Jess Flood-Paddock: Gangsta’s Paradise

Issue 44, October 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Hayward Project Space, London
4 August – 19 September

By Colin Perry

Gangsta’s Paradise is an oversize bestiary that features: two giant rabbits, a tanklike lobster and a man-size rendition of athlete Michael Johnson’s self-help book Slaying the Dragon: How to Turn Your Small Steps to Great Feats (1996). Now, I tend to think that gigantism in sculpture is a means of showboating opulence, spectacle or grandiose ambition (think of Jeff Koons’s critters or Christoph Büchel’s megalomaniacal installations); this exhibition, however, plumbs a different line. Here, Jess Flood-Paddock deploys supersize props as a sort of nebulous metaphor for the ethical and cultural complexities of contemporary and historical greed.

The centrepiece of the show is Big Lobster Supper (all works 2010), a hulking model of haute cuisine crustacean life, whose armour is made of thin fibreboard decorated with yellow and orange spray paint, its claws bound with a beltlike rubber band and its body curled up beneath it (perhaps due to the pain of being boiled alive). Surrounding this is Truman, a canvas printed with an image of blue sky and white clouds that covers three of the gallery’s walls. In The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carey’s character discovers that his life is nothing more than a monstrous reality TV show, and – following a perilous journey across an artificial sea – he breaks through the limits of the set, an artificial sky. Here the lobster makes a similar bid for freedom: its feelers caress the canvas while its right claw pierces the surface of the sham firmament.

The second gallery space contains Michael Johnson’s Self Help, a two-metre-tall edition of the Olympic champion’s autobiography cum self-help book, whose dust jacket informs us, in the author’s own baffling words, that ‘after you have stared for long enough into the dragon’s eyes, there is nothing to do but slay the dragon’. In the same room, Flood- Paddock has tacked up Utopia Last Days, a snapshot of a closing-down sale at a shop that failed to live up to its own hopeful moniker. On another wall is A Group of Cannibals, a reproduction of an invitation card to a dinner in honour of the Victorian explorer Alfred Cort Haddon showing a benign-looking (and apparently uncannibalistic) group of native Torres Strait islanders. There’s a wonderful circularity to this image: the natives are labelled as anthropophagi, but it’s the explorers who are the true consumers.

Weaving through these disparate cultural references is a series of thoughts about subsistence and greed, eating and being eaten. For example, the bunnies populating the atrium are images of a supersize German breed reportedly sold by a German man to the North Korean government for feeding the starving population; in 2007 the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that they were, in fact, eaten at a birthday feast in honour of Kim Jong-Il. The suggestion here is that, as consumers, we’re all the cause of someone else’s pain. Indeed this exhibition is named after a hit single by rapper Coolio that simultaneously celebrates and bemoans the ‘gangsta’ logic of kill-or-be-killed. We might dream of utopian equality (if I read his book, I might run as fast as Michael Johnson!), but real inequities are harder to negotiate.

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