Patrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
Drip. Drip. Drip. Leakage doesn’t tend to be good news. But beyond the body, and beyond our pipes and toilets and taps, the spillage of meaning from one site to another can be enlightening rather than concerning.
Beyond the body, and beyond our pipes and toilets and taps, the spillage of meaning from one site to another can be enlightening rather than concerning.
Animal, human. Male, female. Subject, object. While fluidity flies in the face of society’s favourite categories – and the delineations we’re so keen on – there’s no escaping the messy reality of osmosis. Diffusion. Connectedness. Patrick Staff’s On Venus at the Serpentine’s Sackler gallery, culminating in a poem-cum-film of the same name, engages that leakage as its focus. Signs and signifiers ooze between seemingly disconnected areas of culture, and literal seepage mirrors the metaphorical.
ArrayPatrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
From a network of pipes, tracing walls and ceiling, Staff’s installation around the gallery’s perimeter sees acid fall from metal conduits into vast barrels. The liquid drips with sinister insistency, calling to mind bodily fluids and chemical ooze – but Staff’s is a network set up to host its own lapses. Leaks are welcome here – in fact, they’re centre stage.
Staff’s installation around the gallery’s perimeter sees acid fall from metal conduits into vast barrels.
Follow the pipes to a powder room, where intaglio etchings immortalise recreations of tabloid news stories. Headlines and column inches chart the (entirely invented, widely circulated) history of murderer Ian Huntley’s request for a sex change from behind bars. Reproduced on the surfaces of shiny blocks – along with their half-hearted retractions, or error messages for URLs since taken down – these works make a concerted gesture of solidifying the insidious prejudice which so often slips past unnoticed.
Patrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
Patrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
Patrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
Patrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
That said, and for all its looming monumentality, the medium seems to undermine its own message: polished metal, after all, reflects light flooding into the shadowy space. Quite apart from illuminating anything, it makes the detail hard to catch – light and meaning, leaking into each other. And, for all the responsibility anyone’s willing to take for the news stories, they could have been burnt by the acid trickling overhead. Isn’t that always the trouble, with monoliths held up by everyone-and-no-one at once?
In the show’s second powder room, new and eternal questions of culpability: images of animal slaughter and cruelty crowd into the enclosed space. Pigs and cows and snakes and blood and fur; jostling and panicked and dying, ‘hard to watch’ is an understatement. The atmosphere of violence and claustrophobia bleeds into its viewing, especially as our own status as its beneficiaries infuses the experience. Nonetheless, the work is insistent on its own consumption – after all, we eat this. We drink and wear its shiny products. Delicious, useful, beautiful – that is, if you’re standing on the equation’s winning side.
Array‘On venus, there are no seasons’. Only a winner if there’s a loser; only a top if there’s a bottom. Systems of control and the culture of power share their most fundamental tenet: us and them. Limitations of in-groups are frequently propped up by signalling what (and who) they aren’t, by exclusion or erasure. Violence or silence requires a subject to define itself against. There are many ways, as they say, to skin a cat: whether you can see the symbiosis or not will depend on your position. In, or out?
Patrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
Can you imagine any other way? Staff’s poem, the show’s last work and unifying force, is a lonesome, hopeful little ode. An imagining, and a manifesto; it has leaked into this article, just as its resonances suffuse the rest of the exhibition from which it takes its title. On Venus, flashing up over a video accompaniment like subtitles, unspools a radical proposition for all-encompassing otherness, defined by something rather than in opposition to a default.
ArrayPatrick Staff, (Installation view, 8 November 2019 – 9 February 2020, Serpentine Galleries) © 2019 Photo: Hugo Glenndinning
There’s an idea that, to really undo society’s evils, we’ll need to burn everything to the ground and start again. Perhaps on another planet altogether; ‘on venus, days outlast years / on venus, there were once oceans that have long since burnt away.’ Upside-down, like a double mirror, ‘like sleeping / no sleeping / like home / and no home’.
There’s an idea that, to really undo society’s evils, we’ll need to burn everything to the ground and start again.
Gallery goers, watching rapt from the other side of the room, superimpose their silhouettes on the film’s floor reflection; lights start to flicker, and ambient noise is cranked up. ‘on venus, there is pressure, / enough pressure to crush absolute’. Perhaps on Venus, things really are different – but that’s hard to conceive of. After all, we’d be the common element between worlds; and exerted in increments, that Venusian pressure might sound more familiar. Drip. Drip. Drip.
