Psychos, so they say, are the quiet ones - not frothy-mouthed maniacs, but
suburban conformists with their shirts buttoned up to the top and their
children locked in the cellar. If that's true, then psycho buildings are not
the “Hey, look at me” museums of today's diva architects but the standard
unit of the average British housebuilder, the one with the pitched roof and
the little plastic windows. Because in architecture, as in life, a
conventional façade can hide all manner of sins.
Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture, which opens at the
Hayward Gallery on the South Bank in London tomorrow, aims to shake us out
of any limited expectations that we have of our architectural surroundings.
Ten artists who work with structures and spaces have designed large-scale
installations, which radically alter your experience of the gallery
building. It's a hugely ambitious exhibition that wants to slap us around
and force us to become hyper-aware of space.
The catchy title is somewhat misleading. The show is not really about
psychosis and architecture, although there are a few horror-movie moments;
it's about subverting architectural norms. It was the title of a book of
photographs by the German artist Martin Kippenberger depicting oddities that
he noticed on his day-to-day travels. “They suggested an irrational or
deviant architecture,” says Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward, who
curated the show. “I liked that idea.”
The exhibition is the centrepiece of the Hayward's 40th anniversary
celebrations. Rugoff's inspiration for it was the gallery itself - in his
opinion it is a psycho building in its own right. It looks like a government
bunker for top-secret research. Designed by the architecture department of
what was then called the Greater London Council (it's amazing how
progressive local authority architects used to be), it is a landmark of
Brutalism, the movement of the 1950s and 1960s with a fetish for exposed
concrete. Sternly sculptural, Brutalism had a disciplinarian quality that
the British public has never really warmed to, despite works of beauty such
as Denys Lasdun's National Theatre next door.
A number of the artists in the show have used the building as a coat-hanger
for their ideas. The Viennese collective Gelitin, for instance, has turned
the western sculpture terrace into a boating lake. You don't get many
opportunities in this city to row a boat 12 metres (40ft) above the ground
while looking down at the river. This is precisely the kind of physically
and perceptually incongruous experience that makes Psycho Buildings
such a generous show. The Hayward clearly wants to get noticed. Last summer,
the sculptor Antony Gormley decked its roofs with suicidal-looking figures;
this summer, look up and as well as rowers you'll see a cinema made of
scaffolding and people floating in a geodesic dome.
Roughly speaking, the show can be divided into two categories: works that
propose new ideas of what architecture could be, and those that suggest
alternative psychological readings of the architecture we already have. Put
even more bluntly, you might say that it's divided into dreams and
nightmares.
In the first category is Ernesto Neto's Life Fog Frog ... Fog Frog, a
porous igloo-like structure made of the same material as ladies' stockings
and supported by plywood dinosaur bones. Inside hang pendulous tonsils full
of dark powder, which, when you get close, you discover is black pepper and
cloves. It's not just an architecture of the senses, one that encourages us
to touch and smell; it also appeals to our primal, animal origins. With some
humour, the Brazilian artist seems to be suggesting that it is within our
own skin and bones, our own wombs and orifices, that we'd be most at home.
Although they couldn't look more different, there are parallels in Michael
Beutler's piece, which looks down upon Neto's from the mezzanine. The German
sculptor has created a structure that is everything the Hayward is not:
light, porous, colourful. With pliable mesh walls plastered in bright tissue
paper, it evokes a shanty town but feels more like walking into an abstract
expressionist painting.
Such are the liberties that artists enjoy when they create “architecture” in
galleries: they get to make big things without any of the practical
constraints of the real world. Which is why it feels nicely balanced to have
two very good architects in the show creating something reassuringly solid.
Again playing off the building, the Japanese duo Atelier Bow-Wow have made a
tunnel of steel plates that connects two galleries. It's only a short
transitional space but Life Tunnel forces you to crouch, making you
aware of your physical boundaries. Passing between its beautiful faceted
walls is like entering a portal to another world, and, as in many of the
works in the show, that world feels filmic - it's as though the ventilation
shaft that Bruce Willis crawls though in Die Hard is leading to
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The treatment of architecture in the movies, or even the media, might well be
the subject of Show Room by the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros.
Using wires to suspend debris from the ceiling, the work captures what looks
like a domestic interior in mid-explosion. In the wake of 9/11, the Iraq war
or any of the recent natural disasters, this is a scene ripe with different
readings but also one that you “get” instantly. It is as spectacular as it
is banal: right now someone's home somewhere is being obliterated - look for
it in tomorrow's paper.
Once you become attuned to them, the nightmares start to proliferate. There is
a similar disaster unfolding in Fallen Star 1/5, one of two pieces in
the exhibition by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh. It is a meticulous 1:5 scale
model of his traditional family home crashing into the 19th-century
townhouse in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived as a student. With
echoes of the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz, it's a literal snapshot of
culture shock.
Rachel Whiteread's eerie Place is a sleepy town of doll's houses -
well, either it's sleepy or it's abandoned, after some societal trauma.
Here, in miniature, normality is made disturbing. And finally, there is Mike
Nelson's To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, where at last the
axe-wielding psycho you've been waiting for arrives on the scene. Nelson's
installation looks as though the gallery has barely contained some raging
force - lunatic, wild animal, poltergeist? These splintered walls suggest
our own repressed violent potential.
You might say it's a dark show. The cultural barometers of many of these
artists reflect an anxiety that is in the air these days. With half of the
works either insinuating or explicitly depicting a cataclysm, it's no wonder
the other half feel escapist. The final work, on one of the other sculpture
terraces, is by the Argentinian Tomas Saraceno and consists of a dome
designed by the visionary Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s, in the middle of
which is a transparent PVC pillow. When you walk onto it, you will appear to
those below you to be walking on air. This combination of an archaic vision
of the future with a classic dream fantasy is either optimistic or deluded
depending on how you want to read it. But it is also one of many rich
experiences this show offers that you may never get again.
Justin McGuirk is the editor of icon magazine, www.iconeye.com
Psycho Buildings, from Wednesday until August 25 at the Hayward
Gallery, London SE1 (0871 6632519)
I don't want groundbreaking. I want the ground to stay in one piece. Or else the building may collapse, which is great Event Art but a bit hard on the people inside or nearby.
joe, birmingham, uk