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A SECRET APARTMENT, A LABYRINTH, AND A GLASS HOUSE: ONLONDON SHOWS INTERTWINING ART AND ARCHITECTUREBY Jamie Sterns POSTED 12/04/15 3:38 PM

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys at Raven Row, Stuart Middleton at Carlos Ishikawa, andRachel Rose at the Serpentine

Installation view of ‘Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys: Fine Arts’ at Raven Row.

MARCUS J. LEITH/COURTESY RAVEN ROW

London Art Pitch is a monthly column by Jamie Sterns, a New York–based curator and writer who until recently was attending school in theBritish capital. She just returned to New York.

What is an interior? What is a structure? How does an interior connote and possess feeling, mood, and conceptual turns? Architectureand art have been tied up with each other since time immemorial and there is a vast world of connections between them. Three recentexhibitions in London looked at these questions, playing with the divide between architecture and art, and the mental and emotionalstates their joining can produce.

‘Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys: Fine Arts’ at Raven Row

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Installation view of ‘Jos de Gruyter & Harald

Thys: Fine Arts’ at Raven Row.

MARCUS J. LEITH/COURTESY RAVEN ROW

‘Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys: Fine Arts’ at Raven Row

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys are two Belgian artists who have been collaborating since the1980s and are most noted for their amateur but deadpan absurdist video works. They took upthe entirety of Raven Row, a three-story town house in London’s Spitalfields area, for theirexhibition, which appeared this past spring at MoMA PS1 in New York. The show imaginedthe duo to be Sunday painters, hobbyists who lazily and haphazardly watercolor a Brittanicaof images that are culled from the Internet that harken to imperialist and colonial times.Tribes, quaint village vistas, humorous and exotic animals, and pensive still lifes were hungrandomly in a conservative style that befitted the galleries’ paneling and corniced features.

The works are on paper in thin black frames that have the title in hand-painted white letters—each a description of what you are looking at, such as Lord or Man Holding His Wife’s Head

on His Lap. The consistency of these frames, the slight crookedness of the written text, andthe overall wash of pastels over hurried pencil sketches add to the absurdity of the project.The subject matter and its display are obviously quoting what is often seen in museums andprivate collections and this seems particularly fitting in London, which is full to the brim withsuch displays at museums like the National Gallery and idiosyncratic homes such as Sir John Soane’s.

Added to this seemingly endless collection of watercolors are freestanding sculptures of figures that are slightly larger then life, madeout of flat sheets of metal. They are painted white, and although one could easily call them abstract, that is not what they are about.They are more functional, modular, and are the quickest way to get to an imposing human form without the fuss. They achieve thisand produce the same ominous awkwardness that bronze or stone sculptures emanate. To add to these sculptures’ pluckiness there is asheet of white paper with a hastily drawn face of one man or another stuck onto them.

Installation view of ‘Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys: Fine Arts’ at Raven Row.

MARCUS J. LEITH/COURTESY RAVEN ROW

This floating face was echoed in a large three-headed fountain in the biggest gallery space. The heads are generic and formed in threedimensions, and they spit out streams of water. Everything is white, and this sculpture feels slightly off from the overall theme ofthings, but the familiar design—the cool, vague figuration, mixed with hotel lobby art—gets quickly to the overall mood of the show,which is sniggering at, yet embracing, the supremacy of cultured connoisseurship.

The pièce de résistance of the exhibition, though, was on the top floor, which was hinted at only by a hand-painted “ExhibitionContinues” signs. Walking up a narrow staircase you entered a small hallway that is wallpapered, has retro graphic floral carpeting, andemanates a smell that only your great aunt or gran’s house could produce. There were two rooms open and in them there were video

projections. One is of foam heads, painted in primaries and roughly accentuated with thumbtack eyes, patchy fake hair, and accessories.

Installation view of ‘Stuart Middleton: the gonks’ at Carlos

projections. One is of foam heads, painted in primaries and roughly accentuated with thumbtack eyes, patchy fake hair, and accessories.There is audio, dubbed down and subtitled, and it talks of unconnected things, such as failed painting and finding a correct battery foran electronic device. The other is of the artists’ friends and partners performing as a couple in domestic acts such as painting a room butall their actions and dialogue are stilted. This mundane tension is then punctured with surreal moments, such as people with ravenheads playing cards at the kitchen table.

What makes these rooms and films even more bizarre is that the apartment in which they are installed once belonged to a womannamed Rebecca, who at the time of its purchase by Raven Row (which is financed by a member of the Sainsbury family in 2009) livedthere and continued to do so for about six months after the completion of the deal. There have only been a couple of shows in thisspace and at other times visiting artists and curators stay in these rooms, which are utterly preserved down to the corded phones andtheir mess of wires, the slightly off-kilter miniature chandeliers and matching curtains. The inclusion of this apartment felt like athematic apex for the show and it gave the films an even more sinister edge. The films are unnerving and excavating, drawing up adepth of untapped feelings, and they made the rooms seem possessed of a sweet sincerity mixed with the feeling that they are haunted.Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s use of this space to climax this exhibition seeped down into the floors below. Being in those rooms, itwas hard to imagine that anything else could have ever inhabited this space.

Installation view of ‘Stuart Middleton: the gonks’ at Carlos Ishikawa.COURTESY CARLOS ISHIKAWA

‘Stuart Middleton: the gonks’ at Carlos Ishikawa

Stuart Middleton’s current exhibition at Carlos Ishikawa at first glance appears to be a simple affair. It consists of a tent-like structuremade of white fabric over metal framing that spans one large gallery and also another tucked-away space that holds a miniature room.But hold on, let’s start from the beginning. It begins with a story of sorts, which is printed in a small booklet at the show’s entrance andis an exchange, actually a one-sided exchange, of messages from Don to Carol.

A message at first reveals that there seems to be a misunderstanding, and that Donwants to make amends by taking Carol on another date. Then a message revealsthat there was some sort of sexual misinterpretation that Don wants to clarify.Then the messages become accusing and berating. Then a message makes clearthat Don is in fact Carol’s boss and that the lines of that are getting crossed. Thenthe message becomes formalized, involving a complaint to another worker on thesituation of Carol. Then the message is a termination letter. Then the message isone of apology. Throughout these messages Carol never responds—this is clarifiedin the last letter—but these messages are obviously not about Carol but rather

about Don. Don and his imaginings, Don and his rantings, Don and his looping

Ishikawa.COURTESY CARLOS ISHIKAWA

Stuart Middleton, Untitled (detail), 2015.COURTESY CARLOS ISHIKAWA

about Don. Don and his imaginings, Don and his rantings, Don and his loopingobsessional mind, Don and his inadequacies.

Now, let’s enter the space. After reading these messages the starkness of the structure that on first glance seemed so calming becomessomething else entirely. It feels as if you have entered Don’s brain. The tent feels like neural pathways that are linking, looping, andcircling back into themselves. The hallways are like his trains of thought; there is a structural sense to it, but the echo-chamber-likequality creates claustrophobia mixed with a blank daze. Turning a corner and not knowing if it is an exit feels like searching for Carol.Is she over here? No. Is she over there? No. But the sereneness of the space and its construction fight against the urges of anxiety. Itseems to want to affect a sense of calm, and if you (Don) did calm down, then maybe the urge to find Carol would dissipate. But itdoesn’t—being inside makes you know there is only one way out, and being inside means you are trapped.

Once you are out of the structure and walking the perimeter you immediately startremembering what it felt like to be inside. While you’re contemplating this andskimming the outside of the sculpture there is a small doorway and only if youpossess the right amount of curiosity do you get tempted to peak in. If you do, youconfront a dirty shower stall in which there is a miniature of a room made ofcarved white foam, with a bed, a kitchen, a toilet (by the actual drain), a stove, anda table with two mismatched chairs. Does Don live here? You wonder. The roomfeels familiar and archetypal of a sadness and loneliness that feels prying in itsexposure. Seeing this reinforces the urge to escape, leave, and to untangle yourselffrom Don’s brain and life.

Middleton is exceedingly precise in his gestures and in constructing the story andthese environments. There is a minimalism, a reduction, an almost mathematical feeling to how he created these objects. This does notstrip or make harsh the potential for connection and feeling, though. Rather it makes them resonate deeper. Like a single rock hittingthe bottom of a well.

Installation view of ‘Rachel Rose: Palisades’ at Serpentine Sackler Gallery.© READSREADS.INFO

“Rachel Rose: Palisades” at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Rachel Rose is an ascending art star and you can practically hear the art machine drums that are clearing her path. Her winning theFrieze Artist Award this year went handily with her current exhibition at Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and has been followedby her new show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Do these beating drums know what they are doing? In a simple word, yes, andthe proof is in this show.

Palisades consists of two video works and a sound installation that connects the

Rachel Rose, A Minute Ago (still), 2014.COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY

Rachel Rose, A Minute Ago (still), 2014.COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY

Palisades consists of two video works and a sound installation that connects the

two. While the show’s namesake video work, Palisades in Palisades, is clever and

focuses on this geographic region in New Jersey as the site of narrative and visual

structuring, it felt a bit too stylized and self aware of its cleverness. This possibly

irrational response to this work might be produced due to it being contrasted to

the enrapturing success of the other video work, entitled A Minute Ago. This video

focuses on Philip Johnson’s modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Rose creates a visual collage that dissolves and distorts the boundaries of space and

nature with masterful editing techniques that are unlike anything imagined before.

This house is more than a house—it is a symbol of modernity, and it represents

the condition of heightened living, existing, and modification of a building and a body in space and nature. A tour-like view is given of

the inside of the house but it feels slightly off. There is muffled conversation, there are video-game-type viewpoints and directional

movements, and there are dissolving surfaces that feel like moments of both ecstasy and extinction. The scene of the house is

interspersed with clips and audio of a sudden hailstorm at a beach in which people scramble for cover against the giant end-of-days-like

stones of ice falling from the sky. Nature is cruel and is again spliced through the video with an image of a deer that is edited to appear

to be breaking at its knees, always about to collapse but yet never quite.

The tension of calamity within the preserve of modernity’s usually unflappable

signifier of harmony makes A Minute Ago more then a video work. It becomes a

document of the vulnerabilities and follies of even the most venerated and lauded

cultural symbols. Rose’s installation of sounds and the dispersal and then zooming

in and out of focus of history and narratives within her work create a pendulum of

the condition of inhabiting nature. The sense of becoming, evaporating, and

succumbing to our bodies and the spaces in which they inhabit, both man-made

and natural, alludes to our connection to time and nature but also to the

simultaneous possibilities of that unraveling.

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JOS DE GRUYTER & HARALD THYS

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STUART MIDDLETON

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