Goshka Macuga 'The Nature of the Beast'
The Bloomberg Commission: Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 5th April 2009 – 4th April 2010, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Artist Goshka Macuga uses art history as a springboard to consider global, political and ethical themes. Drawing upon archival research alongside significant visual artefacts she weaves complex, interlocking stories, allowing gallery visitors to explore, learn and make decisions, each at their own pace. For this exhibition, Macuga’s achievement is to procure the Guernica Tapestry – a woven replica of Picasso’s iconic anti-War painting – from its home at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Hanging across the gallery’s back wall, as back-drop to the tapestry, is a rippling blue curtain. After sifting through information provided by the artist on the tapestry’s history, we are reminded of the controversial covering of the piece with a similar drape, after it was deemed too contentious to be associated with the UN during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
After this initial shock, attention is drawn to unassuming and individual protest, perhaps offering methods of hope and resistance. Norman King’s 1938 photo-collages were stand-out works, presented alongside a plethora of other Whitechapel archival finds inside a beautifully constructed round-table display case. King, a left-wing political candidate and union organiser during the 1930s, produced delicate collages with tough messages, for example one involving a paper composition of workers’ united fists.
Indeed, the exhibition as a whole, though installed in part in the manner of a boardroom (complete with soft leather chairs and an angry Colin Powell bust) and in part as an orderly archival display, might be best understood as a kind of collage or montage. Perhaps adapting the strategies of disturbing Surrealist photo-montage and assemblage, designed in the aftermath of World War One to disrupt and expose conventions and to unearth strange desires, Macuga sees her work as somewhat journalistic, ‘calling into question not only how information is mediated, translated or even censored but also the veracity of information we are fed.’ The artist’s mixed media approach, utilising film, sculpture, text, found objects and audience participation (gallery visitors are invited to hold meetings around the round-table display case) certainly provides scope for considered thought and debate, as well as provocation to be more politically aware, critical and active.
An excellent newspaper-format publication, stacked neatly by the main entrance to the exhibition space, reprints a 1939 newspaper article outlining Picasso’s artistic and political credentials for an East London, left-wing audience, as well as providing the full text of Colin Powell’s now-discredited ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ presentation to the UN Security Council in 2003. Exiting the exhibition on this note, however, leaves this reviewer more than a little uncomfortable. While Macuga might encourage us to develop our critical faculties, engage in debate, and get out there and demonstrate, the question of our current individual (or even collective) political effectiveness – like the effectiveness of Guernica itself – is left unanswered.
IMAGE CREDIT: Bloomberg Commission: Goshka Macuga: The Nature of the Beast, 2009 Photo: Patrick Lears
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