REVIEWS SAM BASU
SAM BASU: BASUHAUS
KATE MACGARRY, LONDON
25 MAY – 1 JULY
There’s a current generation of artists for whom the visionary forms of twentieth-century utopian Modernism are like a beacon. Sam Basu has written this
fascination into his own name, merging it with that of the great revolutionary art school the Bauhaus. But whereas the Bauhaus looked forward to a hoped-
for alignment of art and industrial manufacture, Basuhaus presents a bizarre future-past world in which manufacture has slipped its cogs, and seems to
have regressed towards a variety of handicraft techniques, producing totems that might be the artefacts of some collective or commune to come.
Painting, knitting, resin casting and assemblage are all on display, all forms of production suited to the small scale, the individual or the concerted
small group. What they share is the absence of mass-production techniques. Basuhaus plays on a trope of science fi ction in which technologies and
knowledges have been lost and forgotten, and where once-understood objects become mysterious. Two works, for example, are made from the conical
bobbins of industrial yarn-spinning machines. HIVE Arrangement of Cells (all works 2007) has coloured plastic bobbins stacked in formation, while others
dangle down to meet them. Goofy big-headed humanoid fi gures are painted on the topmost cones. Nearby, U n d e c i d a b i l i t y M e m e D i f_f u s i o n stands
against the wall, a backlit steel grid supporting dense clusters of grey cardboard bobbins, which look more organic or crystalline than functional. Before
both of them lies Universal Demos, a large pile of disarrayed yarn, organic and unordered; pre- or post-production?
The stalagmite-stalactite opposition, hanging and rising, recurs throughout. Psymalgum, an angular resin chandelier of red diamonds, cascades
down to point at the corner of a glowing, rock-like pedestal, in which is set a chunky, hieroglyphic motif. These works combine to insinuate that organic
accretion and geophysical processes count for as much as more rational and intentional processes of formation. Ritualistic approaches to form merge
with organic processes to predate – or postdate – the rationalised
account of art and industry that the Bauhaus proposed. Yet these
themes are complicated by the various indications of forms of
idealised collectivity; everything in Basuhaus, not least the titles,
hints at a fantasy of community and solidarity. House Commune,
for example, is made up of a sort of knitted hanging tube of
dif_f erent geometric patterns, topped of_f by a stony triangular
head; a monument to collaborative production around which to
gather?
Basu’s whimsical humour refl ects on how utopianism
projected its harmonious societies in terms of harmonious
production; the most poignant photographs of the Bauhaus are
of its students, together, working or relaxing. In a more absurdist
mood, Basu has used for his invite card an image of a group of
Fremen from the fi lm Dune (1984), the cultish desert-dwellers
whose main survival activity is the recycling of water (drinking
their own urine comes into it!). Basu might be jokingly pointing
to that other tribe of contemporary nomads – artists – who keep
alive the idea of freedom in and through production, forever
anticipating a future of greater, more sociable production.
J.J. Charlesworth
Basuhaus, 2007 (installation view).
Courtesy Kate MacGarry, London
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