After a circuit of Heather Phillipson's corporeal Baltic Centre exhibition, Garageland reviewer Iris Priest leaves the art behind for a guided tour of Newcastle's backstreets.
I
am sat with three strangers, all of us deeply inclined on pillows. My spot is
still warm from the previous occupant and their lingering body heat stirs a
simultaneity of comfort and unease in me.
This is an apt beginning to Heather
Phillipson’s exhibition at the Baltic centre Yes, surprising is existence in the post-vegetal
cosmorama a show that oscillates between states of bodily and intellectual uncertainty,
playfully testing the boundaries of self and other and occasionally obsessing
over issues of personal hygiene and love.
On
a screen that looks down from the angle of a dentist's poise-lamp Immediately
and for a short time balloons weapons too-tight clothing worries of all kinds (2013)
begins with a frenetic kicking of legs and fast, heavy breathing. The
perspective of the film – that of the owner of the legs – immediately
implicates us in the struggle to get out and to get up, the difficult birth
from dreaming into the real world.
Once
the covers are kicked free we are met with a celebratory 'Happy Birthday'
jingle coupled with cheesy balloon animations. Phillipson thanks us for coming 'on such a crap day.' Her
language is poetic and intimate: 'you must have made your way through tight
passages to get here.' Indeed we have, literally entering the gallery space
through a narrow, tilting passageway reminiscent of the entrances to a
fairground ghost ride.
Once
inside we become immersed in a demented post-internet world of excess, tangent
and faltering perspective. Phillipson's hand-held film snippets are collaged
with found footage of maps, TV weathermen, romantic muzak, lo-fi
post-production effects, canned laughter, and pink subtitles that skip across
the screen (remarks from ‘Dad’ to ‘Reindeers’ to ‘Carbohydrates’). Meanwhile,
her authorial monologue accompanies us all the way through the journey.
The
topic segues to finger toothbrushes, introducing the theme of oral hygiene and
the mouth as a boundary – a borderline between interiority and exteriority and
a site for the propagation of germs and words. But the work is in no way
burdened by serious reference; rather it is suffused with humour and
playfulness. It feels as though we are sharing in a somatic flux, a plasticity
of visual, audio and kinaesthetic sensation.
'Love
is the theme and everyone is in it ... You're in it' Phillipson tells us in her
characteristically flat tone. The show is laced with the theme of love. In love
we inhabit contradictory positions. It solidifies our feeling of being a self
enamoured with a separate other, but it also confuses and blurs those
boundaries through the interpenetration of bodies and ideas, and so we find
ourselves back at the mouth: 'What happens in your mouth might not stay in your
mouth ... other people's tongues for example'.
 |
| Niki de Saint Phalle, Hon, 1966 |
Exiting
the intimate, womb-like cinema space of Immediately… I realise with a
barely suppressed giggle that we've slipped out between two gigantic banana
legs, the oval exit/entrance garlanded by gaudy plastic flowers, cleaning
accessories and hula hoops. These monstrous, luminescent legs are evocative of
Niki de Saint Phalle's Hon (1966) at The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, but
in a reversal of audience's interaction with Hon (in which visitors entered
the gallery between the giantess's legs) Immediately… excretes the
viewer outwards into the gallery and world beyond.
A
yellow speedboat rides on a wave of bottled water. The film ha!ah! (2013)
is projected on the boat's splash-screen. I sit in the passenger seat as we
embark on a virtual slalom through water slides, mouths, doorways and dark
passages. Phillipson perforates the accompanying narrative with blanks 'Your
mouth provides the perfect environment for ______ to grow,' and listening, I
begin to suspect that language itself is the 'infectious disease' passed from
person to person and body to body.
In
A is to D what E is to H (2011-13) we are invited upon another jarring,
decentred journey; a fragmented love story played out through the spaces of
language, body and architecture. The inside of the yellow-painted Peugeot (on
which the film is projected) smells of car shampoo, transporting me back to my
nineteen-eighties childhood and the claustrophobia of long road journeys and
family holidays.
'I'm
trying to think about my mouth' Phillipson tells us 'It doesn't wear out
even if I use it.” In the projection the mouth becomes a portal,
transporting us between memories, and real and illusory geographic locations.
Phillipson's narration overlays words or phrases until they become
interchangeable for one another: “French Cuisine” for “French
Kissing”, “overdone” for “half-baked”. Taste sensations and
poetic metaphors turn words into matter and bodily inhabitation into language
until there seems no distinction between aural and oral, between language and
experience.
Phillipson's
twelve step audio visual tour Cardiovascular Vernacular (as in 'it's time
for my regular cardiovascular vernacular') (2013) takes the viewer on
another phantasmagoric journey, this time out of the Baltic and into the city.
'Well' our tour guide/invisible fitness instructor/imaginary friend declares as
we survey the view from outside 'here we are in the world. Behind us is some
art. Ahead is everything else'. Phillipson guides us on a meandering, layered
excursion through Newcastle's backstreets. 'Just relax your grip on the world
for a while ... on real and made-up memories, on material things ... on what
you know of your own instep and heartbeat'.
The
intermittent bells and dings of the smart phone, along with Phillipson's
musings on posture, chance encounters and 'how to walk' become like
meditational aids, soliciting consideration of what is voluntary and
involuntary, whether consciousness has a borderline, where we are and why we
are. By the end of Phillipson's 52 minute 'work out' her intimate semi-stream-of-consciousness
leaves me feeling thoroughly exercised in the art of becoming and not becoming
and I'm left adrift in a strange and exquisite sense of disembodiment.
Iris Priest
Baltic Centre, Gateshead NE8 3BA
21 June - 22 September 2013
Images: Colin Davison
Yes, surprising is existence in the post-
vegetal cosmorama – installation view at
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Courtesy the artist and BALTIC.
Gorgeous!
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