Michael Dean, “Government” at the Henry Moore

Funny thing about a lot of contemporary art is that it’s often hard to say where the art ends and the rest of reality begins. The closer the work comes to impersonating the real world – smudging the boundaries between the gallery space and the exhibits, say – the more we need to rely on the exhibition notes to help get a handle on what we are meant to make of it all.

Michael Dean’s ” Government,” at the Henry Moore Institute until June 17, is one of these quizzical experiences and promises to “quote from and transform” the gallery. You might need to read the brochure first if you want to puzzle out what’s going on.

“Tactility is an essential sculptural quality for Dean,” we are told in the first paragraph. That’s great. We can touch, stroke, prod, tap, lift; it can’t do any harm. Most of the sculptures are made from cast concrete and are the least delicate, fragile things I’ve seen in a gallery for a while. Even the small pieces, which the brochure says are “the perfect size to be carried,” have heck of a heft to then. Lovely shapes and textures, cool and corruscated like big pebbles, you want to pick them up and play with them – but you wouldn’t want one dropping on your foot.

The bigger sculptures, composed of four or five separate pieces as big as barn doors, are said to be “lurking and leaning” against the walls. Leaning they definitely are, looking as if they had been propped there temporarily without much attention to the health and safety implications, threatening to topple if approached without due care and attention. There’s a genuine aura of danger – not exactly aesthetic danger, more the suggestion that one wrong move and someone will be going home in an ambulance. But I’m not sure I’d agree that these things could possibly “lurk.” Lurking implies shadows, hiding, an attempt to remain anonymous, and these pieces are far too attention grabbing for that. You really have to go up to them and run your fingers along the gnarled, striated surfaces, tap them with a knuckle to see what sounds they make, look around the backs of them to see what’s there, and give then a little, tentative prod just to check they won’t budge. They don’t lurk in the slightest.

The brochure mentions that the gallery has been carpeted. And you do notice how odd that feels, and how the sound quality as you walk around is very different to usual – softer, warmer, homelier somehow. Apparently the colour of the carpet is “generic 1970’s library interiors.” That doesn’t feel right to me. I spent most of the seventies in dozens of libraries and the colour doesn’t resonate at all. But that’s just an idiosyncratic opinion, I may have frequented the wrong institutions. Carpeting makes the floor “something to touch.” I don’t make a habit of touching carpets in public spaces, however, so I can’t venture an opinion – in fact, the last time I got up close and personal to an institutional shag pile was an incident I’d rather not remember. It’s nice that the “information assistants” are allowed to sit on the carpet though. I don’t see why they shouldn’t be comfy. Suffering for art is such a 19th century affectation, don’t you think?

We are informed that the door handles of the gallery have been “recast as two forearm sized sculptures.” Who’s forearm, I wondered? They are as big as cricket bats. I would need to consume a mighty amount of steroids before any part of my musculature matched those. Each handle has a working title; “Yes” and “No.” A vast improvement on “In” and “out” I’d say. They also get a bit greasy, “their patina changing as the raw, unsealed surfaces pick up the traces of each person’s touch.” This is because they “leave themselves no choice but to be handled.” Indeed, they don’t. Apart from being a bit of art they are, well, handles. Door handles. That’s what door handles do. How would you get into the gallery otherwise? And in my extensive experience of such objects not once have I witnessed a door handle exercising freedom of the will – “Sorry mate, you don’t look like the sort of bloke that would appreciate what’s in here, why don’t you go handle the door knob of McDonalds instead. That’s more up your street!”

“Writing is an essential part of Dean’s work.” His starting point is “single, precise words.” I pondered this point long and hard as I wandered around the exhibition. It took a while to figure this one out but I think I got there in the end. The art must consist in how far he managed to distance himself from his starting point! I couldn’t pin down anything remotely “precise” in the language in any part of the exhibition. We are told that the sculptures are “accompanied by intimate, observational texts,” (I couldn’t find any) and they “spell out their titles in an abstracted typography.” Now I possess more dictionaries of the English language than your average logomaniac and I still can’t fathom what that last statement means. Though we are told that “Government” refers to “the way human conduct is regulated.” Just a quibble, but I’d say the word you are looking for there is “governance?” You say pedantic, I say precise.

