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For many people, Mark Wallinger (born 1959) is the man who likes horses. He is the artist with a passionate interest in racing and thoroughbreds, the successful competitor for the Ebbsfleet Landmark commission, in which he will place a vast sculpture of a horse in the heartlands of Kent to greet visitors to our green and pleasant racing stable. Now he has been invited to curate an exhibition for the upper floor of the Hayward Gallery. Its odd title will be familiar to football fans, referring to an infamous and still-debated decision in the 1966 World Cup. The theme of the show is further encapsulated in its subtitle: ‘Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds’. It’s what they call a multi-disciplinary show, which means it’s got a bit of everything in it. The mix is rich and undeniably engaging.
The concept of frontiers and divides is one close to Wallinger’s heart, whether physical, metaphysical, political or psychological. As the exhibition guide informs us: ‘The idea of the threshold as a transitional state, an interface between two realms of being, is another central motif.’ We live in an era achingly aware of transition, beset by rampant and unrestrained technological advance (not necessarily evolving for our best interests), and crucially lacking in the certainties and verities once held to be ‘eternal’. Wallinger explores our frail identities in collision with various stronger ideas and beliefs, through a profusion of visual imagery which ranges from painting and sculpture to printed matter, film, installation and, of course, photography.
There are various soundtracks, but the first to strike the ear and infiltrate the consciousness is James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake, making that (for many) near-impenetrable modernist text sound like an Irish lullaby. While listening to the old leprechaun’s sing-song you can look at a marvellous Dürer woodcut of St John devouring the book from the Apocalypse, or a series of photographs by Joanna Kane of life masks of the great poets — Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats. Nearby is a group of stereoscopic photos with their viewers set into a false wall like a row of binoculars for illicit observation. We are shown the Führer’s sculptures and soldiers, the Holy Land and other zones and lines of demarcation. Photos of Egypt and the pyramids from the late 19th century are hung with a beautiful aerial view painting of Jerusalem from 1919 by Richard Carline. This is typical of Wallinger’s inspired and wide-ranging selection: Carline is a fascinating but little-known artist; it’s very good to see him in this company.
Lines abound, not least in Fred Sandback’s simple geometric constructions of stretched yarn. The line beneath the skin is captured brilliantly by Stubbs in his superb graphite drawing of a human skeleton. The subject is further explored in Eadweard Muybridge’s celebrated photographs of figures in movement and a Bruce Nauman video entitled ‘Revolving Upside Down’. Walls are another theme: the Wailing Wall, the Berlin Wall and the so-called ‘Green Line’, not a bus-service but the heavily-fortified cease-fire line between the Turkish and Greek portions of Cyprus. This idea is given another twist in Monika Sosnowska’s disorientating architectural intervention, a three-dimensional Escher-like caprice of a carpeted corridor turning up the wall and over into the next door space.
Among the other exhibits of note are Wallinger’s own sculpture, a stainless-steel coated Tardis, Dr Who’s police-box time-machine, made deliberately to look a bit like a conjuring prop, something that might dematerialise at any moment; Ronald Searle’s searingly matter-of-fact prison camp drawings; C.R.W. Nevinson’s first world war ‘Road from Arras to Bapaume’, lonely as a Lowry; an X-ray of Titian’s ‘Death of Actaeon’, complete with tacks; the famous continuous profile of Mussolini by Bertelli in black glazed terracotta; and an early Roman double-headed marble herm of Dionysus and Silenus. One of the best pieces is Tacita Dean’s amusing and touching installation about Foley artists — those who specialise in sound effects — featuring footage of an elderly couple doing the noises for an off-camera drama.
Finally, it is the subject of last things, or eschatology, that underlies the whole show. Wallinger comments, ‘The unspoken border that keeps rising to the surface as I have gone about compiling this exhibition is death: the undiscovered country.’ And it’s the last chance to see this intelligent and stimulating show in London: it closes on 4 May, but thereafter travels to Leeds Art Gallery (16 May to 28 June) and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea (18 July to 20 September). There’s no catalogue as such, but a book (£14.99 in paperback) which mirrors the juxtapositions of the exhibition has been published, containing a collage of texts and images by the artist and others which adds to the provoking of thought. An aural footnote: Joyce’s lilting light tenor accompanies one even to the gents, babbling of Shem and Shaun. ‘Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!’
Downstairs is, in more than one sense, a comedown. Annette Messager is French and highly regarded, she is also obsessed with self in a way that is terribly tedious. The lower gallery at the Hayward is filled with multiple exhibits composed of such things as children’s drawings, scribbles, signatures, portraits by friends, toys, dresses, lots of black net, unravelling wool and a dressed-up flock of stuffed sparrows. It’s all so adolescent, this fetishising of self, that one loses patience very quickly. The least confessional pieces are the most interesting, such as ‘Casino’ with its half-hidden cities of the plain. Or the body parts made from parachute fabric which keep inflating and deflating, like a Boschian garden of earthly horrors waking up and springing into action. The exhibition continues through ghastly collections of nightmarish stuffed hybrids: the worst excesses of the soft-toy brigade. Let us all cry ‘edit!’.
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