And This Time the Well Is Alive

The artist is supposed to draw from the well of his labor power, but the alchemy that turns it into gold for the dealer leaves him nothing but slag. [1]

– Thierry de Duve

And This Time the Well Is Alive is about the perverse appeal of grotesquery—the affect created when something simultaneously produces discomfort and a sense of attraction in the beholder. The exhibition invokes the grotesque as a methodology for perverting industrial and bureaucratic forms in late capitalism. Even more specifically, it considers grotesquery through the lens of digestion. Chewing, swallowing, and expulsion are concomitant processes of digestion that, taken together, are simultaneously productive and waste-making.

In many respects, And This Time the Well Is Alive is a show about the body without any bodies present. The artworks consider what happens when industrial and mass-produced products stand in for the body, symbolically or literally, and whether this is a regrettable perversion of nature or the inevitable endpoint of human progress. All the artworks take as their foundation an industrial material of some sort. Then this industrial basis is subverted through methods like disintegration, melting, and the poking of holes. Overlaying organic digestive processes on the hard and inorganic materiality of the post-industrial is deliberately jarring. And this is the point: it is precisely through this explicit forcing together of conflicting frameworks that we come to the grotesque. Here, the word evokes conflicting libidinal desires.

For the most part, the digestive logic that underpins The Well is not obvious; its role is, instead, to produce an almost unplaceable discomfort in the viewer. Let us begin with Alexandra Peters’s Bottleneck (2024), an installation comprised of a vinyl covered pipe, a row of supermarket trollies, two paintings adorned with the text “Hardbodies” and corporate carpet tiles. The large pipe runs across the width of the gallery, producing the illusion that a liquid or gas is being transported. Speaking previously of Peters’s pipe works, Azza Zein has asked, “Can the pipe speak of a hidden guttural connection? Aren’t the pipes figures of intestines for economic growth?”[2] Here, Zein illuminates the late-capitalist tendency to adopt language typically used to describe bodily functions as a way of describing the production and distribution of wealth. However, the form also provokes a repulsive image: one envisages the imaginary substance carried through these pipes oozing through the synthetic membrane of the pipes and through the gridded metallic bodies of the trollies that they have violently impaled. Above the trollies, we read the “Hardbodies” phrase. The trollies are, indeed, hard. They are also compromised. The logic of undermining capital—consumerism, big industry, bureaucracy—is not lost on the viewer. With the pipe pierced through the metaphorical stomach of the anthropomorphised trolley, the concept of hard bodies enters the realm of survivalism. These bodies are hardened by circumstance, not choice.

In a similar vein, Burchill/McCamley’s hard, metallic Reflectors and Refractors (2016) intimates the intestinal with its all over perforations. Made from rolled aluminium, it is cold and, at 190cm tall, imposing. Almost as soon as we are confronted by the sculpture, we also notice the attached accoutrements that suggest a body or a site for bodies that are at once deeply emblematic of corporatisation and surveillance states. There are stainless steel door handles, like those found on office buildings, and polycarbonate visors that are worn by riot police, which are simultaneously undeniably appealing in their smoothness and reflectivity. The sculpture is, as art historian Hughes has previously pointed out, “perversely seductive”. [3] The reversal of the industrial complex is completed by the fact that these items are rendered useless in their present configuration—they can’t be worn or used to gain entrance to spaces. The metallic form sits atop a piece of rubber that resembles a yoga mat (is yoga the ultimate late capitalist form of body maintenance? Namaste, Gertrude visitors. Decide for yourselves). Finally, the porousness of the metal structure undermines the hardness of the form, contradicting any promise of an impermeable physical or visual barrier.

Paired with Reflectors and Refractors are Darcy Wedd’s dust paintings (Untitled I-III, V and IX, 2022–23). Flaking and unstable, the works look as though they are disintegrating before the viewer’s eyes. The medium of the dust is knife shavings, which Wedd obtained as a by-product of his knife-making practice. Sharpening his knives against the canvas, Wedd literally registered the volume of his production as strata on the picture surface. The shavings, which have collected dust, cobwebs and other detritus, elicit a sense of decomposition. The visual similarity to soil, a material with myriad cultural significances typically pivoting around ideas of fecundity and growth, disquiets the viewer. Furthermore, the fact of the painting’s material reality further jars the viewer for whom the tension between the sharpness of the knife and the softness of the illusionary soil is difficult to uphold.

