the
sensations of loneliness and wistful desire. This is a meditation on urban
loneliness, a mesmirising yearning for something more, a soul roped off from
the rest of the world, destined to play out this melancholy scene in darkess, untouched
and unnoticed. If no-one is there to witness your creation, can you call it
art?
Down in the basement, 3D glasses are donned to watch Cyprien
Gaillard’s Nightlife. This complex
video is the perfect example of interconnection. As a sequence of images alone
it’s stirring stuff but it requires a few viewings and concentration to unfurl
all the layers. Taking us from LA to Nazi-era Berlin, we end up floating above
the Olympiastadion amongst an immense firework display, all accompanied by a
looped, distorted line from Alton Ellis’s Black Man’s Word: “Aww-wah, I was
born a loser,” Ellis wails, over and over.
The imagery all connects: the shattered Rodin sculpture we light on
was bombed by the Weathermen, a Left-wing group connected to the Black Power
movement; the Berlin stadium was Nazi-built and the spotlit oak tree is the one
that Jesse Owens won in 1936 in that stadium. The quaking trees and
illuminative fireworks are the images that remain, and that hanting refrain, “I
was born a loser” - this is an ambiguous
and meticulously thought-out installation, combining scultpure, music
and 3D visuals to incredible, provoking effect.
Kahlil Joseph’s m.A.A.d
fills two-screens in a panoramic and intimate film; a chaotically disturbing
but hauntingly beautiful portrait of Compton in LA. The pacing and suspense of
the film keeps you hooked, swimming in the unnerving sensation of violence
about to erupt, the jarring juxtapositions of street life and police brutality
with gentle, warm scenes of domestic life, and the unbreakable bonds of
friendship. The scenes veer from intensely realistic and shocking to a kind of
macabre magic realism, that is stunningly matched with Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics,
heightening narrative tension and propelling us towards an abrupt, but not
uenxpected, finale.
Bom Bom’s Dream by Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea shows the fantastical
adventures of a kamikaze dancer competing in a Jamaican dance scene. Her
hilarious contortions are interspersed with deliberately crude fantasy scene of
a chameleon, who eventually swallows her whole.
Cameron Jamie’s Massage the
History, a title taken from the Sonic Youth track, documents bizarrely
erotic dance routines revolving around furniture. The unexpectedness of this
film, the incongruous elements of costume, set and music all align to make a a
surreal and hallucinatory experience, where it is as much fun to watch the
reactions of other visitors as it is to watch the film itself.
Elizabeth Price’s retro-feeling K
is an ominous sci-fi confluence of CGI images of yellow stockings on a
production line, flashes of footage of the singer Crystal Gayle, and an
unnerving, synthesised voice promoting a fictional troupe of “professional
mourners”. these disparate elements combine to create an unsual reflection on
collective emotion and mechanisation of the modern world.
Rachel Rose’s Everything and
More has all the right elements of a soaring, trippy installation, but
somehow fails to move entirely. 1960‘s style psychedelic fractals swarm over a
translucent screen that allows a view over London’s South Bank, a wonderfully
imaginative use of the building, that should induce feelings of weightlesness
to match the narrative, but somehow doesn’t. These galaxies of bubbles, and
indeterminate liquids are used in conjuction
with a voiceover of US astronaut David Wolf’s descriptions of the
jarring effects of returning back home from space, and being crushed by the
weight of gravity (“I thought I had ruined my life, gravity felt so heavy, the
watch like lead on my wrist”) and Aretha Franklin’s soaring vocals.
I entered the gallery as a trepidatious technophobe but emerged
totally overwhelmed by the vast scope of vision that had been encountered and
left with the certainty that audiovisual work is one of the most consistently
creative fields of modern art.
The Infinite Mix is at the The Store at
180 The Strand, WC2 from Friday until December 4.
Admission free
(Text by Rebecca Hughes 2016)
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