It was Joseph Heller in his novel Good as Gold that said commerce (and gold) was everywhere now, "advocating a crusading inertia." Next up at London's Approach Gallery is Martin Westwood with his very own take on this theme. You could call it corporate melancholia. The Chelsea and Royal College of Art graduate uses the stuff that proliferates in bureaucratic environments - reams of paper, paper clips and the like - but deconstructs it. It's when he remodels it, however, that what was once bland and sterile, as if by magic, becomes intricate and seductive.
For his show at the Approach, which opens on the 3 March, Westwood is building temporary walls to block out all the natural light that comes into the East End gallery and showing five new sculptures and five new works on paper.
The streamlined corporate world, with its automated systems and tendency to be a little bit depressing, becomes multi-layered and visually compelling when Westwood gets his hands on its component parts. The uniformity of the corporate aesthetic was perhaps most memorably undermined in his lauded 'fade held' installation at the Tate Modern in 2005. Here he made a false floor, four feet higher than the Tate's floor in which he cut three huge circles that each contained a descending spiral stairwell. These structures suggested flaws in a system; they resembled pie charts but they also threw you off, disoriented you. I suppose they led you to question what might be beneath the surface of this temporary structure and, subsequently, what might be behind the façade of a corporation.
'Fade', 2005, MDF, metal pole, onion sacking, Dimensions Variable
The largest of the new sculptures for the Approach is a kind of table, made from two intersecting hollow cylinders, both 50 centimetres high, that from above look like a Venn diagram. Peering through its glass top, you see piles and piles of printer paper, some piles stacked vertically, some stacked horizontally, but all arranged to make a sort of jigsaw inside each cylinder. Westwood has also made space inside for numerous paper-spikes, the kind used in offices to file receipts, each with a lithograph print of the head of a stereotyped office worker stuck to the tip. There are also hundreds of gold cocktail sticks, again with tiny heads attached.
The other 'table' sculpture is in the shape of a teardrop; inside it are hundreds of filing cards. Then there are three 50-centimetre high drums, each upholstered with brown fabric. They are "based on the sieves used for prospecting, for finding gold", Westwood told me. They contain a series of brass grids running right the way through them, which are full of bits of paper each featuring, again, a picture of a generic worker-bee; they are meant to be trapped, perhaps, in the endless pipes of an office's air conditioning system. All these workaday and somewhat depressing materials come together to make a romantic, and delicately complex aesthetic; it seems Westwood is suggesting that, in the midst of this entombed and controlling office world, there's still room for personal freedom and unpredictability.
The large-scale works on paper Westwood described to me as "ambient mechanical wallpapers." Through several layers of grayscale lithographic paper, he has cut out in one, an image of a group meeting; in another, a woman looking through a corporate brochure; and, in a third, two people countersigning cheque. All of these scenes could have been lifted directly from a corporate magazine. The figures are all trapped in the layers of grey paper, but the way each work is made, so elaborately, elevates them into a more surreal and timeless situation. "I'm interested in how the personal hits the structure," Westwood told me. "It's all about subjectivity in a commercialised environment - how people are affected by a world where everything is purchasable. If it's not already purchasable, it soon will be."
Martin Westwood
3 March - 15 April
The Approach
1st Floor, The Approach Tavern
47 Approach Road
Bethnal Green
London E29LY
www.theapproach.co.uk
T:+44 (0)208 983 3878
Laura K Jones
'Hold', 2005, upholstered table, shredded office stationary, photocopy, glass, map pins, pen, stone, 91.5x0x152.5 cm, 36x0x60 ins
'Churning', 2006
acrylic on newsprint, map pins, ink-jet print, stainless steel and false eyelash on newsprint in walnut frame
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for Your Gallery magazine.
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