As I near the end of my car-ride to the Donald Young Gallery, I feel a fleeting vague familiarity with the area. It is not until I see a parking lot that charges nine dollars for use that I am certain that I have indeed been here before, and as I approach the gallery, I realize that I had seen another exhibit there a few months ago.
I begin with this anecdote for a reason: my observing the Donald Young Gallery when a different artist's work had been displayed gave me the insight of comparison during my recent venture there. Currently, the gallery features an exhibit from Mark Wallinger, a British contemporary artist known for working with themes of social class, religion, and belief. His most well-known piece, “Ecco Homo”, described as “a life-size sculpture of Christ that occupied the 'Fourth Plinth' in London's Trafalgar Square in 1999” [1], reveals his work in this gallery as a departure from what he was previously known for. The completed work he reveals at the Donald Young Gallery show’s Wallinger’s exploration of a completely different and new array of concepts and themes. The exhibit, entitled "The Human Figure in Motion", consists of three different pieces, each of which takes up one of the three total rooms in the gallery.
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is immediately confronted with the first component of the exhibit. This piece, entitled “The Human Figure in Space”, holds an importance aptly established by both the closeness of its title to that of the exhibit, and its forefront placement. Wallinger covered three of the four walls with a black surface, then defined measurements of the space by weaving a grid on top of it with over three miles of white kite string. The final wall, located to the right from the entrance, is simply a large mirror. The creation of the piece was born out of Wallingers study of Eadweard Muybridge, a 19th century photographer who photographed people moving in front of a black wall marked off with white string. However, Wallinger’s “The Human Figure in Space” improves upon Muybridge’s work in its subtlety; initially, the viewer could find himself uncertain about whether the room is even part of the exhibit. It is only after fully entering the room and looking straight into the mirror that any uncertainty is erased. It immerses the viewer in a virtual Alberti screen, a tool used by artists to aid them in translating three-dimensional figures into a two-dimensional format accurately.
The second room, entitled “Landscape with Fall of Icarus”, contained five equally-sized video screens placed upon five equally-sized pedestals. Wallinger placed the pedestals in a slightly arched semi-circle formation in such a way that they take up most of the space of the room. Each screen displays a different video of a person in some sort of struggle: a man struggling with a parachute, a man on a zipline above a lake of mud, a man attempting to cross a lake of mud on merely two thick ropes, a man resisting a pull towards a body of water, and lastly, a man trying to remain grounded while flying a kite. These “have been slowed to an analytical stop frame, a tenth of real time, and seesaw back and forth in an endless cycle” [2].
The final piece in the exhibit is located directly across from “Landscape with Fall of Icarus”. A work nominated for the 2007 Turner Prize, “Sleeper” is a 154 minute video showing Wallinger wearing a bear costume as he wanders, alone, around Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie at night. A few stray pedestrians stop and observe the “bear” as he crawls, hides behind pillars, throws up his arms in frustration, sleeps, and more. The piece equates the unwarranted isolation and the uneasiness of surveillance experienced by imprisoned animals to the condition of modern humans, a comparison which forces the viewer to ponder captivity’s tendency to take forms other than an assumed claustrophobic space encircled by vertical bars. However, the piece has multiple connotations. Along with isolation and captivity, it highlights “politics, humor, nationalism, duality, modernism and Berlin’s troubled past.”[3]
The fact that each piece occupies an entire room reflects its integration into the space itself; the room and the display within it, rather than only the display, becomes the piece. Each is a specific environment that immerses the gallery patron into the thoughts, theories, and conclusions of Mark Wallinger’s work. Furthermore, each piece forces you to somehow interact with the space of the room. “The Human Figure in Space” requires you to observe your placement among the white lines of the grid, “Landscape with all of Icarus” requires you to move yourself as you move your focus from screen to screen, and “Sleeper” evokes feelings of discomfort as you become conscious of your similar circumstance of being in an entrapped space (in this case, the dark viewing room). The acknowledgement of this aspect of Wallinger’s exhibit is something that, although recognizable to a new gallery patron, was accelerated and magnified by my previous experience in the same gallery. Wallinger’s ability to immerse the viewer in each of his pieces, along with a silence inherent to the gallery space, is something that makes “The Human Figure in Motion” insightful, refreshing, and quite successful.
[1] http://www.whitechapel.org/content.php?page_id=547
[2] http://www.donaldyoung.com/wallinger/wallinger_pr_2007.html
[3] http://www.donaldyoung.com/wallinger/wallinger_pr_2007.html
*jep205
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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