Until Our Heart’s Content

Heather Phillipson’s art presents viewers with a floating cacophony of human sensations: at a recent live performance in London, a beating heart pulses violently before me. A young woman appears on a cycling apparatus, moving, her heart rate accelerating; I hear verbiage un-spooling from the depths of the mind—or is it the Internet? It echoes and resounds throughout the auditorium at the Whitechapel Gallery, where I sit. Is this the artist’s voice that the audience hears, or is the figure before us a figment of a shared imagination from the crevices of social media? 

“I had it installed especially to catch all the clichés. Hearts are the best bins for clichés,” we hear the artist’s voice pronounce against the keys of an electric keyboard. 

I don’t quite understand what is happening. Indeed, I am not sure I quite understand Phillipson’s art much at all, but that is the main reason I like it. Phillipson’s practice eschews simple categorization, but rather explores the intersecting corners of disciplines. In addition to her work as a visual artist, Phillipson is quickly becoming celebrated as a poet (the June issue of Poetry features a portfolio of her work), and her performances draw on an array of literary and visual sources: there are video, music, props (of any number of descriptions), and live and recorded speech that unfurls in poetic verse.

These constituent pieces will rarely make sense alone. Rather, they drift and float together, inviting spectators into an interior world until they are left questioning a singular, often fundamental emotion. The artist’s performance piece I outlined above, the nylon tricot hi-cut one-piece (2015), may from its title seem like a banal mash-up of words that ultimately reflect a rather basic piece of clothing. However, for those fortunate enough to immerse themselves in the performance, this was a heartbreak playlist, a mixologist’s heavenly delight. A sculpture that resembles the human heart sits center stage and becomes the subject for the artist to examine. Through gradual analysis, Phillipson exposes the heart as the most anxious and vulnerable of all organs. Is this organ our being? 

The affective impulse by Phillipson to unscrew the cork of love is the connective tissue that links her recent residency at London’s Whitechapel Gallery to her work in the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, un/fit for feeling (2015). There, pink-lit rooms in an Istanbul hotel were filled with an assembly of personal and industrial debris that was anchored by the ropes of a boxing ring. Two televisions allowed viewers to delve into the anatomy of the heart as an organ, the artist’s voice chanting and warbling a lullaby: “Eat here. Eat this—my heart.” 

Eat Here was also the name of a Phillipson installation that occupied a vaulted central space in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. A giant broken foot, invoking an Achilles heel, rested at the heart of a round pedestal. Suspended above were voluminous pink garbage bags floating in air; Phillipson’s distinctive voice filled the atrium. You, the viewer, might have felt vulnerable, but if you looked up: there were red umbrellas to shield you, cut-out eyes watching you, a string of empty hot water bottles to warm your soul. Drooping tennis rackets danced above floating yellow balls; the wounded words of the heart emerged from the hallowed halls. Was this a portrait of a heart upended? Sister Sledge boomed in: “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” and with it the giant heel began to rotate. 

Phillipson’s sculptural installations invoke the satirical whimsy of Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan and the ebullient color schemes of painter Mary Heilmann and sculptor Jessica Stockholder, all merged and muddied by the poetics of the Internet and its encompassing technologies. The resulting architectural environments that Phillipson creates often emerge in this way, such as in her 2013 solo exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England. Here, gallery patrons entered a large orifice: was it a mouth, a butt, a vagina? A windy path led through an adventurous wonderland: a speedboat, a virtual reality ride on a car, out of the gallery and onto a guided city tour where the mundane pleasure of eating sticky buns from the British bakery Greggs was encouraged over and over again. To engage in Phillipson’s laconic musings is not always easy; her view of the world is often one of bewilderment, but this lens of confusion and diffusion allows us to step back and marvel at the incongruous machinations of the contemporary world. 

Phillipson’s setting is a post-digital universe in which confession and hyperbole go hand in hand. This tendency demarcates a directness that can be read in her most recent set of writings from More Flinching, a collection of poems that emerged during the artist’s time as writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery. Here, the artist and poet pictures “render farms” next to ammunition bases and a world in which “the Cloud” is backing up and up and up! 

This zone of investigation is hardly what we might assume: instead of digital apathy, we get heightened emotionality. As Phillipson asserts in “Poem 4” of Some Flinching:

I am so indifferent 
to the limits
of feelings 

 

Those unabashed indulgences resurface in “Poem 9”: 

I love a good weepy
dog-meme as much as the next crybaby
and nauseate irregularly 
when the gifs load automatically 
his hairy body
into my hairy body

This free-flowing candor envelops and consumes not only Phillpson’s readers but also the spectators who immerse themselves in the multiverse of her imagination. Hers is a world in which the string of the heart keeps on pulling, and with every tug, so are we moved.