I came out the back end of the Royal Academy having seen two disappointing but mercifully small exhibitions and found myself in Cork Street, home of some of London’s most famous commercial art galleries. Ordinarily I don’t have the time or the headspace after crawling round a blockbuster like the current Entangled Pasts, but for once I did and decided to have a stroll and an explore.
Almost immediately I came across a display that’s more fun, more diverting and entertaining than anything at the Academy, ‘Peter Blake: Sculpture and Other Matters’ being held at the Waddington Custot Gallery.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot
Blake is, of course, one of the famous pioneers of Pop Art in Britain, a movement which began in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s. Apparently, it’s the first exhibition in twenty years to be dedicated to Peter Blake’s sculpture, less well known than his paintings. But it’s a lot of fun and there’s lots of them here – in fact there are no fewer than 100 works on display, covering the entire period of his career, from the 1950s right up to the present day.
Surprisingly, some of the most recent works are collages which throw back 60 odd years to his beginnings.
‘Big Little Books: Surrounded’ by Peter Blake (2023) Courtesy the artist and Waddington Custot
1959 This sculpture, an old RAF locker covered in glamorous pin-up images, was first shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London in 1960 and is one of the earliest expressions of British ‘Pop’ culture.
It strikes me as marking two aspects of his aesthetic: 1) a loving fondness for found objects and the ephemera of pop culture and what was then mass media (newspapers and magazines) and 2) overlapping this, something to do with fandom, with the hypnotic appeal of being a fan of movie stars or pop bands and collecting their images and plastering them all over your bedroom wall as teenagers and students do, the strangeness, the obsessiveness and the deliciousness of being in love with glamorous stars.
‘Locker’ by Peter Blake (1959) Courtesy the artist and Waddington Custot
Another ‘investigation of’ or maybe, ‘infatuation with’ fandom. is the extraordinary wall-sized shrine to Elvis.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘Shrine for Elvis (Black and White)’ (2003) Photo by the author
Elvis fandom is a kind of black hole down which countless people have fallen into the sequined horror of Las Vegas soul death. Recently I was reading about and rewatching Elvis’s very first recordings and very first TV shows and what’s remarkable is how everything which made him so gauche and innocent and absolute dynamite in that first year or two was completely and utterly drained out of him until he had been replicated as a plastic simulacrum of himself in a decade of terrible movies. And yet the worse he got, the more besotted his fans became and still, to this day, lay flowers and wreaths outside Graceland.
While the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts show lectures its visitors about something they already know very well about (the Great Public Issue of the slave trade), art like this, which trembles on the brink of being no art at all, at the same time gestures towards something more strange and unexplored – the obstinate shallowness of human emotion, the ubiquity of bad taste, the universe of pop and movie obsessions which colours all of our lives. How so much of what we like to think of as our fine personalities is actually made of tacky pop culture. (‘Oh have you seen Andrew Scott in the new Ripley dramatisation on Netflix? Oh, he makes such a convincing psychopath!’)
Half our minds are made of junk, half people’s daily conversations about last night’s telly or movies are glamour-stricken kitsch. Oh the Oscars! Oh the Mercury awards! Oh Love island! Oh The Apprentice! Blake takes it out of the cellar of our minds and puts it on plain view for us to be appalled by.
Early 1960s The show includes painted wooden constructions from the early 1960s which nod to Blake’s earlier years studying at Gravesend, where he was taught woodwork.
1965 The iconic piece ‘Tarzan Box – “Big Iron Bird, She Come”’ (1965) demonstrates Blake’s early move towards assemblage and features some of the storybook characters which would recur in Blake’s work in the coming decades.
1980s The ‘Incidents from a sculpture park’ series, assemblages of found objects.
2003 The ‘Still Life’ series of 2003, homages are made to fellow artists including Claude Monet, Giorgio Morandi and Joseph Cornell, who take the place of pop icons and movie stars as the subjects of Blake’s fandom.
In a later series dedicated to artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg, Blake assembles found items in compositions which directly reference the other artist’s sculptures of the 1970s and 1980s, in which he whittled and painted similar objects in wood.
‘A Parade for Saul Steinberg’ by Peter Blake (2007 to 2012) Courtesy the artist and Waddington Custot
2003 ‘In the Cubist’s Kitchen’ (2003) features a tobacco pipe while ‘Then & Now, For Damien’ (2003) gathers miniature bottles along a shelf, a reference both to Damien Hirst’s (now lapsed) heavy drinking and to Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ of 1498.
2008 to 2010 I really liked this ‘Museum of Black and White’, what a cornucopia of incunabula.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘Museum of Black and White 12: In Homage to Mark Dion’ (2008-2010). Photo by the author
Nearby were a number of alphabets with the letters represented by objects found in junk and antique shops, chosen for their poppy kitschness.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘Alphabet small’ (top) and ‘Alphabet large’ (bottom), both 2007 to 2012. Photo by the author
2012 In the ‘Found Sculpture’ series of conceptual works, pebbles, rocks and other found objects are elevated to fine art status, each placed on a plinth of oak and marble.
