boredom is always counter-revolutionary

As entertainment for a Saturday afternoon, I really enjoyed this exhibition. It was busy, with lots of queuing and children crying and vying for attention, but I suspect that all this created an atmosphere much more suited to this type of event than hushed inspection and contemplation. The eleven installations that make up Psycho Buildings are to be experienced viscerally, even physically: infact, we could even go so far as to think of Psycho Buildings as an exhibition for children that adults happen to enjoy as well, like those animated films and fantasy novels that are deemed, I imagine, to have “crossover appeal”.

Most of this exhibition isn’t really things to look at and think about, but places to be (with, following the usual guidebook rhetoric, the ensuing revaluation of the environments we inhabit). Some of these places to be aren’t entirely unfamiliar, recreating spaces usually found at playgrounds and theme parks: Atelier Bow-Wow’s sheet-metal “Life Tunnel” and Ernesto Neto’s wooden-framed “Life Fog Frog…Fog Frog” could both be from a roadside service station’s kid’s area; whilst, a little more ambitious, Tomas Saraceno’s geodesic “Observatory, Air-Port-City” and Mike Nelson’s cinematic “To The Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, 1999” could be part of an elaborate queuing area for a ride at Alton Towers. I don’t mean to criticise these installations by drawing these comparisons: all of these are fun places to explore and clamber around, and making us feel young and excited is probably the best way to get us to “re-examine our ideas about the relationship between ourselves – our bodies and minds – and our surroundings”.

The other main category of installation at Psycho Buildings is more concerned with the minutiae of dwelling-spaces, appealing more to curiosity and a fine eye. Do Ho Suh’s “Fallen Star 1/5” and Rachel Whiteread’s “Place” both use doll’s houses as the means to dislocate the visitor from an embedded position within a home or a street, and give us a similar sense to how a child must feel with their toys, a contrasting sense of god-like control and humbling reverence for the fragility and artificiality of the environments in which we live. This fragility is then emphasized in Los Carpinteros’ “Show Room“, which freezes a generic Ikea everyroom in the moment of an explosion, although my attention was drawn mainly to the intricacy of the sink’s plug chain rather than reflecting on the startling overall effect and the potential reality of this scene somewhere else in the world.

The most fun – err, I mean intellectually stimulating – part of Psycho Buildings, really, was Gelitin’s “Normally, Preceeding and Unrestricted with without title“, which fills one of The Hayward’s rooftop terraces with water to create a small boating lake. This (judged in part by the length of its queue) seems to achieve most effectively what this exhibition offers, namely a novel but gentle surrealisation of an otherwise innocuous space. Rowing around in a small circle along the skyline of the Southbank may not tell you anything about where and how you live, but certainly suggests that the built environment is not as concrete and fixed as we may assume it to be. The Hayward makes a great pond.

And to pull all this towards more recent debates, these installations – especially the Gelitin boating lake – come as something of a defence of modernist architecture, even a demonstration that Brutalism isn’t such a monolithic vortex of everyday interaction and humane living space after all (see: Robin Hood Gardens’ revamp or knock-it-down-and-start-again debate). On the whole, this exhibition pulls together and makes associations between different, otherwise opposing, environments (serene boating lake and harsh concrete; everyday banality and rupturing explosion; highbrow exhibition space and lowbrow horror film set), the message of which would be that existing space can be reused and reworked in favour of moving prematurely onto something new. A change is as good as a restart.