A Pound of Flesh for 50p (The Melting House), 40 Southwark Street - exhibition review

 
Drip dry: Alex Chinneck’s house made of 8,000 wax bricks is set to melt over the coming weeks
Robert Bevan28 October 2014

Not trusting to London’s Indian summer, Alex Chinneck fired up heaters over the weekend to melt the full-sized wax house that he has built on Southwark Street.

The artist is of an architectural frame of mind and the melting house follows the brick façade sliding off a building in Margate and an illusory installation in Covent Garden piazza that has been wowing the crowds by appearing to levitate part of the market buildings.

The Southwark Street project — for Bankside’s Merge arts festival — takes the form of a symmetrical Georgian villa with the windows, frames and red bricks all made of moulded wax. Its genuine slate roof, brass door number and letterbox will end up spread across its waste-ground site when the wax melts over the coming weeks.

It’s a fun idea but doesn’t bear too close an examination. With the obvious artificiality of a doll’s house, the window frames are too clumsily made, the house’s details too crude for the illusion to work.

The artwork’s title is A Pound of Flesh for 50p and refers, via The Merchant of Venice, to the halving in size of the wax building and the gory, fleshy redness of its 8,000 bricks. Chinneck says extravagant titles are his only opportunity to get abstract in projects that demand a lot of regimented planning.

He also says that his work is about “making the everyday world extraordinary”. One could say the same of conjuring or of fireworks but it doesn’t make them good art and these more recent projects are essentially content-free one-liners.

The house is, however, a reasonable fit for the Merge festival, which offers immersive, accessible art. Just along the street is Peter William Holden’s tap- dancing robots and Bompas & Bar’s installation in the spooky cellars of the Kirkaldy Testing Works where the electromagnetic “God Helmet” is placed on visitors’ heads in an experiment designed to induce the feeling of a paranormal presence.

Until Oct 19, mergefestival.co.uk

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