In Alicia Frankovich’s sculptures, we don’t so much see an anthropomorphism of objects but, instead, the utilisation of objects as dystopian body proxies. By using salvaged airbags from Teslas—a signifier of tech-giant hegemony—Frankovich suggests that body proxy dystopia—a period where the single, natural body is the exception, not the norm—is nearer than we might imagine. For Deep Freeze (Deployed Tesla Airbag) (2023–24), Frankovich has encased an airbag in clear epoxy resin. The white synthetic textile that makes up the airbag is almost translucent in parts, suggestive of a skin sample preserved for scientific purposes. Meanwhile, Blow Up (Deployed Tesla Air-bag) (2023–24), a bubble gum pink airbag that inflates with the aid of a motor housed in a stainless-steel box, is a crude stand in for a lung or stomach. It is often said that with the advent of industrialisation, organic human bodies were rendered machine-like: “engines burning food as fuel”; the Fordist worker as a “mass worker”. Indeed, much capitalist and neo-liberal vernacular invokes the language of digestion: “consumerism,” “trimming the fat”. In Frankovich’s eyes, the endpoint of the conflation of organic processes and capitalism is the replacement of the body with the consumer fetish object.

Digestion is not a new theme in modern and contemporary art. Throughout the last century, artists have directly referenced food, ingestion and waste production as a form of social commentary. In her discussion of Pipilotti Rist’s feminist methodology of Mutaflor (1996), art historian Lindsay Kelley writes: “A cut between mouth and asshole punctuates each loop of the camera and loop of the video. Inside this splice, the chemical and mechanical activities of the alimentary canal sort out what nourishes, what to store, and what to discard”. [4] Here, Kelley reads Rist’s female body as a neat sorting machine. Furthermore, digestion and grotesquery have been bedfellows for decades. In addition to Rist, we might consider the likes of Paul McCarthy or Piero Manzoni or Tania Bruguera, each of whom have played with the relationship between consumption and expulsion. Where these artists either explored consumption in relation to the human body, The Well concerns itself with the non-human digestive structures of late capitalism and explores these ideas through non-figurative sculptural forms.

For Oilstones (2024), for example, Erin Hallyburton has made netball-sized orbs of deep-fried store-bought batter mix that connote, but do not depict, the consumption and digestion of fast food. The work is part of Hallyburton’s ongoing research into fatness and class. Race, fatness, and class are all crucial factors in the negotiation of the bodily status quo. Fatness is habitually regarded as a societal contaminant, triggering disgust in various groups. One study, for example, has shown that anorexic women are not so much obsessed with thinness but with the avoidance of fat, a symbol of impurity. [5] Fatness, says Hallyburton, is closely enmeshed with class politics. Lower socioeconomic communities tend to have high rates of fatness due to the affordability and accessibility of foods with a long shelf life and high energy density. [6] Oilstones is a continuation of Hallyburton’s ongoing investigation into fish and chip shops as symbols of the intersection between class and fatness. Oilstones has the faint whiff of fried foods and leaks oil onto the floor of Gertrude, layering multi-sensorial cues that are designed to provoke bodily responses in the viewer.

In Pope.L’s Small Cup (2008), a model of the Capitol in Washington, DC, is lit by flood light and is slowly destroyed by goats and chickens as they consume feed scattered around the structure. Filmed in 2004, seventeen years before the storming of The Capitol, the ultimate symbol of American democracy, it would be easy to label Small Cup prophetic. More than anything, though, the video is a simple allegory for the fragility of class: offering a metaphor for revolution by way of the consuming goats and chickens. Pope.L stages the way in which rigid class structures necessitate keeping people of different classes separate. The video was filmed in an abandoned textile mill in Lewiston, Maine—once the wealthiest city in the state thanks to the prevalence of industrial textile production. In contrast to the mill’s slow degradation, the chickens and goats in Small Cup make quick work of flattening the Capitol. During his lifetime, Pope.L used his work to highlight race and class disparities in America. He famously completed a number of durational performances where he crawled through public sites and streets in New York City (including Times Square Crawl (1978) and Tompkins Square Crawl (1991). For these crawls, Pope.L chose sites where homeless people gathered and lived. Spectators were forced to gaze down at Pope.L crawling along the ground, military style, in a suit (to signify the desire for upward mobility) and, therefore, consider the physical and metaphorical position of the disadvantaged. Disadvantage is represented in Small Cup by the abandoned warehouse set in a frigid winter. By the time the video comes to a close, the Capitol has been reduced to a shell of its former self.

