I have never been to an exhibition in a commercial gallery before. I do not know what to expect. The image in my mind flickers between Tate Modern and a small, dark art shop filled with paintings, prints and tourist trinkets.
I do not know this part of London. I do not know if ‘5 minutes walk from the tube station’ means a short, manageable walk or the brisk, long legged stride of youth and health and direction.
I feel vulnerable. Exposed. I am surrounded by shabby buildings. Resteraunts, bars. It is a long time since I was in London alone. It is a long time since I was any where and I have forgotten that unconscious confidence of being I must once have possessed.
The email containing directions, hastily printed a few moments before the taxi arrived is dirty and dog-eared from looking, folding, re-folding. Simple directions. Second left and then there you are. There I am. Here. There. But I cannot see a door number even close to 48. Or any building that looks like I imagine a gallery to look. I see a church. A school. I am glad of the sound of children’s voices, I find it reassuring. A resteraunt, another, a couple of bars, a shoe shop.
I like the square. The small, fenced in park with benches that reflect the almost spring sunlight. I am glad that the sun is shining and it is less bitterly cold than of late. I sit and smoke a cigarette. Feel safe.
Cross the square. Re-cross. Up, turn right, right again, and again. Two men with Australian accents chat loudly over a drink. I ask directions and feel a flush of embarrassment as I follow a pointing finger to the building behind me. Obvious. Ridiculous. Me, not the gallery. Look down, smile, say thank you.
My back hurts. I am tired. The door is heavy.
Everything is pristine. Neutral. Cold is the wrong word. Reserved? It is merely a space. Not to be noticed. The reception desk seems to reach almost to my chin and I am looked down upon by catalogues. Famous names. The inhabitants of Olympus. The staff, a young woman and a young man are warm, friendly and helpful. A human touch at the gates of the temple. I buy a catalogue, wince at the cost and smile at the memory of my daughter offering the price of these coveted pages as a Mother’s Day gift.
My back still hurts and pain bites at my right leg.
The girl suggests that I go two doors down to watch a video by Liza Lou. An hour to rest and recover before looking at the rest of her exhibition. An appropriate and convenient moment to view the performance.
The bench is hard and a little low but I am glad of the time to sit. I am alone with the screen except for an attendant on the other side of an open door. I am alone with Liza Lou. Drawn into her world. Her memories.
Pain makes me fidget. My physical pain. Her childhood pain. Childhood. My experience is different. Yet the same. We communicate. Share? Pain? Memories? An act of metamorphosis? Different. Same.
I resent the late comers. The slamming door. Whispers. The finding of places and the getting comfortable.
I apologize.
I watch. I listen. I wonder.
The I wonder if any of the youngsters scrunched around me share this experience? If those that do not, understand? Empathy comes with days and months and years of living.
I wonder if Ms Lou is speaking facts. Not the truth. She speaks a truth, performs a memory. Aaah! There! There is the nub of the matter! Memory. Memories are the stories we tell ourselves. The stories that build, word by word the person. The now individual. Memories are not facts. They change, fade, intensify with repetition. Change with changing perspectives.
History is memory. Yours, mine, our parents and our parents parents. Everyone. Every thing. All that we remember. All that we have forgotten. History is the story society tells itself.
Memories are the stories we tell ourselves. Magnified, shrunken, selelcted. Turned into humor or horror or just a good yarn. They are true. They are factual. Liza Lou tells stories of her childhood. It is true. It is factual. It is a story. A performance separates it from her.
I wonder about art. About what it is and why we do it. ‘We’? At what moment did I put myself at the table marked ‘artists’? I don’t know. I don’t care. It is where , successfully or unsuccessfully, I have taken a seat, placed my name. I am uncomfortable that I use my life, my experience as the starting point for my art. The crime, the sin of self-indulgence is a neon sign pointing the way to the devil’s snares. (Interesting, Lou’s religious language infiltrating my own).
Autobiography isn’t art. The trick is to touch someone else’s experience. To universalize a thought. Alchamy. Art is the philosophers stone that turns lead into gold. The heavy weight of what has passed into the fragility of future possibilities.
I would like to sit in the dark and think, but the lights have gone up. Possessions are collected. The room begins to empty.
I take my coat, my bag, my catalogue, my thoughts, back to the park bench. It’s colder now and I don’t stay long.
My back hurts, I’m tired and the door is heavy.
The White Cube Gallery. Famous. Though not to me, a stranger, creeping into a foreign land. The gallery is small. It feels spacious. Liza Lou’s obsessions stand isolated. Demanding. I suddenly understand the role, the importance of curators. Of the how and what is displayed, not just that it is displayed.
Security Fence dominates the room. The incongruity of its sparking surface is almost painful. I want to run my fingers over the barbed wire. Razor wire. Would it still cut? The emptiness of the structure is deafening.
The gallery is filled with violence. The Seer, with his phallus/dagger threatening self mutilation. Scaffold, gleefully awaiting a lynch party. In the far right corner kneels The Vessel. Braced against the weight he carries, Christ suffers. Humanity suffers and we cover our eyes with glittering knick knacks so that we do not have to see.
The process, the placing of thousands upon thousands of tiny beads, the obsessive detail of these sculptures is shocking. Shocking in the ease with which it is over looked. Shocking in the abrupt shift of thought from the beauty of materials to the ugliness of what they represent.
I almost missed Stairway to Heaven. Tucked away in a tiny alcove close to the entrance. As silent as suicide. As singular as the will of a mob bent on ‘justice’. The smooth gold of the noose’s surface undermining its purpose.
Up the stairs to be confronted by Homeostasis. He stands, raw and utterly vulnerable, fingers pressed against the wall. I am distracted, willingly, eagerly, from the whole by the sheer loveliness of the surface. The rippling, sensuous pattern of white on red. That the beads are positioned with the holes facing upwards adds to the sense of rawness, of exposure. It has the feeling of a cross section slicing through a living body. I want both to walk away and to allow my gaze to linger.
The presence of a slit, a narrow window in the wall finally calls me away. I know what it is, what I will see. Cell. Claustrophobic, tragic in its missing words. Cell…on death row. Again horror beautified. Tender with patience and skill.
I leave thoughtful. Uncomfortable. Unable to separate images of abuse from surfaces that invite touch and visually seduce. Violence all dressed up in its Sunday best.
(For details of the exhibition which runs until April check out www.whitecube.com)
