Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
It seems of late that the Barbican has gone more than a wee bit nuts. The recent 'Do Something Different Weekend' saw a whole host of bizarre activities taking place, and now even the 'proper' exhibition upstairs is, frankly, quite peculiar.
One of these activities, 'Make Me a Museum', involved the communal creation of a kind of big bright multi-media arty sculpture-installation-thing. The point was that anybody could add on whatever they wanted from a vast selection of multi-coloured bits and bobs. The project was filmed over the weekend and a time-lapse video produced to document the ever-changing nature of the project. This is one of the coolest things I've seen: art as an interactive, communal process that's also a bit of fun for the kiddies. And it looked great too. So much East End art nonsense revolves around making art witty and funny and letting everyone join in, but, the thing is, it's always so bloody po-faced.
Anyway, to the exhibition: the premise of 'Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art' is basically that some Martians pop down to Earth, hear about this 'Modern Art' thing, select a few choice pieces and, upon their return to Mars, establish a museum dedicated to explaining the subject. Because the Martian 'curators' see each piece of art as serving some kind of specific more-or-less practical function, a lot of the explanatory spiel consists of amusing misinterpretations. As we all know, art doesn't really need to serve a purpose (or at least its purpose may be to stand in opposition to an obsessively functional society) but somebody forgot to tell the literal minded Martians. But before one is too quick to feel superior, it's worth pointing out that Western anthropology is full of similarly erroneous systems of classification.
There's some properly weird stuff in the first section of the exhibition: Sherrie Levine's slightly pointless bronze version of Marcel Duchamp's iconic 'Fountain'; Luis Jacob's video of some nude chap prancing about in the snow with a fur hat on; and a piece that consists of a monitor and a pile of lights that flash in a Morse Code translation of JK Huysman's decadent masterpiece A Rebours. A fabulous novel, but this? Erm…
After this wacko intro, it actually begins to make some sense. A lot of contemporary conceptual art is concerned with two main and inter-related strategies: deliberately taking things out of context, and pretending to take things seriously (or pretending to pretend to take things seriously...). So there's lots of inappropriate combinations of objects – a double bass with metal wings, a skirt made out of raffle-tickets, a golf-bag totem-pole, a cigarette butt necklace... – and lots of ersatz artefacts like Cornelia Parker's 'Tarnish from Charles Darwin's Sextant', a kind of Turin Shroud for Richard Dawkins fans; and Daniel Spoerri's 'Objects of Dull-witted Magic', a display of faux-tribal paraphernalia – necklaces, charms, totems etc. This is the sort of stuff you'd see in the British Museum but of course here it's fake and pointless and serves no functional purpose. It's great.
There's a whole wealth of good stuff in here, including Damien Hirst's fish and 'Twelve Apostles', an Yves Klein, a Barbara Hepworth, and Warhol's Chairman Mao pictures. But in this odd context these already well-known pieces don't fit that well. Interestingly, the stuff by the likes of Richard Wentworth, Bjorn Dahlem, Jeffrey Vallance, and Francis Upritchard, is actually better equipped to interact with the exhibition's curious curatorship.
Overall, this is certainly a strange show: frequently very funny, sporadically irritating, but definitely continuously thought-provoking. What the exhibition demonstrates is that an object only really makes sense according to its context. However, because something can always be removed from that 'original' context, then context can never really act as a full or final guarantor of meaning, value, function etc. I think this exhibition makes clear some of the themes and aims of this type of art, but is it a shame that the Barbican feels the need to resort to high-concept gimmickry in order to get people to view it? I'm not sure, but I think it probably works.
One parting observation: having taken part in all the fun downstairs, we really just wanted to play with the art, push the buttons, sit on the bean bag, change the TV channels, and strum the flying double-bass... The problem with breaking down the boundaries between artist and viewer and making everything interactive, is that as soon as the work becomes valuable, somebody has to raise those barriers all over again. But then I suppose that's what they mean by context.
