Art

Clemens von Wedemeyer’s multi-screen ‘The Fourth Wall’ is over-thought and overwrought. But first the plot. It hinges loosely on a 1971 news story about the discovery of the Tasaday, an indigenous tribe living a Stone Age existence in the Philippines, and the subsequent revelation that the story may have been a hoax. Can you see where this is going? We’re wading through layers of would-be fact and fiction. Von Wedemeyer’s films are an extended study on the notion of ‘first contact’, which is really a continuation of art’s fascination with the ‘other’.

Making good use of the Barbican’s facilities, he leads us from casting a ‘tribal’ actor to staging a play about the Tasaday – taking a lengthy detour around the not immediately comparable idea of the fourth wall in theatre – before ending up in one of the estate’s flats, where a returning explorer claims to have achieved immortality following his visit.

Each a different format and in a different style, the films – including a genuine, 1983 documentary about the Tasaday – play with the conventions of the medium. Characters reappear in different guises, throwing into doubt the veracity of what’s just been seen. It’s interesting enough and the Curve is ideal for showing slowly unfolding installations. What rankles, though, is the heavy-handedness of it all, how grandiose and self-important it seems. And how the most interesting part remains the original story of the Tasaday. You feel kind of sorry for them. They may have evaded Western civilisation for centuries, but the dead hand of conceptual art caught them in the end.