Analysis of Dock by Phyllida Barlow - Essay Example

The colossal scale of Dock, by the artist Phyllida Barlow was absolutely overwhelming to the visitors when they walked into the Duveen Gallerieslocated at the center of Tate Britain. In 2014, Barlow was commissioned by Tate Britain to exhibit at the grand space of the venue to commemorate its history as the first British public gallery specifically designed to display sculptures. This large installation is so far the most ambitious work contributed by the artist. Barlow successfully conveys a conversational spectacle between massive sculptures and the majestic space of Duveen Galleries through the immense chaos, dissonance, deconstruction and malleability that she orchestrates. The sculptures are hung from the ceiling and some are laid on the marble floor. Since the late 60s, Barlow has been increasingly receiving attention among the important exhibition venues. She was born in Newcastle Tyne, United Kingdom in 1944, stayed in London from a tender age, studied at the Chelsea Collage of Art and later became a Professor Emeritus at the Slade School of Fine Art. It is believed that Barlow has great influence on Young British Artists (YBAs). Her internationally famous students include the notorious Martin Creed, Angela de la Cruz, and Douglas Gordon to the Turner Prize winner Rachel Whiteread. Barlow had remained unknown among international circuit until her shows in the Migros Museum and Vienna’s BAWAG foundation from 2010. The commission of Dock, 2014 for Duveen Galleries is a significant establishment in Barlow’s career as a sculptor artist. For a sculptor, Duveen Galleries is one of the most visible platforms in the country—essentially a long and cavernous hall with vaulted ceilings from which various galleries radiate.1 Dock, 2014 is reportedly inspired by the view of a shipping container on the River Thames located near Tate Britain. Gothic, slapstick, over-reaching, trammelling, dock presents the world as theatre set, a gigantic childs play of sculptural ambition, an anti-monumental act of deconstruction, a huge bricolage. 2 The seven sculptures collectively collapse, jostle and stretch out over the 100-yard in length, 16-yard tall in Duveen Court. The first most eye-catching object is the intricate Dock: 5hungblocks, 2013. The five chunky rectangular forms almost look like trapped in the disorderly arranged wooden fence, suspended by red straps and intruded through several tubes. Barlow is always intrigued by the weightless sense of suspending the object with the illusion of water flowing in the air. She once revealed in an interview that it was also a wonderful minimalist reference in the sense that the cube is a plinth, a container, a vitrine – it’s all these props for sculptural language that inspires her.3 Adjacent to skillfully carved Ionic order museum columns, Barlow built twenty imposing wooden pillars wrapped by bright yellow, red and purple tape and glued by wrinkled Styrofoam sheets in contrast with the grandiosity of the venue. The fallen pile of wood resting on the floor almost resembles a group of soldiers in disarray after losing a battle. Additionally, the generous use of repetition for the dock: empty staircase hoarding, 2014 attached by a painted wall with geometric form visually creates mass and volumes. Finally, a series of scaffolds along one side of the building hold up several unruly bundles and lumps. 3 The cold touch of marble stone which is mainly used for the interior design of Duveen Galleries intensifies the conversation between the space where it is installed and the actual installation. Dock, 2014 is evidently a site-specific project--to launch a conversation between artist’s new work and the space of museum in response to Tate’s large art collection. However, for Barlow’s case, this is an unconventional dialogue with the space. She combined the waste material from the studio and new lightweight material such as cardboard, recycled metal, canvas and timber. Barlow’s sculptures are often identified as anti-monuments by the mass media. Monuments are comprised of tremendous banal and ordinary material. “I like extremely functional materials,” she explains. “Easy to get hold of, simple to use.”4 The materials and structures juxtaposes with the silky smooth finish of the neoclassical architecture of the Duveen Galleries. According to Rosalind Krauss, the category of sculpture can be defined as “infinitely malleable.” The category like sculpture has been “kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display …….that can be extended to include just about anything.”5 Its nontraditional use of medium and decision to the form of structure should not restrain Dock, 2014 from the classification of sculpture. Barlow has claimed that she had a problematic relationship with the sculpture. She likes that because it is three- dimensional and its limitless physical possibilities so as to provide more angles to observe and work upon different material, as opposed to the flatness of the painting with less possibility