As with most of my regular weekend gallery outings, I had made a plan to see one of London’s most popular exhibitions, in this case the National Gallery’s Vemeer and Music. On the way in, my trusty museum-hopping amigo E noticed the poster for ‘Saints Alive by Michael Landy’. ‘Is that on now?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ ‘Oh yes I heard about this, it was recommended to me by someone at work.’ So after a quick tern around the decidedly mediocre Vemeer, we headed into the main building on the hunt for this mysterious exhibition that had apparently been on since May.
It wasn’t too hard to find. Walk in through the main doors
and listen for the distant sounds of thumping and crashing. Queuing in the
middle of one of the ornate gilded galleries, the crashing of metal on metal is
not exactly what you expect to hear in these hallowed halls. But that’s exactly
what ‘Saints Alive’ is all about.
Michael Landy has been working with the National Gallery as
their artist in residence since 2009. In his time there, he became inspired by
the imagery of the martyrs that runs as a theme across so many centuries of
art. Specifically he was interested in the idea of them destroyed themselves to
save others and lead them into salvation. So how do you get the average gallery
visitor to respond with that kind of abstract concept? Well, you make it big,
you make it noisy, you make it fun.
Landy’s ‘Saints’ are not the quiet passive figures of the
paintings in the gallery- they tear at their faces, they hit themselves, they
shudder and swing. Imagery from famous artworks is crossed with kinetic wheels
and pulleys to create larger than life de-constructed statues of metal and
fibre glass. At each sculpture, there is a foot-pedal which visitors stomp to
animate the sculptures while the attendants look on armed with ear plugs
against the clanging art works.
There are so many levels you can enjoy the artworks on.
Personally, I love the fact that the sculptures are literally destroying
themselves. Now that the show has been open for so many months, the sculptures
are scratched and tattered, which I think makes them even more interesting.
What’s really important here, aside from the fact that the
art is fascinating, is that Landy has actually managed to pull of exactly what
an artist in residence is meant to do: engage audiences in a new way with the
collections. The artworks are accessible and funny: walking around the gallery
no one is standing in quiet contemplation. People are giggling, smiling,
stomping on the pedals and pointing as they notice new aspects. I particularly
enjoyed St. Lucy’s disembodied eyes giggling wildly on their plate. Visitors
are then invited to find the source paintings in the gallery and look at them
in a new light.
So well done National Gallery and Michael Landy for such a
fun, interesting, irreverent, noisy, challenging installation. I can only hope
other nationals in London will take a cue from this! A little birdy tells the
Ministry that the Science Museum is developing an exhibition on robots
hopefully in the same vein mixing big questions and entertainment to think
differently about our collections. More on that shortly…
'Saint's Alive' is a free exhibition at the National Gallery running until November 24th.
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