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Walking in the Mind

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Hayward Gallery
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It's worth Walking in the Mind

 

Bejewelled Hare: by Charles Avery

Renowned for the entertainment value of its summer shows, the Hayward Gallery has excelled itself this year with a Disneyworld-like exhibition of “walk-through” installations by well-chosen international contemporary artists.

As you approach the Hayward, a sudden fairytale atmosphere seems to descend on the South Bank.

You will double-take the trees on the esplanade. Their trunks have been covered in red cloth with white polka dots, like the tops of cartoon mushrooms.

This is a work by the 90-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has spent much of her life in mental institutions painting dots — “I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures,” she says.

This is a good introduction to the trippy work to come.

Another nine artists have created spaces that symbolise their overactive or overwrought minds, in which objects and artworks are scattered like thoughts, from random fantasies to well-planned theories.

There’s a small gingerbread-like cottage by Yoshitomo Nara, a legendary Japanese artist who makes childlike paintings of cutesy characters derived from Japanese comic books.

Thomas Hirschhorn, the ubiquitous German anti-capitalist who makes everything out of brown wrapping tape, has here constructed, remarkably, a whole series of caves in this material.

The British artist Keith Tyson is exhibiting a pile of his Studio Wall Drawings, each of which appears to contain a witty fleeting thought.

A younger British artist, Charles Avery, shows he is going from strength to strength with more works from his project The Islanders, last seen in the Tate Triennial, in which he imagines a fantasy archipelago full of philosophical symbols and modernist references.

There’s a problem with a show with a theme this broad, as demonstrated by an excess of guff in the gallery guide — Hirschhorn wants to “create a dialogue or a confrontation in the mind of the other person”, but doesn’t every work of art kinda do that?

There’s plenty to criticise about the art — the holier-than-thou Leftwing politics of a Hirschhorn always makes me feel I am being hectored by a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

And the jury should still be out on Jason Rhoades’s messy arrangements of junk, with surgical bins, laptops and bits of porn.

Yet the curators have pulled off an exhibition that will work as the perfect introduction to contemporary art for neophytes or sceptics, while also describing one of the more intangible phenomena in art today: artists who elaborate personal imaginative worlds over many works and years, and who want you to feel you are inside their artworks.

Until 6 September. Information: 0871 663 2519; www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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