reviews the world as a stage
the world
As A stAge
tate Modern, london
24 october – 1 January
On handing over my ticket to The World as a Stage,
the words “twenty-five million dead” are mumbled
to me by a gently embarrassed employee. Taken by
surprise, I immediately reply, “Thanks very much”
without thinking about the appropriateness of my
response. A Tino Sehgal has just smacked me in
the face when I was least expecting it, and for the
first time in an age I feel horribly self-conscious on
entering a gallery space. Hoping no one has heard,
I quicken my pace into Roman Ondák’s I’m Just Acting
in It (2007), where the awkward exchange is soon
forgotten as I tune in to an overfashioned, middle-
aged, highly perfumed couple reading aloud from
the exhibition booklet while only glimpsing briefly at
the stuff actuallly on display. After this early baptism,
which could have been lifted from an episode of Curb
Your Enthusiasm, it feels appropriate that Ondák’s
work takes as its subject the relationship between
viewer and artist within an exhibition context. Ondák’s
presentations consist of a series of drawings, executed
by nonprofessional artists, of Ondák moving through
the galleries at Tate Modern, each visualisation the
result of a descriptive exchange between the show’s
curators and the drawer; the result is a series of
perhaps unsurprisingly pathetic drawings that when
seen as a whole become charming and evocative. It’s a satisfying and playful beginning to an exhibition that aims to explore
geoffrey Farmer,
Hunchback Kit, 2000
how a sense of theatre, or spectacle, has an impact upon the gallery visitor’s experience. (installation view,
Other successful contributions include Catherine Sullivan’s intense, maddening film The Chittendens: The
gasworks gallery, london,
2002), mixed media.
Resuscitation of Uplifting (2005) and Geoffrey Farmer’s Hunchback Kit (2000–7), a discreet, engaging exploration of Victor
© the artist. collection
the Vancouver art gallery
Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). Sullivan’s engrossing film, made in collaboration with composer Sean
Griffin, features 16 actors who, dressed in stereotypical nineteenth- and twentieth-century American attire, were instructed
to follow a series of behavioural patterns devised by the artist. It’s a kind of acted version of the best of early minimalist music,
and with each repetition, acts of overt emotional resonance are rendered beautifully obsolete by their removal from any
original narrative structure. In contrast, Farmer uses a familiar narrative steeped in popular myth as his starting point, and in
an almost obsessive investigation into Hugo’s legendary novel, the artist draws you into a world of imagined ephemera and
fruitless, related quests. In Hunchback Kit we find a large, hardback flight case with props, documents and costumes that if
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