Мы все таки пошли. Выставка проходила в какой-то маленькой квартире в подвале. И это была одна из лучших инсталляций, которую я видела в своей жизни! Фотографии не передадут всего, но дадут небольшое представление о его работе.
знаю, выглядит совсем не захватывающе, но добавьте темноту, бой барабанов, нефтяное озеро перед ногами, песок, следы от окровавленных рук, дым, следы борьбы... И все это увеличьте до огромных размеров.
Работа была сделана после происшествий с тюрьмой Abu Ghraib
дальше я прикреплю некоторые из рецензий
Tim Shaw
Kenneth Armitage Foundation
London
Far off almost anybody’s London contemporary art map is Kensington, the upscale residential neighborhood where the only galleries are the sort that might be expected to exhibit small bronze figurines—like this foundation sited in the former studio of the prominent postwar sculptor Kenneth Armitage. And small bronze figurines, by a little-known mid-career sculptor, Tim Shaw, do occupy the top floor, which made the installation hidden at the back all the more astonishing.
Shaw has spent much of his two-year residency here building Casting a Dark Democracy, 2007-2008, a gargantuan, more than sixteen-foot-high sculpture of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, and it is shockingly powerful. Shaw’s classical training allowed him to craft this giant (made of steel, barbed wire, and black plastic) to pitch-perfect recognizability. After Richard Serra’s flat and disappointing drawing of the same figure, Stop Bush, 2004, I’d assumed that no artwork could ever match the impact of the actual newspaper photos, but Casting succeeds. In this tall, windowless space—part chapel, part prison cell—the noted Christian connotations (crucifixion, stigmata) were oddly supplanted by pagan overtones, recalling Burning Man or some secret cult. From the entranceway it was a massively imposing vision; from underneath one could see that it is hollow, as if torn open and shredding, ghostly and overwhelming.
Followers of contemporary art might instinctively recoil from Casting as an obsolete example of the eighteenth-century sublime, combining terror, immense scale , awe, and beauty. Artists now tend to chronicle our times via the gaps or edges of history—for example Mark Wallinger’s brilliant State Britain, 2007, his recreation of an antiwar street encampment. Casting is a conventional monument, effectively following in the outmoded footsteps of, say, the 1954 Iwo Jima Memorial, which similarly rendered in metal a war’s most visually communicative photograph. But Shaw’s transposition of monumental subject matter from heroic victor to tortured enemy is quite a turnaround.
This is a truly Gothic work; like the genre’s best literary or filmic practitioners, Shaw adopts the formal conventions (claustrophobia, shadows, scale, the play of surfaces as identified as central to Gothic by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her influential analysis)’ to speak of disintegrating histories and taboos, triggering our basic emotions and fears to subvert the possibility of a passive response. And, honestly, finding oneself alone with this two-story specter was frightening. Casting a Dark Democracy is the stuff of nightmares, wherein the victim—martyr and master, monster and monument—returns to terrify the perpetrator. Like the worst of Gothic it is literal, theatrical, apocalyptic. Yet Casting is an unforgettable indictment of the dehumanizing effects of war, far more so than the ICA’s thoughtful, up-to-date, but anecdotal and finally forgettable “Memorial to the Iraq War” exhibition last year in which, for example Jeremy Deller proposed twinning an Iraqi city with one in Britain, or Khalil Rabah challenged viewers to assemble a map of Iraq. Casting succeeded in prompting its intended, old-fashioned, “never forget” feeling; my greatest shock, standing in its suffocating presence, was realizing that just four years on, I’d actually almost forgotten those awful images. In the postelection euphoria of autumn 2008, Casting was a sobering reminder of barbaric wartime policies scarcely behind us. This symbol of trampled human rights returns, towering monstrously above us, its message more urgent and compelling than ever.
—Gilda Williams
Time Out
Reviews
Tim Shaw
Kenneth Armitage Foundation
Five stars
At the top of the staircase is a framed poem by Seamus Heaney dedicated to the artist Tim Shaw. Though not part of the show, the poem is apposite; it is one of the series in which Heaney meditates on those extraordinary archaeological finds, the ‘bog bodies’; preserved Iron Age corpses discovered buried deep in Danish peat bogs. Hooded and bound, their throats slashed, they were thought to have been sacrifices to the earth goddess, a guarantee of future good harvests. Interred in peat that was also cut for fuel, these victims ensured the living would prosper.
Fast-forward to 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, a war fought partly for oil, the subterranean bounty that assures the continued security of the current world order. The powerful set of sculptures that Shaw assembled here suggests his recent attempt to guarantee future prosperity came with a list of sacrificial demands not dissimilar to those of the long forgotten past.
This sense of the archaic suffusing the modern is most intense in the show’s major installation, ‘Casting A Dark Democracy’. To the sound of a rhythmic double beat – heart, drum, or the steady glug of oil from a barrel – one enters a large space, lit by a bare bulb. The walls are smeared and marked with oil; the floor is covered in sand. Towering over the viewer is a vast hooded figure, its ragged cloak exposing a barbed-wire armature, its shadow a black slick of oil. It is the torture victim from Abu Ghraib, balanced on a box, wires attached to his fingers. Shaw’s sculpture restores to the now famous image all the horror that repeated production has leached from it, making of it an archetypal figure, redolent of ancient rites, prices paid, and damage done. Upstairs, next to Heaney’s poem, is a group of eight ‘Fertility Figures’, stoutly virile, winged, horned and defiantly pagan: old gods of increase. This impressive and moving show reminds us that they are in no mood to give up their due.
Francis Gooding
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