Geoffrey Farmer’s ‘fun and mysterious’ parade

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Rosalind Ormiston encounters a compelling puppet parade inspired by a German philosopher and a second-hand book sale

A short sentence, ‘Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman’, from the 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), was a starting point for Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer’s body of work ‘The Surgeon and the Photographer’, at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London (until 28 July 2013), his first major exhibition in the UK. It is part of a trilogy of works, ‘The Last Two Million Years’, 2007; and ‘Leaves of Grass’, 2012.

In 2009, Farmer, born in 1967 in Vancouver, heard a rumour that a well-known second-hand bookshop in the city was going to close. He visited the store and purchased several hundred books. It led to the formation of ‘The Surgeon and the Photographer’, 365 hand-made puppet-like figures –one for each day of the year – clothed in a variety of fabrics, with multiple faces, limbs, accessories and other appendages, collage created through images cut out from the books he bought, and glued on to the puppet frames. As he explains:

One day while flipping through a book there I had a simple thought about its relationship to my hand. I thought perhaps this relationship might also apply to the images it contained. That is when I started to construct the hand puppets.

At the Barbican the puppets form a long procession that winds through The Curve exhibition space. A multiplicity of random sounds are relayed through speakers, which seem to animate the procession figures with a cough or sneeze, bangs, crashes, or voices talking and other sounds, as though they are making a noise. At the same time the sounds are relevant or irrelevant to a video montage visible on a large wall screen at the end of the procession. Look in my Face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell… is a newly commissioned, computer controlled montage of thousands of images, displayed by predetermined categories and chance, created from scans of the books’ made before their being cut up to create the collage figures.

The shape of The Curve (it runs round the semi-circular back of the Barbican Concert Hall, hence its name), means that when one enters the exhibition hall the far end is not in sight. This is perfect for Farmer’s ‘procession’ of puppet characters, positioned at eye level, that seem to be walking forward to meet the visitor or assemble at a distant point; the front leaders are not visible to those at the back. Some figures are in large groups, others are spread out on separate modular plinths; or gathered in smaller troupes along the curved space; or placed as singular plinth displays. The feeling created by so many photographs of faces, famous, infamous and unknown, staring out as one passes down the parade, is of being in the presence of people, not inanimate objects, especially with the addition of random sounds. It is fun and mysterious at the same time.

Lydia Yee, curator of ‘Geoffrey Farmer: The Surgeon and the Photographer’ collaborated closely with the artist to produce this show. The grouping of characters in the gallery space holds interest. Yee comments:

We had a lot of dialogue about how the space works. Geoffrey wanted to create a different rhythm in the space. It is something between intuitive and planned… [At the beginning of the procession] there are demonstrations, social protest. Certain types are put together and the figures have more elements: lots of eyes, lots of noses, many facets to their faces. In the middle [of the procession],it is more a feel of sculpture, of objects and artefacts, ethnographic objects – a Picasso painting in one of them. At the end it is breaking apart, with smaller clusters, social groupings and individuality.

Geoffrey Farmer cites the influences that reflect in his work: the element of chance in the works of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Marcel Duchamp; and collage and assemblage in the works of Hannah Hoch and Robert Rauschenberg. His exhibition is part of the Barbican’s ‘Dancing around Duchamp’ season, a series of events continuing until June 2013, which celebrate and explore the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). It is a must-see, and it’s free.