Art - Richard Cork compares two very different meditations on the fragility of life today
As we approach Tate Britain, nothing prepares us for the conflagration to come. The gardens outside the Clore Gallery are irreproachably quiet and orderly. Everything is neatly trimmed, the flowers are confined to geometrical borders, and the sunken pool looks sluggish. Then, with a shock, we encounter the flames. Leaping unexplained from a steel grating near the centre of the open-air sculpture court, they threaten to singe the heavy overhanging trees.
Black scorch marks are smeared around the grating. They testify to the restless-ness of flames that, on a windy summer evening, shift direction continually. Sometimes they rise straight up towards the sky, and yet the next second they writhe across the ground like maddened orange serpents. Their potential threat is real enough, and a grey metal fence prevents us from getting too close. On all four sides, notices issue a stern order: "Do not enter. Naked flame". But I find, when standing on the side nearest the fire, that its heat is palpable even from a safe distance.
Roger Hiorns, the young artist who made this alarmingly raw work and called it Vauxhall, offers no explanation. He is right to remain silent. For no one can doubt that these unruly, bad-tempered flames upset the civility of their surroundings in a jarringly aggressive way. On one level, their proximity to the Clore building is an affront. After all, thousands of Turner's paintings, watercolours and drawings are housed only yards away, and the fire looks voracious enough to consume them all. But a strange rushing noise, from deep underneath the grating, wrenches our attention away from fears about the safety of the Tate's collection. Instead, we wonder what might be happening far below, away from sight.
Maybe a catastrophic accident has occurred - some terrible malfunction in an Underground tunnel, derailing a train and subjecting its passengers to a gruesome ordeal. Or perhaps the fire was deliberate, an unstoppable act of terrorism involving a lethal explosion. All these possibilities race through our minds as we stare at the mysterious flames. Whether Hiorns intended it or not, Vauxhall is a work that reflects the traumatic temper of our time. It acknowledges, albeit implicitly, that London has become a more vulnerable city than before, prone not only to the possibility of mechanical failure beneath the ground, but also to the ruthlessness of sudden, suicidal atrocity.
In the sunken pool nearby, a real grating can be detected beneath the surface of the murky waters. Silent, sodden and sluggish, it makes Hiorns's fiery version appear, in comparison, even more brazen. And yet Vauxhall does not look like "art" at all. That is the source of its disquieting power. The flames are as unstable as the meaning of the work. The longer I linger there, the more this incessant flaring reminds me of the "eternal flame" installed at the base of a memorial to the war dead. However hard the wind buffets it, the fire refuses to be extinguished. Leaping out of its hidden source, it suggests the dual need for warning and remembrance.
Inside Tate Britain, another young artist meditates on the fragility of life today, though with more traditional media. Approaching the Art Now space, I am confronted by a fragment of a grey, skeletal structure flattened on the wall ahead. It seems spectacularly large and, as I round the corner of David Musgrave's room, the skeleton spreads over the rest of the wall in a bony tangle of spine, fingers and limbs. Colossal enough to resemble the remains of a dinosaur, they nevertheless retain a kinship with the structure of a human figure. That is why they are able to disturb us as we struggle, unsuccessfully, to make anatomical sense of this outflung apparition. It has the quality of a nightmare, yet Musgrave's handling is the very opposite of expressionist. He has executed the wall-work in silk emulsion paint, and its cool, patient intricacy is more suggestive of a police laboratory than an abattoir.
The epic scale of the wall-work could not be further removed from the diminutive body marooned in the centre of the grey floor. Head and limbs torn from its torso, Paper Golem sprawls like the victim of some grotesque crime. According to Jewish legend, a golem is a clay figure supernaturally brought to life. But Musgrave does not believe in its ability to fend off a murderous attack. His golem has been ripped apart, and its smallness serves only to accentuate the sense of calamity. Because the entire figure appears to be a paper cut-out, we can even suspect that a vicious child might be responsible for its plight. When I kneel down to inspect it close up, the golem turns out to be made of aluminium painted with white acrylic. But it still looks intensely fragile, and an attentive warden is quick to tell me that the sculpture should not be touched. Musgrave clearly wants the golem to look exposed, so that it can arouse protective feelings in the onlooker.
Judging by the even more minuscule work isolated on another wall, Musgrave has a caricaturist's humour. Modelled from epoxy putty and covered in enamel paint, this tiny yet rebarbative form is like an angry red eruption. In colour and forcefulness, it reminds me of the fire still flaring outside the gallery. But Musgrave's sculpture is shiny, and he has made it in a seeming frenzy. With its spiky nose, this convulsive little creature appears capable of unleashing the violence that pulled the golem to pieces.
The most chilling image in Musgrave's show, however, is clinical rather than delirious. He calls it Drawing, as if it were an abstract work. But close inspection reveals a painstaking depiction of body parts. Although difficult to identify, they are reminiscent of entrails, detached fingers and other, equally unsettling possibilities. Fascinated by the process of change, Musgrave tantalises us by hovering in a pictorial no man's land between representational clarity and the unknowable.
In the end, however, this accomplished pencil study stirs memories of Gericault's paintings of truncated limbs and decapitated heads supplied by an asylum. Meticulous, detailed and carried out with forensic zeal, Musgrave's Drawing shows how dismembered bodies have become an unavoidable presence in a world fast flaming beyond our control.
Roger Hiorns and David Musgrave are at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8725) until 31 August and 7 September respectively. Richard Cork's four books on modern art have just been published by Yale University Press
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