LONDON'S ART EXHIBITIONS: REVIEW
Rockman's "Wonderful World": Nostalgia for future utopia.
Scientists
love Alexis Rockman's warped visions of a genetically modified future. Adrian
Searle is glad he won't be around to see it .
Alexis Rockman: Wonderful World
is at the Camden Arts Centre, London NW3, until June 13. Details: 020-7472
5500
Alexis Rockman's paintings are fascinating. This is not to say that I like them much, just that it is hard to drag yourself away from them till you have marvelled at the scenery, devoured all their details. They keep you at it for some time. Wonderful World, Rockman's recent suite of five large paintings, fills the biggest space at Camden Arts Centre. The exhibition, which opened last Friday, is the 41-year-old New Yorker's biggest show in the UK to date, much of the work the result of a two-year research residency based at the gallery. The show's title, Wonderful World, might make you think first of the Louis Armstrong song, but it is as much a nod to the late Harvard palaeontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould - and in particular to Wonderful Life, Gould's book about the bizarre profusion of Cambrian fossils embedded in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies. What these fossils tell us about evolution is a matter of sometimes heated scientific debate; what such debate tells us is that there is also much uncertainty about the mechanisms of evolution, at work in what Gould called nature's "dead-end experiments". How human intelligence itself evolved, and what our place is in the scheme of things, if indeed there is a scheme beyond the evolutionary process itself, is a corollary of that same debate. The way things are looking, we could be a dead end too, although Rockman's take on all this is complex - as indeed was Gould's largely enthusiastic take on Rockman, which I'll come back to. Wonderful World depicts a future so appalling, and so uncomfortably familiar, I'm glad I shan't be around to see much of it. The paintings are mostly concerned with unnatural selection: intensive breeding and genetic engineering, GM crops and designer pets, techno-eugenics and bionic footballers; interspecies sex and science fiction sports and theme parks. In the past, Rockman has made paintings about biosphere experiments in space and monsters mutating beneath the greens of a land-fill golf course; sport fishing for ichthyosaurs in Jurassic oceans, the death of an American eco-tourist in a foetid jungle. He's even had a dig at the pseudo-scientific claptrap of creationism.
The earliest of Rockman's painting's here, The Farm (2000), is a sort of primer to what comes next. Soya bean rows stretch to the horizon. In the distance stand a wild cow and a boar. Reading the painting from left to right, we then see a familiar domesticated cow and pig, and lastly a huge, slab-sided bovine with a tiny head and ballooning udders, and a great, bloated, obscene sow, munching on multicoloured maize in the foreground. There's something of the storybook or children's encyclopaedia illustration about this painting. The big pig shits. Here's a feral rodent, there's that lab rat with a human ear grafted on to its back. The cockerels ranged on the fenceposts go from classic cock-a-doodle-doo to bald, hen-factory monstrosity. There are cuboid watermelons and giant tomatoes, as well as little vignette inserts punctuating the picture - a fruit fly, a strand of human DNA, a repulsive overbred lapdog framed in a prize-winning blue rosette. Rockman ladens his paintings with information (some of which will be taken as in-jokes by the science crowd - nothing wrong with that, especially as art usually makes jokes only for the art crowd); he packs so much in that they tend, like all that GM food and overbred meat, to the indigestible. In his brief notes for The Farm, Rockman writes: "Agricultural Landscape, 1949-50s feeling; artists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton; puritan Americans ... nostalgia for future utopia". The US isolationist, ruralist tradition, exemplified by Wood and Benton (who was Jackson Pollock's teacher), persists as a rosy nostalgic view of the US farming industry, with its Monsanto seeds, international barter grain-mountains and supermarkets filled with bland, flavour-free produce. The last, perhaps, is itself a product of US puritanism: food is to fill, not to give too much sinful pleasure, along with the added vitamins and antibiotics. That Americans themselves are tending toward the condition of that obese pig might be yet another subtext to the painting. Like me, Gould found The Farm too didactic.
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