This is blog is about seeing the Southbank Hayward Gallery’s modern historical and contemporary sculpture exhibition on 21st January 2024 When Forms Come Alive.
This is the second follow-up blog to one introducing my day trip: For other parts use links here: Part 1 General Introduction & Part 2: On Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads
The Hayward Gallery has haunted me since I first visited it in London in the 1970s (to see a Munch retrospective I think) as a student at UCL. From the publicity photograph above, the grandeur of the Venetian fort style brutalism is clear, towers and battlements honed down to a kind of kitsch with decoration. Externally it is a powerful building, best seen as above when the glass frontage is more reflective surface than access point. For, as the latter, it is duller – its interior looking merely functional despite the bravura of the exhibition publicity. Nevertheless it has a kind of fascination of a portal, where the interior is unclear in its potential to interest and the whole seeming a forbidding surface rather than a warm entry beyond this exterior to a warmer inside (there was a cold breeze in the slightly warm rainy day when I got there from off the bluster of Waterloo Bridge.
Entrance to Hayward, showing picture of Teresa Solar Abboud’s ‘Tunnel boring Machine’ (2021)
Auerbach still overwhelmed me. But here I was. I made my way to buy my catalogue and found the Gallery staff would let me in earlier than my ticket time, so in I went. The staff at the Hayward are so young, fresh and welcoming. It is a pleasant start to an exhibition I still felt unsure about in terms of what to expect.
And once ‘inside’ the true beaty of 1950s brutalism strikes you. It is a conceptual beauty that never goes away, as the norms of what is interior and what exterior get rapidly confused, as in the Southbank complex entirely, even the National Theatre. Stairs get transformed by artificial light and that is the only sign that they are not like their cousins outside, where light falls the more randomly. But every corner hides a visit out to another space, even though it is still another inner space. The design of the building is dependent on levels, like the mezzanine room facing you as you enter. There are ways up and down, ramps, stairways, lift but the overall confusion is a building that confutes the logic of its layering, where up and down, deep and shallow are never clear. This beauty is all the clearer in the barest of the rooms, which strikes one at first – I will point it out when we get there as a very dull warehouse space, unkind to the thinly dispersed items it holds.. You just have to love the Hayward. And you have to notice that it reflects themes from the works it houses, especially the ambiguity and nuance of exteriority / interiority essential to them conceptually, visually and materially.
I will select items as I walk through the halls with you, and chat on the ramps and on the stair landings. My sel;ection is not gaged by quality of the work, or even how much I like them, though sometimes that last feature is a prominent issue. I was still a bit fuddled as I looked at what face me. As for Shylight, it haunts but I could not look at it (or look for anything in it on which to focus, even though it fronts you on entry – a set of lights that ascend and descend in some kind of pattern, a difficult one to decipher, and perhaps randomised – I don’t know’. Lots of skylights acting ‘Shy’ (hence shylights). They retreat to holders in the ceiling wich enclose their expansibe beauty when left to open in descent and shine lit lit flowers as they open (look back at the collage of interior stairways – you will catch them there).
Too soon you realise as you catch sight of then throughout the exhibition – ascending and descending yourself on ramps and stairs that these shy gay (I think they called them Daisy in the show) sneak in on your gaze very often, demanding attention to their pointless beauty in sight and in their dance-like ensemble motion (not regular – but, as I say, with a supicion of pattern that is, of course, robotically programmed. But at first, I turned away to find something I might feel more copmfortable in understanding.
However, you never get that comfort for the whole point of most works here is that the heaviness of the materials – even when it is steel – can be made to appear light (as in works by Phyllida Barlow), as dark might show light in variance in Shylight, or soft materials get hardened blown surfaces. What is visible makes itself invisible. And on the wall to your left as you enter you encounter a wall made resistant by a surface decoration and sculpture that turns out to be made of the softest of ‘material’ – bath foam, Michael Blazy’s Bouquet Final.
Centre: Michael Blazy ‘Bouquet Final’ (2012) – Bath foam, water, compressor unit, plastic tubes, scaffolding & rubber Flooring). Margins: Olaf Brzeski ‘untitled’ from the ‘Little orphans’ series – Cast iron, chairs.
