Demo: art about art

Entering the Kunsthalle Zurich for the Phyllida Barlow exhibition, you may think you are in the wrong place, or maybe you got the wrong exhibition date. The entrance corridor seems to be under construction, maybe having the walls retouched, with yellow tapes all over the floor. As you step inside the gallery, the feeling of being in a building site remains. And please watch your head! You are indeed inside Barlow’s installation.

The British artist has been working with sculptural interventions for about five decades, dealing mainly with utilitarian materials such as wooden batons, construction panels, foam panels, cardboard, plaster, cement and crates. For Demo, the title of the exhibition, she builds a kind of a broken Jungle Gym playground that takes over the whole white cube space of the gallery’s first floor, from floor to ceiling. A lot of fragments and pieces are docked inside this unstructured wooden skeleton. In this chaotic assemblage, you may also find some deconstructed pianos made of cardboard, and not for nothing: they might be a reference to Rebeca Horn’s mechanized sculpture, the upside down suspended piano, Concert for Anarchy (1990). Are the other forms also linked to other artworks? Maybe the curved brown paper tower, in the corner, is a reference to Richard Serra corten steel sculptures. And what about the bobbins? This one I could not figure out. If you do, please let me know. After making your way through the structure, two big white balls are suspended from the ceiling, like pendulums. If one could move then, even though they are made of polystyrene, I am pretty sure of their potential to destroy the whole installation. Thankfully, they seem to be frozen.

The exhibition continues on the third floor, where there is a wood stage covering half the floor of the (again) big white (and cold) cube, the place where “the outside world must not come in”, as said Brian O’Doherty in “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space” (1986). The empty stage installed in the room reinforces the presence of the huge white walls. Is likely to be reminded of Yves Klein’s immaterial exhibition Le Vide (The Void), when in 1958 he completely emptied the Iris Clert Gallery except for a single plain display case. However, Barlow breaks the white cube by making tubular holes on the walls (about ten of 15cm each), through which visitors, as voyeurs, can peep into another place where real construction is happening. White walls are being rebuilt, materials lying on the floor; there are dust and noise. From time to time, you may even come across some workers.

Barlow plays with O’Doherty’s theory, as she does not really bring anything from the outside world. The whole installation deals with art itself, be it works of art referenced or space itself made art. Nevertheless, she shows everything from inside out, we could say. In this sense, the exhibition acts not on the subtraction of the white cube space, but acts exactly on the sum of it, making the white cube the biggest element in the work. Phyllida Barlow uses art to talk about art, an art that is in ruins, or under demolition, just to mention the title prefix, Demo.

Giovanna Bragaglia