by One day Olaf Brzeski was cleaning the chimney of his studio in Wroclaw, Poland, when something terrible happened. “A column of soot 10 meters high fell down through the chimney,” he recalls. “He covered everything in the studio. And, of course, me.”
As he stood blinking dust from his eyes, Brzeski couldn’t even blame someone else. He had unburdened himself of the weight of the past, brought dark matter to light, unclogged the chimney of all its waste as effectively as a colonial irrigation course. Freud would be called the return to repression; others might see it as revenge, getting his own back on those who had burned his previous incarnations.
The world we all live in is based on regular, predictable shapes – but everything in this show is completely irregular
Brzeski collected the soot and, using chemical agents I barely understand, made a sculpture. His next stop will be the Hayward Gallery in London, where this miraculous explosion of soot will pour from a wall, its motion frozen in time, its bulbous form and imbalance. Brzeski will darken the wall with his blow to add the finishing touch.
He calls the result a Dream – Spontaneous Combustion. His idea is that a dream could contain thoughts that would be as fire as could ignite the human body. Brzeski has long been interested in the history of spontaneous combustion, assuming it may all be hokum. This history stretches from an Italian knight named Polonus Vorstius, who was reported to have been consumed by flames in 1471, to the 2011 case of an Irish pensioner who died, an inquest concluded, from spontaneous combustion. Like many of the works in When Forms Come Alive, as Hayward’s new group show is called, Aisling is the result of someone with a Puckish mindset, who snatches from disaster something thought-provoking.
So can sculpture be funny? Many of the works that Hayward’s director, Ralph Rugoff, has collected for the exhibition are playful, unpredictable and incredible. While they represent artists who express movement and growth through sculpture, many of them subvert any sense of bias or self-importance. Rugoff directs me to a giant Pepto-Bismol-pink blob hanging in one room. The blob, like something out of a Liz Truss nightmare, is a creepy but funny poplin satellite with connectors sticking out like cartoon trumpets.
It is a sculpture called Epiphany on Chairs by the Austrian artist Franz West. The gag? Chairs are surrounded by this obvious cloud computing, inviting viewers to contemplate its significance in awed reverie. “It’s taking the piss out of the idea of looking at art and having some kind of epiphany about your experience,” says Rugoff. Cain and Abel, another sculpture by West, are two vaguely human forms facing each other. Boy, I think those biblical brothers have really let themselves go. Are they about to shake hands? Or, more likely, are those other appendages being stretched out? Does this represent the first ever tournament for a willful wave? It’s hard to be sure.
Rugoff gestures to a pile of goop in the corner. “It could be mud, lava or excrement,” he says. In fact, it is a lead sculpture by Lynda Benglis, called Quartered Meteor. What looks like an abject mess that should be quickly removed by experts in hazmat suits is actually a piece of art, which the executable managed to turn into something amazing – maybe even funny. “I’ve never heard her talk about her work being funny,” says Rugoff, “but there’s a kind of humor in it, ‘I’m just going to drop this leaden form in this great gallery.’ What she has said is that her work is about standing against geometry. And I think geometry represents the world of the straight.”
So is this exhibition for the abject, the abject, the bonkers? “Indeed,” replied Rugoff. “The world we all live in is based on predictable things and regular shapes. But everything in this show is completely irregular.” So the brutality of the late artist Phyllida Barlow, and the teetering sculpture of a rollercoaster by EJ Hill – they are all rebelling against direct objects, be it lines or worldviews.
But nothing captures the show’s spirit of irregularity, ephemerality and endless mutation like Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Final sculpture. This is a multi-tiered fountain, held in place by scaffolding, but instead of flowing water, a pump whips up scented bubble bath foam. Say what you like about the glory of Louis XIV’s fountains, but the Sun King cruising through the gardens of Versailles did not have bubble baths.
But don’t you think, I ask Rugoff, that the display of these sooty explosions, bubble-bath fountains and glitz will set off Hayward’s switchboard with naysayers, saying that if this is art, they have a compost pile in the back. a garden that is crying out for gallery space? “I think those days of anger are over,” says Rugoff, perhaps with regret. “I did a show a few years ago about the invisible in art, and no one called us there.”
Of the many delights of When Forms Come Alive, I have also taken the work of Matthew Ronay. The American artist seems to have taken all the plumbing from inside our bodies – sacs, intestines, organs, tubes – and recreated them through a sculpture as large as it seems. Ronay tells me that he started out making sculpture inspired by fungus but moved on, as he says in the catalogue, to research all kinds of things that contribute to his work “like death, reproduction, disease, aging , sexual organs, orifices, peduncles, gyrus, mathematics”. After all this, he came back to one humble opinion: “All these things you think you thought, nature thought of them first.”
An equally arresting work is a strange sculpture of ducts called Sottobosco, made by London-based artist Holly Hendry. At first it looks like a riff on the way architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano installed color-coded pipework on the outside of the Pompidou Center to show where the power, water and air are flow, but the tubes she has sculpted in a window opening. the Hayward has no function. At least none that are not aesthetic.
What is that all about? Like Brzeski, Hendry cites Baroque ancestry as an explanation. “The IS sottobosco It is an Italian term that specifically means a type of moist undergrowth that was the focus of the work of a 17th century Dutch painter named Otto Marseus van Schrieck. He painted a still life of the forest floor. Because he was at the moment of the microscope, he was suddenly looking down instead of out and around. That’s what I’m doing. I started with the idea of taking something microscopic, magnifying it by 25 times, and seeing this world full of life.”
Certainly, when one looks at the cross-sections of Hendry’s ducts and pipes, they are covered with foam and fossils, as if the world is so full of matter that even the pipes meant to carry waste are no longer fit for purpose . Marie Kondo is no different to this perma-gut stuff.
Not far from Sottobosco is another Brzeski work, in which Corten steel girders are flopped onto chairs. He calls them Orphans. “My thought,” he says, “is that all these raw materials of art are tired. They need rest. They are all too long.” Unbeknownst to him, Brzeski has created sculptures that converse with others recently shown upriver: at Tate Britain, Sarah Lucas rabbit-like figures similarly flopped on a chair, as if tired of being objectified female symbols . Like the girders that were over-manipulated for art, Lucas’ figures seem to have had enough, especially by being subjected to the patriarchal eye.
What is particularly strange is that these girders mounted on chairs look remarkably human. I’ve never felt like I could relate to metal pieces before, but here it’s really easy – just because they look tired. Now that, I can’t help thinking as I swim down to rest, it’s pretty funny.
• When Forms Come Alive will be at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 6 May
