You’ll recognise it immediately. Revolving in a room of its own, Mark Wallinger’s ‘Superego’ is a dead ringer for the New Scotland Yard sign. Wallinger has stripped the triangular form of words and mirrored it so that, spinning above your head, it reflects fragments of the gallery in an endless cubist dance. It’s mesmerising but also a little terrifying – too high to allow you to catch a glimpse of yourself, it feels aloof, imposing and alienating. Like the Met itself, you might say, or glitzy contemporary art.
In this show, his first with the mighty commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth, Wallinger is examining Freudian concepts of id, ego and superego, which might make you want to go for a lie down in a darkened room. What this boils down to, though, is a sustained, amused and amusing look at how we feel about ourselves, fit in, define and defend our freedoms, or toe the line.
The ‘Superego’ half of the show riffs on ideas of control. In true Wallinger fashion, it quickly spins off from personal recollections and anecdotes to ponder the Big Questions. For example, the video work ‘Orrery’ comprises a series of apparently endless loops of the Fullwell Cross roundabout, where Wallinger learned to drive in his native Essex. Round and round he goes. Yet Wallinger quickly manages to get you thinking about the Festival of Britain, the cycle of life, our tiny planet orbiting in space and different meanings of the word ‘revolution’ while gliding past Barkingside buses and vans.
The other half looks at disorder. Taking painting right back to its shit-smearing beginnings, Wallinger has lined the walls with vast finger paintings as wide as the artist’s six-foot reach and twice as high. Each is a Rorschach-style image that invites you to see whatever you see. Free will, right? Except, aren’t those faces and figures in the paint just reflections of your hang-ups and desires? And who’s responsible for those? Freud would point the finger squarely at your parents and their parents before them. Wallinger, meanwhile, is in complete command of his disquieting, provocative art.