Hayward bound
The Southbank is one of my favourite places in London. Whenever I go, at whatever time of year, it is always vibrant and joyful, full of people doing a myriad of different things they love, from cocktails to skateboarding, mime artists to symphony orchestras … to art. Which is why I never understand how I so often forget that the Hayward Gallery is right there amongst it all. It does suffer from being set back from the river behind the National Theatre, but I am clearly alone in forgetting it as, on a sunny Saturday afternoon last week, the queue for tickets stretched well out of the door.
The Hayward’s modernist and flexible exhibition space has, in the past, staged some spectacular and thought-provoking shows. Here I’m thinking particularly of Anthony Gormley: Blind Light, Walking in my Mind, and Mark Wallinger: The Russian Linesman, among recent shows. But, I feel that now the Hayward increasingly falls between two stools. It cannot, and I think shouldn’t, stage the blockbuster modern art exhibitions that are the preserve of the Tate, Royal Academy, or the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, but equally it is not a small avant-garde contemporary gallery. In some ways it is the London equivalent of the new contemporary galleries that are appearing in the regions – Nottingham Contemporary, the Baltic, Turner Contemporary etc – and about which I have written before. Yet, it performs this role within the difficult setting of the London art scene.
Take the two current exhibitions for example: Brain Activity by the British Artist David Shrigley, and Joy in People by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. Shrigley’s work is witty, irreverent and disconcerting, from dead rats to simple line-drawn animations. It is wry, and the exhibition is enjoyable as much as a visitor experience as a ‘straight forward’ art show. The more interactive show is something that the Hayward has always done well. But I left wondering what the point of the exhibition was, and feeling that Shrigley’s humourous work is better enjoyed in the greeting card form in which it is better known.
The Deller exhibition is a collection of his past work. The eclectic, participatory and installation-based nature of Deller’s work makes this difficult and left the show feeling incoherent. There were some stimulating pieces like the It is what it is installation of a bombed-out car from Baghdad which Deller took on a tour of the US, but this felt flat in the straight gallery space. I did enjoy the ‘failed projects’ section, but so many of Deller’s pieces require a level of back-story and text explanation that I felt deadened the art itself. The stand-out piece for me was Exodus: a 3D-projection film of thousands of bats in flight. It was beautiful, moving and unsettling. It made me think of work I love by Tacita Dean or Werner Herzog.
This was a re-work of Deller’s final piece for the Turner Prize, which left me wondering if the Hayward needs to embrace its ‘regional’ status and vie with the other ‘regional contemporaries’ to play host to the Prize and establish itself firmly on that stool.