A Virtual Reality Cosmos at the Serpentine

 Toby Upson visits the Serpentine to view Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s 'Alienarium 5'

 

I am a dreamy romantic; more drawn to Elio Pearlman (Call Me by Your Name) than Paul Atreides (Dune). That is, I like to be pushed into free flow through sublime affect, not guided to a beyond vis-à-vis spectacular narrative. It goes without saying, therefore, that I approached Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s current exhibition, Alienarium 5 at Serpentine’s south gallery, with a level of aesthetic reticence. Building upon Gonzalez-Foerster’s interest in science-fiction, as well as her previous exhibitions that question the psychological dimensions of one’s being, this exhibitonary environment, a gesamtkunstwerk perhaps, is billed as a site through which to ‘imagine possible encounters with extra-terrestrials.’ To reiterate, as someone not fond of the somewhat paradoxical composite, science-(and)-fiction, I find myself bracing teeth as I venture onto, into, and the beyond of (deep voice) Alienarium 5.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Alienarium, 2022. Produced by VIVE Arts and developed by Lucid Realities. Installation view, Alienarium 5 (Serpentine South, 14 April - 4 September 2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © The artist and Serpentine, 2022

Set up as a cosmos of sorts, a solar system formed without a singular divine bang, Alienarium 5 is a constellation of collaborations and alien-corporealities brought into an orbit. Laid out spherically, the Sci-Fi connotation is omnipresent and perhaps a little too contrived. Indeed, focusing on each of the works-come-gestures that form this speculative planetary system, I sense a clash between the more narrative-based and the more mysteriously toned pieces. For example, as I sojourn around the exhibition’s press view, there is a rather long queue for Alienarium, 2022, a multi-user Virtual Reality experience, with no one curiously peeping through the tiny eyeholes of La Planète close (vision), 2021. Perhaps this is a sign of the times. Who needs to work at piecing together what we are seeing, being told, or experiencing, when we can plonk ourselves on a bench, plugin, and be guided towards an expanded understanding of ‘how we might relate to one another when untethered from our physical form.’ Conceptually, I find this notion of untethering uncomfortable. My critique of post-humanist postulations for something otherwise comes from the lack of real multi-sensory encounters I see mediums like VR offering to bodies; and importantly, the affective labour these encounters can provoke in a body. Now that is a far larger conversation, one nuanced by formalities in artistic media as well as by wider socio-cultural factors. It is a conversation, however, perhaps best entered into with Gonzalez-Foerster’s collaborator Paul B. Preciado and others from the fields of Queer and Black Studies (Jack Halberstam and Saidiya Hartman to name two other beautiful theorists). 

 

But let's backtrack; get up off that critical stool and feel what Gonzalez-Foerster’s experimental art universe has to offer. I mean, after all, I am a fan of neon (Alienarium 5 (Neon), 2022), perfume (Alienflowers (holorium), 2022), and pearlescent exhibition guides. 

Alienarium 5 exhibition guides. 

I stand, sit, and then stroll on a soft crackling amoeba. The gravity holding Alienarium 5’s cosmos together, Planet Carpet (Uranus), 2022, runs throughout the inside of the Serpentine’s exhibition space. As the name suggests, this carpet piece is based upon an image of the planet Uranus; one rendered here in psychedelic shades of electric blue and LSD orange. Perforated with glitchy pops, or spores, these colours and the weave of the carpet, echo the pixelated world of Alienarium, 2022, and indeed the central force around which the exhibition revolves, Metapanorama, 2022.

 

Unlike the computery narrative of her VR works, Metapanorama, a 360-degree collage with a soundscape by Julien Perez, leaves more room for bodily meanderings. Working from the historical panorama - a mode of display that provides ‘an unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer’ - this self-referential wave juxtaposes grainy images of human and non-human beings, organic and architectural references. Aesthetically, the collage recalls Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with Perez’s added burps of fragmented Teletubby noise give this staged meta-world a sense of lightness; furthering its lyrical capaciousness. As a narrative tool, the panorama isn't new to Gonzalez-Foerster. In 2019, her panoramic collage, Volcanic Excursion (A Vision), exhibited at Secessions (Vienna), used images of human beings as starting point to lay out a cosmology of the artist’s role models, friends, and influences, establishing a field of meaning for her practice at that moment. Here, the panoramic mode functions in much the same way, and when paired with another work situated in the exhibition’s central chamber, Alienarium 5 (Bibliography), 2022,Metapanorama can be seen as a sun radiating life into different elements of the exhibition. 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Martial Galfione and Mike Gaughan, Metapanorama, 2022. Installation view, Alienarium 5 (Serpentine South, 14 April - 4 September 2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © The artist and Serpentine, 2022.

Gonzalez-Foerster's use of the collage as a device through which to create ‘extraordinary apparitions’ not only lies in the realms of the purely visual. Throughout Alienarium 5 an expanded notion of collage is used to bring differing historical references, ideas, forms of life and modes of artmaking in contact with one another; to allow new possible beings to be dreamt. To me, it seems fitting that this idea of a new possible and the display of such dreamings lies in proximity to the historical site of the Albertopolis - the antiquated name for this historical area of South Kensington; the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, where the spectacle of new other worlds was laid out for a hungry Victorian public to consume. 

 

Tracing that sense of voyeuristic wonder through art-history, Gonzalez-Foerster appears to take a stop at Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 1946-66. In what is my favourite piece/planet in the solar system of Alienarium 5, La Planète close (vision), 2021, riffs off the Duchampian tableau vivant, inviting, nay implicating me as a viewer in a surrealist multisensory quisicality. Peeping through one of the eye holes cut into a mute mint green MDF wall, I spy a bulge of bark sprouting forth from a blaze of auburn hair. At once glistening, luscious and smooth, the scene appears to conceal something writhing just off out of sight; something just or about to happen. The scene reminds me of some of Gonzalez-Foerster’s filmic works, Cinema (QM.15), 2016, or some of the music videos she has produced with Julien Perez, under the title Exotourisme. Without sound nor movement, the sense of liveness I gleam from my peeping arrives through the olfactory. Spritzed with a specially produced, Barnabé Fillion (Apra Studios), fragrance, Alienflowers (holorium), 2022, provides a heady musk of fire and bean, cedar and fern, bracken just crunched. As with most fragrances, there is something beyond comprehension, to this sensorial encounter. For Gonzalez-Foerster, the pairing of the perfume and closeted space are meant to provoke a sense of edge, a seductive invitation to imagine possibilities beyond the chromatic universe rendered throughout Alienarium 5. 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mélanie Gerbeaux and Barnabé Fillion (Arpa Studios) La planète close (vision), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Installation view, Alienarium 5 (Serpentine South, 14 April - 4 September 2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © The artist and Serpentine, 2022.

Leaving the Serpentine, one more work holds me. In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), 2022, a sculptural collaboration with Paul B. Preciado, sprouts forth from the soil of Hyde Park, twisting like a tree root and forming what looks like a butterfly or a scientific diagram of a female sex. As an anthropomorphic sculpture with a pearlescent pink and yellow sheen, we are told the queer stature is more than a marker for something past, but a ‘portal, a site for transmission and an invitation to engage across time and space.’ Caught up in the curves of the work, I notice its surface dotted with ornately speckled ladybirds. Gorgeous: the ambivalence of nature. It's romantic. And I am back in my comfort zone. 

Toby Upson

 

 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Alienarium 5

Serpentine South, London

until 4 September 2022

 

 In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), 2022