Notes on: Performance Anxiety

Connie Brown on Florence Wild’s Droopy time; RM Gallery and Project Space.

In a recent editorial for The Guardian, Diane Abbott recalled her early days in British Parliament when all of the MPs had a personal bronze hook in the cloakroom looped with a length of red ribbon—supposedly meant for the Member’s sword. For centuries these ribbons have remained, dangling empty and limp, except on rainy days when they’re used for storing umbrellas. Talk about a hang-up.

The architecture of the cloakroom is at play in Florence Wild’s sculptural installation Droopy time, its centrepiece a set of five bronze spikes draped with stuffed silk ties. Frat boy gestures in country club prints. Classic Paisley in Mauve and Vermillion or Modern Check in Warm Umber. Wild describes her work as an exploration “of time and distance, and acts of leaving and returning,” and the procession of hourglass sand sculptures propped on yellow bollards in the sunlight certainly support a more conventional interpretation of these themes. But for me it’s a work about impotence, or, to use the modern idiom—whiskey dick. Wild’s sad silken ties, like the red ribbons, are apt metaphors for an old-style power and politics steadily emptying out of meaning but still lingering as a neurotic presence: history’s sword-slinging steely Fathers gathered together in the cloakroom and shouting in their thousands Get it done. Get it up. Get the country back on track. No wonder Christopher Luxon always looks so nervous.

Images: Florence Wild, Droopy time (detail). Installation view, RM Gallery and Project Space, 24.07.2024–17.08.2024. Photo: Ardit Hoxha