Of the 30 minimalist, empty plinths that make up Ceal Floyer’s sound-installation, ‘Things’, there were about six or seven that, during my visit at least, had their top speaker-grilles misaligned – either sitting not quite flush or even fallen completely out of place. And whereas, with other artists, you might be able to overlook these sorts of slight imperfections and think instead about the intention behind the work, with Floyer’s brand of arch, ultra-minimalist conceptualism – where the focus is precisely on the relationship between perception and imagination – such little details do, unfortunately, tend to matter.
In theory, then, the piece consists of sporadic, sung utterances of the word ‘things’ which have been isolated from 30 different pop songs – presumably intended as a sort of ironic, contemplative contrast to the lack of physical ‘thingness’ actually on display. In practice, however, the plinths’ imperfections mean it’s hard to properly escape an awareness of materiality, of the constructed and artificial nature of the piece – so that these brief snippets of occasionally familiar songs just end up sounding rather prosaic.
Elsewhere in the gallery, fortunately, the works are much more successful, seeming to carry an air of surprise or serendipity: an aluminium ladder, with all its rungs except the top and bottom removed, has an oddly startling, almost comical sense of vacancy; a tall white column becomes, on closer inspection, a stack of A4 paper –11,083 sheets in all, according to the top one, so that you have to take it on trust that the remaining 11,082 are similarly numerated; and, lastly, a close-up, abstracted video-projection of blank paper scrolling through a whirring fax machine suggests a subtle, vaguely distressing sense of ephemerality, its constant sound and fury signifying nothing.