An exhibition by George Tobias. Tate Modern Made Out of Books - and other works of Art.
[ID: screenshot of an image in an iPhone album. A white man with a bald head holds a printed protest sign, over which is superimposed green hand-drawn lettering. The sign now reads ‘PLAYIN WITH SUGAR'…’
Private view: Friday 14th October, 6-9pm
Exhibition continues until 22nd October. Mon-Sat 12-6pm
For his fourth outing at the Horse Hospital, George Tobias has made the Tate Modern out of books.
The exhibition’s title, Playing with Sugar, alludes to the legacy of the 19th century sugar merchant Henry Tate, founder of Tate Galleries as well as Tate & Lyle, Britain's largest cane sugar brand. The Tate Galleries were incidentally built on money made from cane sugar and subsequently from an industry that was founded on slave labour and maintained later by the exploitation of indentured labourers. Tobias’ sculpture, Tate Modern Made Of Books, uses the iconic building, painted red, as a kind of symbol of this history. The work on show in Playing With Sugar, in a quite literal sense, plays with this history, teases it out; it calls into question the sugar-coated, gift-shop art institution.
In the face of oversized buildings we instinctively feel, at some level, a kind of quiet dread. Standing at the entrance to Tate Modern a few years ago, George Tobias experienced a kind of deja vu, in which he had the distinct feeling he had seen the ramp and the chimney of the iconic power station before. Though he couldn’t initially place the memory, Tobias eventually connected it with his trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum a couple years earlier, where he had seen a similar ramp and a similar chimney at Crematorium I. That ultimate symbol of death, Auschwitz, in bitter irony, survives not only its victims but its survivors.
But the centerpiece of this exhibition, Tate Modern Made of Books is not deathly and dark, but humorous. The sculpture itself is large, chunky, awkward. When we look at this simulacrum of Tate Modern, we feel, in every deviation from this adherence to the original, an uncomfortableness, or a soft frustration. We want to see the huge building perfectly rendered inf ront of us, this is after all, what the title of the work promises us. But Tobias is not interested in promises, or reproduction for likeness’ sake, he is interested in provoking discomfort, irritation, rebelion.
The bravado of its claim (‘this, here, is the Tate Modern made out of books!’) and the ad hoc nature of the execution has all the whimsy of the bricoleur, the handy-man, who, with the intent of creating an ideal, makes do with his finite resources:
‘…who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman’…
- Levi Strauss
In this playfulness, this charming folly, in which Tate Modern, Penguin classics, Mao Zedong’s The Little Red Book, pulp novels, Tate & Lyle, the economic history of sugar and Auschwitz all are components, all assembled and disassembled all parts of the provocateur’s repertoire, of the bricoleur’s tool-kit.
The drawings on drafting paper, which surround the red book sculpture, bring to mind the blackboard drawings of Beuys or Twombly, both in their playfulness and freedom. On the other hand they are also, quite literally the blueprint of the sculpture they encircle, which creates a kind of faux-industrial relationship between plan and product.
Tobias’ fascination with death, his tarrying with the negative, is not reserved to his Jewish identity and the inheritance of the Shoah, but is more so wrapped in the personal experience of burying two life-partners. Tobias has described his practice as ‘using shock tactics to scare away death.’ There is in this work, a correlative made between the trauma of surviving the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the inheritance of Auschwitz. Death becomes, in the work, a master signifier, a penultimate authority, shape shifting from The Corporate, The Brand, Capital, History, Auschwitz. These ‘facisms’. But what is especially remarkable is that the polemics against this master signifier, take on a playfulness, they are a kind of ‘camping’ of death.
“Impolite, imprecise and flagrantly disobedient of normative values, George Tobias’s things – made from clay, found materials, imprints and reclaimed debris – make meaning out of waste, revel in the ill-formed, the unfinished and the rough. Out of this concerted crudity, something precious and perfect emerges. It deserves to be seen. It unsettles, unnerves and unbalances us.”
- Professor Tamar Garb (Head of the Department of History of Art, at University College London)