The critic and art historian reviews Dig.
Just off Tottenham Court Road, deep in a desolate building site formerly inhabited by one of London’s grandest Odeon cinemas, Daniel Silver has created an audacious and haunting installation. When Artangel commissioned him to produce a major project in an unconventional location, Silver recalled walking past this derelict setting as a student at the Slade School of Art nearby. Now he has dramatically transformed part of the site, and signals his archaeological intentions by calling the work Dig. But anyone visiting Silver’s tour de force must first make their way through a grimy waste-land, smeared with fading graffiti and punctuated by shabby old notices sternly warning us not to park our cars here.
Eventually, on the left, I discover that Silver has constructed a slender, sloping wooden bridge enabling us to cross over a declivity filled with wild plants. At the other side, I find myself entering the strange ruins of a concrete building started and then abandoned decades ago. Black metal rods still thrust out in clusters from the grubby white blocks, yet inside this forlorn structure a series of wooden trestle tables have now been placed. They display sculptural fragments, arranged in rows like pieces unearthed from a bizarre and very extensive archaeological excavation.
One table is covered with mud-coloured fragments, looking as if they have only just been prized from the rain-sodden clay. I notice a figure with gesturing arms, like someone frantically seeking help before being exterminated and buried. But other fragments are barely recognisable in human terms, and this tension between representation and abstraction is also apparent on the other tables, where all the pieces are white. They appear ghostly, even though heads, breasts and even a phallus can be detected among them. One very disturbing table is dominated by minuscule blanched forms, like the remains of bodies blown up by a devastating explosion. Others look mutilated, suggesting that they were the victims of oppressors bent on torturing them.
Why did they suffer, and who were their assailants? Although Silver does not identify them, he must have been profoundly affected as a child by living in Jerusalem and becoming aware of its turbulent past. He had Polish-Jewish grandparents who emigrated to South Africa, so anti-Semitic oppression was a family reality. Even so, Dig cannot be described simply as an autobiographical work. It reflects Silver’s fascination with the immense history of sculpture, from its primordial origins through to Brancusi, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska. Their 20th-century obsession with “carving direct” is reflected in Silver’s own work. But his interests range widely, and Dig also testifies to his involvement with the sculpture collection amassed by Sigmund Freud. Now preserved in the psychoanalyst’s Hampstead house, it contains around 2,000 figurative images from a multitude of different cultures, embracing the classical world as well as Assyrian, Chinese and Hindu artefacts.
Silver came across the collection four years ago, and became intrigued by Freud’s references to archaeology as a metaphor for the process of uncovering the truth through psychoanalytical probing. Beyond the wooden tables in Dig, we are confronted on the floor by hundreds of white heads and figures inspired by the sculpture in Freud’s collection. Some of these plaster casts bear the imprint of Silver’s fingers as he pressed, with urgent physicality, into the faces. He has reworked his source material with freedom and intensity, producing works as diverse as an encrusted figure with an erection and a woman raising both her arms as if to dance.
But the climax of this installation is located in the basement below the concrete building. After carefully negotiating some narrow, slippery stairs, I am confronted down there by the challenge of wandering through a muddy swamp. On the right, a large figure swathed in Assyrian draperies clasps his hands as if praying. Behind him, half hidden by shadows, a female statue seems almost to be floating on the water. An ancient world of cultish deities and spirits is evoked, yet Silver makes clear that they have lost their former power. As I find a pathway through the rest of this strange, almost primeval marshland, my attention is held by images of heavily bearded men. Balanced on tall stelae, and surrounded by blocks of concrete dumped in the water decades ago, they seem at first to have been lurking down here for centuries. But one of them bears a resemblance to the archetypal Victorian portrait of Charles Darwin.
As I move on, though, the hirsute faces become unrecognisable. One, whose eyes have been brutally gouged out, opens his mouth as if to howl. He looks as distressed as another patriarch further on. Half of his furrowed face has been obliterated, enabling me to gaze straight through to the back of his skull. No wonder his remaining eye is closed. The torment he endured is unimaginable -- unless, of course, the damage was inflicted by a vandal who targeted the statue long after it was erected. At any rate, Silver makes me acutely conscious of the vulnerability afflicting all these bearded men. Marooned in a water-logged hell hole, they appear doomed to brood forever on their ignominious fate.
All the same, Dig stops well short of leaving them in despair. By the time my mud-spattered shoes have reached the far end of the swamp, Silver confronts me with a marble bust bearing an unmistakeable resemblance to Freud. Perched meditatively on a plinth, his eroded features look stoical and reassuring. Nearby, another bearded figure reclines on an austere wooden couch. He may well be the analysand whom Freud is attempting to help. But the man’s face is based on a life-cast of Silver’s own features. So am I confronted, here, by the artist’s fantasy of lying down in Freud’s consulting room? Silver’s recumbent body is covered in alarming growths, all swollen to such a degree that they threaten to burst open. Or should they be seen in a more positive light, as the fantasies proliferating in Silver’s mind as he roams freely through the history of three-dimensional image-making?
This extraordinary project, which brings together so many different cultural references, invites us at every turn to think about sculptural tradition in a new, provocative and paradoxically invigorating way.
Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster and exhibition curator. His books include Vorticism (1976), Art Beyond The Gallery (1985), David Bomberg (1987), A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (1994), four volumes of his critical writings on modern art (Yale, 2003) and The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals (2012). He has curated major exhibitions at Tate, the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Academy and many other galleries.