I wrote this review for a critical art writing competition but as nothing is going to come of that, here are 1275 words to ignore:
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| Dorothy Cross, Foxglove, 2015, bronze Photo courtesy of Lismore Castle Arts |
A Weed
Is A Plant Out Of Place: The Invigilator's Cut
Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Co.
Waterford: 3 April – 2 October, 2016
Anna
Atkins, Harry Callahan, Pierpaolo Campanini, Mat Collishaw, Dorothy Cross,
Latifa Echakhch, Susan Hartnett, Michael Landy, Mateo Lopez, Maria Sibylla
Merian, Adrian Paci, Luisa Rabbia, Jeanne Silverthorne, Philip Taaffe, Emma
Tennant, Michael John Whelan and Pae White.
Curated
by Allegra Pesenti.
After a while it's more
about what the works have to offer you.
Not the normal five second visitor/art work interaction but say The Guardians, a video by Adrien Paci, that will give me, the permanently upright
invigilator, 6 minutes and 22 seconds of seated peace if visitors watch it all,
which most of the time they do. Prolonged
viewing is often unusual for video works but this is an unusual video, a
beautiful video without dialogue, text or music that opens with slow pans of
tall trees and overgrown funereal artefacts.
Next a trickle of children, some barefoot, through a graveyard. They wait around for a time and then everything
begins – a hand brushes crumbs of dirt off white stone, fingers peel away cobwebs
or uproot brittle weeds that sound like sticks breaking and then a bucket of
water is sloshed over stone and the camera zooms out and out and out to show dozens
of children washing every grave in a constant movement and babble. The most commonly asked question after 6
minutes and 22 seconds: 'Where was that
filmed?' Paci filmed the video in his home town of Shkodër, the centre for
Roman Catholicism in Albania, where after the withdrawal of Russian troops
following the collapse of Communism, local children were paid to clean the
graves that had been hidden by a protecting shroud of weeds.
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| Adrien Paci, The Guardians, video, 2015 |
[Most common visitor
comment on entering the gallery: 'I hate weeds']
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| Michael Landy, from Nourishment (detail), 2002, etching |
'A Weed Is A Plant Out
of Place' germinated from Michael Landy's series of 2002 etchings entitled 'Nourishment' for which Landy studied and
drew the weeds growing around his studio in London. After viewing the work at Landy's studio,
Pesenti, the show's curator, became fascinated by these scraps of plants
growing wherever the slightest opportunity, the least nourishment could be
found. On returning home to the USA, Pesenti,
Italian by birth, was detained in secondary immigration at LAX. Looking around, she saw herself and her
fellow travellers as weeds, waiting at the margins to move into foreign
territory and put down roots. Depicted
roots and all, Landy's weeds are obsessive, eye-wateringly detailed portraits
of individual plants rather than generic or scientific illustrations and as
such, announce the intent of the exhibition which is to rehabilitate and
reassess weeds, to remind us of the status they once had as food or medicine or
as repositories of historical and socio-cultural beliefs such as death,
fertility, and grief.
This reassessment is
difficult in a gallery which is surrounded by seven acres of gardens maintained
and weeded by a team of gardeners. Most
visitors come to see the gardens and the gallery is unexpected. Some visitors are curious, others hope for a
way into the castle. Instead they are given
an exhibition guide and invited to look at art.
[Personal Gallery Diary
Entry: Friday, 26 August 2016: A man in a blue blazer inspects the gallery
before finding a painting his wife "might like". He brings her in, timidly chaperoning her
straight to the work, a botanical watercolour of a lily by Emma Tennant. Both of them look at it, neither speaks. Then they both turn and walk out.]
Dorothy Cross's Foxglove (2015) is a star
performer. Immaculate, perfectly and
significantly reproduced in bronze, it stops visitors in their tracks. A hand reaches out to touch the sharp edges
of a leaf but I am there to discourage too much artistic interaction and
instead show them Crosses' fingers that have been flawlessly cast in place of
some of the bells. There is always a
reaction, usually a laugh and a step back, a grimace, or a hand to the chest, 'that's very good now'. Cross's foxglove is an invigilator's dream, the connections coming thick
and fast; digitalis for the fingers
and the Latin name of the plant, for the childhood (and beyond) desire to put
one's own fingers into the floppy purple bells, for digitalin, the heart drug
that can kill or cure, for the whole poisonous aspect to this plant, so
beautiful in nature and so sinister and malevolent in its neutral bronze
reincarnation.
[Visitor comment:
Wednesday, 14 September, 2016: 'Tumbleweeds
in an art gallery are a sign of the end of civilization.']
American, Australian
and South African visitors do not want to see tumbleweeds in a gallery in a
castle when they have them piled up against the fence back at home. European visitors are unsure of what they are
looking at.
Answers to
questions: Yes, those are real
tumbleweeds and we had them shipped from the United States at the request of
the artist. Yes, we did pay for
them. Yes, they do have a specific place
in the gallery and must not be moved, clattered into or picked up and turned
over by impromptu would-be curators.
The tumbleweeds are
distributed around the gallery floor, impeding progress, completely out of
place, non-native to Ireland and non-native ironically, to the States even
though they are one if its iconic symbols.
This shift and the responses to it are revealing – they are either too
exotic and alien or too familiar and inappropriate. The subtext of this show is
migration, both vegetable and human, the two being linked for where we travel,
so do our weeds and these gate crashing tumbleweeds, spiked triggers for
unconscious reactions to interlopers, show that there is often no control and
that 'home' is a transitory concept sometimes defined by where one ends up
rather than where one begins. The artist,
Latifa Echakhch, lives in Switzerland but was born in Morocco. She was unable to get a visa to attend the
exhibition opening.
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| Latifa Ekchakh, Tumbleweed, 2016, installation view (detail) |
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[Personal Gallery Diary Entry, Tuesday, 19 April,
2016:
A man and a woman. She is wandering around praising the works and
showing interest. He has thin brown hair
in a ponytail and a very square jaw and even when walking into the gallery
looks as if he is walking out again. All
the time she is trying to involve him, get him interested, pointing out works,
exclaiming how lovely things are. She is
inducing him to like the art. She is
forcing the art upon him.]
Mateo Lopez's 'Urban Tumbleweed (Helecho)' (2016) has also
infiltrated its way into the space. A
paper weed in an inflated clear plastic bag it sits unobtrusively in one corner
of the gallery having taken advantage of the warm protection of plastic to
sprout from a corner of soil disguised as rubbish. It looks pitiful, yet exists and will thrive,
an embodiment of the dual nature of weeds as 'weedy', something feeble and
frail and equally, voracious and uncontrollable, appearing where they are least
expected and with any luck taking over; impervious, adaptable, interminable. Like us.
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| Mateo Lopez, Urban Tumbleweed (Helecho), plastic bag, paper, wire 2016 |
[Home Diary Entry,
Tuesday May 3, 2016: Farmer Weed Killer has sprayed the edges of
every field and lane and everything that was springing up straight and strong
is now falling down, curled, contorted and dying. But here, the weeds are safe, although
trampled by the bullocks. I was reading that
weeds need disturbance, soil turmoil, to thrive and I know from experience that
even the doused weeds will come back and patches will have escaped altogether
and although it is only the third day of summer, their skeletons will be there
in the winter to come.]
