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MADDER139
No.1 VYNER STREET
LONDON E2 9DG
+44
(0)20 7490 3667
Michael
Lisle-Taylor
4 Sept- 4 October
2009
Private View Thursday 3 September 6-9
Omm Papa (i),
2009
The
hilarity at the core of Michael Lisle-Taylor's work arises
from a dance with military service that won't let go. It's an
embrace that promotes its own laughter. It probes the
interfaces of insubordination while acknowledging that
discipline encodes behaviour that prevails when rupture and
trauma take hold. When men and horses get blown-up, humour
repels, anaesthetizes and provides a safe passage back to the
problem. Once, military farriers hacked off the branded
fetlocks and hooves of stricken horses, abandoned on the
battlefield, in order to prevent hostile identification. Not
at Knightsbridge with the Blues and Royals in 1982 – but at
Naseby and then routinely at Dettingen, Waterloo, Balaclava
and Mons in 1914. Men and horses get blownup: perverse
laughter begins the repair work. Today, in Helmand, donkeys
are used as roadside bombs. It's a world of 'shock and
eeeyore.' Stand back, it’s best not to get in the way –
perhaps, its best, not to get it anyway.
Omm
Papa (iii)(Detail), 2009
What's left in Lisle-Taylor when the laughter subsides?
His skill for a start, which refers to his time in the service
working with aircraft and weapons handling equipment. He's
good at adapting Blues Ceremonial kit as well. His sewing is
reliable and as matter-of-fact as his way of assembling his
functional sculptures. Consequently the shredded uniforms, the
dislocated flags, the themes of fragmentation and dispersal
have the additional pathos of knowing how to destroy such
well-made things.
In
the central work 'Omm Papa', Lisle-Taylor contrasts the
paraphernalia of childhood and play: rocking horse, roundabout
and see-saw to put on display the evidence of this violent
protest. It invokes the doomed juveniles, riding tombstones in
Thomas Bewick's engraving 'The Churchyard Cavalry' 1804. Then
again George Fullard, in 1964, made his 'Death or Glory' (the
motto of the 17th/21st Lancers) where an infant playing at
soldiering, proudly sits on top of his charger – oblivious to
the suffering of the collapsed animal beneath him. It's an
innocence that will survive until the regimental farriers
arrive to remove the regimental evidence – that's when the
comedy, that Lisle-Taylor deploys begins to deliver its
payload.
Omm Papa (ii),
2009
In 'Yeehaa', Lisle-Taylor
uses the motif of the flag, redirecting it away from its
modernist rhetoric, a site of formal internal relationships
only, and reclaims it as the emblematic device it always was.
This comes with its own problems. The flag indicates the
rituals played-out, with increasing regularity, as troops are
brought back from foreign service. The flags that cover
military caskets are ceremonially folded in particular ways.
The fragments of Old Glory, in this work are seen through an
arrangement of folds and cuts and packed into triangular
containers and displayed with an inescapable reference to the
diagonals of the Union Jack. Consequently the image settles on
neither one but reflects the uneasy alliance between the two.
Look across to the shattered metaphors of 'Omm Papa' which in
consequence accrues to it problematic associations when
American political equivocation and popular support for the
IRA is factored in.
Yeehaa (Detail) 1945 and
2009
The 1982 Knightsbridge
explosion is at the centre of this exhibition, but it conjures
other reverberations from further a field. In 2008,
Lisle-Taylor travelled to the Tien Shan mountains in east
Kazakhstan in order to pick enough wild apples to make thirty
litres of cider for his work 'Diaspora'. His theme here is
dispersal – not the dispersal that results from the detonation
of malign devices but a more insidious permeation of
knowledge. The Tien Shan apples are the apples of the original
Fall – the Garden of Eden Apples – the ones Milton wrote about
in 'Paradise Lost' and that Blake illustrated with his 'Satan
Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve' – and with awful
realisation we learn that amongst these prelapsarian wild
apples on the Chinese border the Soviets set-up their nuclear
testing range.
Diaspora (Kazak)
2008
In place of Blake's
solemn, erotic conjugation on its bed of yielding apples,
Lisle-Taylor positions his rudimentary cider press – assembled
for the sole purpose of extracting isotope-laden cider and
like so much of his work showing the history of its necessary
modification with little concern for embellishment or
refinement. Above is suspended the map of the test site,
hovering like Duchamp's 'Top Inscription', the dark cloud that
looms over his 'Large Glass'. This is not the only reference
to the 'Glass' in Lisle-Taylor's work. The (cavalry) uniform,
the suspended object on his see-saw, the sliding mechanisms of
the rocking horse, the roundabout – all have their equivalents
in Duchamp's early masterpiece. Finally we have Duchamp's
bleak humour that was conditioned by his experience as an
infantry corporal in 1905 and that stayed with him. That was
another dance that wouldn't let go. There is a lot to laugh at
in Lisle-Taylor as with Duchamp, but it is hilarity rather
than humour and it carries its own collateral of
pain.
Kieran Lyons, August
2009
Michael
Lisle-Taylor was born in 1969 and was brought up in
Pembrokeshire, Wales. He graduated from the Royal College of
Art in 2006. His works are held in several collections
including the David Roberts Foundation, the Saatchi Collection
and the Imperial War Museum. For more information please
contact Debbie Carslaw at info@madder139.com
Open
Wednesday – Sunday 12–6pm or by appointment
No.1 VYNER
STREET LONDON E2 9DG
+44 (0)20 7490 3667
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