One of the worst things contemporary art can make you do is think serious thoughts about stupid things. Sure, sometimes a urinal is beautiful, a shed is interesting, and an empty room is a container of countless ideas. But sometimes, it has no deeper meaning worth seeking out. Sometimes it’s just a bit silly.
Brazilian conceptualist Laura Lima would rather call it absurd. Her show at the ICA – her first solo presentation in the UK despite decades of international exhibitions and biennale appearances – is filled with surreal encounters, all of which are meant to jostle you out of your mundane, staid mental rut (“our habitual modes of attention”) and find meaning in the unexpected.
How unexpected you find a life drawing class in an art gallery depends on your expectations, obviously. Quite expected, I’d imagine. But this one is different: not only are you allowed to participate, but everything is on wheels. Crazy. The easels and models are all placed on moving wooden platforms, which autonomously meander around the room, making you crane your neck and spin your noggin to see the model.
It’s all about randomness and chaos, says the handout, but how random and chaotic is it really? All the references to chance, unpredictability and “Epicurus’s atomist theory” are undermined by the fact that the platforms are all giant roombas with sensors. They spin around a predefined area in a preprogrammed way. It’s only chaotic and unpredictable if you don’t actually think about it.
And if the idea instead is to make you look at things from different perspectives, I’d argue that doing it by making you sit at a giant spinning easel is pretty heavy-handed.
There are a set of keys on the floor in the next room, with a human arm poking out under the wall trying to grab them. At first it just about works: it’s absurd, funny. But then you start looking for the meaning that’s meant to be hidden in the periphery and it just falls apart. Is the idea that meaning is just out of reach, there but ultimately ungraspable? Then why does the hand eventually reach the keys, grab them and then chuck them back out? All it’s saying is that meaning is only out of reach because you’ve made it bloody difficult for yourself.
Upstairs, a red parasol on motorised wheels dances around the gallery. Next door a fridge holds images frozen in ice which you’re meant to take out and defrost in order to see. It’s not hugely worth it.
Lima is big on making you find significance in the unexpected without nudging you towards any actual substance. But that’s a convenient way of making meaningless work while telling viewers they’re just not looking hard enough.
If she said “Hey, this is just absurd, surreal and poetic”, it would be fine. But the whole show is so heavily loaded with half-baked philosophy and shoddy conceptualism that you don’t get to enjoy it for what it is. It’s all meant to be about process and discovery. I don’t have a problem with the form of any of it, I just don’t think it means much, says anything – or looks that good.
I sat there watching people on giant roombas drawing a naked bloke with an umbrella and tried to think about Epicurus and atoms and chance. I stared at the spinning parasol, I defrosted some trays of ice. I really tried to figure it out, to find meaning and beauty. I thought serious thoughts, but only found silly art.
