Art

I’ve spent a pleasant morning sniffing spices, staring at skylines, slip-sliding down a chute and messing about in boats – without ever leaving the Hayward Gallery. This is the way of many contemporary art extravaganzathons, in which rolling down grassy knolls or spiralling through galleries on breakneck slides takes precedence over the act of looking at art. But until museums resort to yelling ‘Roll up, roll up!’ – for a spot of toy-duck shooting or whacking the rat, perhaps – there is a lot to be said for exhibitions that promote interactivity and sensual enjoyment over the usual cerebral one-upmanship.

Take Ernesto Neto’s amorphous oversized body-double installation in the entrance. It’s made from sheer Lycra that’s been stretched over a wooden skeleton and has dangly appendages that are filled with a clovesy, chai-smelling pot pourri and droop down to head height, waiting to be sniffed. These human nosebags make for a ridiculous but agreeable out-of-body activity that’s part science exhibit, part coffee-shop experience – the let down is it’s disappointingly similar to all of Neto’s previous output. Or why not try out Austrian group Gelitin’s boating lake on one of the gallery’s outdoor terraces high above the ground, complete with tiny, pitching rowing boats reminiscent of Edward Lear’s nonsensical ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’?

 
As fun as it may sound, summer offering ‘Psycho Buildings: Artists Take On Architecture’ isn’t just for kids. This art theme park has, the Hayward claims, adult themes and concerns at its core, rather than traditional thrills and spills. And ‘Psycho Buildings’ is not, in fact, a politically incorrect term for mental institutes, but the title of a 1988 book by German artist Martin Kippenberger for which he compiled photographs of bizarre houses or half-built oddities that neither worked as shelter nor structure. Such anomalous edifices are, according to curator Ralph Rugoff, ‘bumps on the rectilinear surfaces of the city’ and ‘antidotes to the seamless sameness of the built environment’. The catalogue also provides a helpful glossary with a few precedents of artist-made ‘Psycho Buildings’ including Salvador Dalí’s fishy undersea grotto made for the 1939 World’s Fair, Robert Smithson’s ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’ and a chocolate-covered room by Ed Ruscha.

While examples before the twentieth century are not forthcoming, anyone who has been to the Alhambra in Granada or the Forbidden City in Beijing might argue to backdate this phenomenon of mind-altering and psychologically charged architecture. You could feasibly add all religious structures to the list of ‘psycho buildings’ – given the powerful shifts in social and spiritual order experienced once you’re through the door of a church, synagogue or mosque – or you could deem such structural witnesses to trauma as Auschwitz or the World Trade Center as the ultimate in thought-provoking and politically pregnant spaces. Anyway, what’s more psycho than the concrete gangways of the Southbank Centre at night? It’s a shame that so little of this rich possibility filters through to the actual exhibition, but beneath the dodgem-ride funfair feel there is an interesting undercurrent of violence and memory to be found.

One of the best moments is the immersive and unexpected crêpe paper maze by Michael Beutler, where colourful, but hole-ridden, pummelled mesh walls have the distressed, exotic look of a Rio shanty or a Marrakech souk. If this German artist’s work is unfamiliar, then Mike Nelson’s is fast becoming an aesthetic all of his own. Thankfully, he’s not raided any car-boot sales for his latest creepy gallery intervention. He relies instead on a similar kind of enacted violence to Beutler, albeit in a more menacing, axed environment upstairs. The walls are scarred and ripped as if by some beast let loose, but Nelson’s act of dereliction is eerily anonymous and quiet.

Another room to ponder is Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Place’, comprising 200 hand-built dolls’ houses lit moodily from within. There’s a great metaphor somewhere in there about group identity and how the Englishman’s home is his castle, but it’s hard to get past the prettiness and twinklyness of ‘Place’. Maybe the rest of the show’s deep-and-meaningful bits are also trapped in those little houses.