There’s a primal urge in us to return to the cave.
The cave is where we, as early-humans, once dwelt, and Goshka Macuga is ushering us back home.
The Polish-born, London-based artist has filled Bloomberg’s gallery with vast gleaming stalactites and stalagmites. They erupt from the floor, drip from the ceiling, glistening in pinks and browns and purples and blues. They look like ceramics, but they’re resin-coated foam, dominating the space with their bodily, physical, penile presences.
As objects, I like them plenty, but they’re pretty generic: there’s a lot of gloopy geological ceramic-y art out there. It’s Macuga’s ideas that make this work, because this cave echoes the one below; the ancient Roman Temple of Mithras under the building (an archaeological site discovered when constructing the vast office block that houses this gallery) is an underground sanctuary, a place of worship. The cave as a concept symbolises safety, a metaphorical, prehistoric womb for humanity to crawl back to.
And we need that safety, because the world is harsh, the world is dangerous. Three paintings on the wall, loaned from the Imperial War Museum, show wartime destruction; a cloud of bomb debris shaped like a clown’s face over Kensington from 1944, a wounded horse rampaging through London during an air raid in 1938, St Clement’s Dane church ablaze in 1941.
War, destruction, pain, annihilation; tragedies that have beset this city for centuries, and continue to beset the world at large now, but the cave…the cave is safe, the cave is a refuge, a shelter, and one that humanity seems to desperately need right now.