to extend creativity. Sculpture is like sand through fingers and it has the ability to take up the space and inhabit in the space. Just like choreography, it is able to draw viewers’ attention and compel them to navigate and walk in the space. As for the painting, it is displayed in a very different pictorial way. To be specific, when an object hangs on the wall, viewers can only patrol the space in forward and backward motion. On the other hand, she witnesses the fallacy and theatricality of the sculpture such as a bronze statue with black hollow that nobody could see. Barlow is very honest. She has been working with inexpensive material for decades in order to address the fallacies and paradox that she perceived in traditional sculptures. The intention of Dock is to form a context within the large space of the Duveen Galleries and to explore the remaining terrain with volatile obstacles and spillages so as to utilize both formal and anti-formal qualities. Understanding of culture and infusion of allusions constitutes Phyllida Barlow’s Dock. According to critics, Dock has diverse processes of making and viewing that demonstrate the rigorous planning the project has undergone. Art critics equally reveal several transformations that prove that Barlow’s related drawings are the logbook of the artist to communicate numerous ideas at once. Similarly, the quick sketches by the artist expose her thinking processes with the intention of resolving or developing objects or shapes. The preparatory drawings give the artist an idea of how the work will be like with its final incarnation, regardless of the fact that everything is unpredictable through the process of production. It is almost like foreboding. The more ambitious the work is, the greater sense of foreboding.6 The evolution of Dock is deemed an inspiration emanating from the ‘lump’ base that Barlow attempted to use in her representation of the marginalized history of sculpture. In other words, her growth and development as an artist over the years is a testimony of integrating different approaches that Barlow says is her inspiration. According to Barlow, the artistic pieces she produced in the 1980s and 1990s were always concerned with revealing concealed materials. Consequently, Dock elicits a fusion that denotes the passage of time and aspects of departure. On the same context, a state of flux erupts that gives the viewer a complicity in the direction of the art’s journey through time. It is a phenomenon that starts its conception and realization in the studio to its staging in the public. In contrast, the impressive installation of Dock means that it deserves performance and witnessing to enable the viewer to understand the sculptural object from multiple facets. Barlow has been interested in tragic monuments since she was young. In the early 1950s, her father once took her family on a tour to the East End of London. They drove down to the docks and all the surrounding area while her father showed them the demolished sites that he had known well. She said in an interview that, this childhood experience is fixed in mind and had some sort of impact on her later creative artworks. We have lived in a more than a decades of many symbolic fallen monuments, beginning from the Twin Tower in New York city, the subsequently torn down Saddam Hussein and going on the Buddha in Afghanistan. We can all recall those monumental moments that the constant changes inscribed within certain environment …… which absorbs present, past and future: damage, reparation, renewal, reconstruction-these are in an ever-evolving lifecycle which mirrors the decay and renewal of the natural environment. 7 The notion of collapsing monuments inherently carries an irony: the disappearance of monumentalism at the moment when it collapsed. To be specific, a large solid object built to let people pay homage is actually so fragile that it is not able to sustain its status once it is damaged. This is what fascinates Barlow about the sculpture: its precariousness and slightly off-balance. She stated in an interview with Louisiana Chanel that given its cathedral style design, Duveen galleries is the reminiscent of the British prosperous 19th century past with its formidable colonial power which does not exist now. She intends to confront the haughtiness of the space with something that has been gone and disappeared. The openness should be considered as another important theme, no matter the transparency of her sculptures or from the way of how Barlow talks about the ideas of her works. The mark of applying thick paint, the wrinkle on the foam sheet from taping or the trace of lumping together cement and plaster—essentially none of these actions have been hidden from the audiences’ eyes. The quality of transparency gives the work a sense of being unfinished, provisional and subject to change at any moment. 