To Old Street station and am pleasantly surprised to find that when I emerge from the underworld and into the light, I’ve actually managed to pick the right subway exit to take me in the direction of Shoreditch. I’m heading that way to get to the Flowers gallery where Michael Sandle is currently showing a selection of his sculptures and drawings in a show he’s called Time, Transition and Dissent. An alternative title might have been Heavy Metal to mark both the artist’s favoured choice of medium and the weightiness of the themes he’s spent his career exploring. All the works here are cast in bronze and come with a seriously dark black patina, aside from The Sound of Your Silence, a hefty piece of carved lime wood that shows a full size figure of a woman, sitting down and holding out a child that’s completely swathed in bandages. The mother’s head is covered by a shroud that brings to mind the pictures of detainees at Guantanamo but the piece works well enough to be a poignant memorial to the suffering of all those caught up in the wars and violence in Iraq, the Middle East and the world in general. And it’s this fascination with all forms of conflict, brutality and disaster that has provided the artist with an endless source of inspiration to create all of the works on show here. Some, like Caput Mortuum, with its references to the Falkland’s War, are designed to commemorate specific battles while others, often in the form of decorated tombs, are more general, symbolic memorials to destruction and the appalling, grandiose power of modern-day warfare. Whether standing in statue form or laid out on a catafalque, Sandle typically creates characters that are splintered forms, part human and part machine, and it’s sometimes difficult to determine where the uniformed soldier ends and his military kit begins, as everything merges together in the messy detritus and fog of war.
Not surprisingly, all this confusion of flesh, bone, metal and rubble makes for quite uncomfortable viewing, with Sandle deliberately embracing the forms of the traditional war memorial all the better to subvert their messages. Any thoughts of Horace’s Dulce et Decorum Est are banished and superseded by General Sherman’s more simple truth that War is Hell. On the other hand, Sandle seems a bit too enamoured with the heroic form and maybe just a little too comfortable exploring his awful imagery to be any kind of a pacifist. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I find it easy to imagine him carefully crafting and polishing his works with an intensity that grows in parallel with the increasing horror of his subject matter.
Upstairs are a range of Sandle’s preparatory sketches and drawings which show the same skillful artistic facility as revealed in his sculptural works. They also share the same charcoal dark interest in exploring different forms of warfare, real and imagined. Alongside the works on paper, there are also a couple of disembodied heads but they’re nothing to do with any jihadi activities – although surely Sandle will reference these particular atrocities at some point in the future. In fact, these trophies are from one of the artist’s best known earlier works where he recast Mickey, the famous Disney mouse, into a decidedly more ferocious rodent, complete with Browning machine gun and ammunition belt, full of highly polished bullets. The complete work, a sort of sarcastic V-sign flicked in the direction of America and an earlier episode of their imperialist adventurism in the Far East, gets a brief showing in a video playing in the gallery reception area. The film is an interesting documentary featuring some of Sandle’s other creations and commissions as well as an interview with the artist himself, whose opinions seem to be expressed with perhaps less of the uncompromisingly hard certainty of his sculptures. Nevertheless, it’s not all that surprising that some critics have labelled him a bit of a fascist, although ‘egocentric reactionary’, the self-styed denomination that he proposes, is probably a better fit.
Mr Sandle walked through the exhibition while I was making my notes so I told him that I thought it was a very impressive body of work but that I wasn’t sure that I like it very much. Evidently, this was the right reaction since it provoked a broad smile and the extension of his hand for me to shake, which I did.
Frankly, it was something of a relief to leave the gloom of the gallery and return to the light and fresh air outside and then catch a bus in the direction of the Victoria Miro gallery where Stan Douglas’ large six-screen film installation, The Secret Agent is now playing. Fortunately, the invigilator tells me that the film has only just started, so for the next ten minutes I find myself twisting and turning my head to catch the story as it progresses, switching between the different sets of screens that are lined up in parallel on opposite sides of the bench on which I’m sat. The film seems to be a fairly straightforward narrative about some kind of double-crossing anarchist who has sold out his subversive comrades and is acting as an agent provocateur, under the control of the American Government. So, having received instructions from his minder in the American Embassy – a portrait of Gerald Ford hangs on the wall and so tells us we’re in the 1970s – off he goes to meet his old friends in the projection room of a small cinema and starts to plot a series of explosions in Lisbon to help shore up the failing Portuguese dictatorship and so…
Well, that was as far as I got until, overcome by the wooden acting and dull, plodding plotline, I thought it sensible to depart, because I really didn’t think it was going to get any better. I confess that I’m not really sure why the film is playing in an art gallery and not a cinema, except that no cinema would bother with such a dreary, amateur production. I’m also not sure why the artist needed six screens to display the action – or, rather, lack of it – since for all the time I was present there were only ever two screens playing at the same time, with one of those generally just showing part of the set while the actors struggled along on the other. According to the gallery leaflet, the film is a reworking of the eponymous Conrad novel and is, ‘…saturated with information…yet rejecting easily consumable messages…within a charged atmosphere and ambiguous political and social intricacies…’ All of which makes me think that I must have walked into the wrong screening room because what I was watching had more in common with an episode of Crossroads or Emmerdale Farm than with the appropriated messages from a classic of 20th century literary fiction.
After that hugely dispiriting experience I’m in need of some comfort food which, following a somewhat circuitous route to the Victoria & Albert Museum, I find in the form of one of their blackcurrant and white chocolate muffins. Recharged, it seems only courtesy to take a quick look at the display of early photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron that are featured in an exhibition at the Museum. Of course, I recognize the position she holds as one of the great early pioneers of the newly developed science and art of photography, but her works still look just as boring as they always have done to me. Ok, I admit, the portrait of the crazed romantic Tennyson and the wild-eyed scientist Herschel are magnificent but all the other bearded gentlemen and misty-eyed maidens looking off into the distance, not to mention the sugary sentimentalism of the cute young children, just make me want to groan out loud. So before the urge proves irresistible, I exit speedily down Exhibition Road to get to the Royal Geographic Society building where the small but exquisite Works on Paper art fair has set up shop. It’s the usual crush of little displays being looked after by the kind of terribly smart and nice stallholders who give the impression that they like nothing better than to chat to their old friends and colleagues while trying to block the view of anyone actually trying to look at their selection of works. It’s almost as if they can’t bear the thought of selling anything and thereby having to part with any of their beautiful collections. And, actually, this suits me fine. Naturally, I’m tempted by some of the stuff but, fortunately, amongst all the pieces by Laura Knight and Augustus John and all the dozens of unfamiliar Royal Academicians who couldn’t resist trying to capture the wonders of a Venetian sunset, or make a pretty still life out of a bunch of old vegetables; or the ton of other stuff, good, bad and indifferent…there is nothing sufficiently attractive and well-priced that I feel the need to acquire it. And for that, my wallet and I are really quite grateful.