Phyllida Barlow at Tate Britain. Excellent exhibition.

When I had some time to kill between lectures I went to the Tate Britain to see the new sculptural installation (commissioned work) called 'Deck' by the British artist Phyllida Barlow, located in the Duveen galleries and loosely inspired by the view from Tate Britain Milbank of barges floating in the Thames.

 

 The work is in stark contrast to the newly refurbished galleries and staircase which look really composed, elegant, neo classical. Phyllida Barlow's work is massive, chaotic, in all possible ways. I could walk through it and around it. It is an anti monument made out of every day ordinary materials such as cardboard, polystyrene, foam, colourful tape, wood (timber), a combination of texture and colour, scrap materials that have not been used for years, that one would not associate with a monument - these are used to make stilted giant towers, with cardboard which doesn't sit perfectly straight, the jumbled pieces of wood stuck one on top of the other, going in different directions - these bring a sense of chaos to the whole section.  It is in your face and you can't avoid the work as it is so large and imposing, there is no refinement to it, it is blatantly crude.

She says: 'The idea to begin with was incredibly simple: to plant into the Duveen a new structure that counteracted the reverent, vaulted space, and its almost religious connotations, and introduce an almost basic geometry'. Barlow with these colossal architectural structures made out of ordinary materials (some are built like scaffoldings), is referring to industrial structures, containers, while at the same time referring to the history of sculpture very present in the other rooms of Tate Britain.

 

 

The first piece is made out of five large blocks,  the size of a shipping container, with orange and black cords; everything is mangled, nothing is straight or precise, nor precious. I am not allowed to touch anything, though, and I really feel like touching the mad tower made out of cardboard and colourful tape similar in height to the other pillars in the gallery. It is a funny joke about the straight classical, past monuments made by men; nothing is certain in her installation, her column is not perfectly straight but is made out of crumbled cardboard and it's got colour around it in total opposition to the seriousness and self importance of past monuments; but the work is huge like past and current male artists love to make. In one way it's great that a woman artist  is commissioned to do such giant work, on the other hand why does a woman artist need to do big work as a male artist? This is my own general question: do women artists need to play like their male counterpart artists in order to be recognised? The large scale sculptures are excellent; while walking through them just the sheer size of them, going up to the roof and down to the floor, brought me mentally back to the past and to large scale monuments, architectural works, and to question their validity and place in society. Also by whom they where chosen and for whom? Especially considering that women were not included generally in monuments and did not participate in the making of monuments in the past, so in this context I find Phyllida Barlow's sculptural installation excellent and feminist, and I looked at in comparison to past monuments made by men for men and in comparison to Tate Britain which was built by masculine authority. (Nowadays, however, Tate Britain does show plenty of work by women artists, more so than other galleries.) The sum of her works stands in comparison to Tate Britain's solid structure, a skeleton, a dystopian view, with the look of ruins. The work is about assembling, storing, arrangement, the material is predominant and is right in your face. There is no single viewpoint for the work so the viewer is forced to move around, across and under the work.

Barlow's work also refers to arte povera, minimalism, and to British sculpture of the past.

 

 Yes, everybody can enjoy the sculptural installation and the simple ordinary materials, combined with coloured tape these make you think of a child playing, assembling; there is nothing high tech in place apart from the way it's assembled that I am sure required a specialist team. Barlow said: “I love the cliché that a child could do it. Yes, a child could do it, but when you’re an adult, you’re doing it for real, either because there’s some OCD condition where you’re a hoarder, or for practical reasons, or you shift a bit further over and it’s in a museum of art''.  Through her work she questions the fundamental aspects of sculpture, its presence in space and its physicality, a combination of softness and hardness.

Phyllida Barlow was a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art; her students included Angela de la Cruz and Rachel Whiteread; she was a strong influence on a young generation of artists. Previously she studied at the Chelsea School of Arts (1960-63) and later at the Slade School of Art (1963-66) where she trained conventionally in sculpture and in techniques such as metal casting, armature construction, plaster modelling etc. I find this interesting as nowadays in art colleges across the UK there is no conventional teaching (apart from theory), or practical classes.

I went to her exhibition because I work with found, scrap materials in my own sculptures and was interested in how she used those materials and also because in my own work I aim to create something different.

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