Not Waving, Not Drowning

Waterloo Sunset

There he stands in his white shirt, unruffled by the breeze, hands hanging limp by his sides, gazing upstream. He rises and falls on the tide, through a long watch. Lighters, launches and barges, pilots and pleasure boats pass him by. Strollers on the bank point him out. Tourists take his photograph. He seems both watchful and oblivious, a man transfixed. Downpours and river mists, gales and frosts do not deter him. Brown fogs of winter dawns drifting into lilac-time; and then, one fine day, he's gone.

He is no mariner, floating there on his pontoon. In his white shirt he looks more like a stranded waiter. When he first appeared he was perched on a buoy, but the river police moved him on. People kept calling the cops about the bloke in the river. Someone decided to attempt a rescue, and dived in. So they gave him a pontoon, where he stands erect, raised on a floating dais.

Mud boils under the bridges, London clay and silt carried down on the stream from the Oxford plain, and a cocktail of industrial filth driven up on the tide from the refineries and chemical plants on the estuary.

Spencer and Wordsworth, Monet and Turner, Whistler, Eliot and a host of others - who has not gazed upon the river and imagined himself a poet... or fallen in love, or contemplated suicide...? On the bank of a distant tributary, picknicking amongst tussocks and rabbit-holes, Reverend Dodgson told stories to Alice Liddell on a hot afternoon. History and driftwood - our waiter witnessed none of this.

At Blackfriars a double row of cast-iron pillars rise from the riverbed, the preserved remains of a Victorian railway bridge. On one of the pillars stands an oversized sculptor's modelling table. On the table stands a huge, carved wooden head of a young man. He faces west, catching the afternoon sun - when there is any - full in the face. He, too, is looking upstream, into the river's bowl of pearly light. Right in front of him is a roadbridge, behind him the main-line railway crossing into Blackfriars station.

Eliot wrote that the river is a strong brown god: this isn't him, personified, but like Eliot's river god he keeps his place, unhonoured, unpropitiated... but waiting, watching and waiting just the same, while the thousands of people who cross and recross those two bridges every day pass him by. He gazes into the orange scab of a pollution sunset flaring over the Houses of Parliament.1

Royal Hospital, Dublin

In perfect illustration of the rules of perspective the regular march of evenly-spaced windows along one side of the broad corridor and the row of paintings hung opposite grow smaller as they recede into the the distance. They track towards a single vanishing-point, picking up speed as they go, bunching together and shrinking as they panic towards zero. I can blot out an entire architecture with the palms of my hand, and edit out the posse of schoolchildren who've just turned the corner at the far end of the corridor simply by raising a finger. For a fleeting moment I feel enormous and omnipotent. I am the base of a cone which contains my entire world, I am always the centre of attention.

Where the corridor turns, and begins yet another race towards infinity, (it does this twice before we're back where we started - the building is constructed around an inner courtyard) the way is blocked by another enormous head, again on a sculptor's block, again (propitiously and accidentally) facing west. I view him in profile, down the magisterial length of the corridor. Space seems to concertina. He shrinks my sense of myself, and I begin to feel like Alice down the rabbit-hole, Alice through the mirror.

Around the corner, in a little side room, stands another man - the one I saw at a distance on the river, or another just like him. Tan trousers, dark shirt this time, hand in pocket, head raised. Maybe he's not so blonde, maybe it's his day off, and maybe he's never been a waiter. He looks familiar, a sort of taller handsomer Norman Rosenthal in casual wear. He stands on a chunk of the tree trunk he's been carved from, even so he's bigger than I am. Everything about him is a bit over-large: I am not to scale. His eyes go over my head. I understand, suddenly, why short people are always so pushy - this small room doesn't feel big enough for both of us. He appears to be contemplating the view through the window behind me - green fields, crows pecking at the grass, brown arable land and trees, purply low-browed mountains for a backdrop. Jackdaws on the roof, magpies ferrying twigs for nesting material, small tubular green things poking obscenely through the loam. In the next room stands an unpainted, sprightly bunch of wooden narcissi thrusting out of a carved wooden pot which stands on a rough-hewn wood column. The flowers are nearly the right size. Around yet another corner stands a very small man on a knocked-together shelf. He's much smaller than the flowers. Drink me, reads the label on the bottle Alice has just picked up. Next, she'll probably turn into an oak tree.

There are other figures here. Jeff Wall once wrote that Stephan Balkenhol's figures looked like 'people who have recently come out of hospital after a serious illness, who cannot yet really return to active life, but who can get dressed normally and face things again.'2 A nice image. Now they look like normally pasty-faced Northern Europeans at the end of a long and wearying winter. Wall was writing in 1988, and so we have every right to have expected them to have recuperated by now. And if some of them are ill, it is an illness of a peculiar, mental nature. Often we catch Balkenhol's figures placed in the most precarious of circumstances, and wonder how, exactly, they've found themselves in such a fix.

