Aeneas Wilder: Jenga Or Joy?

Year on year, the Mead Gallery gropes for the attention of the campus population traipsing past its doors each day, too often overshadowed by the decidedly avant-garde sandwich fillings of the Arts Centre coffee shop. Last year brought The Indiscipline of Painting, a transfer from Tate St Ives with absolute corkers from big guns such as Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Bridget Reilly, as well as some gloriously irritating colour blocking, copious amounts of glitter and rather charming giant stencilled lobsters.
It will forever remain a mystery to me that the Mead has not yet fully taken advantage of the army of cable-knit-clad arts students who, whilst being totally into glittery lobsters, don’t realise that as well as satisfying their irrational cravings for falafel, the Arts Centre provides free internationally-respected exhibitions every term. This year’s programme begins with Aeneas Wilder’s sculpture, Untitled #162, otherwise affectionately known as ‘the giant Jenga thing’ by those who have already taken the plunge and walked within its structure. This piece is about as infuriating as art can get, and massively exciting for that same reason.
The sculpture took three weeks to build and is made up of hundreds of wooden blocks, held up by nothing other than their own weight. The whole thing takes the form of an enclosure that visitors (sans coat and bag) can walk within. Here is the great part – there are no barriers. Each guest has it within their power to walk in, push over the entire thing and nonchalantly saunter back to their chai latte. The structure is incredibly vulnerable, to the extent that slight movements of the floorboards could collapse the entire thing. This fact alone has, I’m sure, already doubled the blood pressure of the poor steward team, almost bursting a blood vessel each time someone stumbles within its walls. The plan is that the structure remains until Aeneas himself returns to ceremoniously kick down the piece in December.
As you set foot within the gallery space, you become overwhelmed by a great heaviness of feeling. Instead of viewing a canvas in passing, suddenly you become burdened with responsibility for the safety of the piece, part of its fragility. There is a glorious child-like sense of being somewhere restricted; the knowledge of its weakness automatically arousing the instinct of destruction within even the most temperate visitors. It awakens the part of us all that just wants to push the big red button, even though we know we shouldn’t. Art becomes an exercise of trust, a contract drawn between artist and visitor that can be ripped to shreds with a single touch of curiosity. This to me is what makes this sculpture so special. It interacts with its space and its visitors through every stage of construction (painstaking, and apparently involving a cherry picker) throughout the exhibition and right to the end of its ‘life’ as a piece. There is also something wonderful about an artist being able to decide how long their work should exist, creating art entirely on their terms instead of these decisions being taken out of their hands by auction houses and arts’ trusts. Aeneas effectively becomes the guardian of each piece he creates – a completely different image of creation and destruction to the clichéd angry French portrait artist weeping and slashing his paintings with a steak knife whilst vehemently smoking and consuming brioche.
As with all modern art, there is also the flipped perspective that this Aeneas bloke has constructed what is, intricacy aside, a massive Jenga puzzle. Many find the concept of paying to swill red wine and watch a bloke kick down a load of wooden blocks laughable – perhaps they have a point. From the outset, the whole thing smacks of pretension (which is something all good art, visual or otherwise, doesn’t need). But the amount of interest there has been in this event speaks volumes about the innate fascination we all seem to have with construction and destruction. After all, it’s fundamental to being human. We build, we destruct, we re-build, and so it goes on. Perhaps this is what is important to consider – this art can’t be sold, moved or altered. It exists for a definite period in time, in context with the space it occupies, only to be returned to the raw material it grew from. Definite food for thought, although so was the onion bhaji sarnie on offer in the café last week – whatever gets you going!