A squash game that nobody wins
Anthea Hamilton Tate Britain
Anyone who saw Anthea Hamilton’s 2016 Turner Prize exhibition is unlikely to forget it in a hurry. Alongside a unisex suit with a pattern of red bricks, she presented an enormous golden bottom, each nude buttock splayed by a giant hand.
This disembodied backside was inspired by Italian architect Gaetano Pesce’s unrealised and equally unforgettable design for a doorway to a Manhattan apartment, which Hamilton had encountered in a book. Although it didn’t win her the prize, her cheeky manifestation was endlessly reproduced on social media.
If only some of that raucous energy and bawdy humour animated The
Squash, Hamilton’s installation-cumperformance that forms this year’s Tate Britain Duveen Commission. Sadly, though, the tone of her new work, her largest to date, is more decorous and dreamy – and, ultimately, baffling and underwhelming.
To realise it, Hamilton has transformed Tate Britain’s neoclassical Duveen Galleries by covering the terrazzo floor with 7,000 white ceramic tiles, summoning an unexpected, bathetic effect that is part bathroom, part municipal swimming pool. (At the press view, several tiles looked grubby.)
Various modular structures, reminiscent of large 3D Tetris blocks, also clad in white tiles, provide plinths for sculptures selected by Hamilton, mostly from the Tate’s collection. There are three abstract bronzes by Henry Moore, as well as a bronze crab by Bernard Meadows, on loan from the Hepworth Wakefield gallery, where Hamilton exhibited in 2016.
The true focal point, though, is a solo performer valiantly writhing about as the eponymous character “Squash”, ie, a pumpkin. Every day, one of 14 performers will select a luxuriant costume from seven outfits created by fashion designer Jonathan Anderson to represent different varieties of squash or pumpkin.
Some are white, with flecks of gold and green, and with Seventies touches such as disco-ready ruffle shirts and flared bottoms. One is made up of blackand-white stripes, so that the performer resembles a space-age, eyeless zebra. All are finished with a great gourd-like mask, entirely covering their head, so that the tapering end of the squash becomes a kind of snout or beak. Surreal doesn’t come close.
Apparently, Hamilton’s pumpkinpeople pay homage to a mysterious black-and-white photograph of a harlequin-like performer wearing a similar costume, which she first came across at art school. It has obsessed her ever since, in part because she has never discovered its original context. Reproduced in an accompanying leaflet, the image is beguiling and memorable, but it’s hard, frankly, to get as excited about it as Hamilton does.
During the press view, one enigmatic squash-being draped itself across a podium languorously (in a nod, I guess, to germinating seeds and a vegetable’s gentle growth), its gourd-head mournfully downcast.
What are we supposed to make of this peculiar spectacle? For one thing, we are invited to dial down our frenetic human consciousness, and imagine what it would be like to be part of the plant kingdom – almost, but not quite, inanimate and inert.
For another, there is a pleasing formal interplay between the stark, relentlessly symmetrical tiling, which marshals the eye with the rigour of gridded graphics on a computer, and the sensual display of the performers’ muscled legs, which rhyme with the ripe, swelling forms of sculptures: voluptuousness versus restraint.
If you were to ask me, though, what The Squash “means”, I would shrug. Frankly, I doubt Hamilton really knows; the whole affair feels rather muted and unresolved. The source photograph for the show may exert a strange, inexpressible hold over her imagination, but it feels arbitrary to make something so slight the basis for an exhibition on this scale.
Until Oct 7. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk