Miroslaw Balka DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 25,31m AMSL at White Cube

White Cube’s latest exhibition at their Masons’ Yard space is Miroslaw Balka’s DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 25,31m AMSL. The title refers both to the building’s altitude above sea level and the original German title of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams – the exhibition running concurrently with another at London’s Freud Museum (73,32m AMSL).

The title immediately suggests a connection with mental landscapes whilst – as with his vast steel box construction, How It Is, which occupied the Tate Modern turbine hall a couple of years ago – Balka’s work also is strongly connected with the body, materials and the physical.

The ground floor gallery houses just two minimalist concrete sculptures. The first, entitled 100 x 100 x 20 TTT, is a flat structure from which an internal light shines. Is it a plinth, a grave or perhaps a trapdoor to a subterranean space? Alongside is a trapezohedron, open at one side, that is inspired by the mysterious object in Abrecht Durer’s Melancolia 1 (1514) and matches the magic ‘invisibility’ helmet from Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

In the basement space Balka has installed Above your Head – a steel mesh canopy (chicken wire to you and me) fixed just above head height. He has added to this dim lighting and the whistled soundtrack of the Great Escape theme tune ‘to continue the theme of refuge and confinement’.

This all relates to recurring Balka references that cover topics like Polish history and the holocaust. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. The White Cube space looks like – well – a big space with a chicken wire ceiling and doesn’t invoke the claustrophobia and sense of confinement that it is meant to. The whistled tune is annoying and obvious whilst the ‘escape hatch’ sculpture of the upper gallery is far too simplistic.

‘DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG / 75,32m AMSL’, Freud Museum
Photo: Jack Hems
Courtesy White Cube

The attempt at some sort of mystery supposedly introduced by the enigmatic tarpezohedron seems just a little desperate and the whole is far too literal. Perhaps the second exhibition at the Freud Museum makes more sense, but I won’t personally be finding out.

Miroslaw Balka DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG is at White Cube Masons Yard until  until 25 May 2014 and at the Freud Museum  until 25 May 2014

josiah mcelheny at white cube masons yard

This exhibition is entitled Interactions of the Abstract Body and is where Josiah McElheny apparently explores how ‘constantly shifting forms of fashion can reveal the core beliefs and assumptions of a given era’. Sorry, not here and not for me.

Upstairs cabinets containing rather beautiful and elegant hand-made glass objects crafted after modernist styles are held in vitrines to represent for example The Space-Age Body (2012) or The Uniform Body (2012). These are impressive works individually and collectively within their vitrines.

However, downstairs are eight carefully crafted wooden sandwich-boards with variously shaped mirrors where, according to White Cube, by “combining a continuous flesh-and-blood performance with static sculpture in the same gallery space McElheny radically fractures the distinction between performance and exhibition”.

Sadly I have news for White Cube – it doesn’t, it’s not radical and anyway it has been done many times before. Lots, and better. This is the sort of thing that you wouldn’t have been surprised to see in 1918 Zurich, 1930’s Paris, 1960’s New York or London Art School graduate shows anytime in the last 20 years. Furthermore the ‘constant presence of a performer’ was a solitary embarrassed student who perfunctorily strolled around with a mirrored sandwich-board for a couple of minutes whist we were there. This supposedly created a ‘shifting other-worldy space’. In your dreams.

On the walls are a few flat, shaped reflecting glass shapes ‘based on designs by Delaunay and Stepanova’ (and Homebase), representing strong women, previously often overlooked in the history of art and fashion. True, and in theory the reflected images of modernist mirrored moving shapes I suppose sounds quite elegant. Unfortunately in the large space that is the ‘Lower ground’ (or ‘basement’ to you and I) gallery the reflections are too distant and space to large to create any meaningful reflections or invoke any sort of ‘complex, intangible sense of space’ that the artist/Press release promises.

Interactions of the Abstract Body  is at White Cube Mason’s Yard until 12 January 2013

Images with no figures courtesy of artist and White Cube.

Related articles

• Cultural shift as White Cube says farewell to Hoxton base (standard.co.uk)
• Antony Gormley’s Model: ‘I’ve made a body you can actually go in’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Antony Gormley: a model of hype? (guardian.co.uk)

jake or dinos chapman – white cube

Correct – Jake or Dinos. Each of the infamous brothers has supposedly worked separately for around a year to each produce their own White Cube exhibition – one at Masons Yard and one at Hoxton. Having only collaborated since graduating from the RCA in 1990 this show is an experimental diversion – Dinos recently said ‘We’re not interested in our similarities between our interests, but the divergencies. This show will be an exemplar of that.’

What you get here is not really a surprise – the brothers have rarely, if at all, moved from their disturbing moral takes on politics, religion and morality and again we see few divergencies. It all starts comfortably enough upstairs at Masons Yard with a deliberately cramped display of forty-seven roughly hewn sculptural works, constructed of thick cardboard and roughly painted in dark shades. Each sits on its own white pedestal. Think Picasso or Schwitters assemblages as made by primary school children, a rethink of modernist sculpture.

Downstairs Dinos (I think, but it really doesn’t matter) really gets going. Uniformed Nazis, flesh stripped off and charred black, sporting deathly grins admire an exhibition of similar, but more monumental works in painted steel whilst randomly buggering or being shat upon by stuffed birds. A reversed and nightmarish version of Entartete Kunst – the Nazis exhibition of forbidden art – but here being enjoyed by the degenerate gurning guards. On the wall original Goya Disasters of War etchings are symbolically drawn over and blackened.

In a separate darkened room a work by Pieter Bruegel (his nickname ‘Hell-Breugel’) has been distorted and defaced with trademark Chapman figures. Breughel was presumably a Chapman influence – filling his paintings with hellish medieval grotesques of his own – so much so that Adrian Searle (in the only review I have read so far – Guardian) hilariously missed the Chapman’s additions!

Over at Hoxton disturbing animal-faced children huddle and admire the paintings – large, brooding Chapmanesque takes on fairy-stories. Childhood stolen and distorted. Upstairs are tableaux of household Catholic shrines, the tacky, gothic statuettes of religious figures in painted plaster are similarly deformed – baby Jesus with swirling tentacles instead of a face, Madonna with stitched-on patches of skin. These are sinister Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ Icons and more wonderful digs at the fakery of religion.

Some hard-boiled art critics have taken to criticising the brothers on the basis that their art no longer shocks. This is just not true – we may have seen it before or suspect what the Chapmans are going to show us but they miss the fact that this is art which gets you on a visceral level. It also pushes and prods us and intellectually challenges us whilst examining the history of art. Some find the Chapmans an easy target and, although I would love them to try something new, I prefer to side with Waldemar Januszczak who finds them amongst the most important artists working today. Love ’em or hate ’em it is a show you should see.

Related articles

• Jake or Dinos Chapman – picture preview (independent.co.uk)
• Jake or Dinos Chapman – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Jake and Dinos Chapman at the White Cube in pictures (telegraph.co.uk)