Review of Phyllida Barlow’s Dock at Tate Britain, London

    

This is Barlow’s largest piece of work to date and dwarfs the Duveen Galleries at London’s Tate Britain.  As a huge fan of her work and contribution to contemporary British Art, I was full of expectation.

It’s a magnificent piece, there is no denying, stretching almost as far as the eye can see along the length of this central atrium within the gallery.  That is if one could see the whole sculpture as a complete whole.  But, you cannot do this as its many elements obscure a total view of the whole.  Instead, the viewer is forced to negotiate around the work, weaving a path, where one large object obscures your path and your ability to see.

Dock contains all of the Barlow elements, lots of wood, lots of packaging material (black bags, parcel tape, string, rope) and reused material – at least, it appears to be reused, but given that this is her biggest work, its hard to see where all the material comes from, so I am assuming that much is new but made to look reused.  This leads one to consider how much the recycling of materials from one work to another is part of her USP, or whether it is just a practicality based on the contingency of cost and the type of materials and aesthetic she embraces.   I am not sure I really have the answer to that one here.  So let’s assume that some of the wood bearing the traces of dripped paint is reused from earlier pieces (if it isn’t, it manages to effect that conceit very convincingly).   Then this work begins to gel as part of the Barlow canon.

But I am not convinced that upsizing her work has lead to the masterpiece I was expecting.  Yes it’s a brave work and yes Tate’s director, Penelope Curtis has to be applauded for commissioning this work, but it’s not a fully resolved piece in a number of respects.  The high structures, which resemble Russian wood scaffolding (at least Soviet era Scaffolding, I’ve not seen the post era stuff) give the elevation that Barlow has successfully utilised in the past, I’m thinking of the work in the downstairs lobby of her recent Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly show.  What’s missing in the Tate piece is something of the vulnerability of that work, the precariousness of the elevated objects on flimsy stems.  At the Tate the structures are rigid and box like and feel stable, even if some elements over hang them.

So what’s missing from this piece is some of the vulnerability of her earlier works and also some of the colour and curiosity too.  Elements look derivative like the large tube structure and the high platforms have echoes of Tracey Emin’s raised seaside chalet or big dipper in structure and material but lack the interest Emin’s does and the vulnerability she engenders.  Also, the desire to see above our head height which Emin’s work provokes.  This is lacking in Barlow’s work at Tate and was so masterfully there at Hauser & Wirth where you could see up close from the upstairs balcony what you could only glimpse and imagine from below.  Now I do chide myself for not looking at Tate Britain from the member’s lounge or its environs on the upper floor to see whether there were any elevated views of Barlow’s Dock, and it is possible there are.

The Barlow Dock, has echoes of the riverside activity of times past on the adjacent Thames, but it seems like a flimsy hook to base the work and is also not necessary to anchor the piece.  It does not add to the work and it quite possibly detracts by over determining responses to the piece, stripping it of enigma and encouraging viewers to read things into elements that might not be helpful.  There was one element that I think really didn’t work and that was the collapsed piece that looked too self-conscious. We are all well acquainted now with the language of sculptural pieces that have constructed and deconstructed echoes side by side.  It’s no longer necessary and looks jokey in a more visually enlightened age.  We need to develop a new vocabulary, that language has been thoroughly explored and feels dated.

There is much to admire and I will certainly visit again, but I think this large commission has been an important learning curve for Barlow as it should be for all artists who are encouraged or are contemplating up-scaling their work.  Sometimes it does not come off.  We need to treat the urge to up size with extreme caution.  It might be that Barlow’s work does not suit the grand gesture like this and is better small.  And on that note lets hear it for the smaller artwork, sometimes less is more and we shouldn’t feel embarrassed or uncomfortable with that.

 

 

Thoughts on artists collaborating following talk by Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs

Matthew and Emma gave a talk in Norwich to Paint Club East where they outlined their collaborative approach to working. Matthew is a well-known critic and painter, his partner Emma, is a ceramicist. The work they talked about was new work that was about to be exhibited at Vigo Gallery in London. What emerged during their talk was that they had developed a very process orientated approach to working which some artists in the audience found difficult to handle. Matthew revealed that he was, in relation to these works at least, little more than a technician or an automated drawing tool or paintbrush. Emma it appears decides what colours are used in what combination and the type of stroke or mark making that is needed.

Let me explain a bit more.   The paintings are large-scale canvases divided into many geometric diamond shapes that are then further divided into triangles. Each triangle is a different colour, and the colours are built up using many layers of colour glaze before a final combination of colours is arrived at. The paintings appear to be multi-layered, as if the geometric diamond shapes are obscuring some thing else be it a landscape or seascape of some sort, the colours vibrate off each other in a successful overall vision which does not allow for straight geometric reading of the Diamond grid.

Biggs & Collings

The pictures are not unlike Bridget Riley’s, although to my mind they work better than Riley’s.

Biggs and Collings’ exhibition in London opened a few days after the Paint Club East talk. I went to the Private view at Vigo.  The next day I went to see Bridget Riley paintings at Tate Britain to compare and contrast. I like the Bridget Reilly’s, but I prefer her collage mock ups to her finished paintings which I have previously seen at Kettles’ Yard in Cambridge.

 

Detail of Biggs and Collings’ work

I suppose the key issue for me with Biggs and Collings’ work is the one emerging around a collaborative practice. I found that their honesty in the way they talked about their collaborative work really refreshing. This was most evident when Matthew Collings talked about their sublimation of painterly or artistic ego. I found this both disturbing and intriguing and I would like to work collaboratively with more artists to explore its possibilities. It seems quite clear that there is enormous potential and I can’t fully know how I’d feel about it until I’ve done more. I have collaborated with the artist David Kefford at Aid and Abet on a tiny scale recently in Cambridge, or the limited outings I had whilst an undergraduate at NUA.

Bridget Riley