Sex, violence and religion: Danh Vō’s new exhibition isn’t shy about getting into life’s nitty gritty. And that might kind of be the point. The Danish artist seems like he’s tired of cranking out the monumental, critically engaged sculptures he’s known for and has opted instead to try another tack and just make everyone a little uncomfortable.
And boy has it worked. This is a weird, complex exhibition. The main gallery space is filled with images by his university tutor Peter Bonde; glow-in-the-dark paint on reflective foil, like slimy smears on mirrors, they're grimy, dirty, physical, abstract things. Photographs of his teenage nephew taken by his lover Heinz Peter Knes line the wall. They’re inarguably sexual: the boy’s arse fills the frame, covered in mud, he pulls his pants down, revealing his hip bones. Interspersed among all that is a series of neatly drawn quotes from ‘The Exorcist’ about sucking cocks in hell and shoving things up arses, all precisely and meticulously written out by the artist’s father.
It’s like a self-portrait via the work of the men who matter to him; his tutor, his lover, his father. But it’s also quite sensual and erotic, and aggressive and confrontational. One of his own sculptures is placed in the centre of the room, but it’s totally lost, and totally pointless, in amongst all the familial respect and overt sexuality. It’s poorly thought-through, and it leaves you confused and uncomfortable more than it engages you.
Over in the Fire Station space, you find 1970s images of Vietnamese men taken by Dr Joseph M Carrier, a gay photographer friend of the artist’s. Some show men holding hands or napping next to each other, portraits of male affection. Others are just voyeuristic shots of hot male bods. It’s hard to know if they’re being presented critically, or – since the bloke is Vō’s friend – just as pretty pictures of pretty guys.
Upstairs are photographs and drawings relating to the murder of French missionaries, so now you’re getting some colonial criticism chucked into the mix. And then, in the final space he’s pulled together works by artists like Nancy Spero and Sister Corita Kent, all taken from a group show he helped curate in 2013. Andres Serrano’s infamous ‘Piss Christ’ is here too, and, for some reason, a sheet of the Unabomber’s cyphers.
The whole thing is halfway between a group show and a collaborative undertaking, but it just makes so little sense. By the time you find the sculpture by Isumu Noguchi that he’s plonked in the housing estate around the corner you’ll not only have no idea what the hell Danh Vō’s on about, but you won’t care.
I get it, it's about the rich complexity of life, and navigating our intricate world, yadda, yadda, yadda. But it's so unnapproachable that it just pushes you away.
All the time you spend trying to knit all of Danh Vō’s endless threads into some comprehensible conceptual sweater is way more than he seems to have bothered with. The show feels like he just didn’t have enough work to fill an exhibition this size so just whacked a bunch of crap by his mates in it and hoped it would work. Well, it doesn’t.
