The story of sculpture begins with the body, through the making of monuments and statues. Signifiers of power and status, they established a closely guarded language of accepted norms concerning where sculpture should sit, how it should look, what it should be made of, what it should represent, and who gets to make it. The most conservative of disciplines, it became loaded with expectations around solidity, weight, scale and longevity which, even after decades of kneading and stretching and twisting (to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss) , continue to linger in contemporary discourse and art-making practice.
At this moment, in the early stages of the 21st century, seismic social, political and environmental shifts have created the foundation for new thinking around the body’s relation to the world and to sculpture. There is a growing, visceral sense that our bodies are vulnerable and fragile things that exist within a crumbling ecosystem; that the binary approach we employ to create systems of knowledge is increasingly outmoded; and that the hierarchical structure we have created in which the human body is viewed as superior to - or separate from - other life forms and organisms is not only inaccurate but also deeply pernicious.
Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body brings together the work of eleven artists who are exploring this new configuration of the body’s relation to the world. It shines a light on the potent slippages that are taking place between bodily systems, technology, humans, animals, identities and the environment, and acknowledges that the distinction between human and animal, man and woman, organism and machine is gradually eroding. It recognises that our bodies are entangled in the geopolitical landscape of contemporary life, or to put it another way, that our bodies are contaminated with the pollutants of 21st century extractive capitalism. Bodies are on the move, in search of scarce resources and viable climates. Desperation-driven migration is the result of a planetary polycrisis born of inequality, colonialism, precarity and cultural supremacy. This world of destabilised borders and breached boundaries has resulted in a situation in which everything opens onto everything else, and bodies are implicated.
We may be parched (metaphorically, morally, physically), but the artists in the exhibition insist on experimenting with categorial fluidity. They work with and beyond existing frameworks in order to invent new languages, new bodies, and new relations to the world. In many cases, the artwork is slippery and opaque - the artists asserting that beauty, glamour, seduction, compulsion, and things unknown and unspeakable remain at its core. Craftsmanship, exquisite attention to detail, and abundant care is manifestly evident. There is also a marked sense of solidarity between the artists themselves – they recognise that solo bodies, including those of artists, are vulnerable and more able to flourish within a support structure. This care and solidarity is political – it expresses an awareness of the way bodies, in broader societal contexts, are treated, how they are described, impacted on, and controlled. This proximity and generosity of spirit can be extended to the rhizomatic ways that artworks in the exhibition overlap, connect with, and move through each other. Visitors are invited to dance on a sculpture while wearing another; look through a sculpture to view the work of another; sit with a sculpture and listen to another.
Many of the artists in the exhibition identify as non-binary, neuro-divergent, non-verbal, Black, queer, or trans. While identity is in no way the sole driver in the work, it inevitably surfaces at key points, through the expression of expansive mind-bending world views, and a freeing up of the body to explore new connections to its environment through dance, movement, conceptual framing and material closeness. In an oblique, playful, sometimes disturbing way, much of the work asks if we can move beyond a system that categorises art and artists in binary terms (female / male; figurative / abstract; human / animal; able-bodied / disabled) to reach a more porous place that recognises the shifts, the seepage, the hybrid spaces, the unmoored places, the worlds that are newly forming. Perhaps in this moment, we can engineer a glitch in the planetary system of the visual art infrastructure that moves beyond ‘women only’ exhibition and book-making formats, to include a more fluid mix of practitioners who embrace instability, and lean into something that exists beyond language and gender.
This grouping together of artists living predominantly in the UK inevitably leads to a discussion about the concept of ‘British sculpture’, a term tied to the 1980s, when a number of artists rose to prominence on an international stage. Rejecting the dematerialisation of art in its minimal and conceptual form as practised in the 1960s and 70s, these artists returned to the traditional materials and processes of the previous generation. Working in the politically tumultuous Thatcher years which spawned our post-industrial landscape and free-market economy, this loosely configured group that included Bill Woodrow, Alison Wilding, Barry Flanagan, Tony Cragg, and Shirazeh Houshiary, rejected abstraction in favour of figurative and metaphoric imagery. Often using the debris of contemporary life (including old sofas, clothes, shopping trolleys, tyres, and plastic toys) they considered ways that objects are assigned meaning, and played with colour, humour, and variegated forms of physicality. Seminal exhibitions were held at the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine Gallery in 1983 (The Sculpture Show), and twenty years later, in 2002, the Whitechapel Gallery staged an exhibition Early One Morning (a tribute to Anthony Caro’s eponymous sculpture of 1962) showing the work of five young UK based artists: Eva Rothschild, Gary Webb, Shahin Afrassiabi, Claire Barclay, and Jim Lambie. Notable for their sense of optimism about the future (this was, after all, the dawn of a new millennium), they experimented with three dimensional form primarily through the assemblage of found materials, often constructing the work on site, in the gallery space. There were a number of defining features of the works: they were explicitly non-figurative, it was hard to tell if they were sculptures or installations, they were made with whatever was to hand (synthetic plastic, bits of leather, buttons, lightbulbs, loudspeakers), and they were anti-monumental and curious about the relationship between the viewer and the work. Also evident was the artists’ interest in broader contemporary culture, as well as issues around consumerism, modernism and politics.
