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Lucy Gunning, ‘Esc (detail)’, installation, 2004.
Courtesy: the artist and Matt's Gallery, London.
Matt's Gallery, London
21 April – 13 June
Reviewed by: Nina Madden
Gunning's installation looks at the strange ways that humans behave when trying to escape the trap that their world has become. Combining video and sculptural elements, the first video shows a series of ramshackle tree-houses occupied by a community protesting against land development, and connected by elaborately constructed walkways of rope. The work is de-contextualised and tinted with a shade of innocent nostalgia with the sound from the diggers below replaced by birdsong. The second video, set in a period country house, documents a group of hippies practising Qi Gong. Shaking, in a trance-like state, their faces display a mixture of pain and ecstasy. Wearing outmoded signifiers of idealism and spiritualism, they give the impression of a rare and odd species threatened by extinction. In contrast the third video, hidden in a cardboard room-like box, documents a more familiar scene. Young city boys at Liverpool Street Station – perhaps the very same property developers the treetop community is protesting against – stumble as they attempt to locate themselves, their levels of intoxication on a par with the social outcasts in Gillian Wearing's Drunk.
The videos are linked by their focus on different means of escape and the individuals depicted have made themselves inaccessible both to the surrounding world and to us; they are oblivious/indifferent to our gaze.
Taking into account, and perhaps making assumptions about, the generic makeup of the average visitor to the Matt's Gallery, the installation also looks at otherness within our culture. Although we may be united with the city boys in our preferred choice of analgesic, the financial district and its lackeys, hippies practising Qi Gong and a tree-house community become, by way of presentation, a different species.
The wall painting, suggesting altered states of mind, is moreover reflected in the roof of one of the tree-houses hinting, perhaps incidentally, towards the context of the art gallery and by extension towards us as viewers. The work oscillates between documentary language and metaphorical meaning, wavering between the absurdity, necessity and inevitability of escape. This subject matter, and means by which behaviour is recorded – with the absence of a declared standpoint – allows ambivalence and contradiction to cohabit uncomfortably.
Writer detail:
Nina Madden is a critic/writer based in London.
Venue detail:
Matts Gallery
42-44 Copperfield Road, LONDON E3 4RR
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