There's the man in the Thames, and another perched high on a narrow sill set into a wall above a tobacconist's shop, somewhere in Germany. Then there's a man and a woman standing on a narrow beam which spans a corridor, above our heads, in Dublin's Irish Museum of Modern Art. They face in opposite directions, oblivious of the long drop to the floor below. How did they get there? Are they sentinels, or are they lovers who've just had a row, each contemplating their own, dramatic gesture of farewell? They're an irritating little couple; you feel like telling them to jump and be done with it.

My Family and Other Animals

And then there are the animals. Balkenhol is on dangerous ground here, when he sculpts a wan little fellow straddling the neck of an unconvincing giraffe, or a winsome idiot sitting contemplatively on the shell of a giant snail: someone suggested, cruelly, that this was Balkenhol's version of Rodin's Thinker. There's a turtle which reminds me of a novelty wooden ashtray that has somehow insinuated its way into my life, and a group of studiously crafted bears adopting bear-like poses; they're ever-so lifelike and you can't but admire how he's used a great hunk of some endangered hardwood in the production of each and every one. But if each of these small-scale bears weren't whittled atop half a telegraph pole of Lignum Vitae, they'd be indistinguishable from the carving my grandfather did in his garden shed; admirable in their way, skilled in execution, but without any further ambition than the pleasure involved in making them and the excuse they offered to get out of ear-shot of the rest of the family.

Balkenhol may well be interested in the strangeness of animals, and of the affection and fear that they can inspire in humans, and yet for the most part he does little more than illustrate these creatures, or lend them a benign if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-today anthropomorphism.

In the forest there are trees. Balkenhol carves his sculptures from woods. Woodcarving is an artisanal tradition and traditional artisans frequently chisel away at sculptures depicting the flora and fauna of their rural environment; such has been the way of country life for thousands of years, a way of harmony and and peace. Modern urban humanity, on the other hand, is by and large alienated from Nature, and, ipso facto, from itself. City-dwellers - and I guess Balkenhol's sculptures and relief-heads of men and women are urban types - are all fucked up. Modern art, too, is all fucked-up, fragmented and alienated. Balkenhol's work would seem to have taken a utopian stance of late, flirting with folklore and a sentimentalised nature. Jörg Johnen, in a catalogue essay on these recent works by Balkenhol, writes that 'casually, almost like an aside, the question of how we relate to nature is posed. It is answered with a declaration of love.'3

The unassuming normality of Balkenhol's solitary, slightly awkward caucasians, with their everyday clothes and pallid, bland expressions are all the more affecting for their generic loneliness and self-consciousness. Their faces, as yet untouched by life, reveal only a candid emptiness. It is as though they were waiting for life to happen to them. And if they are ill, alienated and lonely, perhaps without even realising that this is their fate, maybe a return to nature will cure them.

Look at the penguins. Johnen writes that 'The decision to use penguins was made quite simply because Balkenhol enjoys watching them, but also because they walk upright like human beings and live in large colonies.' Balkenhol's penguins are no less endearing than the real thing; they peer as though amazed at their own webbed feet, they stretch their stunted wings, they turn and strain and waddle on the plinths from which they have been carved. The plinths, of unequal height, and sometimes leaning at disconcerting angles, crowd the gallery space, adding to the naturalistic sense of a jostling community of birds perched in some wild terrain. Unlike his human figures, Balkenhol's penguins give the impression that they relate to one another, and they seem animated and alive. They are, like all his sculptures, rapidly carved and coloured-in, with yellow beaks, and black and white bodies. The evident rapidity of their execution adds to their liveliness. Also, it must be noted, they smell; the wawa wood emits a faint odour of fish. One can wander around and between them, and feel, for a moment, a part of their world.

There are no narratives in Stephan Balkenhol's work except the ones we choose to weave. At their best his figures are haunting and memorable. Our relationship to them is uneasy - they are both indifferent to our gaze and yet their condition as statutary makes them terribly vulnerable. His relief-figures and heads, with all their compressed foreshortening and distortions, the rough handling and splintered chisel-marks, set against an almost trompe l'oeil illusion of depth and the simple colouring of eyes, lips and skin, invoke feelings of tenderness and intimacy. Against the grain, these anonymous people affirm identity and individuality and the sense of belonging to a community, a culture and a time. And you're never alone with a penguin.

1. The two Balkenhol sculptures on the Thames were part of the Hayward 'Doubletake' exhibition, and were commissioned in association with the Artangel Trust.

2. Jeff Wall: Essay on Stephan Balkenhol, Kunsthalle, Bern, 1988

3. Irish Museum of Modern Art catalogue, 1991