Review: Satistying destruction in new art installation at Warwick Arts Centre

Taking their cue from Buster Keaton, the deadpan comic genius of early cinema, this selected international group of artists embrace the futile gesture in a collection of filmed experiments that seem to have been deliberately designed to foil conventional expectations in more or less spectacular fashion.

The best of them deliberately go nowhere but with style. Peter Fischli and David Weis take knock-on effects to new heights in their film of an improvised, kinetic structure that slowly totters with satisfyingly destructive consequences.

Keaton himself is well represented in several clips of his family-friendly comedies. It’s hard to imagine what he would have made of his inclusion in a contemporary art exhibition or whether he would have taken kindly to the work of the other exhibitors. The violence of Sofia Hulten’s destruction and reconstitution of an acoustic guitar would not, you feel, have won his approval, though the seriousness of its underlying message might well have done.

But there can be no doubt that the disruption to the opening sequence of Miranda Pennell’s Fisticuffs would have appealed to him. It’s a fine example of comic timing that the rest of her film never quite manages.

The organisers’ contention about the relationship between slapstick film, sculpture and performance is well illustrated in archival footage of 1970s artists and more tangibly in Ben Woodeson’s dangerously teetering sheet of glass. Don’t miss it, but don’t walk into it either.

Peter McCarthy