Last year home to the Bond exhibition, this Spring the Barbican’s Curve gallery is hosting a new exhibition by Geoffrey Farmer, ‘The Surgeon & The Photographer’.
A work he has been putting together for the last four years, the work consists of 365 small puppets – 3D objects assembled from fragments of photographs – a theme that follows on from The Last Two Million Years (2007) and Leaves Of Grass (2012). The inspiration for this installation comes from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, ‘The Work Of Art in the age of Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, where he set out a rather prophetic vision – that photography in particular would eventually come to challenge the ‘aura surrounding the work of art and its parasitical dependence on ritual‘.
When you enter the gallery, you’ll discover that most of the figures that make up ‘The Surgeon & The Photographer’ are clumped together in islands, with individual puppets picked out by spotlights between them – amongst the sea of standing figures in the first grouping there’s a cluster of gay rights activists, their banners held aloft while birds wheel overhead. Further on there are groups of warriors, swords drawn, and what I suspect are representations of red-robed priests.
There’s something rather unearthly about this large assembly of characters – looking closely at the individual figures some have had their eyes cut out so that their empty sockets gape at the viewer, while others have faces which are made up of bizarre combinations of separate eyes, lips and noses. This wild visual stimulus is overlaid with an odd soundtrack, which mixes brief chords of notes from various musical instruments with the giggling of babies, bolts being thrown and snatches of distant laughter.
Right at the end of the Curve (and with only the central spine of the gallery occupied by the figures you can understand why it get’s its name) there’s a large screen that projects the photographs which Farmer dissected to create the work. Most are portraits, many anonymous and some famous – I spotted a young Bob Dylan amongst the flickering images, for example.
I left ‘The Surgeon & The Photographer’ today feeling quite disturbed – it’s a very unsettling installation, and definitely worth putting on your list of gallery visits in 2013. Entry is free of charge and you have plenty of time to see it as it will be occupying the Curve until 28 July.
About Pete Stean