How does Trickster Figures extend this narrative? The most obvious ‘extension’ can be seen in the variegated character of the practitioners themselves, in terms of geographical and cultural heritage, but also in terms of race and gender. In marked contrast to work in the Whitechapel exhibition twenty years previously, there is a foreboding about the future expressed in many of the works that is unnerving and strange. There is also little sense that these artists are interested in what they should or shouldn’t be using as materials, the choice is dictated by what the work itself appears to demand. So, bronze and copper sculptures sit alongside ones made of polystyrene, resin, plastic bags and body wash. Other previously upheld orthodoxies are ignored, toyed with, or embraced: a plinth is employed when it is useful, while other works sit directly on the floor (and in one case, the work is the floor), and the human figure is explicitly present in some works, while other works offer more elusive, abstract representations of the body. Some are stand-alone sculptures, while others are part of an installation made up of murals, groupings, and drawings. Some artists spend days finely crafting a work, while others outsource production or use ‘found’ objects, for example a piece of industrial machinery found on a factory floor. There is no ‘truth to materials’ diktat that establishes a clear relationship between the size and shape of an object and the inherent qualities – some works are stretched, painted, and moulded, while others retain their original material state. There is an urgent interest in process – how the works are made, and the political, ideological context in which they are situated. This inevitably extends to an awareness of the ethical issues relating to the use of other bodies, and the means of extraction employed in the sourcing of materials. Many of the artists seem interested in the idea that form is not an attribute that is necessarily fixed, but one that is malleable and even unstable. Broadly speaking, the artists extend their reach beyond the closed-loop system of art appraisal by form, to arrive at a place that is less shackled to historical norms and practices.
The provocation implicit in the subtitle of the exhibition (‘the next chapter in the story of British sculpture’) is perhaps evidence that the Trickster has entered the fray. It could be argued that there is now no such thing as ‘British sculpture’. The tech-enabled ease with which bodies move across the planet, combined with the ghostly, tendrilled workings of the internet, means that it is increasingly hard to align art with national characteristics or geographic specificity. Unlike artists working in the mid and late 20th century, who were predominantly born and lived in the UK, many of the artists in Trickster Figures were brought up far from UK shores, from São Paulo to Nancy and Ávila, and don’t consider themselves to be ‘British’ at all. This is an island whose people seem loath to confront the reality of their colonial past and whose identity is looking increasingly fragile on the world stage due to its ongoing campaign of xenophobia, misanthropy and cultural jingoism. With the fallout of Brexit, draconian anti-immigration rhetoric and policies, an ideological commitment to austerity, restrictions on freedom of expression, and growing calls for independence from Scotland, the concept of ‘Britishness’ is fraught, at best, and perhaps one that few artists are clamouring to be part of.
The historical or mythological ‘trickster’ is often defined as a character who disobeys rules and defies categories and conventions. But he (for he is almost always a he) is so much more: ‘Lord of the in-between’, the crossroad at the edge of town, the confounder of distinctions (between wrong / right, sacred / profane, young / old, living / dead, male / female), the mythic embodiment of ambiguity, an eternal state of mind. Trickster is also a truly global phenomenon, assuming a multitude of forms and characters, west Africa’s Legba, to Native America’s Wakdjunkaga. Old Norse tales and Greek myths focus on the antics of Loki and Hermes. He is described as polytropic (‘turning many ways’) and often regarded as the creator of culture. He encourages embodied thinking and speaks freshly where language has been blocked. The academic and philosopher Donna Haraway refers to tricksters as ‘wild cards that reconfigure possible worlds’ . The artists in this exhibition are doing just that, although here, trickster assumes a more elusive and fluid identity that befits the ambiguity that marks their character.
This letting go of old systems and categories is mirrored in the ways that artists and writers are currently experimenting with text and format in art criticism and writing. Developed over the last twenty years, this approach challenges conventional ideas about how art writing looks, sounds, and feels, where it is published, who writes and reads it, and whose voice is prioritised within it. It provides us with an alternative model of disseminating the thinking that takes place around contemporary art practice, and is ‘an attempt to attend to that which does not fit’. While this experimental turn is gaining traction within the established core of the artworld, it is marginal feminist, queer, non-binary, anti-racist voices that originally sought to disrupt the nest with their embodied narratives. These writers move fluidly between genres such as theory, fiction and criticism to create playful, speculative, and politically astute contributions to the field. Many of the artists in Trickster Figures are interested in this new portal into the world of art. It felt apt, therefore, to invite artist and writer Francis Whorrall-Campbell to contribute a text to this publication that builds on this genre. The Cowboy, written in the form of an on-line community message board in which a trickster carries out a series of fantastical, botched odd-jobs that take the assume the character of the artworks in the exhibition, is a joyful, strange, sometimes troubling addition to our project. It casts the exhibition as a piece of fiction, using the language of 21st century communication, with its constructed identities, swagger and sloppy grammar. Like much of the work in the exhibition, it exists in the in-between, the glitch where new things are born.
The breadth of interests of these artists is evident in the ways that many of them situate and think through their work within the fictive worlds of literature, poetry, and film, as well as YouTube videos, popular science books, and political theory. In order to highlight these eclectic, expansive pool of influences we have invited the artists to suggest books, podcasts, films or TV programmes to include in our bibliography at the back of this publication, and in the reading space at MK Gallery. Ranging from a book on the testimonies of survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, to an anime TV series about an alien parasite, and a children’s story about a west African trickster, they forge generous and generative conversations across disciplines, and tell apposite stories about the interests of a selection of artists working in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Although only manifesting as a finite three-month exhibition, Trickster Figures is part of an ongoing, evolving project. It remains full of gaps and unstable propositions, but the hope is that it will resonate with, and draw sustenance from, other discourses and conversations within the field of sculpture and beyond.
The science fiction author Octavia Butler wasn’t able to finish her Parable of the Trickster before she died in 2006, but she did arrive at an epigram for the book which beautifully expresses the possibility of breaking through an impasse to arrive at something previously unexpressed. Her lines mirror the varying, magical ways that the artists in Trickster Figures are able to reach beyond existing frameworks to imagine new worlds:
There’s nothing new
under the sun,
but there are new suns.
PDF of catalogue here