Andrew Graham-Dixon on new works from Bill Woodrow and Jannis Kounellis.
ARMED WITH a set of pliers, a hammer and an electric drill, Bill Woodrow is the handyman of modern British sculpture. The first work you see in his fine new show at the Lisson Gallery is called, appropriately, Do It Your-self, a robotic pigmy conjured from a pair of battered old metal chests, upended and stacked into a squat approximation of human-ness. The boxes have been charac¬teristically flayed, the peelings of side or lid twisted into absurd, screw-clamp hands. Like most of Woodrow's work, its cobbled-to-getherness suggests the DIY enthusiast's pride in difficulties overcome; an "all my own work" sign wouldn't look out of place in the gallery.
Woodrow has been through his Vacuum Cleaner period, his Washing Machine period (see the Tate's Twin Tub with GuUar), and his Car Part period. Now he's into filing cabinets, metal boxes and lockers. Not that it's ever been that rigid — Woodrow's work, succeeds, in large measure, be-cause it manages to convince you that the man could turn just about anything into sculpture. Stuck on a desert island, he would probably develop a working relationship with coconuts and sand.
Ship of Fools, Break with the Butcher, the largest work in the show, is a perverse bent-metal fabrication that contrives a snooker table tableau from four vandalised changing-room lock¬ers and liberal quantities of enamel paint. The balls are set for a clearance, but the game has been interrupted by the presence of a listing three-master floating on this green sea, and by a meat cleaver, crunched into the table near the black, awaiting con-frontation with a joint of beef near the yellow. Presiding over this disaster-strewn frame is a lu-dicrously cavorting cuestick-man, his head the red balls' triangle, who dances on the...