Of course to get nearer to the Blazy, you must pass what sems two rather unbecoming chairs across which ‘lounge’ (no other words will do hard and rusted shaped cast iron forms. The notions of relaxation and rigor force themselves upon you not just as concepts (why here is really no CONCEPTUAL art that is purely so, but as attitudes and haptic invitations to touch and where, one cannot touch, as usually in art galleries, imagine that touch and sense it proprioceptively in your inner capture of how your physical body feels when it flexes. Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian review of the show says these bars looked like he felt after the show, ready to ‘flop down for a rest’: the bars look ‘astonishingly human’ because ‘they look tired’.[1]
And then you turn and are confronted by the shylights again and stay and stare awhile.
STUDIO DRIFT (founded by Lonneke Gordin & Ralph Nauta) ‘Shylight’ (2006-14) Aluminium, , polished stainless steel, silk, LEDS, robotics.
Up the ramp to the mezzanine floor and there is a garden of forms playing with the binary ideas of hard / soft, life /death, decay / growth, bloom and wither.
Choi Jeong Hwa ‘Blooming matrix’ (2018) Mixed media.
I didn’t feel as engaged with these but behind their reflective guards which multiply them are strange works in which life-forms, biomorphic and sometimes zoomorphic, contrast vulnerable body materials with hard castings used in traditional sculpture like the ‘tunnelling’ machine shown on the entrance publicity to the whole show (see above) and Marguerite Humeau’s fantasy made of dead organic materials – woods labelled as being ‘150 years old (cause of death unknown)’, Life and death here enter not just in the sculpted soft appearances of hard artificial materials (processed metals and plastics) but in the materials themselves – some of these are impossible to see, such as the wasp venom (and even beeswax is hard to recognise as a material – especially that specifically collected in Bermondsey) Humeau uses. This notion of poison in a life-form also engages us with how some life-forms get wrongly labelled as ‘dangerous’ or ‘toxic’, when the logic of their lives is merely different. ‘Venom’ is not a word, no doubt, a wasp would use of its secretions. The beautiful work known as The Holder of Wasp Venom is surely impossible to comprehend other in its mutations to the sight. It is yet again a work where its outsides curve into interiors hiding secret dark spaces that sometimes invitingly open. What would it be to enter this ‘holder’ or ‘container’. What secrets does it keep and for how long – remember that OLD wood.
Marguerite Humeau ‘The Holder of Wasp Venom’ (2023) handblown glass, 150 year-old walnut (causes of death unknown), Bermondsey Beeswax & Handblown glass & wasp venom.
These bold idea in Humeau are even more present in a work we have to use a dark descending, blue-enwrapped Hayward staircase to get to, a work so hard it understand and which is partly made of sound, the sound of harmonic insect life. People crowded around tis, looking but then returning to the explanatory plaque in the doorway to the room holding it. We can’t see that one of its materials is ‘4,500 year-old’ organic yeast but once we know it, it estranges us from the blown-glass container – delicate but hard, transparent but posing, for we cannot see its interior contents opaquely. It is a work you don’t forget, despite its smaller size and resistance to being comprehended. Is it ‘brewing’ something within – brewing and fermenting are ideas already ambiguous, associated with good and evil ideationally but decidedly ‘natural’, but only because nature can make the artificial itself.
Marguerite Humeau ‘The Brewer’ (2023) handblown glass, 150 year-old walnut (causes of death unknown), raw honey, 4,500 year-old yeast, brewer’s yeast, wasp venom, cultured termite mushroom, SOUND.
In fact you don’t get down to this second Humeau work (with others in the same room) without passing a star of the show by Tara Donovan:
Tara Donovan ‘Untitled (Mylar)’ (2011) Mylar & hot glue.
However many perspectives a tour of this work yields, its structure remains impenetrable whilst inviting penetration, displaying a plenitude of interiors even in the cavities that form its surface. We cannot know whether this work is opaque or open, dark or light – it depends on how and from where we look at vis-à-vis its lighting. It’s tremendous but I don’t know what else to say about it.
After the Humeau room, we enter a room so stark that is small objects posing as art, for this is what they seem to declare themselves to do – as if further playing with ideas of impostership in art – whose beauty has to be investigated (if at all) in detail. There is a kind of resistance to creating beautiful display environments in this room. The pieces sit on what look like Formica tables. Yet approached singly, these works open up narratives or other growth-like potentials – that might include decay as well as blooming. They are made of materials that are belied in their appearance.
Various small works by Matthew Ronay (inset is A: ‘Crawl’ 2023 & C: ‘Third Instar’ 2023) Jean-Luc Moulène (Inset B: ‘Parure I’ and others as displayed in background. A. B & C from left clockwise.