Digestion is not a linear start-to-finish process but is, instead, a cycle of reconfiguration. Once one entity digests and expels something, their waste becomes food for another (think, for example, of the relationship between animals and plants). Eventually, the snake eats its own tail. In other words, waste as a key element of digestion is not the endpoint—waste is part of a circular logic that by-products are just the start of something new.

For The Well, Iris Touliatou presents two versions of her site-specific installations, untitled (sweet and low) (for love or money) (2024) and mother light (Gertrude) (2024). Each work begins with pre-existing items found in Gertrude that have then been transformed physically but not materially. For untitled (sweet and low), Touliatou utilised excess flyers from Gertrude’s 2022 fundraising campaign, featuring an artwork by Kay Abude, a screenprint titled FOR LOVE OR MONEY (2021). Once the fundraising campaign was complete, and the desired outcome was achieved—the collection of money—the flyers became obsolete, taking up space in Gertrude’s storage cabinets.

As untitled (sweet and low), they have been pulverised to resemble cotton candy and sprinkled around the gallery, accumulating in corners and following the viewer out the door. Now rid of its functionality, the flyer exists as an aesthetic trope that subverts a use-value. For mother light (Gertrude), Touliatou directed Gertrude staff to install an extra light below the pre-existing lighting grid in the gallery’s foyer. The “mother” is, in reality, the “offspring”, born from the lighting grid above. This semantic glitch is in keeping with Touliatou’s desire to insert anomalies into the institution’s fabric.

To demonstrate the logic of constant returns and cycles, it is fitting to end this essay with the oldest works in the exhibition, by Joseph Beuys—an artist whose work routinely pivots around the cycling or transfer of energy from one entity into another, and who famously worked with materials of digestion including fat and honey. Akkumulatoren Doppelblat (1959) consists of two pencil drawings, each on a perforated sketchbook page. The objects depicted in the sketches might be interpreted as vehicles, weapons, a pyramid, but they are ultimately unidentifiable. However, the identity of the depicted objects is not as important as what the process of making the drawings represents. As curator Ann Temkin argues, “These landscapes have more to do with process than with place, as they pictorialise the drama of creation and regeneration… the earth appears as a sculptural site that natural processes endlessly create”. [7] For Beuys, spiritual regeneration was critical in the post-war period as a means of countering Germany’s physical reconstruction.

Beuys’s Mit Schwefel überzogene Zinkkiste (tamponierte Ecke) (1970), a pair of zinc boxes, represent a productive volatility. As a highly conductive metal, zinc has the potential to enable energy flow, such as in a battery. Meanwhile, the yellow box is covered in sulphur, a highly flammable material that—although volatile—is unlikely to react in its present state. Beuys applied the small daub of gauze in the box’s corner to allow for spiritual regeneration to filter through. [8]

Given that numerous twenty-first century thinkers have argued that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, many artists use the space of art to visualise, speculate, pervert, and distort its operations. As The Well shows, many artists borrow organic digestive processes to analyse and deconstruct its circulatory logic. The intersection of the organic and inorganic that these artists create produces a form of grotesquery: one that in, the very same gesture, models the allure of capitalist consumerism whilst simultaneously highlighting its social and psychological violence. 

For the artists in And This Time the Well Is Alive, the simultaneous representation of production and destruction is fertile ground—at least in the safety of the gallery—for perverting the status quo. Eat the rich. Or, more specifically, eat the products of the rich. Chew them up, absorb energy from them, reconfigure them, shit them out, nourish the soil, start again.