Forvever Loop - Eddie Peake Barbican Curve

“I want to convey a narrative in which unrequited desire, jealousy, love and other real emotions implicit in the experience of being in a relationship with another person, as well as the various manifestations of one’s sense of self, are all emphatically alluded to,” Peake said of his Barbican Curve installation.

I really enjoyed this exhibition - it became a personal journey. My initial reaction to Forever Loop was this is an elegiac ritual for the crashing of the urban hipster Wavey Garms art wave. Fishing around on the Internet and going to other shows I see I’m horrendously out of touch. This early 21^st century try-hard edgy style is not on the decline. I also thought oh another show that could be a joke about hip modern multi-disciplinary art but dismissed this due to my open minded position. Peake himself recognises that the nude has become a semiotic unit. What is the reason for a touch stone of radical art having been scooped up as a signifier and severed from its germinal state? I believe this is down to civilised progress's intrinsic connection with repetition - we take something real and repeat it as a sign then again as a sign of a sign. Again and again. If every word is a dead metaphor does it follow that every naked performance is a dead metaphor too?  I like some of what Peake says about the art (see above) it’s just that if feels like another show where everything was post-rationalised as it was created.

Something I liked about this show was that I got to think about how the nude has become a signifier. As a man I might easily have grown up thinking naked women were like Page Three girls or Nuts models but I had no 24 hour digital miasma of airbrushed perfection but did have a loving home environment with two sisters so I knew otherwise. The performers in FL are clearly real people and happening upon this is a transformative moment of engagement. I found myself thinking this is good for this younger generation (some of whom were present) to experience. The models also did try to catch the visitor’s eye sand return the gaze thus riffing on Manet’s Olympia. Then you’ve got the home video of toddler Peake and siblings post bath-time engaging in a negotiation of  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”. I get this but its arbitrary placing in the show made it feel YBA sensationalist rather than open discussion of who and what we are. There is also the customary knowing use of functional materials like plasterboard walls but again it feels like a reference rather than something transformative a la Mike Nelson. Its dislocated in a neurotic way that revels in the surface rather than daring to let the unknown form manifest and create its own connections 

Freud distilled the psyche to sex and that is what Peake seems to be doing. Except that what we need to remember is that art does us not the other way around. Peake is a producer and as a result there are parts of the show that are genuinely affecting but his ersatz control acts as a de-resonator. He stops the viewer from truly creating a rich experience for themselves. As the roller skater in a sheer onesie skirted round me I wanted to scream let go Eddie and give us something that really is a story. Peake talks about the viewer going on a journey, which in this context feels like a word that signifies little. Borges reminds us that all words are dead metaphors and here the word journey is just that. The roller-skater in a sheer onesie is moving around at a different rate to the more choreographed naked female (when I went) models but there’s no sense of an internal dynamic. I think that this feeling of stasis is partially because really Peake is interested in creating images. Something he said of his work in the Tate Tanks. Nothing in this installation feels like it came from the darkness of the shadow. In Forever Loop we find a post-Freudian, ordered sense of the subconscious. On the other hand a Jungian realm is a vast dark sea surrounding the manicured island of the self we create and present. Freud’s is a small space under the bed, which is easily de-cluttered.

Perhaps the problem is that the show is drenched in the very things Peake thinks stand in the way i.e. semiotics (of the naked form). Mirrored bears in scarves are a signifier for our fascination with anthropomorphosis and whalebones are perhaps a reference to pelvises, which are thrust rhythmically to cello accompaniment on tangential video monitor. All signifier after signifier. Like Ai Weiwei, Peake is clearly a great producer but his understanding of and willingness to set free the nuances of his art prevent it adding up to something as rich as the component parts suggest. I don’t think Peake could decide what this show was about. On the one hand its deliberately personal to a point of obfuscation (hidden graffiti note to self) and on the other it uses the personal to attempt to grapple with something universal. Lacan talks of there not being enough personal to fill the universal but Peake’s show feels like there is no universal anymore just tags and labels. Mervyn Peake (Eddie's grandad) wrote, “the trouble with a diamond is that it’s far too bright” and Eddie creates dazzling images without bringing us too much succour. Despite this I do recommend a trip to what might still be a very personal journey.

Forvever Loop - Barbican Curve Closes on Sunday 10th Jan 2016