One of the show’s highlights, a Francis Bacon-esque triptych by Kate Lambert of segmented, dissected human bodies, reduces or rather magnifies mankind into a pound of flesh. Lambert comes closest here to expressing Schopenhauer’s conception of the sublime as a pleasure through fear, joying in an awareness of the nothingness of the human self: her pink and grey forms sit on a calm blue background, clearly recognisable and yet strangely horrifying. Her treatment of both the themes was welcome in a display that sometimes isolated one or the other, partitioning aesthetics into ‘ugly’ or ‘pretty’ and leaving it at that. Many of the more successful works escaped this dichotomy through the use of a fantastic realist style, exploring the sublime through dream-like combinations of the bizarre yet beautiful.
One such work was a highlight of the show: a piece of performance art by students from the Ruskin, led by Dan Udy. Four figures in skin-tight nude fabric emerged in the spotlit area outside the exhibition space and kneeled together on a white platform, remaining absolutely still as they were wrapped in transparent film. Their bodies were at once united and trapped by the horrifyinglysuffocatory material. The beautiful symmetry of their poses seemed to invite the spectator to appreciate them as a visual object – yet this aesthetic appeal was undercut by a gradually stronger sense of unease as the breath thickened in their smooth prison.
At last, another performer began to play shrill notes on a violin which ripped through the tension just as the figures suddenly became alive and struggled to break out of their film. At once they were transformed from objects of perfect stillness to irregular, uncoordinated bodies of an overwhelming fleshliness. Their limbs gradually broke through the plastic seal: the embryonic structure that had contained them began to collapse as they writhed to be free and emerged as limp bodies on the cold stone ground. Their previous perfection had been tarnished as they lay dishevelled, now smeared with pig’s blood, and with fragments of the film still sticking to them like a second skin.