The sea churns and swirls around me, vast, foam-flecked, lurid. It is not made of water but paint. As I move along the video walls that cover three sides of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, the colours of this mighty ocean – yellow, red, greasy brown, forming a thick, warping surface that bubbles with unhealthy blobs like nodules of hard bacon fat – it is abundantly clear that Sondra Perry’s installation has something to do with the art of JMW Turner.
For her first solo exhibition this side of the Atlantic, this young African American artist has reinvented Britain’s greatest painter for the digital age, transforming one of his most powerful paintings into an apocalyptic, seething video spectacle of stormlight and doom-laden waters. Yet there is more to it than that. This is not merely any Turner seascape she has animated. Her installation is called Typhoon Coming On, and is an uneasy 21st-century remake of Turner’s 1840 masterpiece, often known simply as Slave Ship, but called by him Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On.
Turner’s canvas is the most harrowing and damning ever painted of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Inspired by the Zong, a slaver whose captain, in 1781, cynically threw sick members of his “cargo” overboard for the insurance money, it is a tumultuous vision of massacre and mayhem on the high seas. The glowing, roiling water is full of bodies – bobbing, struggling, sinking. Sharks race towards helpless flailing people as their chains weigh them down. A fiery, sickly, morbid sky blazes with red and gold menace as purple clouds mass over the sailing ship, which looks as doomed as the people it has murdered. Nature is merciless to victim and criminal alike.
Perry’s video version of this macabre seascape removes the pictorial elements – there are no bodies, no ship. The colours alone create her installation’s eerie threat. But you don’t need to see limbs sinking in these fermented oceanic pigments to feel the foreboding. At regular intervals, the painted sea becomes a purple digitally created ocean that is just as deathly.
You can also sit in a rowing machine and row for dear life to try and escape the typhoon. The cruel sea follows, on screens arrayed at the front of the device. The same sea is ahead and behind, on those video walls.
Perry has picked the most troubling of Turner’s works, the one that should shake all white consciences. It certainly upset the Victorian critic John Ruskin. He was given it as a Christmas present by his wealthy father but found it so upsetting he had to sell it.
Do we have the concentration span to focus on such horrors today or are we endlessly diverted by mass media channel-hopping and internet mouse-clicking? That seems to be the question Perry poses. Another video monitor is showing a depressingly random, 24-hour news evocation of America in 2018, where injustice is filtered through daytime TV formulae and oppression is both endemic and bizarrely trivialised. Hopping from nighttime arrests to protests, from Black Lives Matter to the Geraldo show, it is painfully nervous, relentless viewing. I go back to bask in Turner’s ocean. There is no relief there. Like a gravy made of human bones, the video ocean is full of death. Will you be immersed in guilt and pain, drowned in bad memories, or will you change channel?
Perry juxtaposes the shallowness of our media-saturated lives with the power of true art and properly held memory. If we carried the bloodstained Atlantic that Turner painted in our hearts, maybe we could address the crimes and wrongs of the present. Yet forgetfulness is winning. There is a typhoon coming on.
By comparison with Perry’s thoughtful vision, Ian Cheng’s attempt to create a digital lifeform at the Serpentine feels pointless. Or at least artless. I’ve seen enough bad robots (meaning ones that don’t work) to appreciate that the Lego-like entities inhabiting a series of virtual spaces in his installation BOB exhibit some impressive AI traits. They do seem to see you, and respond to your presence in a stressed, aware way. They fix multiple eyes on their visitors, then collapse in apparent fear, reverting to what looks like a pile of disconnected bits before gathering themselves up again.
As an experiment this is interesting, maybe even important. For all I know, BOB may mark the birth of true AI, and in a few years the snaky plasticky beings that rise, fall and squirm on Cheng’s screens will soon be our overlords. However, at the moment, a day after being “born”, they resemble amoebae painted by Francis Bacon on a bad day. I find it hard to care, for these are totally remote, not even properly animal, entities. They are just clever lab models. There is no soul here.
The contrast between the ways these two artists use technology reveals that art is always human, or nothing at all. Cheng forgets this, and his work is a techno bore. Perry says something significant because she never loses sight of the ghost in the machine.
•Sondra Perry: Typhoon Coming On is at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, until 20 May. Ian Cheng: Bob is at the Serpentine Gallery until 22 April.
