Peter Greenaway at Compton Verney

Compton Verney is an art gallery a few miles Southeast of Stratford-upon-Avon. Acquired and wonderfully adapted by the Peter Moores’ Foundation, it holds very high-quality small collections of art from Naples, Chinese Bronzes and British Folk Art.

At the moment, it’s also home to an installation from Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper project. Entitled Tulse Luper at Compton Verney it’s based around a number of suitcases: filled, arranged, installed, confounded and integrated, the suitcases are installed amongst the collection in a number of different rooms. Objects relating to the life of Tulse Luper fill the suitcases.

An uncertain figure, whose life seems to blend fiction with documentary existence, an alter ego
whose own adventures echo and distort those of his creator, Luper is a
chimerical identity that pans across the span of a century or perhaps
longer. The many fragments and symbols that fill the suitcases indicate
a life of flight, a lack of fixity that sits strangely within its
setting of an established country pile: the very image of conservative,
steady identity. Yet Luper’s inner life is very strongly fixed, even if
it is out-of-focus. Sequences of letters, poignant epistles whose words
are read aloud, spill their emotional content into the rooms filled
with fragments and animate a strong sense of personality attached to
the objects. There is also a sense of humour, with absurdity and red
herrings cropping up regularly as one paces from one room to another.

Although much of the material is clearly part of the ongoing project
establishing Luper as a sort of fictive hybrid of refugee and
documentarist, there is also much here that seems to relate to the
house and grounds. A collection of Chinese bronzes of figures on
horseback is echoed, first of all in the traditions of British art that
delights in depicting features of the chase, and secondly in
Greenaway’s appropriation of such figures on horseback in his
installation. This is especially appropriate in the setting. Other
elements echo the surroundings and collections: a pig in a suitcase
evokes and perhaps satirises the imagery of livestock in folk art; a
(real) block of ice sits in another suitcase, reminding one of the
icehouse one passes in the grounds, relic of a pre-refrigeration
penchant for ice-cream that necessitated careful storage and
forethought to provide the materials necessary. A spyhole, fitted with
the cross hairs of a perspective glass, stares out of a gallery wall,
aligned with an enormous boulder of stone that seems of the same
material (though much rougher) as the house itself. The balance of the
picturesque landscape: the natural and classical elements fused in the
gaze of perspective seem to be indicated here- though unfortunately the
perspective-glass’ aim seems to be somewhat off and strikes the ground
immediately before the boulder. Perhaps I’m choosing to see what I know
is there, rather than what the frame actually shows. This is one of
Greenaway’s concerns in The Draughtsman’s Contract , a work that is clearly referenced in the use of the perspective-glass.

The most striking piece, in the house’s Adam hall, is an
installation of several dozen suitcases suspended y wires from
scaffolding, each suitcase individually illuminated with its own
lighbulb. A sophisticated lighting and sound installation with music (a
piece of Handel I can’t identify, but certainly picturesque music)
takes us through a rainstorm, a dawn, a night and a day, and contrives
feelings of atmospheric effect and emotional depth from a few battered
suitcases and some lighbulbs.

I wish I’d had a lot longer to read and absorb and piece together
this sequence of enigmas. The strategy of array, the cascading richness
of more-piled-on-more, the cavalcade of red herrings, emotion,
formalism and sequence that is so typical of Greenaway is a strategy
that I warm to and applaud for its imagination and guts. It’s not easy
to come away from the feast feeling that you have penetrated to the
heart of the mystery however. Greenaway himself once described The Draughtsman’s Contract as a mystery piece without the usual explanatory denouement,
and certainly one feels, coming away from the work, that one’s
intellectual probing has perhaps only built a number of castles in the
air. But, there again, the same is true of everything, sooner or later.
The
conflation of a practice where documentary and fictive elements
coexist, and where a formalism and narrative frame help produce
temporary structures is one that I feel is akin to my own methods and
ways of seeing artworks. I found myself identifying strongly with this
installation, profoundly interwoven with the fabric of its setting, but
also flitting, moving out from the space into an uncertain reality. I’d
love to have the chance, the opportunity, hell, the gumption to produce
something on this scale and in this manner. I hope one day I shall.

Here are some related articles from the Guardian.

And here's Greenaway's page about it. I was allowed to take some photographs myself, but only for use with my PhD. Hence they can't be published here.