An Operatic Farce in Twelve Tiresome Acts
It takes a certain kind of genius,or perhaps sadistic persistence,to make a gallery-goer question not only the validity of art, but the very function of their own senses. Clarc Dendrite’s Gristle of the Spirit achieves this rare feat. Not since Sacha Hohn created his armpit works have I so profoundly regretted leaving the house and visiting the gallery.
Clarc Dendrite, for those lucky enough to be unfamiliar, is known for his confrontational installations and his deep, personal commitment to being completely insufferable. His previous show, Skin is a Lie, involved dehydrated banana peels and fortune cookie threats. This time, he claims to be “dismantling the Cartesian mind/meat binary.” What that actually entails is anyone’s guess, but the result looks like a charcuterie board designed by a war criminal with a minor in semiotics.
The gallery is divided into twelve “acts,” each more baffling than the last, beginning with Act I: Pre-Linguistic Sausage. It consists of a single rotating plinth upon which rests a translucent, wrinkled object that may or may not have once been edible. Hovering above it is a microphone dangling from the ceiling, catching every whisper, sigh, and stomach gurgle in the room and amplifying them through a delay pedal.
Act III, Hamlet’s Ham, presents us with a disembodied hand cast in pork gelatin, gently spinning inside a refrigerated display case. The hand holds a single, laminated quote from Judith Butler, smudged beyond legibility, possibly due to the condensation. On the wall beside it, the word “FLESHUAL” is painted in viscous red paint,or possibly jam. I asked a nearby docent what it all meant, which was obviously the wrong thing to do. She responded – I don’t remember her words exactly but it was something like, “This is an uncurated space. Meaning is an act of audience aggression.”
In the centre of the exhibition is a towering sculpture entitled The Meat of Man Is Memory, a tangled mass of vacuum-sealed tofu, rubber tubing, and what I suspect is a disassembled IKEA bookshelf. Dendrite’s process video, playing nearby, shows him grunting while dragging this monstrosity through a muddy field, pausing only to weep and eat a grape.
Perhaps the lowest point comes in Act VIII, The Tectonics of Tenderness, an interactive installation in which visitors are encouraged to “knead” a raw chicken breast while reciting memories of their childhood. A sign says this is meant to “reconcile the violence of adult becoming with the softness of childhood loss.” I left that room and never looked back.
Sound design throughout the show is credited to someone named “Fëath,” and features samples of chewing, gurgling, mooing, and what may have been a recording of someone blowing raspberries into a sink. This cacophony bleeds from room to room like a relentless gastrointestinal opera. At one point, I genuinely thought I was going to be sick,not because of the art, but because of the overwhelming sound of digestion wafting through the air.
The grand finale, Act XII: Rapture in the Ribcage, is a pitch-black chamber where guests are invited to lie on a heated floor and listen to Clarc Dendrite softly muttering “chew me” in sixteen languages while strobe lights flicker in sync with a slowed-down heartbeat. I can’t tell you how it ends because I left halfway through with a migraine, mild nausea, and a permanent grudge.
To sum up: Gristle of the Spirit is less a show and more a form of low-level sensory warfare. Clarc Dendrite has succeeded in creating the rare work that offends sight, smell, hearing, and logic all at once. It’s not that it’s bad art,it’s that it’s barely art. It isn’t even anti-art. It is un-art. It is the sound of the modern gallery system quietly rolling its Rs into a velvet cushion and pretending it’s the national anthem.
One star, and that’s only because the gallery’s toilet was mercifully clean and far enough away from the exhibit to serve as a safe space. I advise giving this show a miss.
