One day, Olaf Brzeski was cleaning the chimney of his studio in Wrocław, Poland, when something terrible happened. “A 10-foot-high column of soot fell from the chimney,” he recalls. “It covered everything in the studio. And of course me too.”
As he stood blinking black dust from his eyes, Brzeski couldn’t even blame anyone else. He had shed the weight of the past, brought dark matter to light, effectively unblocked all the waste in the chimney like colonic irrigation. Freud called this the return of the repressed; others might see this as revenge for the institution, taking revenge on the people who burned their previous incarnations.
The entire world we live in is based on predictable, orderly shapes, but everything in this exhibition is completely irregular.
Brzeski collected the soot and made a sculpture using chemicals I don’t quite understand. His next stop will be the Hayward Gallery in London; Here, this seemingly miraculous explosion of soot will pour out of a wall, its movement frozen in time, its shape will be curved and unstable. To add the finishing touches, Brzeski will darken the wall with a blowtorch.
He calls the result Dream – Spontaneous Combustion. His idea is that a dream can contain thoughts so provocative that they can cause the human body to ignite. Brzeski had long been fascinated by the history of spontaneous combustion, but acknowledged that it might all be nonsense. This history ranges from an Italian knight named Polonus Vorstius, who reportedly burst into flames in 1471, to the case of an Irish pensioner who died of spontaneous combustion in 2011, according to the inquest. Like many of the works in When Forms Come Alive, the title of Hayward’s new group exhibition, Dream is the product of someone with a Puck-like temperament who draws something funny and thought-provoking from disaster.
So can the statue be funny? Many of the works that Hayward director Ralph Rugoff has collected for the exhibition are playful, unknowable, and untamable. While it shows artists depicting movement and growth through sculpture, many also subvert any sense of assertiveness or self-importance. Rugoff directs me to a large blob of Pepto-Bismol pink hanging in a room. Resembling something from Liz Truss’s nightmares, the blob is a creepy yet funny pop art satellite with appendages protruding like cartoon trumpets.
The sculpture Epiphany in Chairs by Austrian artist Franz West. Is it a joke? This apparent absurdity is surrounded by chairs, inviting viewers to contemplate its significance in awe-filled reverie. “It unnerves the idea of looking at art and having some kind of epiphany about your experience,” Rugoff says. Another of West’s sculptures, Cain and Abel, consists of two vaguely human forms facing each other. Wow, I think those biblical brothers really let themselves go. Will they shake hands? Or more likely, other extensions that have been extended? Is this a representation of the first will-waving contest in history? It’s hard to be sure.
Rugoff points to a pile of mud in the corner. “It could be mud, lava or feces,” he says. It’s actually a lead sculpture by Lynda Benglis called Quarter Meteor. What looks like a terrible mess that hazmat suit experts must quickly dispose of is actually a work of art; a work that manages to turn the disgustingly disgusting into something endearing, perhaps even funny. “I’ve never heard him talk about his work being funny, but he has a sense of humor that says, ‘I’ll leave this leaden form in this pristine gallery,'” Rugoff says. He said that his work was to resist geometry. And I think geometry represents the world of heterosexuality.”
So is this exhibition for the weird, the wretched and the crazy? “Absolutely,” Rugoff replies. “The world we live in is based on things in predictable and orderly ways. But everything in this show is completely out of order. Namely, the late artist Phyllida Barlow’s large hulking savages of indeterminate shapes and EJ Hill’s swinging roller coaster sculpture; They all rebel against straight things, whether lines or worldviews.
But nothing captures the exhibition’s spirit of disorder, impermanence, and endless mutation quite like Michel Blazy’s Bouquet Finale sculpture. It’s a multi-tiered fountain held in place by scaffolding, but instead of flowing water, scented bath bubbles are whipped up by pumps. Say what you will about the magnificence of Louis XIV’s fountains, but there were no bubble baths flowing in the Sun King’s Versailles gardens.
But I ask Rugoff, don’t you think that displaying these sooty explosions, bubble bath jets, and mud will keep Hayward’s powerhouse busy with complainers and say that if this is art, there’s a manure heap behind them? The garden crying out for gallery space? “I think those angry days are over,” Rugoff says, probably with regret. “I did a show about the invisible in art for a few years, and no one called us then.”
Among the many pleasures of When Forms Come Alive, I was also struck by Matthew Ronay’s work. The American artist seems to have taken all the plumbing inside our body (sacs, intestines, organs, tubes) and recreated it with netsuke-sized and equally fascinating sculptures. Ronay told me that he started making sculptures inspired by mushrooms, but as he says in the catalogue, he continues to explore all kinds of things that feed his work: “death, reproduction, disease, aging, genitals, holes, flower stalks, mounds, mathematics.” After all this, a single he returned to the humble thought: “Nature first thought of all these things that you think you have invented.”
An equally remarkable work is the whimsical canal sculpture called Sottobosco, by London-based artist Holly Hendry. At first, it seems like an analogy to the way architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano installed color-coded pipes outside the Pompidou Center to show where power, water, and air flow from, but the tubes are shaped in a window opening of the Pompidou Center. Hayward has no function. At least none that are not aesthetic.
What’s all this about? Like Brzeski, Hendry cites a baroque ancestor for explanatory purposes. “ Sottobosco It is an Italian term meaning specifically a type of damp undergrowth, and its depiction became the focus of the work of the 17th-century Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck. He painted still lifes of the forest floor. Because it was a microscope moment, he was suddenly looking down instead of looking out and around. That’s what I’m doing. “I started with the idea of taking something microscopic and magnifying it 25 times and seeing this world full of life.”
Of course, looking at cross-sections of Hendry’s canals and pipes, they are constipated with foam and fossils, as if the world was so full of material that even the pipes used to transport waste were no longer fit for purpose. Marie Kondo can’t compete with this abundance of permanent supplies.
Not far from Sottobosco, another Brzeski work consists of Corten steel beams inserted into chairs. He calls them Orphans. “My opinion,” he says, “is that all these raw materials of art are tired. They need a rest. They’ve been dealing with them for too long.” Brzeski has unwittingly created sculptures that converse with others recently shown upriver: at Tate Britain, Sarah Lucas’s rabbit-like figures were similarly thrown onto chairs, as if tired of being symbols of female objectification. Like beams over-manipulated for art, Lucas’s figures seem adequate, at least in their exposure to the patriarchal gaze.
What is particularly curious is that these beams suspended from the chairs look surprisingly human-like. I’ve never felt like I could identify with metal pieces before, but here it’s strangely easy; just because they look tired. Now as I go downstairs to rest I can’t help but think this is pretty funny.
• When Forms Come Alive is at the Hayward Gallery in London until 6 May