As the press summary puts it:
Lainé’s complex installations transform the spaces they occupy into unsettling perceptual environments.
For this exhibition, the artist brings together familiar objects, organic materials and life-sized, floor-to-ceiling imagery to create a disorienting scene that explores industry, display and the contemporary workplace.
The exhibition’s title, ‘Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist!’ is a quotation attributed to Pablo Picasso. Lainé, who first encountered the quotation as a motivational slogan on the walls of an office space in the United States, is interested in its appropriation by the corporate sector.
Lainé’s site-specific installation addresses the relationship between art, production and digital technology, as well as the boundary between our professional and personal lives. Featuring office paraphernalia alongside intimate domestic items, it references the working environments of arts institutions; spaces that are home to a combination of creative and prosaic activity and are not usually on public view.
And so, as this introduction might lead you to expect, the exhibition consists of one room full of miscellaneous stuff, the ephemera of modern life, arranged in groups or clusters.
Installation view of ‘Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist!’. Photo by the author
Generally I like minimalism, and generally I like the use of industrial or everyday materials, but… it was hard to get very worked up about this collection of clutter.
Installation view of ‘Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist!’. Photo by the author
Mention of ‘digital’ in the blurb made me think, yet again, that I have yet to encounter any artwork anywhere by anyone which really ‘engages with’, depicts, portrays, conveys or explains the digital world we now all inhabit – either the way it has transformed the way we communicate with each other and access information – or the way most of us now ‘work’ sitting silently in front of a computer screen for 8 hours a day – or, what really interests me, the immense, mind-blowing amounts of data which we are allowing American multinational corporations to harvest from us every minute of our lives.
Having worked in government IT and websites since 2008, having been to so many utopian conferences and seminars and presentations uncritically praising the digital revolution to the skies, having been so intimately involved with so many projects which have costs tens of millions of pounds and gone wrong for so many reasons, having seen the mind-blowing complexity of the technical, programming, coding and project management challenges thrown up by creating even simple-sounding websites, transactions or apps…. I am still waiting for a single artist anywhere to convey the weirdness, the megalomania, the cock-ups and the really creepy implications of so much of what is going on in the digital world.
This bunch of office chairs and shopping bags didn’t even begin to come anywhere near what is required.
Related links
- ‘Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist!’ continues at the HENI Project Space at the Hayward Gallery until 24 December 2018
- Interview with Emmanuelle Lainé
Books & Boots 