After the runaway success of Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light last year, the Hayward is set for another summer blockbuster with Psycho Buildings. The exhibition, which provides a fusion of art and architecture, is a joyride which is at once sinister, sensual and thought-provoking.
Overall, Psycho Buildings has something of a fairground feel, engaging with its audience physically, with exhibits which can be clambered up, smelled and even rowed upon. Certainly, Geltin’s outdoor water terrace, suspended high above London, on which the brave can take out a little rowing boat, has been the exhibit which has possibly attracted the most attention. And the attention is well deserved; bobbing in a miniature craft looking out over the London skyline is an exhilarating, if slightly nauseating, experience. There seems to be little stopping the water and boat from cascading over the edge of the building.
Behind the childlike fun there are elements of danger and threat in many of the exhibits. Los Carpinteros’s ‘Show Room’ displays a room which appears to be suspended mid-explosion. Mike Nelson’s installation ‘To the memory of H.P.Lovecraft 1999’, meanwhile, features a series of rooms which have been violently destroyed by an undefined creature. The effect is unsettling, one has the uncanny feeling that the beast may emerge at any time to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting people wandering the gallery.
Yet, the installation which proves the most haunting and thought-provoking is that with the least bombast- Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Place’. Whiteread is an artist known for her engagement with architecture, notably in her cast sculptures of the negative space within houses. For ‘Place’ Whiteread has collected a vast number of different dolls’ houses which are exhibited to form a tiny town built upon on packing crates marked ‘fragile’. The houses are lit from the inside, exaggerating their unexplained emptiness. The room as a whole has a feeling of eerie calm, and raises questions of the way in which place is made and defined by the people who populate it.
Undeniably, Psycho Buildings is an exhibition which has succeeded in its mission to get people to re-examine and explore their relationship with their surroundings. Yet, like all blockbusters, it has a tendency to be crowded- so for those desiring to brave a roof-top boat outing, its best to get there early.
Psycho Buildings runs at the Hayward until 25th August.
