Exhibition Review: Cello Players, Headless Sheep and Contemporary Pastoralism

“But where to turn? Earth endures
After the passing, necessary shame
Of winter, and the old lie
Of green places beckons me still
From the new world, ugly and evil,
That men pry for in truth's name.”
― R.S. Thomas, Song at the Year's Turning

Descend the stairs of the ‘Centre Pompidou Malaga’ and you enter a counterintuitive space that detaches itself from any natural light, which for a gallery you’d think to be essential. However, this subterraneous architectural decision creates a kind of liminal space, initially capturing a sterility before it transforms into a message concerning the nature of modern society. Nothing bursts out, seizes or ‘hits you hard’; all is synthetic and appeals to a cold linearity.

The exhibition is uninterested in historical or stylistic compartmentalisation as the favourable method of many gallery spaces; the guidance it provides for visitors is wholly sensory. It demonstrates a hybridity of cinematography, auditory and static art generating an uncanniness that stays with you after you leave.

Yet when you consider all the individual art works in conjunction, the exhibition becomes metonymic for the concept of pastoralism, reimagined in a contemporary context. Making the ideology of each piece work in simultaneity allows a unified discourse to emerge surrounding a longing for pastoral rusticity, and issues with a damaging “ugly and evil” new world.

The artistic pastoralism the gallery portrays is melancholic in repeatedly showing through figurative means the fissures between Man and Nature. One cinematographic piece uses the medium of puppetry to depict this estrangement, and symbolise the individual psychodrama of feeling helpless in an urban landscape which is inimical to attaining a natural ideal. A tree is used as a constant amid the onscreen action, a Locus Amoenus to remind the audience of a rural past.

George Puttenham, a pastoral theorist, is conclusive in his assertion that pastoralism is a guise for political discourse and a means “to contain and enforme moral discipline for the amendment of man’s behaviour”. ‘Troupeau de moutons’ by François-Xavier Lalanne can be considered in light of this instructional subtext through synthesising something both familiar yet eerily preternatural. Dominating the central floor space with a terse descriptor translated as “Flock of 24 sheep mounted on wheels, 14 of them without a head”, the piece is physically busy yet psychologically sparse. Lalanne reworks surrealism to compound the pastoral message. Rather than making the rural emphatic, each sheep becomes defined for an unnatural functionality. The sheep are no longer animals more suited to a literary landscape such as that of Hesiod’s Golden Age in ‘Work and Days’, but are seats which when placed together, can form a bench. This, and the decision to make some sheep headless is what permanently removes all naturalism and reveals an idealised vision imbued with traces of a human destructive capacity.

Some installations are less pronounced in their moralising but are expository in showing the importance of the coexistence of realism and idealism, urban and rural. Su-Mei Tse’s ‘L’Echo’ as an audio visual piece is a complex, yet mesmeric delineation of this. It explores perception as a subjective experience by harmonising sound and image, emphasising the importance of listening to one’s interior self. Drawing parallels with Caspar David Friedrich’s explorations of Romantic sublimity and reunion with the spiritual self, Tse’s work is self-referential as she places herself playing the cello in the middle of a vast natural landscape. Each section of the melody is followed by its echo, working like an internal monologue that Tse describes as “the beginning of communication”. Thus the piece is dialogical in the form of duet, conveying a concord between Man and Nature.

Romanticism and its interconnection with the pastoral is also rendered with metaphysical symbolism. Peter Doig’s ‘100 Years Ago’ with both its title and traditional style poses as anachronistic within the concrete starkness of a modern art gallery. The work inhabits the indeterminate area between nature and civilisation. The figure depicted in the foreground, much alike Tse’s, is overwhelmed with its backdrop. The combination of striking block colour and the lyricism created with almost hallucinatory brushstrokes serve to dichotomise the image, and symbolise man’s dislocated position from nature. What could be seen as an artistic contextualisation of the “mind forg’d manacles” Blake described as a cause of this distance, Doig has extended this by reflecting on the aimless sobriety of modern man.

Perhaps what affirms the underlying didacticism of the exhibition most forcefully is Franck Scurti’s ‘N.Y., 06: 00 A.M’. “The piece is like a dream that can be used to dream: it is the basis and the object of the dream.” This is how Scurti explains his installation, a bed which effectively is an enlarged sardine tin. Sometimes the work is transposed into a microcosmic piece of theatre featuring a sleeping couple fantasising about the breakfast they will eat when they wake up (indicated in the mural). As a distillation of a contemporary reverie, Scurti’s art is bold and defined whilst revealing the sinister elements of today’s society; over consumption, consumerism and emotional disconnection. The positioning of the sardine bed in relation to the mural invokes an ‘expectant gaze’, exploring everyday institutionalisation. However it has a quietude. It’s reflective. It isn’t a call to arms.

A unified piece of art itself, the exhibition conveys two sides of the modern psyche; that of idealism and regret. It deals with notions of contemporary existence through a complex, striking amalgamation of pastoral allusion and premonitory dystopia. With regards to Malaga, which I found to architecturally echo this juxtaposition between a call for the preservation of the city’s historical vernacular, and recognition of its urban future, the situation of this new gallery couldn’t be more fitting. A quiet radicalism sits among the neutrality of the gallery space. In this way the city and the gallery are in constant communication with each other.