The three large sculptures were made on site, which is genuinely fascinating and I would have liked to have known more about the process. They are called; “Education (working title)”, “Health (working title) and “Home (yes, you picked up the pattern there.)” The thing with these sculptures, we are told, is that they copy, enlarge or reduce the architecture of the gallery “as if applying the logic of a photocopier.” The last time I stuck a lump of concrete in a copier was when we were trying to shut down a National Front bookshop in Finsbury Park, and the result was not exactly intended as an artistic statement. I’m not sure when the “logic of a photocopier” became acceptable art practice – about the same time as the imagination of a dishwasher and the wit of a hand dryer I assume.

“Home (working title)” is for me the most impressive piece in the exhibition. It is a genuinely swaggering, domineering, thrilling sculpture occupying the space between two galleries, barring the way with a bit of bravado. It was amusing watching people touch the thing with a real sense of anxiety. The notes say that it obstructs the route between the galleries, “leaving a gap measuring the minimum legal limit leading to a room illuminated by a flickering television screen.” Now I appreciate that the state is intruding ever deeper into our most intimate, domestic arrangements but this is a law too far! I recently knocked a narrow crawl hole through a load bearing wall in my house to allow access to my own personal flickering telly room – my landlord was pissed off but what it has to do with the government? Absolutely nothing! In the case of the gallery the plasma TV is showing a film “documenting light passing over an image of a cabbage.” What could be the problem with that? When was the last time the sight of a brassica provoked anybody to hurl a Molotov cocktail against an armoured personnel carrier? Exactly, never!

The cabbage film was called “Traduce,” I believe. I took the title – which means “to make false statements” – to refer to the words that accompanied the piece, one of those word salad arrangements which some people mistake for “experimental writing.” And I suppose some people would call the concrete cabbage “experimental horticulture.”

There is something called a “diminishing paperback.” It’s a big, doorstop of a book “collating a piece of Dean’s writing.” I couldn’t make out what “collating” meant in the context; the hundreds of pages contain the same words and the text appears to be a jumble made up of random snatches of other pieces. Visitors are encouraged to rip a page out, which I hugely enjoyed (destroying a book is a highly transgressive act after all) but I wasn’t sure what to do with the page I’d torn . . . and could I tear another? Take it home? Copy edit the text and return it tomorrow with a little note suggesting improvements? Apparently the gallery staff have to read these words aloud every so often throughout the day. I’m not sorry I missed that, I would have found it a tad embarrassing for all concerned . . . though I suppose we would all have been sitting comfortably on that fawn carpet.

“Like government papers, these pages are subjective policies, documents written with a specific thought in mind that, once distributed, becomes subject to interpretation by others.”

This sentence baffled me for a variety of reasons. How exactly are government papers subjective policies? How are the pages we tear out either policies or subjective? What was the specific thought the artist had in mind, and couldn’t he have expressed it more clearly? Since when did tearing and dropping pieces of paper constitute “distribution” and not plain old littering? How does my interpretation of a government paper (binding as a citizen and backed up by objective enforcements) in any way resemble my interpretation of these bits of paper scattered on the floor of an art gallery? And is shrugging and scratching ones head – my response to the words on the page – an “interpretation” exactly?

My befuddlement only gets deeper with the last words of the brochure. “Placing the spoken word in space is, for Dean, as much a sculpture as is any object.” I refer you back only a few paragraphs to the beginning of the notes . . . I’m sure there are plenty of people that take this sort of blather as a sign of profundity but I’m not anywhere subtle enough to synthesise some artistic “aufhebung”out of such blatant self contradiction. It makes me want to bang my head against “Health (working title)” . . . at least I know there’s something soft to catch me when I fall.