Hence, you stop at some and wonder, such as the Méduse below: Myth or nature, poisonous or benign, maternal or murderous. The very form ponders whether it has a meaning, or at least whether it can ever have ONE meaning ONLY – for maybe life is like that.
At the opposed corner of the room is a portal, covered with dense semi-transparent-opaque plastic to guard the modified dark behind it, in which I lost my heart to my favourite piece in the show. It is E. J. Hill’s ‘A Subsequent Offering’ (2017).
Portal to E. J. Hill ‘A Subsequent Offering’ (2017) Wood & LED neon flex.
So much do we want this to merely represent the roller-coaster it looks like we might neglect the impossibility a ride on it would represent, a LED track that sometimes twists in a way that would be unsupportive to any life even imagining riding it in mobile speed. Even it’d box-like platform cannot easily be seen to represent something – like a boarding platform for the ride imagined – for it screams of being merely formal, interpreted only because of its geometrical dissimilarity to other forms in the whole. Again some views look in and through the structure so that it has interiors that, after all are also framework exteriors, a bit like the Hayward itself.
E. J. Hill ‘A Subsequent Offering’ (2017) Wood & LED neon flex.
Hill, on the plaque (died in the pervading coloured light of the room – pinker than it looks on the photograph – discourses about the human meanings of the piece. Believe me. They DO communicate themselves. I can’t forget this piece. I never will.
I ascend another Hayward staircase out of the room, winked at again by the shylights to my side. At the stair top is my second favourite piece: Neto’s Iaia Kui Dau Arã Naìa. I cannot find a translation. The catalogue sees it as a work about relationship and activation of the senses (its colour dyes are foodstuff spices),. It recalls the natural – spiders who hunt, live, and reproduce are mentioned. The piece is visceral as well – suggesting body organs but also external hanging or inverted forms. Light is not mentioned as a material but you feel inside this work, approaching underneath it by a staircase because it casts shadows of itself on every wall. This is wonderful art. I could have gazed forever as did the couple of beautiful lads who were there at the same time and from hence appear with other works.
Ernesto Neto ‘Iaia Kui Dau Arã Naìa’ (2021) Cotton string crochet dyed with spices (turmeric, ginger, cumin, pepper, ginger) stones & wooden hooks.
If you look at that stair lobby you will see one of the functional plain inset windows of the Hayward. Holly Hendry created her work Sottobosco, especially for the outside and inside of this window to again play with notions of interiority, for what is outside of the building’s window of the metal ducting tunes of her work are ‘insides’ we look into through this window. There is a play with what is and what is reflection, but also with the organic form of the 50s architecture represented. Air ducts are the viscera of buildings – indeed of the Hayward itself as the catalogue points out. Here they may serve life in potential but cannot do so directly in this broken form, that yet serves beauty, even becoming one with the landscapes beyond the window that art’s elements doubly-front.
Holly Hendry ‘Sottobosco’ (2024 for exhibition) – steel ducting pipes, glass water, etc.
In a room opposite the experience of the exhibition became strangely re-interpreted. In that room, though I look at this work last (on exit of that room) were three works in ensemble by Ruth Asawa (just discernible blow in my collage). As I pondered in this room, a group of visitors gathered round the pieces to hear a mini-lecture by the guide, whose voice played a symphony with notes that were the words ‘inside’ and ‘outside’., explaining them central contrasts of every work in the exhibition. And so it is. Stuart Jeffries explains that look at cross-sectionally these ducts are actually also about decay for they are ‘constipated with foam and fossils’. And the metaphor is there, for if ducts in the body carry air and blood, they also are ‘pipes meant to carry waste away’ that are ‘no longer fit for the purpose’. A digestive flatulence seems to surround them.[2]
Glimpses of Ruth Asawa’s (from back to front, left to right) ‘Untitled S.154’ (c.1958), ‘Untitled S.142’ (1990) & ‘Untitled S.065’ (1960-3). – Metallic wires
The catalogue quotes Asawa thus: ‘The piece does not hide anything. You can show inside and outside, and inside and outside are connected. Everything is connected, continuous’.[3] But Asawa misses something here. It isn’t that nothing is hidden in the work, this is a mere appearance for few transparencies are entirely so, even metal wire, however thinly pulled, and secrets may hide in illusions caused by forms doubling and shadowing, and creating wall shadows, which are implicit in every narrative. For even these works have narrative. It is so slow and calm a narrative that we do not see it or the ‘genesis of secrecy’, Frank Kermode long told us that narratives imply.
