A tank of sump oil is causing a stir in Hackney. Andrew Graham-Dixon finds out why.
THE BRITISH obstinately distrust art that you cannot hang on a wall or put on a plinth. Yet much of the most innovative British art of the last 20 years, whether it has taken the form of performance art or temporary installation, has been essentially ephemeral. A few years ago, Bruce McLean pointed the finger for its neglect at the major British art institutions, which he accused of having "no real feeling for it or understanding of what the hell's going on".
Last month the Royal Academy blew its big chance to prove him wrong. Its new year blockbuster, "British Art in the Twentieth Century", disgracefully restricted the section devoted to artists working outside the traditional confines of the gallery to one tiny room ludicrously labelled "Breaking the Boundaries".
The organisers of the Royal Academy exhibition could do worse than leap the boundaries of Cork Street and pay a visit to Matt's Gallery in deepest Hackney, where Richard Wilson has created one of the finest installa-tions seen in London this decade.
For 20:50 Wilson has turned the gallery into a forbidding swimming pool of thick, turbid sump oil, treating the space like a room-sized tank into which he has poured what looks like thousands of gallons of the stuff. It does not sound promising but his work conjures an extraordinary visual, sensual and psychological experi-ence from its slimy contents.
Wilson has worked extensively as a performance artist, but this is a piece that demands perfor¬mance from the spectators them¬selves. He has inserted a narrow, upwardly sloping' channel along which you walk, Uke Moses at the parting of the waves, between the sides of the massive, V-shaped rusted steel vat that contains his oil. At...