This work below is from a series where he uses stones which have ‘eyes’ and other facial features, stuck atop bits of wood or bric-a-brac, to create abstract human figures. It’s from a series of six or so which are all linked because in the foreground on the right is an utterly naturalistic little model of a boy sitting in an armchair (in each instance of the series he’s in a different type of chair but it’s always the same model).
Making art out of found materials goes back to the Dadaists and Duchamps. What makes it Pop or Blake is the inclusion of the pop-kitsch-junkshop element of the boy which turns it from sci fi weirdness into pipe smoking charm.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘people’ made out of found material and stones with ‘eyes’. Photo by the author
2012 The ‘Generals’ series features figures of dark-painted wood pinned with medals and each with a bowling ball for a head. Blake’s been fascinated by the artistic charge of medals, and of badges more generally, for over half a century and these works show that these small shiny pins and buttons retain a weird power. On one level these mysterious figures combine are fairly obvious satire on senior soldiers and militarism, the kind of naive anti-militarism which drove the 1969 musical ‘Oh What A Lovely War!’ But these figures combine that with something else entirely, something voodoo to do with science fiction and one-eyed robots…
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing five pieces from the ‘Generals’ series. Photo by the author
2010: Sea Battles One of the rooms is dominated by a series of big and wonderfully detailed models of old sailing ships. These chime strangely with the much bigger collection of model ships by Hew Locke, each suspended from the ceiling, currently to be seen in the Academy’s Entangled Pasts show. The difference is that whereas Locke is trying to make us feel bad (about slavery, pollution, globalisation, capitalism and the refugee crisis) Blake is aiming to make us smile. On the day I read about the Israeli army not just killing but blowing to pieces seven unarmed food aid workers in Gaza, I know which I prefer.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing some of the ‘Sea Battle’ series. Photo by the author
Anyway, how do they make you smile? Because when you go up close you realise that these beautiful models are crewed by kitsch plastic models, mostly of Disney princesses (on the left) who appear to be coming under attack from models of soldiers (on the right). Hard not to be charmed and delighted.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot, close-up of ‘Sea Battle: Disney Princesses’ (2010) Photo by the author
General themes
It’s amazing how impactful it can be just to put two found objects next to each other, on a plinth or a bench or a stand, and watch them reverberate. Not only visually, as objects, but semantically, as vessels of meaning, rich in cultural overtones.
The cult author the Comte de Lautréamont in his 1869 book ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ wrote about ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’, a sentence which was taken up and trumpeted by the Surrealists half a century later as expressing their aesthetic.
But Blake’s exuberant juxtapositions, despite yoking together all manner of objects, natural or man-made, are not, in fact, surreal. They don’t aim to disturb or momentarily open a doorway to the unconscious as surrealism did. They aim to entertain, amuse, and create good-humoured art objects, constructs, assemblies – strange but not that strange.
All of them feel very English and unthreatening, cosy and comfy, like the coloured pencils and shape tracer in this assembly which made me think of school, and not just school but junior school, of being 9 or 10 and happy.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘Still Life: The American Stamp Pad (in homage to Saul Steinberg)’ (2010) Photo by the author
They are playful in the literal sense of including toys and kids’ models, plastic figures for fairly small children or, as in the collages, Mickey Mouse images appropriate to toddlers. No images of Hiroshima or cut-up bodies or sex shock bondage of the kind favoured by the Surrealists or the psycho end of 60s Pop (I’m thinking, as I often do, of J.G. Ballard and his car crash exhibition at the ICA).
Not only does a lot of this stuff come from junk shops but the works feel as if they exist in a kind of mental junk shop – they invoke and recreate a wonderful old rag-and-bone shop of the kind that it’s hard to find nowadays, packed with all kinds of wonderful old junk, forgotten toys and curiosities – and then situate all these collocations and juxtapositions in your imagination.
Fundamentally, Blake deals in nostalgia but nostalgia with a kink, nostalgia for a kind of innocent strangeness, maybe the uncorrupted strangeness of the true child’s vision, which finds everything about the adult world bizarre and inexplicable.
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘Family’ (2003) Photo by the author
The curators claim that the exhibition ‘transforms the gallery into an interactive, theatrical space which reflects the imaginative potential of the sculpture on show’ and for once this is true. It’s a fabulous exhibition. It really feels like you’re entering and strolling round another dimension. It feels like a wonderland, a fantasy world of oddities and strangenesses, some more obviously funny than others, but all underpinned by a fundamental and very winning sense of humour.
Because here is Snow White calling a meeting of all the dwarfs, not just the seven ones mentioned in the fairy tales and the Disney movie, no, the entire platoon of dwarves has been assembled and Snow White is about to make a Very Important Announcement. What is it? Imagine one. Make up one yourself. What message would you have for these plastic dwarves?
Installation view of ‘Sculpture and Other Matters’ by Peter Blake at Waddington Custot showing ‘Swiss chalet: A Lone Bagpiper Confronts Snow White and her 30 Dwarves’ (2012) Photo by the author
Related links
- Sculpture and Other Matters by Peter Blake continues at Waddington Custot until Saturday 13 April 2024
Books & Boots 