One day Olaf Brzeski was cleaning the chimney of his studio in Wrocław, Poland, when something terrible happened. “A column of soot 10 metres high fell down through the chimney,” he recalls. “It covered everything in the studio. And, of course, me.”
As he stood blinking black dust from his eyes, Brzeski couldn’t even blame someone else. He had unleashed upon himself the weight of the past, brought dark matter to light, unclogged the chimney of all its waste as effectively as a course of colonic irrigation. Freud would have called it the return of the repressed; others might have seen it as soot’s revenge, getting its own back on the humans who had burned its previous incarnations.
Brzeski gathered the soot and, using chemical agents I scarcely understand, fashioned a sculpture. Its next stop is the Hayward Gallery in London, where this seemingly miraculous explosion of soot will spill from a wall, its motion frozen in time, its form bulbous and imbalanced. Brzeski will darken the wall with his blowtorch to add the finishing touch.
He calls the result Dream – Spontaneous Combustion. His idea is that a dream might contain thoughts so incendiary it could cause a human body to ignite. Brzeski has long been fascinated with the history of spontaneous combustion, while accepting that it may all be hokum. This history extends from an Italian knight called Polonus Vorstius, reportedly consumed by flames in 1471, to the 2011 case of an Irish pensioner who died, an inquest concluded, from spontaneous combustion. Like many of the works in When Forms Come Alive, as the Hayward’s new group show is called, Dream is the product of someone with a Puckish temperament, who snatches from disaster something droll and thought-provoking.
So can sculpture be funny? Many of the works Hayward director Ralph Rugoff has collected for the exhibition are playful, unknowable and untameable. While they show artists depicting movement and growth through sculpture, many also subvert any sense of pretension or self-importance. Rugoff directs me to a huge Pepto-Bismol-pink blob that hangs in one room. The blob, like something from Liz Truss’s nightmares, is a creepy but comical pop art satellite with appendages sticking out like cartoon trumpets.
It’s a sculpture called Epiphany on Chairs by Austrian artist Franz West. The gag? This obvious nonsense is surrounded by chairs, inviting viewers to contemplate its significance in awed reverie. “It’s taking the piss out of the idea of looking at art and having some kind of epiphany about your experience,” says Rugoff. Cain and Abel, another of West’s sculptures, consists of two vaguely human forms confronting each other. Boy, I think, those biblical brothers have really let themselves go. Are they about to shake hands? Or, more likely, are those other appendages that are being outstretched? Is this a representation of the first ever willy-waving contest? It’s hard to be sure.
Rugoff gestures to a pile of goop in the corner. “It could be mud, lava or excremental,” he says. In fact, it’s a sculpture made of lead by Lynda Benglis, called Quartered Meteor. What looks like an abject mess that experts in hazmat suits should quickly remove is actually a piece of art, one that has managed to turn the abjectly execrable into something adorable – perhaps even funny. “I’ve never heard her talk about her work being funny,” says Rugoff, “but there is a kind of humour of, ‘I’m gonna just drop this leaden form in this pristine gallery.’ What she has said is that her work is about resisting geometry. And I think geometry stands for the world of straight.”
So is this exhibition for the queer, the abject, the bonkers? “Absolutely,” Rugoff replies. “The world we live in is all based on things that are predictable and regular shapes. But everything in this show is totally irregular.” So the great hulking brutes of indeterminate forms by the late artist Phyllida Barlow, and the teetering sculpture of a rollercoaster by EJ Hill – they are all rebelling against straight stuff, be that lines or worldviews.
But nothing captures the exhibition’s spirit of irregularity, ephemerality and endless mutation quite like Michel Blazy’s sculpture Bouquet Final. This is a multitiered fountain, held in place by scaffolding, but instead of flowing water, scented bubble bath foam is whipped up by pumps. Say what you like about the glories of Louis XIV’s fountains, but the Sun King didn’t have bubble bath coursing through the gardens of Versailles.
But don’t you think, I ask Rugoff, that exhibiting these sooty explosions, bubble bath fountains and gloop is going to jam the Hayward’s switchboard with complainers, saying that if this is art, then they’ve got a compost heap in the back garden that’s crying out for gallery space? “I think those days of outrage are over,” says Rugoff, possibly with a note of regret. “I did a show a few years go about the invisible in art, and no one called us then.”
Of the many delights in When Forms Come Alive, I’m also taken by Matthew Ronay’s work. The American artist seems to have taken all the plumbing from inside our bodies – sacs, intestines, organs, tubes – and recreated them via sculptures the size of netsuke and just as charming. Ronay tells me he started making sculptures inspired by fungus but moved on, as he says in the catalogue, to research all sorts of things that feed into his work “such as death, reproduction, disease, ageing, sexual organs, orifices, peduncles, protuberances, mathematics”. After all this, he came back to one humbling notion: “All these things you think you invented, nature thought of them first.”
An equally arresting work is a strange sculpture of ducts called Sottobosco, made by the London-based artist Holly Hendry. At first it looks like a riff on the way architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano put colour-coded pipework on the outside of the Pompidou Centre to show where the power, water and air flow, but the tubes she has sculpted in a window opening of the Hayward have no function. At least none that isn’t aesthetic.
What’s all that about? Like Brzeski, Hendry cites a baroque forebear by way of explanation. “The sottobosco is an Italian term meaning specifically a kind of damp undergrowth whose depiction became the focus of the work of a 17th-century Dutch painter called Otto Marseus van Schrieck. He painted still lifes of the forest floor. Because it was the moment of the microscope, he was suddenly looking down instead of out and around. That’s what I’m doing. I started with the idea of taking something that’s microscopic, increasing it by 25 times, and seeing this world that’s teeming with life.”
Certainly, when one looks at cross-sections of Hendry’s ducts and pipes, they are constipated with foam and fossils, as if the world has become so full of material that even the pipes meant to carry waste away are no longer fit for purpose. Marie Kondo is no match for this perma-glut of stuff.
Not far from Sottobosco is another Brzeski work, which consists of Corten steel girders flopped on to chairs. He calls them Orphans. “My idea,” he says, “is that all these raw materials of art have got tired. They need a rest. They’ve been messed around with for too long.” Unwittingly, Brzeski has created sculptures that converse with others recently shown upriver: at Tate Britain, Sarah Lucas’s bunny-like figures were similarly flopped on chairs, as if weary of being symbols of female objectification. Like the girders that have been over manipulated for art, so Lucas’s figures seem to have had enough, not least through being subjected to the patriarchal gaze.
What is especially curious is that these girders draped on chairs look astonishingly human. I have never felt as if I could identify with bits of metal before, but here it’s strangely easy – just because they look tired. Now that, I can’t help thinking as I flop down for a rest, is pretty funny.
• When Forms Come Alive is at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 6 May