The flows of time felt in Asawa’s work are so stilled, but not so, at least in the dynamism of their appearance to the wandering circumambulating view of the sculpture viewer and reader of the soft-looking but very hard forms at the other side of the room. I was lost with those when the mini-lecture previously referred to. Amongst the most impressive is Linda Bengalis’ Power Tower II, wherein the artist reinterprets the phallus for feminist art. Just gaze at it and in it for a while in inadequate stills in collage:
Lynda Benglis ‘Power Tower’ (2019) – Everdure bronze (golden)
The material of the tower is actually ceramic, a pot digitally enlarged. I think the pretension of the phallus is mocked but the tower is not ‘masculine’ without the fusion of something crafted and creative in its generation of life-like form. Katie Guggenheim in the catalogue says: ‘Dance-like twists and arcs refer to the physicality of the act of making, but also involve the spectator, whose body is stretched and morphed by the sculpture’s reflective curves’.[4] Hence, travelling beyond binaries again is the direction made by the work – masculine /. Feminine, rising / spreading, hardness and the look of softness. I find the piece CALMING and RESTLESS, the sign of a creation but also a destructive fragmentation. And, in this sense, I think this true of many works here – they are never soft without looking hard material, and vice-versa, and never at rest without looking mobile and vice-versa (think of Shylights for the latter).
And Benglis makes a point too in a work standing to the side of Power-Tower II, almost ‘dumped’ in the fullest and crudest sense of the word in a corner. The Quartered Meteor has not so much hit the earth but oozed onto it or up from it, though it may be a meteor of a solid form turning liquid in our atmosphere. Looking soft, fluid, mobile, it is hard lead and steel on a hard steel base.
Left: Lynda Benglis (1969) ‘Quartered Meteor’ – Lead and Steel; Right : Oleg Brzeski ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ (2008) – polyurethane resin, carbon fibre mat, black pigment, wood, steel.
Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward, said to Stuart Jeffries that the material though hard and static ‘could be mud, lava, or excremental’ (literally a pile of sh*t) – an ‘abject mess’, which still poses as a work of art, such that beautiful and ugly combine together – and part of the motivation Rugoff thinks might be humour against a certain view of the ‘purity’ of art: “I’m gonna just drop this leaden form in this pristine gallery”. I think he may be right. But the issue of hard thinks miming soft, still things the mobile is also another way of talking of the fluidity between boundaries – of both binaries and other frigid categories. Benglis talks about it as form opposed to geometry, so valorised in the aesthetic tradition in both Leonardo and Cezanne for instance. Fluidity queers geometry. Rugoff interprets Benglis saying her work resists geometry as meaning that such resistance is necessary because ‘geometry stands for the world of the straight’. [5]
Look at the Brzeski work in the next and penultimate room (the last in the main section of the gallery) Spontaneous Combustion. It mimes an explosion in process but is totally still. It is the figure in European art gone up in a ‘puff’ of smoke, whose genesis was pondering ‘true’ stories of ‘human combustion’, there being a case in Ireland as late as 2011, and valorised by Dickens in the ending of the character Krook in Bleak House. Something passing however based on forces not understood gets more permanence as art. Different kinds of fluid, of particle-filled gas for instance, show forms different from the liquid fluidity in Benglis.
Turn away from that work and some strange work by Phyllida Barlow emerges. I have mentioned Barlow before in a blog on the less well-known work of Matthew Rugg (see this link for that blog), who like Barlow employed waste industrial materials in their art, and both ,looked for the tender in the extremely hard. Barlow obviously addresses sex/ gender in this – in works of a sublime sort (see the two in this room in the collage below. They are works that aim to make concepts as porous as they could ever be, even sex.
Phyllida Barlow (left to right) ‘untitled girl II’ (2019) & ‘untitled: modernsculpture’ (2022) – steel, timber, wire netting, plasticated materials, paint, base building materials, paint.
The sense of something contained but yet full of holes offering access is also apparent here, especially that near-enclosed social group in untitled: modernsculpture. I see people though Helen Luckett says the form represents ‘the space of landscape and things within it: a neolithic dolmen or a clump of trees’.[6] These are not mutually exclusive ideas in art. The point is how are the energies of clustering of otherwise fragmented things representable. It is a point worth exploring. In the exploration of femininity in untitled: girl ii, Barlow uses masculine tropes to reinvent femininity, rooting the feminine in a form which is usually represented as something adrift or associated with what is adrift. But I need longer with Barlow’s work I think. Likewise with Chin-Up, several pieces of which are mounted on a far wall behind the Barlow:
Glimpses and details of Nairy Baghramian ‘Chin Up’: Left – Fitting C, Right (from right to left) Fittings C, A etc,) [2016] – Waxed wood, polished and lacquered aluminium.
