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TONI GRAND
Exhibition at Camden Arts Centre
1st July - 21 August 1994
I remember opening the big encyclopaedia at the page with the chart showing processions of birds and fish traversing the globe on their migratory routes; including, of course, a stream of eels wriggling from the rivers of Europe to the Sargasso Sea; each animal its own compass needle, an instrument of orientation to the world.
The eels form a quickening stream running through Toni Grand's sly and startling exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. They don't wriggle much, but they still traverse, and still carry a sense of direction. Du Simple au double fills the largest gallery. The visitor is blocked by a sea of chilly blue drums; each one a sideways cylinder of transluscent resin, apparently weighted along the floor by a curious dark welt running the length of its side, like a clumsy seam. You stoop to scrutinise, and can just distinguish, through ripply resin, the eyes in a tapering shuttle-like body (another memory: standing on the shallow frozen lake at Osterley Park, seeing the trapped goldfish beneath the ice). That each cylinder should take its variable dimensions and its orientation from the eel encased within it seems inevitable: each fish (of a certain thickness, but essentially one-dimensional) becomes, for the sculpture, that imperial yard or standard metre, locked in a vault, from which all other measurements are extended. In the next room, in Entre 49 et 115 centimetres, each eel stands to attention (more like a lonely sardine) in its own made-to-measure tray, all stacked, overlapping, against two walls, as if waiting to be posted to some ultimate destination.
There is something very pragmatic about the way Grand builds his sculptures from these fishy fingers. Some artists embrace metaphor too quickly (metaphors for death, for birth, for sex, for love, for separation....), sometimes so elegantly, so entirely, that the whole thing implodes, and you are left with just the spectacle: a flattened tableau of too much signification. Grand's sculpture accumulates meaning more slowly, and always in tandem with the developing physical structure of the work. It seems to have started, very importantly, from improvisation rather than intention: a wooden sculpture from 1974, returned to the artist for repair. The sculpture was essentially a wooden strip, pushed into a gentle curve by ten wedges inserted along its length. Already a latent image of a spinal cord; what could be more natural than that the sculptor should reach for a nearby eel to reinforce it. The result, with the eel attached and rigidified by resin, is reminiscent of an old bridge strengthened with a new parallel superstructure. In another piece the eel is crooked like a boomerang, painted bright safety-yellow, bridging two short right-angle sections of resin; like an engineer's sample: useless in itself but demonstrating some principle of organic displacement.
In 27 sur 27 the
eels, now stiff little torpedoes, cluster beneath the legs of
gathered trestles, forming a suspended layer, a new species of
sub-pedestal sculpture. Critics have been suspicious of Grand's
provocations to humour, sensing a joke strung out too long. But
it never was a joke, and goes far beyond humour: a profound well
of absurdity is opened up, both unsentimental and poignant. The
sculpture does, ultimately, quietly, push the viewer to wider
reflection. That an animal be destined to be preserved merely
as an articulated length of tube seems momentarily sad; like a
man sentenced to be a conveyancer. But as in death, so it was
in life: all those individual eels were, after all, wriggling
their way back to the Sargasso Sea to pass on one articulated
length of genetic information.
Jeffrey Dennis August 1994.
see also: A Net of Eels 2009 by Jake Tilson and Kyoichi Tsuzuki
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