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Shock and oar as new show goes wayward at Hayward
Valentine Low, Evening Standard27.05.08
The Ideal Home Show it ain't. An exploding room, a house colliding with another, a mad axeman who has run amok in an empty room - it is the art show that takes the idea of home sweet home and turns it upside down and inside out.
Psycho Buildings at the Hayward Gallery even features a boating lake on an outside terrace 40 feet above street level.
The highlight of the gallery's 40th anniversary season, the exhibition includes a room exploding at the moment of some unspecified disaster. The work of a Cuban group called Los Carpinteros, it shows pieces of breeze block seemingly flying through the air alongside broken chairs and tables.
"What has happened here? I don't know," said Marco Castillo, one of the group. "There has been an impact - an explosion, a strong wind, something electrical."
Equally mysterious is what happened in Mike Nelson's installation To The Memory Of HP Lovecraft. The gallery is stripped bare, with huge holes gouged out of the plasterboard walls, as if an unseen beast - or perhaps mad axeman - had freed himself from the space by violently attacking the walls.
The artist has installed new doors and a hatch but the rest is the result of taking an axe to the gallery's real walls. "This piece plays with the Gothic fear of the unseen," said Ralph Rugoff, Hayward director.
An installation by Korean artist Do-Ho Suh, who moved from Seoul to the US when he was 29, shows a one-fifth scale model of his childhood home smashing into the apartment building where he first lived in New England. Furniture from his Korean home - meticulously made to scale by the artist - cascade into the US home. Mr Rugoff said: "The Wizard of Oz is a reference point - the cyclone blew Dorothy's house and landed it in Oz. He is very interesting about cultural displacement."
Other works include the boating pond built by the Austrian collective Gelitin on one of the gallery's sculpture terraces. "Visitors can go out and access a totally different type of space that they would not normally associate with the brutalist architecture of the South Bank," said Mr Rugoff.
The exhibition includes an enlarged version of the Rachel Whiteread installation of dolls' houses set in a darkened room, each lit from within. Originally called Village with 50 houses, it now has 200 and is called Place.
Mr Rugoff said: "We wanted to give people something that was very experiential, where a lot of the content of the work is your experience in it. Your response is important. It is not just looking at a painting on a wall and saying 'that's nice' - you are immersed in it, you are involved. The Hayward feels like a sculpture anyway, and this exhibition makes you aware of the space that you are in."
Reader views (1)
I hope there is a full time life guard to monitor the roof-top boating lake. A granny in Portsmouth was told by Council Offialdom this was a necessary requirement to continue a 24 year old tradition to have a 0.6m (2ft) deep paddling pool in her front garden.
- Terry G, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain
