REVIEWS PALE CARNAGE
ni, Bristol
, 2007 (installation view). Photo: Jamie Woodley. Courtesy Arnolfi
Pale Carnage
PALE CARNAGE Pale Carnage is a show with an idea. That idea, though never precisely defi ned, takes in modernism, the aesthetics of purity and fascism. Or as the curator Martin Clark describes
ARNOLFINI, BRISTOL it, “the point where utopianism fl ips over into oppression”.
17 FEBRUARY – 15 APRIL There’s a lot to absorb. The main gallery confronts the visitor with a disconcerting
variety of objects that only gradually begin to make sense. Lothar Hempel’s monumental
2007 work Nachts, wenn alles schläft! (In the dead of night, when everything sleeps) combines
classical sculpture with allusions to theories of the unconscious. Arranged at a diagonal
across the centre of the space, four blocks rise and fall in height: a minimalist tympanum. Images of artefacts from the Acropolis cover
their sides, which support a crow and a brightly coloured stuf_f ed trumpeter. Echoing Hempel’s suggestion of weirdly eroticised militarism,
an incessant drumming emanates from Aïda Ruilova’s short video Beat and Perv (1999). In it a young woman, strung-out but baby-faced,
rocks to and fro in front of a mirror, screeching dementedly. In an adjacent room, Athanasios Argianas’s clean, precise technique is shown
of_f in two very dif_f erent forms. His painting Braid Series 2 (2006) meticulously depicts the braids and plaits on the backs of women’s heads,
lavishing them with the same detail a conventional portraitist would the face. In contrast, Lyrical Machine and Song Machine No. 6 (both
2006) are geometric sculptures, the fi rst a metal cradle surmounted by concentric Stars of David, the second six plywood frames – the
leaves of a multidimensional songbook – that radiate from a central point.
Mark Leckey’s fi lm Parade (2003) mesmerises with visuals and sound that border on the psychedelic. The camera takes in a
continuously changing stream of images: street scenes, pictures from magazines, a sparsely furnished room. Our companion on this trip is
an eccentrically dressed observer who registers no emotion, a modern-day fl âneur, jaded and indif_f erent.
Elsewhere there are some unlikely but happy artistic pairings. Cerith Wyn Evans’s A Short History of the Shadow (2004), a lamp
that fl ashes out a text in Morse code, faces J.D. Williams’s boot-polish paintings. Tom Burr’s cool abstraction acts as the foil to Nobuyoshi
Araki’s fl orid scenes of bondage, and Ulla von Brandenburg’s gigantic black-and-white mural glowers over everything.
You would expect the narrow space that separates dreams of utopia from an ugly reality to be fi lled with uneasiness and foreboding.
Viewed as a whole, Pale Carnage delivers just that kind tension. Argianas’s severe styling, the austerity of Hempel’s contemporary classicism,
Araki’s discomfi ting photographs; it makes for an exciting ride, but perhaps doesn’t add up to a show about the political and aesthetic
ambiguity of modernism’s darker side. Still, if the analogy doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, Clark has engineered himself a get-out clause:
the ‘theme’ is merely a personal starting point, a fi lter through which he has come to view some of the artists’ work. And in the end it doesn’t
really matter. The work is powerful enough to blow quibbles about intellectual consistency out of the water. David Shariatmadari
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