Not Waving but Drowning

Not Waving but Drowning

19 January, 2009
by: Katuschka

Obsessive compulsive is the name of the game at Alastair Mackie's new show, Not Waving but Drowning at David Roberts Art Foundation. Mackie has spent a year collecting hundreds of regurgitated Barn Owl pellets and the wood pulp from abandoned bee hives and formed them into elaborate works of art, so you don't have to. What's that you say? How does collecting owl vomit and, essentially, insect garbage make him an artist rather than a crazy Mc Crazy weirdo? Well I'm not entirely sure, but you have to admire his moxie and dedication. The show is a little work-lite with only three new installation pieces, but each one is a painstakingly complex study in primal urges, natural selection, the passage of time, and death.

Mackie is influenced by the elaborate statement pieces of the Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn, which goes some way towards explaining why his roster of materials includes wasp spit (wasps spit…who knew?) mosquitoes and dung. Mackie's sculptures are eye-wateringly fiddly affairs, which by their sheer presence embody countless hours hunched over a studio desk. From the hive pulp, Mackie has fashioned an intricate, full-scale Victorian dolls' house and placed it on a high plinth so that it towers 'like a set from a Hitchcock movie'. Mackie has re-imagined the material, used primarily for the bees' 'home', in a human context; and fashioned it into an ominous funereal icon. 

Downstairs, a large pile of mouse bones, unravelled from Barn Owl pellets, and a loom displaying a cloth woven from their discarded hair, is a profoundly moving motif: it echoes the way in which Holocaust exhibitions use mountainous remnants to hammer home the gravitas of the event. There is also something gruesomely ordinary about the piece, a passive acceptance of our primal instincts, and the inevitable cruelty of our nature which can even override our ability to choose.

The weakest piece in the show, which seems to pointlessly over-egg the pudding, is a taxidermy display case which has been coated with mirrored glass. This piece seems to bear the moral of the show; when you try to view the ghoulish stuffed animal, impelled to look by our rubbernecking mentality and our mortal fear of death, we come face to face with – wait for it – our own reflection. Yes that's right, we are the earth-raping bastards and we have to face up to it. Thank you Mr Mackie for our own medicine, you can go collect some beaver crap now and fashion it into a scale model of the Hoover Dam. This is an interesting idea, but without any explanation, the meaning is negated and all that can be seen is a slightly phallic, baffling silver cylinder.

This is quite a staggering exhibition, if not for the philosophical and artistic aspects, then for the carnivalesque sideshow oddities Mackie has lovingly constructed. Whilst I'm not sure I would want to spend a lot of time in Mackie's studio, or go on a picnic with him, it is this eccentricity and inventiveness which makes these three pieces enough to accrue a new show and glowing reviews. Fine art at its weirdest and best.

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Katuschka