Nicely grouted white tiles cover the floor, giving the Duveen sculpture galleries at Tate Britain a blank, hygienic air. It’s wipeable. Sharing both the clean look of minimalism (Sol Lewitt comes to mind) and vaguely medical spa-centre swank, Anthea Hamilton’s The Squash, her 2018 Duveen commission, has an air of unreality. Gridded by the square tiles, the space has the appearance of a computer-generated model. The same tiles provide the module for various pieces of plinth-cum-furniture that rise from the floor, creating sofas, chairs, posing platforms, a shallow double bathtub and, at the far end of the gallery, a sort of plunge-pool. Except there is no pool. If Topps Tiles clad a Lego version of the Pergamon Altar, it would look like this.
In one of the pair of shallow, empty bathtubs, Henry Laurens’ 1948 bronze female figure Autumn reclines, as though waiting for a sluice-down and a full colonic at the hydrotherapy wellness clinic. The sculpture doesn’t look too happy about it. Perhaps it drowned. A Henry Moore sits on a plinth with legs. Under glass, Bernard Meadows’ 1953 Crab has nowhere to scuttle. Its legs look like high-heeled shoes.
Rounded things with pointy extrusions – FE McWilliam’s daft, Jean Arp-ish Eye, Nose and Cheek; Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy’s Earth, a sort of dumb earth mother – lurk by one of the gallery’s columns. Nearby, Frederic Leighton’s The Sluggard (1885) has a yawn and a stretch. Dumb and dumber, most of these sculptures look like they were made by men who wore chunky-knit jumpers and wished they were in Paris. Arnold Machin’s terracotta Spring faces away from us, looking into what appears to be a huge tiled fireplace. The rear of the sculpture (which was never intended to be seen in the round) is, in any case, much more interesting to look at than the young woman and cherubs he sculpted on the front. Atop the fireplace stands François Stahly’s Growth, a nasty slithery thing from 1963 I wouldn’t put on my mantelpiece. Or perhaps I might.
Hamilton treats all these sculptures with a mixture of pleasure and derision. They serve as mute actors, or witnesses, to the live performers who, one or perhaps two at a time, will occupy the space over the next six months, lounging and posing, moving about artistically and looking as decorous and meaningful as anyone can look while wearing a pumpkin on their head. Hamilton’s gourd-headed commedia dell’arte dancers are the main event. One of the pair I saw this morning wore a sort of black-and-white striped butternut-squash-meets-badger head, striped trousers and a padded black leather bolero that would be perfectly acceptable to the stringent dress codes in force at Torture Garden. Ruffles, sequins, silks, codpieces, trails of seaweedy green fabric, outfits reminiscent of biker gear with bulbous helmets, the outfits are wonderfully perverse and androgynous.
Hamilton cites Antonin Artaud as an influence, but this is all less a theatre of cruelty than of the absurd. The big heads are carnivalesque rather than sinister, though one can imagine them in some Hieronymus Bosch themed fashion show. Hamilton designed the outfits with Jonathan Anderson, creative director at fashion house Loewe. The work’s inspiration, we are told, was a found photograph that Hamilton has now lost. This adds a tantalising, if spurious, level of mystery to the whole conceit. And conceit the whole thing is. Hamilton is all for interpretation, as much for ourselves as for her troupe of performers. The live participants are no more or less peculiar than their sculpted counterparts. They are certainly more colourful, and their actions, at least today, had a delicacy and occasional poignancy the sculptures entirely lacked, with their varying degrees of realism and deformation, their lumpen pomposities and their approximations of movement and grace. The setting certainly made me approach the sculptures differently. They looked out of place and out of time.
A few yards from the Duveen sculpture court, Hamilton showed a huge pair of buttocks, modelled after a never-constructed door for a New York apartment block, designed by Gaetano Pesce, in the 2016 Turner prize show. The Squash is no less arresting, funny and infuriating in its refusal to explain. There is a lesson here about the living and the sculpted, expression and presentation – I just wish I knew what it was. If only she hadn’t lost that photograph.