The pigeon sits high up on its perch, tethered to a drooping cord, utterly immobile. Occasionally it shits. Far below, its droppings pool and dry, resolving themselves into a spotlit mountain of guano. Contained within a circle of blue light, the bird’s silhouette falls like a cameo portrait upon a far wall. More shit falls. The mountain grows. The exhibition measures itself not in hours or days, but in a mini-Olympus of excrement.
In the right quantities, bird droppings are a valuable commodity, as a fertilizer, and as an ingredient in the manufacture of gunpowder. Tom Woolner’s plastic pigeon, however, shits paint. If we’re feeling Modern, we might interpret his bird as a modest or even unconscious Abstract Expressionist who replaces Jackson Pollock’s macho ejaculations of pigment with an undiscriminating and very domestic act of defecation, but I suspect the artist is more interested in its classical role as messenger. Bound to its perch, this pigeon can deliver only one communication, and in only one medium. Time ticks on and the shit accrues, while value and meaning are held in abeyance.
Entitled A Monument to Averages (2007), Woolner’s installation described a place in which all drama and urgency had been suspended, as though some faceless, weary god had put the world on pause. Here and there in the long gallery space, tall wobbly walls rose from the ground, their tea-red polystyrene bricks held together with polyurethane foam that frothed and bubbled like cream cheese squeezed through clenched teeth. Pierced with holes, and ragged around the edges, it was never quite clear whether these structures were in the process of being made or unmade. We might imagine them as the buckled ruins of a prewar housing terrace, or the cartoon aftermath of a cartoon bombing, or else a work in progress, awaiting completion by lackadaisical builders who’ve sloped off for a cigarette and a bacon sandwich. No matter where these walls may have existed on the spectrum of creation and destruction, their purpose was, in the end, just to hold themselves together, just to cling on to signification and form. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. Woolner’s sculptures demonstrated that this might apply to objects, too.
Near the gallery door, above the first fragment of brickwork, hung a square metal rail from which were suspended a couple of flat, plastic clouds, their white forms bound by a thick, comic book-like black line. A motor whirred, and they pursued each other along the rail’s length in a series of apathetic judders. Fated to never catch up, we might compare their efforts to those of Sisyphus, were it not for their lethargy, and fact that little fluffy clouds are unlikely candidates for satanic torment. Instead, they seemed to speak of a kind of blithe acceptance of the fact that the world is sometimes boring, or even pointless. Best, under these circumstances, to hunker down and carry on. Someday, after all, the weather may change.
If Woolner’s walls and clouds had the schematic, melancholy feel of fiberglass fittings from a below-par theme park, so too did the ceiling-scraping tree at the terminus of his show. Constructed from cardboard and covered in wood veneer plastic, its leafless cylindrical branches reached up to a non-existent sun. There’s no growth here, and no budding or blooming, only the perpetuation of a single moment. While Woolner’s show drew, stylistically at least, on the work of European sculptors such as Urs Fischer, it was in truth a very British affair; like British sitcoms from Hancock’s Half Hour to I’m Alan Partridge, a meditation on the feeling that life is happening elsewhere. But while Hancock and Partridge raged against stasis, Woolner is almost serene. For sculpture to keep it together is, in this shit-spattered world, perhaps drama enough.
Tom Morton
