Dilston Grove, Southwest corner of Southwark Park, London, SE16 2UA
Rating:
By Sally O’Reilly
Posted: Tue Oct 16 2007
The ups and downs of the relationship between three generations of men finds an amusingly apt form in Andrew Kötting’s ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’. One large inflatable sculpture bears a photograph of the artist’s dead father, another of his grandfather – so that’s deadad and deadad’s deadad – and, on 65 monitors, we see these rise to their full height in places of relevance to the family’s history. Some locations are historiographical in nature: the family grave in Wuppertal and a Furoese homestead where deadad was born, for instance. Others represent the relational aspects of the family, of breakdowns in communication and other human foibles we must unconditionally accept. The video of an inflating deadad in a landscape subtitled ‘of Pyrenean pastoral and my life he could never understand’ manages to convey in ten words a whole chapter of misunderstandings and blinkered arguments.
Throughout the videos, Kötting avoids being formulaic, occasionally inflating the deadads inside a car or building for slapstick effect, and shifting the register of reference in the subtitles from the circumstantial to the behavioural to the psychological. The project feels literary in scope and indeed the subtitles do accrue into a poem of sorts. One group of videos revisits a holiday in Mexico, where the family encountered day of the dead festivities, and this provides a key to appreciating the celebratory aspect of Kötting’s own project, but far from being nostalgic autobiography, this is an at times brutally open evaluation of an apparently difficult man.
1 comment
Once again a very strong exhibition in this fantastic space - don't miss!