RA Schools student Eddie Peake at White Cube

Posted: 16 April 2013 by Sam Phillips

Rather than the reverent silence one anticipates on a visit to an art gallery, last Saturday as I walked into White Cube Bermondsey a sound system was banging out UK bass music. In a large gallery in front of the public, artist Eddie Peake was rehearsing a performance piece, in which – to live music played by two musicians – a small group of dancer-actors made shapes to high-tempo beats, writhed together in twos and threes, and spoke out monologues and conversations.

The improvised action, choreographed as it went along by Peake and his performers, took place inside and outside a mini ellipse-shaped amphitheatre that stood in the centre of space, and interacted with Peake’s paintings, photographs, freestanding sculptures and neon-light wall works around this structure.

_{Eddie Peake, 'Infinite Disparity', 2013. Performance.Dimensions variable. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.}

Except, as the British artist clarifies in a break for lunch, the rehearsal I saw shouldn’t be thought of as just a rehearsal.

"We are working towards a structured, cohesive, complete piece of work that will be 30 to 45 minutes long and that will be performed on the final day next Sunday," says Peake, who, around his hectic exhibition schedule, is in the final year of the postgraduate course at the Royal Academy Schools.

"But in trying to arrive at that we’re writing stuff, improvising stuff, or working on a whole sequence and then realising we don’t like it and then chucking it away… And that rehearsal constitutes a work. There is a performance that is the one long rehearsal that lasts the whole duration of the show – a six-week performance that is the process of devising a complete performance work."

Peake’s performances have been presented recently at other London venues such as the RA, Tate Modern Tanks and Chisenhale Gallery, but this is his first live art piece that interfaces with his two- and three-dimensional artworks. The meaning of the performers’ gestures and words seeps into our perceptions of the art objects; for example, his quiet abstract sculptures, in which blobby polished-plaster forms rest on large and concrete cuboids, begin to appear like bodily shapes when surrounded by real moving bodies.

The spread of ideas from one type of representation to another seemed a central concern of the show ‘Ruby’ at London’s Gallery Vela, an exhibition that Peake curated last year and which I reviewed here.

"I suppose that if I was to say that I had a central thought or a crux across all of the work, that’s it", the artist continues. "There is a multitude of languages – a language of images, or a language of objects, or a language of emotions – and although these languages might appear antithetical to each other, they might also direct how each other can be read. More important are the spaces between those languages, how one might jump between them, or how one might try to articulate them.

"We all have this common language of spoken word as a means to try and equate these different other languages, but inevitably there’s going to be failure there, and I think that space where that failure happens – the impossibility of trying to sum up those other languages in words – that’s my specific interest."

Peake’s paintings on view feature slogans such as ‘Crushingly Hopeless’ or ‘Don't Think U R 2 Nice’, their throwaway and often inane soundbites emphasising this sense of the poverty of words. The artist also explains how each word in these paintings is "literally a void". They are formed by applying masking tape in the shape of letters to a sheet of mirror; the glass is then coated by spray paint and when the masking tape is removed, the pristine mirror forms the letters as negative space against the pigment.

_{Eddie Peake, 'Infinite Disparity', 2013. Performance.Dimensions variable. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.}

The amphitheatre, a language of the more architectural variety, is Peake’s take on the revered Modernist penguin pool in London Zoo, designed by Berthold Lubetkin RA in 1934. Peake has used such sculptural interventions in his previous exhibitions, and chose Lubetkin’s now-obsolete structure partly out of its role in the history of Britain Modernism, but more significantly because it "imposed on the animals, who were none the wiser, a theatrical narrative". Peake wanted to see what happened if the building was taken out of context and if it could project its drama on his narrative performance in process.

Another theatrical element in the exhibition is the work Deal With The Matter (2013), which comprises a custom-made knitwear suit, roller skates, and a roller skater – i.e. a roller skater, clad in a see-through body suit, who meanders around the gallery, in and out of the amphitheatre, both collaborating in the performance and remaining separate. He acts in Peake’s words as a "a segue between the different languages", as he joins the performance, or rests against a sculpture, or looks into a mirrored painting – in a sense, a physical metaphor for how ideas spread between the works in the show.

He also physically resembles (by coincidence or conspiracy) the character of the faun that is formed out of neon lights in two places in the room, made into a dapper present-day gentleman by the fact each work sports a scarf.

_{Eddie Peake, 'Infinite Disparity', 2013. Performance.Dimensions variable. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.}

‘I wanted a character I could own and deploy in any way that I like,’ Peake elaborates. ‘I want this character to live with me for a number of years and to have many different manifestations. In the catalogue for the show he appears as a mischievous, childlike character, and in the neons he is much more adult and sexualized, and he might go on to be a character in a 3-D film, or a set of sculptures, or a character in a play.’ The faun will pop up across Peake’s different ‘languages’, changing over time but always recognizable like Mickey Mouse or Tony the Tiger.

Peake is working with the performers in the gallery space from this Thursday to Sunday, the final day of the exhibition. Do go down and visit, and see something memorable – something like a ‘total work of art’ in progress, albeit one wholeheartedly contemporary in sensibility. 'I really love that Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk,' the artist concludes, ‘and I like to have things happen on a massive scale that might attack you in all directions.’