One gusty afternoon in 1971, the artist Rose Finn-Kelcey hoisted a flag above Alexandra Palace in London. Silver lamé letters on a black background, spelling Here Is a Gale Warning, sounded the alarm for an unspecified emergency. A half century later, Finn-Kelcey’s act, a video of which flickers above one of the two main galleries at Kettle’s Yard and gives this exhibition its title, no longer seems so enigmatic. From climate change to economic precarity to rising fascism, we are living in an age of concurrent catastrophes. The future is here, the storm already blowing.
Artists have always responded to the exigencies of their times, but these days it’s museums that are uniquely under pressure. Public campaigns to make institutions more diverse and accessible have mounted just as governments around the world move to strip them of budgets and their audiences of rights. Museums have a responsibility to grapple with the cultural fallout, though the trend for mounting group exhibitions around critical issues can feel like an anxious plea for survival. Art, meanwhile, isn’t well served by sloganeering. Assembling works ranging from documentary to totally abstract around the assertion that they “warn us of political, social and ecological upheaval”, Here Is a Gale Warning seems painfully aware of this conundrum, but succumbs to it anyway.
Take, for instance, the show’s opening salvo, God Kennel – A Tabernacle, a wooden sculpture resembling a doghouse suspended upside down from the ceiling. Also by Finn-Kelcey, it hovers above the floorplan of a flat in a nearby Cambridge council estate, rendered to scale in masking tape by Anne Tallentire so that it extends across the floor into the neighbouring gallery. Clever and economical, Tallentire’s work brings a working-class domicile into Kettle’s Yard, a museum attached to the former home of wealthy art collectors. Yet the pairing is presented as a statement about the UK housing crisis, a topic subsequently abandoned – and one that doesn’t quite sync with Finn-Kelcey’s own reference to the Ark of the Covenant.
In the next room, Finn-Kelcey’s video, along with her tantalising photographs of hands in boxing gloves about to burst airborne bubbles, keep company with Cecilia Vicuña’s Precarios. Ephemeral sculptures made of rubbish the artist gathered from streets near her home in New York City, or from the banks of a river in her native Chile, these are heartbreakingly anthropomorphic, fragile monuments made of the very materials with which we’re destroying our planet and ourselves. Pia Arke’s nearby video Arctic Hysteria, named for a pseudo-scientific condition said to inflict Inuit women, shows the Greenlandic artist crawling naked over an enormous photograph of Nuugaarsuk Point, taken with an inhabitable, hut-shaped camera, before tearing it to shreds. The raw performance invokes the violence of Danish colonisation on Greenlandic women’s bodies – all the more apt now that Donald Trump has said he wants to claim the island for the US.
I’ve never seen Arke, Finn-Kelcey and Vicuña exhibited together before, and their grouping feels poignant and elegiac. Yet beyond shared environmental concerns, the strength of these works lies in the fact that their meaning remains slippery.
The rest of the show is far more abstract and vaguer still in its relevance to the theme. Tarek Lakhrissi’s Unfinished Sentence I, an installation of hanging spears and tridents, is a reference – or so we’re told – to the lesbian feminist Amazons in Monique Wittig’s novel Les Guérillères. Clanging sounds clipped from TV shows such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer play in the background, adding drolly to the work’s militant atmosphere, though the weapons on display are too dull and crudely welded to much threaten the patriarchy. Wall text also explains that lavender gels on the overhead lights are a reference to the LGBTQ+ community, but tinted so faintly they’re almost unnoticeable, they hardly enhance the visibility of queer lives.
More than a dozen small hand-loom weavings by Candace Hill-Montgomery hang on the walls of both galleries. Incorporating objects sourced from the artist’s friends and family, their titles nod to references as diverse as Brice Marden and George Floyd, though their colourful patterns are entirely abstract. Alongside Justin Caguiat’s Pissing in the Stars, a monumental painting like an acid-dipped astral projection, they seem far more meditative than premonitory. Interspacing 03, a Tallentire sculpture of stacked polystyrene, gridded paper and colourful tape rolls, is described in a wall label as being somehow about the prison system – though it appeared to me as tersely minimalist as any floor piece by Carl Andre. Large, collaged works by Tomashi Jackson, meanwhile, render images of protests in Los Angeles and London inscrutable through layers of screen-printed paint, paper and vinyl. Although their textured surfaces are highly engaging, they only became legible when I viewed them through my mobile phone. Like so many other works on display whose subjects are identified in wall labels, they relied a bit too much on outside mediation.
Then again, that’s how we experience most things nowadays. Art, protests and natural disasters all come to us flattened, abstracted and annotated on our tiny screens. Museums can show us other ways of looking at the world that don’t inscribe culture within an equally limiting frame. Abstraction doesn’t need to warn us to be worthy of our attention. It’s enough to make us feel things we can’t explain.