8 The vast use of repetition in the Dock: empty staircase hoarding undoubtedly elevates itself to another level. The numerous wooden bench-like form stack, amass and lean on each other. Repetition is a powerful way to let loose control from the artist’s hand and let it stay uncompleted until something great emerges. Barlow asserted in an interview that her relationship with the process of making indirectly reflects the restlessness where she is NEVER sure when enough is enough. “There is always this craving to add another layer or to break something down again—to destroy, repair, and rebuild.”9 The artist self is unable to predict how it looks like when it is finished. The process of production is almost guesswork, a silence game with the handling material on her hand. Guesswork is a noteworthy but overlooked approach to create the work: it appears to rely on the former knowledge but is also so eager to challenge and test them out with the conclusion. “It promotes risk and a refusal to explain and justify and a respect for lack of logic.”10 To a certain extent, Barlow values spectatorship but she considers it in a more self-concerning way. For the general viewers, it almost seems like the invasively massive sculptures are about to impede upon and swallow them. They feel repelled to travel and move around the space in order to have a better sight to see the monster-like objects. In that sense, the massiveness of the sculptures contains the notion of attracting audience. As the viewers, we expected to be seduced, enthralled and even overwhelmed by creations of even-greater size, value, ambition and extravagance, with artists scaling up and pushing their work further, following the maxim of multiply, magnify and maximize. 11 Yet, for Barlow, she prefers the audience with similar mentality, the fellow artists. In an interview with Gary Carrion-Murayari, she states that she does not think about “who is it for?” because that has been overly concerned by gallery art and art production since the late ’80 or early ’90 and it seems problematic for her. Artists will be constrained on their mind when they are too spectator-oriented. When at the studio making art, she considers about: how will I be surprised? Does it look strange, delightful, tedious or exciting? Where should I reach up to? Actually, no anyone else but herself is able to complete those questions. Therefore, she positions herself as the primary viewer through the process of making the art with the hope to transform the artwork for the eventual site into something that has more depth than an act of presentation. The professional art background provides Barlow an additional way to perceive the subject of Art in terms of how it relates nation-wide. In Barlow’s eyes the British Art discourse on sculptures was very conservative and seemed insulated in comparison to the Arte Povera in Italy or post-minimalism in USA.12 She claimed that British Art has been kept sluggish and problematic in results of judgmentalism and high moral status. However, she is particularly intrigued by post-minimalism and abstract expressionism. Many of her works of art actually show the influence from American Art from ’50s to ‘60s. For example, Robert Smithson’s gigantic earthwork spiral Jetty; Ad Reinhardt’s abstract painting, whose influence is noticeable in her monochrome works from early period, where her works were mainly associated with light and shadow effect; or even the physical impact of Eva Hesse’ sculpture. These all become her major sources of inspiration as an effort to translate sculpture into something original and autonomous. In spite of the underachieving British Art in 1960s, Barlow began to work with the materials found on street, encouraged by her instructor at the Chelsea Art School, George Fullord. Barlow works with young artist and students in her studio. She always cares about the condition of the unknown artist. In the contemporary art market, having audience for an artwork is so crucial as they share an interlocking relationship. As an unknown artist for more than four decades, Barlow sympathizes with the struggles of these small groups of artists living outside public radius. She herself is almost a testimony of how tough the art market and art institution are. Having artworks sold is a capitalism driven activity. It’s a strangely all-embracing form of capitalism when it comes to the art market. 12 The harsh fact that most artists’ works are not seen saddens Barlow. However, only someone with the concerning eyes for the young generation and art world at large is able to exert tremendous influence in British Art. Overall, Dock embodies the exaggerated absurdity and inherent awkwardness, but that is what I find exhilarating about her artwork. The excessiveness, contradictions and amplification root from combining hardness and softness, the form and anti-formal quality. It all comes together to characterize Barlow’s relentlessly seeking the alternative and new ways to create work and to discharge it from its production site, to eventually integrate its methods of production into its final destination. Dock represents every sense of tremendous creativity. 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