Oscar Tuazon My Mistake4th June – 15th August
ICA: The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
Opening Hours: Daily, 12—7p; Thursday until 9pm
When you walk into Gallery One at the ICA an overwhelming smell of wood will hit you. For me, this scent conjured up memories of noisy wood work lessons at school, during which I used to reluctantly wrestle with the blunt blade of a saw, dragging it back and forth over a piece of wood, trying to replicate the butt joint, or later the dove tail joint, that the teacher had effortlessly demonstrated. Needless to say, this isn’t a memory I cherish fondly, which got my relationship with Oscar Tuazon off to a bit of a bad start.
I stood for a while in the gallery wondering what exactly the point of this installation was. Trying to fathom it out, I read the description on the wall, which described of its existence as an embodiment of a concept and a reference to the formal language of architecture. Neither of these were immediately obvious looking at the enormous sprawling structure. The two things that instead struck me were the not-quite-even joints, which reminded me of my own pitiful attempts at woodwork and the hairy, un-sanded body of the wood, which awoke memories of many a painful splinter. But, as I began to interact with the piece, following its sprawling frame out of Gallery One and into first the reading room, then the cafe, then finally the corridor, I began to change my mind about the piece.
Tuazon has created a piece of architecture inside an established piece of architecture. The artist describes his piece as ‘growing inside another, a plan for renovation laid over an existing building, a redevelopment, two structures fucking one another.’ To me, rather than fucking each other, it looks like these two structures are wrestling with each other, fighting over space. In places Tuazon’s installation tunnels under the floor boards and slices through the walls, eating away at the cleanly cut edges of the ICA, leaving you marvelling at the audacity of this ugly piece of wood.
The artists on-site installations been likened to the Arte Povera style of modern art, because they attack the institution within which they sit. They do this in a very physical way, rather than the metaphorical way in which the original Arte Paovera artists attacked established institutions. They also do it in a very permanent way, even once this structure has been taken down, the holes in the walls and the floor of the ICA will still remain and will have to fixed. This is becoming a somewhat reoccurring theme in art in recent years as artists redefine the spaces in which they show. Three years ago there was Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, which pierced through the fabric of the Tate’s Turbine Hall, last year there was Anish Kapoor’s restrospective, which painted the Royal Academy of Arts red, and now Oscar Tuazon is remodelling the ICA. The art of destruction really is becoming a sight to behold.
I walked away with just one criticism of the latest show at the ICA, however, and that was its size. It wasn’t that the structure itself was not large enough, but rather that this one piece hardly constitutes a show in itself. It is interesting to learn that the entire thing was constructed on-site over six days and that there was no formal planning for the piece. The ICA documented the six-day construction period via an online photo blog, and it seems a shame that these photographs and more information about the physical construction of the piece aren’t available to visitors of the gallery.
