Visual art - Richard Cork feels trapped by the work of an artist preoccupied by fragility
Halfway through our troubled decade, Jannis Kounellis has produced a work that confronts us with the 21st century at its most convulsive. The view through the doorway to the large and lofty Upper Gallery at Modern Art Oxford warns of a catastrophe to come. Dark steel beams jut into the air like girders left behind after some devastating explosion. They are instantly reminiscent of buildings shattered or train tracks wrenched upwards by a terrorist assault.
But there is nothing literal about this immense, multi-layered work. Kounellis calls it Untitled, and has no intention of limiting the range of possible meanings. As I walk into the room and become ensnared by the metal rearing ominously in front of me, its stark, criss-cross rhythms begin to resemble the skeletal remains of bodies ripped apart in an unimaginable cataclysm. Then, as the beams close around me, they become far more immediate and visceral. Stumbling through the interstices of this stern structure, I soon become involved in a struggle.
However carefully I step over the shards, they threaten to entangle me. Towards the centre, I am forced to dodge, twist and bend. My body feels trapped in a mesh. I have become part of the work - a prisoner, almost, of its remorseless power. Here is the sculptural equivalent of the feelings so often engendered by events in the new century's opening years. Wherever we look, violence breaks out, and Kounellis captures its strength in the hard, dehumanised character of his tour de force.
Only at the far end, when we feel relieved to be liberating ourselves from the cat's cradle of beams, does he admit a more personal note. Slung from a metal hook high on the final girder are a black coat and hat. They could be a reminder of the artist responsible for the work. But more generally, the funereal hat and coat may also be intended as an elegiac memorial to all the people who perish, sometimes unrecorded, in conflicts today. The hook, after all, makes us think of an abattoir, and many of the prisons run by tyrannical regimes treat their inmates as carcasses.
Yet Kounellis does not stop there. Just as I begin to conclude that mortal abuse is the overall theme, my eyes are caught by the extreme contrast between the austere metal beams and the rich, multicoloured Turkish rugs on which they rest. The warm rugs are redolent of a spiritual culture, in touch with ancient traditions and a belief system far removed from the technological supremacy of cold steel. Here, two worlds are brought into jarring conjunction with each other.
Because the rugs lie beneath the metal, they might be seen as victims of a dominant system invading their hallowed territory. But the beams have a damaged air, suggesting that technology is just as vulnerable as the woven cloth below. The rugs, after all, have not yet been torn by the industrial might pressing down on them. It could even be claimed that the steel shards are transformed by their contact with the rugs. Like a magic carpet, they seem to lift the metal off the floor. So although Kounellis addresses the clash between east and west, he does not suggest that either side has lost or won.
Nevertheless, fragility turns out to be an abiding preoccupation in his art. The rest of this superb show presents a selection of work produced over his long career, stretching back to the time when, 45 years ago, the young Greek-born artist first exhibited in his adopted city of Rome. Setting no boundaries on the materials he might deploy, Kounellis used anything from coal to sewing machines. In the Piper Gallery at Oxford, a series of old trestle tables has been assembled as a rudimentary yet effective stage set for his version of a Greek tragedy, silently performed by a selection of pieces from the past. In a white bowl, two goldfish dart alarmingly close to a large kitchen knife immersed in the same water. On a neighbouring wall, three plaster fragments of a human face, daubed and spattered with sooty pigment, emerge from a brown canvas. In another part of the room, we are frustrated by a black canvas bag, filled and tied up without explanation. But no one can doubt the reality of the dead fly on top of a pillar of cotton.
Everywhere you look, black and white predominate. A candle projects from a steel panel where, in chalk, the artist has written: "Liberta o Morte/V[iva] Marat/V[iva] Robespierre". Over and above the political references in the Piper Gallery, Kounellis reveals himself to be obsessed with transience. Many of his works belong to the vanitas tradition of still-life painting. Even an egg, usually a symbol of new life, seems to sit waiting to be broken. And in other galleries, Kounellis makes us aware of further possible disasters. A fragment of a fishing boat reminds us that he grew up in the port of Piraeus near Athens. But any suspicion that he is nostalgic for his birthplace is countered by the vessel's vulnerability and its name: Untitled (Albatross).
As for the toy train racing on a track around a white column, it seems bound to end in derailment. Kounellis installed the first version of this piece in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella in 1977. A decade earlier, he had made another work in which equally small trains emerge from a trio of marble cubes. The artist is clearly preoccupied with this image, as he him-self appears in a photograph opening his mouth to disgorge another toy train. Is he giving birth or merely choking? We do not know. Kounellis is never concerned with providing answers. He aims instead at provoking multiple questions, nowhere more fruitfully than in the Upper Gallery.
Returning there for a last look at the eruptive steel splayed so incongruously on the rugs, I realise that the beams are all bolted into crosses. Lying on their sides, they look dormant, but that does not detract from their menace. Have the crosses been discarded at the end of a protracted Calvary, or are they waiting for another mass martyrdom to begin?
"Jannis Kounellis" is at Modern Art Oxford (01865 722 733) until 20 March
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