Art in which nothing is quite as it seems
Phyllida Barlow, Folly, Venice Biennale 2017, review
Ol der women are often seen as a neglected resource, or indeed simply as neglected. We are often told, for example, that there are no roles, even for great older actresses.
Yet that picture seems to be changing, at least in the visual arts, where women of a certain age are stepping to the forefront, and the more in-your-face the better. The favourite to win this year’s Turner Prize, Lubaina Himid, is a largely unknown 62-year-old, while here in Venice the Lifetime Achievement Award has gone to Carolee Schneemann, a 77 year old American performance artist, best known for her work Meat Joy, in which the naked participants roll and writh in heaps of raw meat.
Britain, meanwhile, is represented in 2017 Biennale by 73-year-old sculptor Phyllida Barlow, whose career has only really taken off over the past decade. Her most visible work to date, dock, was a vertiginous avalanche of discarded materials — boards, doors and chunks of polystyrene — that filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2014, looking rather as though the contents of a builder’s yard were collapsing out of the ceiling onto the spectator.
The view of the British pavilion is obscured by huge gobbets of what looks like concrete, crudely painted and spiked onto metal stands that cluster in a kind spinney round the neat neo-classical building. Looking like monstrously bloated sacks, and very solid in appearance, they are in fact made of plaster and comparatively light. But then, things in Barlow’ s work are rarely what they seem: the massive and monumental is often fragile, things that look like they’d kill you if they hit you—and placed in terrifyingly precarious positions—may turn out to be virtually weightless.
Entering the pavilion’s central space, we encounter a forest of oppressively enormous columns that bring to mind the enormous, roomfilling replica of the ancient Roman Trajan’ s column in the V& A. Here, however, we’ re looking not at marble, but at plaster-soaked scrim (a kind of loose sacking) wound around polystyrene armatures. Great slabs of what looks like marble or concrete, perched on top are in fact more polystyrene, while crowding the rest of the space are competing column structures: a spire of coiled tubing tightly wound in red cloth and a stack of rather comic “boulders” straight out of the Flintstones.
There’ s an exuberant, messy physicalityto this work that flies in the face of the clinical neatness of so much contemporary art; a vibrant tactility that makes you want to rub your hands over the often puzzling surfaces or knock on them to find out what they’re made of — an urge confounded here by a ridiculous “no touching” rule.
Moving on, we find ourselves clambering, Alice-like, through a wonderland of trashed surfaces and junkyard materials jammed into rooms at uncomfortable angles. A human-height cable drum — or is it a tape dispenser — in black painted polystyrene has a bust roll of cardboard jammed through it. Assemblages of boards like discarded stage flats slice across spaces, poking into the skylights, with absurd appendages: two enormous chunks of polystyrene suspended from one, while great shards of “slate” — actually fibreglass — jut out of another.
A comically clunky balcony projecting from one screen creates a deliberate parallel between Barlow’s rough-and-ready aesthetic and the crumbling theatricality of Venice, a city that is often been described as a vast stage set. The fact that the rather tacky colours with which Barlow daubs her work, a pinky red, a mustardy yellow and a rather nasty pale green — hues more redolent of a builders merchant than a high-end paint dealer — echo, surprisingly, the washed-out pastels of old Venetian facades is a happy accident.
Barlow’s work stems from a lovehate relationship with traditional processes. As a student, she found the focus on pure form and materials by an older generation of sculptures typified by Barbara Hepworth admirable, but suffocating. It was only when she began working with “worthless” materials, in contrast to Hepworth’s stone and bronze, that she found her voice. Equally, she hated having to make armatures, wooden internal frames for plaster sculptures, then still an essential part of a sculptor’s training. But over the succeeding decades this education has stood her in good stead — if not in the way intended. The preoccupation with weight and balance is apparent in her lumbering but delicately positioned structures. But rather than hide the evidence of how the sculpture was made—the untidy, uncomfortable, often dangerous processes that go into it — in the manner of traditional art, Barlow spreads the mess of the studio all over her work with the dizzy recklessness of an out-of-control child.
As to what it all means, the folly of the work’s title refers both to the architectural folly — a structure created for visual amusement rather than practical use (an idea that could be applied both to the pavilion and her use of it) and to the current political situation. Don’t, however, come here looking for a message about Brexit or Trump.
At a time when the interpretation of art focuses increasingly on quasiliterary “themes” (the notion that Damien Hirst’s work is “about” sex and death being a prime example), Barlow regards herself as a “formalist”: her work is “about” processes and materials. Folly isamarvellously comic and inventive divertissement that throws up all kinds of visual jokes and quite profound resonances: about scale and endurance, mortality and decay. But above all, it is a physical and sensual experience: what you make of the sensation of walking between Barlow’s looming pillars or squeezing between her bastardised stage flats is up to you.
Barlow’s belated success can be attributed, at least in part, to the collapse of the cult of youth that has dominated British art since the rise of the so-called Young British Artists in the late Eighties. The rise of Barlow and her peers, by contrast, represents the resurgence of a very old idea: that it is those with most experience who have most to offer. Given that we’re all living, working and generally hanging around on the planet a lot longer, that feels like heartening news. On this evidence, at least, 70 feels like the new 40.
Phyllida Barlow’s British Council commission is at the Biennale Arte 2017 until November 26. Details: britishcouncil.org/ venicebiennale