Bill Woodrow: Skill, contemplation and alchemy

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David Eccleston finds shock, irony and much to admire in the current show at Burlington Gardens

This extensive and well-curated exhibition encourages contemplation, surely Bill Woodrow’s own intention.  My thoughts came round to Sarah Lucas,  whose show at the Whitechapel I recently visited.  Why?  After all, they were born more than half a generation apart: Woodrow in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and Lucas late enough to belong to the ‘young British artists’ of the early 1990s.  It was the use of bronze by both of them.

Both were well established in their careers before they used bronze:  expensive technology is made available by success.  But their use of the material could not be more different.  Lucas uses bronze as a marker of success, transmuting the defiant almost contemptuous nature of her earlier kapok-filled tights into something aspiring to the noble in the luxurious, highly polished metal.  In contrast, Woodrow is at the greatest possible pains to disguise the metal, producing the most skilful imitations of wood, plaster of Paris and, in one case, a piece of basket-work – that you have to tap to convince yourself.  This is a perfect, indeed perfected, example of skeuomorphism: reproducing one technology in the material of another.  This is a knowing, ironic transformation: Woodrow is asserting the value of artistic skill over the value of material – a comment on the alchemy that resides within the artist’s mind and hands.  These are concepts that would have found favour with Vasari, the first chronicler of art’s history, in the 16th century, but fell out of fashion with the advent of Conceptualism   in the latter half of the 20th century. 

This show has a power that goes way beyond art theory.  It is a potency that emerges from an exciting imagination rather than the unreconstructed desire to shock outrageously that was running alongside him in British sculpture at the time that many of these works were made.

Take Boeing (1983). This is undeniably shocking. High up on the wall of this generous exhibition space at Burlington Gardens (the RA’s new space for showing sculpture) is stuck a cut-out of the tail plane of an aircraft.  Three thin strands connect this to the stream of debris on the floor:  a car door, an automatic weapon, a burst suitcase, pools of red and black.  The desolation of mundane elements torn away irrevocably from their day-to-day function, such that we have all sensed in newsreels of plane crashes, but this makes us stand close to the desolation and jams us against the element of terrorism in the gun, and the vulnerability of machines in the car door.  The sense of helplessness is overwhelming.  This show is admirably curated by Edith Devaney, and I was a little puzzled by her reluctance to comment on this powerful piece except in terms of the evolution of the artist’s use of different materials.  Perhaps its very rawness unnerves the expert.  Nonetheless, this is not the flung faeces shock of the ‘young British artists’.  The shock is not born out of outrage, but of despondency.

You can be more quietly, academically despondent in the face of Regardless of History (1998).  This is bronze used for its weight and authority.  It is a one-tenth-scale maquette and even though it stands little more than a metre high it has impressive gravitas.  A tree that might have escaped from Waiting for Godot runs its branching roots over a book that sits atop the bust of a man whose passive features tell of a struggle lost.  Then the roots reach further down and tie the whole construct to the plinth on which it stands, and call even that icon of permanence into doubt.  What of civilization will ultimately remain?

These are doubts that are appropriate to our time and correspond closely to doubts that began to emerge in America in the 1830s, and were expressed vividly in paint and canvas in Thomas Cole’s ‘The Course of Empire’ series.  Apocalyptic worries that were soon to be borne out in the Civil War and have periodically emerged in the West ever since.  The reference back to Boeing may be no more than an unintended curatorial apposition, but it is pungent nonetheless.

All the same, these concepts are beautifully balanced, both by the artist and the curator, with a lively and entertaining sense of humour.  In Untitled (1979), part of the Fossil series, a telephone appears to emerge out of primeval rock (skilfully disguised plaster of Paris).  For me, this was more Salvador Dalí than Michelangelo’s Prisoners (as the catalogue suggests), but then this is so much the spirit of fertile ambiguity that Woodrow engenders.  There was also the playful suggestion that the telephone dial was offering us a means of communicating directly with the infinity of pre-history.

So back to the Sarah Lucas comparison.  Art is not a competition, and often a levity of approach can be extremely effective – Marcel Duchamp  and Salvador Dalí  come to mind.  Nonetheless, the spread of Woodrow’s interests and means of expression take him above the ordinary.  There is so much in the show.  Be prepared not to like it all; there is more there that you will.