Raqib Shaw manipulates pooled metallic paint with a porcupine quill to produce marbled patterns on the petals of peonies. There’s a pedantry in that level of minute pissing about that’s off putting, especially when you imagine the great troop of poorly paid peasant art students who are doing the quill fiddling for him, swooping, pausing and dipping over the enormous patterned panels like hummingbirds.
(When I was at the gallery I happened to stand next to one of these art students. I overheard her telling her friends about which sections she had worked on.
‘I was up on a stool, bent over that small part of the piece, completing the flowers by that join. It was ridiculously tricky because the whole thing was still wet, so you couldn’t lean on it or brush against it. You had to come at it from above. It was back-aching and bloody hard to get it all the panels match up.’)
But they are sublimely beautiful – camp as a Christmas tree (is that the phrase?) – naked demons and demi-gods bound with diamante encrusted ropes - and so blindingly brightly coloured, sparkling and intricately worked that it hurts your eyes to try and figure out what’s actually going on. I stepped backwards and forwards, trying to unlock the detail of one small section close up, before piecing it into the wider narrative.
The whole room is dimmed, which enhances the dazzling effect of the work. Perhaps it also adds to the ecclesiastical vibe White Cube have gone for (they make much of hanging the show so that the room resembles a church, with altar piece/stained glass windows etc.). You could say that the dimmed room also gives the spectator’s experience a cinematic quality – but then cinemas are like churches too in terms of lighting, layout, and ritualistic communal behaviour - and galleries in fact - full circle: we whisper in all three.
I haven’t laid eyes on anything quite so spectacular in a long time. It offers the densley crowded visual entertainment of Where’s Wally?, sexed up with eyeball-boggling homo-erotic, rhinestone-spangled, grotesquerie.
White Cube draws out the influence of Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516) in particular - see The Garden of Earthly Delights, below, with the creation of man (Adam and Eve on the left - evil invading the world), earthly paradise (centre - sensual pleasures) and vision of hell (right - horror and tortuous punishment). In Shaw's work sensual pleasure and torture are bound together in a teaming S&M paradise.
The show made me think of Salman Rushdie – Immigrant literature/Magic Realism – in particular Gibreel Firishta’s half-magic half-mad (schizophrenic) dream visions. The way Shaw irreverently mixes up Eastern and Western religious imagery and narratives is perhaps partly responsible (Gibreel/Gabriel in Rushdie, for example - not to mention the sexy rendering of the Prophet Mohammed). Perhaps in Shaw the realism of Rushdie’s Magic Realism is classicism?. I noticed there is an essay by Homi K. Babha in the catalogue that accompanies the show – renowned theorist of post-colonialism/nationality and identity (Nation and Narration, 1990) and of such renowned wordy impenetrability that he won a prize for most unreadable academic writing style. His commentary would be fitting – in form as well as content. Unreadable in one sitting but richly dense and intriguing.
The gore is extravagantly ladled on. The lobster raping Adam is silly. However, I could look again, with pleasure, and would enjoy sucking out a little more juicy ocular detail.
No comments:
Post a Comment