Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne reviews Robert Gober/Tristin Lowe/Liam O'Callaghan at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery.
It's quite something for the Gallagher Gallery to stage a show by Robert Gober - the first in Ireland - not alone because he's one of the leading American artists of his generation but because he's a sculptor, and more often than not sculpture presents particular problems of transport and installation. In the event, the Gober is but one of a trio of ambitious shows of sculptural installation currently on view at the Gallagher. The largest is devoted to the work of another American, Tristin Lowe. And the Americans are joined by young Irish artist Liam O'Callaghan, who has more than risen to the challenge with an ambitious, very well judged show. All three complement each other very effectively.
Gober established his reputation with narratively charged works in the 1980s, quizzical mixed media pieces that are in one sense readily comprehensible, consisting as they mostly do of everyday things (kitchen sinks, playpen, dog basket, for example), but also quizzical in that the stories they set up are left open to various interpretations. His way of working implied a rejection of the Modernist view of the art object, in that what he made literally set about humanising objects.
Gober's iconic works, though, made early in the 1990s, are eerie pieces in which the body is objectified.
In the best known, the lower half of a man's body obtrudes from a wall, clad in underpants, shoes and socks. Thus far, it's an uncomfortable image of vulnerability. But the body is pitted with plastic drainage fittings, inserted flush with the skin, making it a quietly unsettling, nightmarish vision, not un-akin to some of David Cronenberg's imagery. Its resonance was all the greater given that it and its companion pieces were made at the height of the Aids crisis.
The drawings and sculptures that make up the show in the Gallagher show are more oblique, though all offer various levels of access. One of the most subtle is the largest, Prison Window, from 1992. High in the gallery wall, a small, barred window looks out to a sunny blue sky - except that the whole thing is rendered in a comic book style that recalls the late paintings of Philip Guston, and we are actually on the outside looking in, given that the light emanating from the window is a contrivance. The implication, that we are imprisoned in our apparent freedom, is lightly delivered.
An untitled sculpture of a hugely outsized pat of butter - beeswax - on its unfolded wrapper is like a sensory magnification. The same could be said of the bare Lightbulb, another Guston reference but one that also recalls Beckett, who surfaces again as a referent in a fairly tortuous trash-can sculpture, which turns out to be a convoluted allegory of republican politics in the United States, linking religion, dirty tricks and dramatic symbolism in a deadpan composite.
Deadpan is a good term for Gober's overall approach, which is to draw us into engagement and speculation.
Where there is some common ground between them, Lowe is, on the whole, much more brash and assertive in his occupation and domination of space.
Given that his show, which occupies the huge Gallery I, features Dumbo the elephant and a pair of inflatable Alice dolls, not to mention Frosty, which is a version of Frosty the Snowman, it may sound like ideal Christmas fare for all the family. Only to the extent that Bad Santa is an ideal Christmas movie. Like the film, Lowe's sculpture is scabrously subversive of the feel-good fantasy world that it draws on for its sources.
His Chair is a gigantic construction, a scaled-up version of an ordinary foldable chair which casts us in a Lilliputian role. Together with his gigantic inflatable sculptures, it generates a certain anxiety of status in the observer. Like Paul McCarthy or Mike Kelley, he rummages in the store of childhood imagery, the culture of childhood and infantalisation, and reworks supposedly innocent motifs with a dark overlay.
The full title of the inflated pink elephant sculpture is Dumbo & Bourbon Pillow, and it picks up on a reference to drunkenness in the film itself. The fantasy collides with the pungent props that are part of the piece. While not as wildly, messily scatological as McCarthy, Lowe is drawn to the same queasy area of abjection. In other words, his work is not for the faint-hearted or those with weak stomachs.
O'Callaghan's past projects have employed widely divergent strategies, though always with strong elements of social research and taxonomic procedures. His exhibition and book I'm a Success canvassed individuals to identify their own measure of personal success in their lives, for example. What we see in this show is something of a departure. His remarkable installation, Time finds you a good place to fall, which is really, really worth seeing, generates a sense of an extraordinary, transformed space. A paper screen enlivened by a beautiful glowing pattern, it's a genuinely absorbing and meditative place to be.
What is also striking about it, however, is something that is characteristic of O'Callaghan's approach as a whole: our first encounter with this piece of magical image-making is from the outside, and all of its workings are exposed.
He relishes the way effects are manufactured, the improvisational play that goes into the seamless, finished impression, so that we see the joins, the messing around with bits and pieces of everyday technology. This should take away from the finely crafted illusion, but it doesn't - it's oddly satisfying and only reinforces the overall work.
Andrew Kearney comes to mind as a comparable employer of technology. The simultaneous instance of the everyday and the transcendent is a recurrent idea running through all of O'Callaghan's pieces, and all of them are conceptually ingenious and effectively embodied. His show contains perhaps one piece too many, but that apart it's a terrific achievement.
