Bruce Lacey – An English Eccentric reviewed

The Bruce Lacey Experience is at the Camden Arts Centre until 16th September 2012

With his usual personal touch, Jeremy Deller has co-curated a show with David Mellor, which will undoubtedly resurrect interest in the eccentric British artist, Bruce Lacey. Taking a focus on his mechanical creations alongside his more spiritual engagement with the English landscape, this relatively small gallery space manages to explore the multifaceted nature of Lacey’s output.

In the same way that we rediscover our heritage through the mementoes of our relatives, Lacey’s artistic creations are presented as part of a British cultural genealogy to be affectionately remembered through a series of quirky creations.

Attic/archive

There are two kinds of textures to Bruce Lacey’s mechanical creations. The first type is consciously cultivated by the artist and draws attention to the varied bricolage of his pieces. The anthropomorphic forms of his machines have varied skins; rubber gloves, the sheer plastic of dolls heads and balloons. These are intermingled with other more tactile surfaces; the splintering of old wood, the rust of decades exposed metal and the browning fragility of ageing paper. It is in the use of these ephemeral materials that Lacey’s creations are anchored in the time of their creation.

Jeremy Deller and David Mellor have fully exploited these qualities in the manner they have curated the show. These pieces have not been restored for this retrospective; rather they are presented like old film reels where the crackles and jumps have been left intact. Crucially, the main texts are Lacey’s own recollections combined with handwritten dates and descriptions for the accompanying photographs. Thus it is Lacey’s inner subjective voice that recalls the pieces, in direct juxtaposition to the mode of gallery ‘over-writings’ which set out to describe from the outset, the piece’s meaning.

In these textures of subjective recollection and weathered surfaces, it is intriguing to learn that most of the pieces in the first two rooms are from the Tate permanent collection. Presented within Tate’s collection, Lacey’s work would have been rehabilitated into an overarching historical context with an open-ended relationship to the works surrounding it. Deller’s achievement is present Lacey outside of such frameworks, retaining the innovation and eccentricities of his work.

Memory/retrospect

Lacey’s childhood is given substantial space in this show, but not until the last room. In a mosaic formation paintings form his student days hang on the back wall. With these and a collection of mechanical toys from the early twentieth century, we begin to recall Lacey’s work through the lens of his own childhood memory. This can be seen in pieces such as Electric Actors (1962) where two mannequins’ movement are aided with springs and various prosthetic body parts pieced together. Its irreverence and interest in movement are qualities rooted in childhood play.

If his mechanical creations offer early alternative viewpoints on the technology that now populates our way of living, Lacey’s ritual performances have something interesting to say too. His new age paintings of circles hovering in space, textured with other worldly patterns, are both planetary and cell-like. In these we see that Lacey’s engagement with mysticism is tellingly informed by the visual language of science. In other projects he is a self-created shaman leading community performances. These are the two personas of Lacey in this exhibition; a mystical leader of immersive gatherings of people and on the other hand an eccentric technologist partnering his mechanical actors.

This playfulness combined with the ability to immerse himself in alternative worlds is characteristic of Lacey’s lifelong work. One photo in particular from the exhibition seems to illustrate this. It depicts Lacey driving to his Whitechapel retrospective in 1975. He sits in a vehicle made from an aeroplane cockpit, riding alongside London traffic. It is a quirky subversion of our expectations, humorous and playful but nonetheless- inventive.