Reflecting poorly on me: Space Shifters at the Hayward Gallery

Another week, another date and another gallery. I got invited to go and see the newish Space Shifters exhibition by an old friend last Sunday. I was running late and was rushing due to a highly improbable coincidence involving a Sunday lunch and planned engineering works. I had radioed ahead from the impossibly slow Upminster train telling her to go on in and that I would catch her up. All this meant that when I arrived I didn’t do the usual straight-legged, cross-armed stroll around the exhibits but instead dashed through the rooms looking for the old friend, barely registering what was around me.

I include the mental notes I made. “Big box thing, twisty mirror, dangly metal things and blokes walking around with bedroom mirrors strapped to their chests”. Indeed, the mix of my hurrying and my last minute reading up on the gallery website about how the exhibition explored “boundaries” proved to be fatal when I reached a completely ordinary velvet rope barrier and I stopped to think about how to get over it without damaging the art. I came to my senses, phoned date, and we went back to the beginning and strolled.

The exhibition brings together a load of artists to “investigate space”, and, though I cannot help but sneer, this was fun to go along to. The exhibition takes the form of a gauntlet of interactive and non-interactive (signs everywhere warn parents to keep their children on the leash) pieces. The hour-long stroll was like a walk-through Oz. From our yellow brick road we saw all sorts of shiny and plasticy things.

The effect was largely successful, though it was sometimes hard to avoid the comparison to the strangest IKEA ever or an updated children’s soft play area, missing only the rollers and the smell of piss.

Effort had clearly been made to make the whole thing very photogenic and Instagramable. The “dangly metal things” were in fact sheets of silvery chains that hung from the ceiling down to about waist height, enclosing half of a ramp and mezzanine. The effect was pretty and I would have spent more time thinking about what the artist had been trying to do had the whole thing not been packed out with people trying to get the perfect picture. No sarky one-liner will do to describe the guilty parties. It seems that polished metal links are what it takes to get anyone from parties of slightly artsy schoolgirls, to Eastern European male tourists in tight trousers, to helicopter parents posing and trying to look #art #connectingthingswithanonflexiblematerialwithahightensilestrength.

Similarly, the open-sided interlocking cast iron frame boxes (“big boxy thing”) attracted people like flies to honey. The main attraction to me was watching people test out each wall to see if it was one of the mirror walls instead of the open ones. It seemed to take an incredible amount of time. If you do intend to go to the exhibit, refer to my handy guide for not looking like a tosser at the end. I suppose this is what the artist was intending when trying to ‘play with borders’ but, like a child who can’t get onto the swings because the vodka-drinking youths are on them, I have decided that I don’t like swings anyway.

Once past the crowd-pleasers, the art got more serious, and more enjoyable because of it. Fred Sandback’s red yarn triangle sections off a corner of a room and suddenly that space beyond becomes very strange and foreign.

I had to refer to my own MirrorTest to stop myself from reaching out to touch the air. Past a load of reflective bowling balls like edible cupcake sprinkles and up the stairs, following a red and bronze plastic handrail that twists and curves and explodes into mad and tangled joy on a wall. The incongruity and fun of it made me laugh.

More dangly things, like the earrings your cooler aunt wears, and I get my first proper look at the “blokes walking around with bedroom mirrors strapped to their chests”. Sandwich board style, these actors prance along, reflecting things and getting in the way. Finally, the showpiece.

After an hour’s wait, Richard Wilson’s 20:50 is a walkway out into a room waist deep in black oil. It shimmers and reflects very prettily but is haunted by the accumulated dread of people terrified that their coat or scarf is about to get ruined.

Great fun, take a camera.

The Mirror Test

Question: Is there a mirror in front of you?

Answer: Can you see your own reflection?

A. Yes

B. No

If your answer was A then you are in front of a mirror. If your answer was B then you are not in front of a mirror.

Copyright

CalumDrysdale

-4 stars