Tim Shaw: Casting a Dark Democracy
Words by Louisa Elderton
I wander through the quiet streets of Kensington on a warm spring evening, raising my face to the aqua blue sky to absorb the day’s last sun rays. Sleepy blossom slowly cascades to the ground, to make way for summer leaves. The scene is still, picturesque and beautiful, and is not one that prepares me - either mentally or emotionally - for the stark imagery that Tim Shaw presents in his recent show Casting a Dark Democracy. Riflemaker Gallery presented the work for one night only (well, actually it has been shown twice, but let’s not be pernickety) on 20th April, at the Kenneth Armitage Foundation, the site of the artist’s two year residency which commenced in 2007. The catalyst for many of Shaw’s works come from images of war and conflict represented through the media gaze. His work can be interpreted as a form of political protest, about the Iraq war (and indeed war in general), and the way in which our counties are governed and impose government on others. He examines the dark side of man’s consciousness and the corrosive extremities of violence and hate.
The first work I encounter is Middle World, which was created over seven years (1989-1995), and is literally positioned in the centre of the house. The sculpture is reminiscent of a gothic altar piece and the visual plane is positioned to meet the viewer’s gaze (I watch a woman press her forehead into the work’s side grooves, as if sharing thought waves, connecting with the image, soaking up its essence through osmosis). We are confronted with an array of figures occupying this plane - 70 to be exact, which have been made from both bronze and terracotta. Surreal and fantastical, they play out an apocalyptic scene overshadowed by a church façade which is bound by chains, containing the figure of Christ on the cross and an Angel of Death, bordered by walls composed of tanks and skeletons.
Is this Shaw’s vision of our day of Judgement? The continuum of time dissolves to disorder past, present and future, resulting in a mesh of Vulcan bombers, satellites, and Pagan and Christian symbolism; the dead rise to walk with the living, an incarnation of hybrid monsters, devils and harlequins. Beneath this cracked clay surface extends an environment of stalactites where calcium carbonate drips to form a landscape of inhospitable daggers. There is no going back, no going underground, only perpetual hell on Earth’s surface. The Angel of Death presides over the scene, supplementing God, to judge and damn; it seems we have been abandoned to face a world where the horrors of man play out forever. We are posed with the question: ‘To where say we pray now?’.
The answer is to be found in the next room. Casting a Dark Democracy (the name from which the show draws its title) is a staggering 17 ft large scale installation, that is, frankly, terrifying. A hooded, cloaked apparition presides over the space, elevated on a wooden box. This is an oxymoronic Christ-like figure, whose outstretched arms receive worship from an empty, desolate room, where evidence of death and struggle remains. Its conception was in reaction to the outrage at the British government’s decision to join the USA in its occupation of Iraq. It draws from the image of the hooded and wired Abu Ghraib prisoner who was reportedly told that he would be electrocuted if he fell from the box. The leaked image of this prisoner shocked the world and Shaw has reappropriated it to indicate the horrors of which man is capable, underlined by the relationship of the costume to the Ku Klux Klan.
This stark vision is multi-sensory, with smoke billowing in the air, and the sound of footsteps, or even a slow, heavy heart beat resonating through the room. Frantic scrabbling handprints mark the walls, as if smeared in blood before people were dragged underground. Phrases including ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘Where is Democracy’ are barely legible, but seems to posit the cries of the people who scream protests on deaf ears. Electrical wires coil on the ground, from which the figure grows and accumulates energy from damned man. This beast is formed of steel and barbed wire over which heavy black polythene is draped, stretched and torn to reveal but a skeleton with no moral substance. His shadow is cast as an oil pool in his form; thick and opaque like the blackened gaze of Narcissus. In this shadow of thick and glossy oil, Shaw says he saw “a vision of spilt blood flowing across land…there is an inextricable link between oil, life-force and conflict”. The viewer’s own reflection merges with that of this hooded Angel of Death, an indication that the Western World’s need for oil, and the conflicts that arise accordingly, implicates us all.
Man on Fire (2007), was influenced by an image of a soldier throwing himself from a tank, his body engulfed by flames. Again, the materials of oil and polythene are utilised, and there is a powerful sense of movement in the work. It is almost as if we are witness to this man extinguishing himself in a pool of oil, or even his own blood. The flames billow behind him and there is an agony to the work that is reminiscent of Hellenistic sculpture. Inscribed on the plinth is the question, “What God of love inspires such hatred in the hearts of men?”. There is a nihilism to Shaw’s philosophy that is stark in its abandonment of hope.
The role that shadow plays in the show is profound. Each work casts its own dark afterthought so that the images exist in the realms of both the physical and ethereal. The shadow becomes a metaphor for the dark democracy cast by the government during the Iraq War, as well as the concept of being trapped between two worlds, that of life and death.
Ultimately, Shaw’s images are politically powerful and exist as forms of direct protest that we rarely see in contemporary art today. The work is ambiguous, and implicates everyday man as much as modern government. His use of interesting materials creates textural works that seem to breath with an essence of both life and death. He conjures realms of purgatory, where mutated beings will exist in limbo for eternity. The exhibition is timely with our troops’ current withdrawal from Iraq; the works could be seen to represent the culmination of the past six years. This is a brave exhibition that gives the voice back to the people, after the government ignored the cries of millions not to go to war. No matter what your political beliefs, this is a show not to be missed.
Posted Tue, May 05, 2009