You might note those nice young men again in this picture. The fluid is a version of the absent or its imaginative filler in these bare minimalist frameworks. Natalie Rudd says that they reflect on ‘the relationships between sculpture, our bodies and the world’. I get a version of this though there seems more, particularly when the works are seen in ensemble. Baghramian said themselves that they are meant to elicit the vulnerability of the exposure in the world of both the outsides and insides of people through the emotional dynamics of inclusion and inclusion.[7] But by now I was too tired to work this out in a way that might render understanding that is cognitive, sensuous and emotional. It makes sense to me, but not in any way I can try and communicate.
Stuart Jeffries loved the next piece and so did I. See it first:
Franz West ‘Epiphanie an Stülhen (Epiphany on Chairs)’ [2011] – steel, polystyrene, gauze, six projecting arms.
Called Epiphanie an Stülhen (Epiphany on Chairs) Rugoff suggested to Jeffries that it is a piece of meta-art, art about art, ‘taking the piss out of the idea of looking at art and having some kind of epiphany about your experience’.[8] And yes, I see that. But wouldn’t that be a pointless gesture to JUST debunk art, the artist and the viewer in one go – reducing them all to levers maintain something pointless. For me, it has more meaning after HIV/AIDs. It seems a contemplation of the consequences of a viral messenger that people have ONLY stared at.
As I wandered back to the stairway, past the Shylights, who winked at me again, I was puzzled to find an ‘Exhibition Continues’ sign with a left -facing arrow on the exit door. Out in the glass-fronted lobby, I see another entrance to a room. In it, explained only outside a room stuffed with what feels like visceral pink intestines curving in and around each other, smothered in pink and purple light and music. This is the artwork adapted by Eva Fàbregas ‘Pumping’. The name says much: it is about something still but intent on mobilising unseen contents, creating a movement or motion in all their ambiguity. It is a dance and an evacuation at one time – the excremental vision gone internal and valorising a human process as worthy as the more obviously productive ones like breathing. Look at my collage:
Eva Fàbregas ‘Pumping’ (2019 – adapted for exhibition), inflatable lycra, robotics, sound.
Does this piece hang by slim tendons or thrust strings outward to c onnect and climb upwards? Does it fill or empty the room it is in? Is it ugly or beautiful? Is it a set of outsides or indides – it certainly creates dark rifices as well as lighter spaces in between. Can we breathe in it or do we suffocate? It ia an amazing piece. Fabregas is quote in the catalogue as saying that her work is a kind of science fiction making ‘creatures that can help us imagine other possible bodies, other ways of living and new forms of desire and affect’.[9] That thing about ‘desire and affect’. I felt them but do we often open ourself up to biomorphic abstract art as much as these fluid examples insist?
It was too much to think of. I had time to find another exhibition before my train at 6.30 home but no, I wanted to rest after all this restlessness. I walked to Cecil Court to see the bookshops and then started up St. Martin’s Lane back to Kings Cross via Russell Square. On Henrietta Street, I came across a lovely restaurant:
Attended to by the kindest of patron s and waited on by a gorgeous Czech waiter with a kind smile, this was the perfect lunch. They chose for me: Prawns in spices to start and a ‘Kingfisher’ fish curry for main. Delicious soul food! From then I caught the train from Kings Cross at 6.30 and home to husband, Geoff. A good day.
With love
Steve xxxx
[1] Stuart Jeffries (2024: 9)’Top of the Blobs’ in The Guardian (Thursday 8th February 2024). 8f.
[2] Stuart Jeffries op. cit: 9
[3] Asawa in 2007 cited by Ralph Rugoff (Ed.) (2024: 194) ‘Catalogue’ in Ralph Rugoff (Ed.) When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture London, Hayward Gallery Publishing.
[4] Guggenheim in ibid: 201
[5] Cited in Stuart Jeffries op.cit: 8.
[6] Ibid: 199
[7] In ibid: 197
[8] In Stuart Jeffries op.cit: 8
[9] Rugoff op.cit: 116
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