I have carefully avoided visiting Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) for weeks. The thing is I quite like modern art, but I hate big empty spaces. In my opinion, Glasgow’s GoMA is not only an empty space, but a huge waste of space with works of modern art carelessly scattered on its three floors, with a tiny library and an absolutely crap and noisy café in the basement. Anyway, I’m not sure why, but a few days ago I decided to go in and ended up staying half an hour walking around Jim Lambie’s exhibition “Forever Changes” in the main gallery.
Since he graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994, Lambie had his works showcased in exhibitions such as Zenomap at the Venice Biennale (2003), the Carnegie International in the USA (2004) and the Turner Prize in London (2005). Lambie is well-known for taking inspiration from contemporary life and transforming ordinary objects in sculptures and installations.
For his “Forever Changes” exhibition – a title taken from a 1968 album by cult American band Love – Lambie radically transformed the floor of the Gallery of Modern Art creating psychedelic motifs using curved strips of black and white vinyl tape entitling this floor installation “The Strokes”. Blocks of concrete embedded with old record sleeves emerge from the floor. Lambie, who often used in previous installations glossy adhesive vinyl stripes in varying colours applied in continuous lines, has a capacity to transform the spaces he works on, but also the ordinary objects he finds.
For this exhibition he has taken ordinary objects of fashion such as fabrics, bags and leather jackets and turned them into works of art. At the entrance to the gallery, a small wall, made from bricks of coloured cloth (among which you can also spot an Emilio Pucci-like print) welcomes the visitors. In a corner sits a spiked structure resembling an uncanny mine created by stitching together sleeves of leather jackets around a bowling ball ("Warm Leatherette"); in the opposite aisle sits instead a black patent leather holdall turned into a strange sculpture with handbag straps in different colours protruding from it ("Head Shadow"), looking like a funnier version of Marc Jacob’s 2007 Louis Vuitton Tribute Patchwork Bag.
Handbags covered in mirrors hang from a structure of sliced wooden chairs painted in pastel colours and piled in the centre of the gallery("Seven and Seven Is or Sunshine Bathed the Golden Glow"). There might be no great meanings behind such pieces of art, but they are fun and I like the idea of confusing and disorienting the spectator by reusing second-hand accessories and clothes while create something new that has also got a new energy, a great sense of enigmatic and bizarre chaos and a slightly kitsch edge.
The colours used by Lambie also made me think about the vibrantly coloured wonderland created by Manish Arora in his collections that often feature outfits combining images inspired by Pop Art, Indian comics, Bollywood costumes and the future.
Forever Changes is at GoMA, Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, UK, until 29th September 2008.
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