Review

Lauren Halsey: emajendat

Martin Herbert is urged to free his mind

Lauren Halsey, ‘emajendat’

The origins of Lauren Halsey’s first solo show in the UK, ‘emajendat’, are traceable to three aspects of her biography. The artist (b1987) grew up in South Central Los Angeles, she originally thought she might become an architect, and from her preteen years she loved the maximalist aesthetic and permissive outlandishness of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and the lysergic mutant strain of funk music he invented in the late 1960s and christened P-Funk. All of this dovetails in an as-yet-unrealised plan for what Halsey describes, in the handout, as ‘a series of Funk garden projects that I envision building in South Central LA, the culminat- ing one being a permanent garden’. The Serpentine show superficially makes most sense as a rendering of the spirit of any such thing, since much of what is here wouldn’t survive outdoors; so, when Halsey, via her lightly funkified exhibition title, asks us to ‘imagine that’, it’s in the tradition of one of Clinton’s key slogans/onstage chants, ‘Free your mind’ (shorn of its pendant ‘and your ass will follow’). All of this is necessary to keep in mind while viewing ‘emajendat’, especially if you have an interest in the bodily immediacies of funk, or if you’re a stickler for feasibility in civic planning.

Instead of a garden, exactly, Halsey has turned Serpentine South into an extremely visually active multiroom grotto, one that invigilators insist you traverse in a non-ass-freeing clockwise manner. Sculptural mounds in ice cream colours, like psyche- delic rocks, lay all around (you can’t sit on them). The walls are rainbow-shimmery with overlapping layers of iridescent CDs, upon which sit all manner of transtemporal stuff: cutouts of black women from Funkadelic album covers, bulbous black hands with fancy nail art, Egyptology imagery (a cornerstone of the historical funk and jazz imaginary, from Sun Ra to Earth, Wind & Fire). The low-lit rooms are punctuated by busy, multicoloured oases of objects and imagery: mirrored pyramids splashed with text (‘Free your mind’ again), freestanding cut-out palm trees festooned with collaged black faces, à la funk album sleeves from Sly Stone’s onwards. There are signs everywhere for events (‘Welcome Watts Summer Festival 1990’), local businesses (bookshops, body oils, discount stores, Vanessa’s Positive Energy dance class), the South Central community gardens that inspired Halsey in the first place, and communitarian protest. Sculpted figures dot the rooms, from ball-twirling basketball players to, in the central floorspace of the rotunda, an oversized black girl doodling happily on the floor.

There is, pointedly, no in-gallery soundtrack to all this. Instead, Halsey asks what a funk aesthetic might look like, might feel like, in the now, as an expression of community, pride and aesthetic generosity in embattled times, and as a way of maintaining physical contact in an increasingly atomised world – in figuring a garden, she also wants to figure its consequences. And if this is to be a living, near-future thing, she suggests, it can’t be mired in nostalgia – so she steers away from, say, imaging the massive stagings, complete with descending ‘motherships’, of Parliament-Funkadelic concerts, rather going for an aesthetic of shiny, bulbous, uncontainable visual excessing: something popping everywhere you look. Looking at the floor, she has recognised that, if covered with a layer of Perspex, a whole further substratum of collaged imagery could sit under it. Halsey also goes in for wrongfooting shifts of scale: ‘emajendat’ constantly toggles between big and small, from large objects appliqued with myriad photos to miniaturised pieces of architecture and little niches containing dioramas. Blackness, stimulation, disorientation, communality: P-Funk, maybe, if P-Funk were silent.

And in this sense Halsey ends up so cussedly far from her original reference points – funk music, communal space in Los Angeles – that a viewer almost has to fill in the gaps or, again, be left with a sense of a fundamental absence and disjunction, which may also pay dividends. If your ears aren’t full of pleasure-giving syncopation, maybe you can hear other things, like the hum of fundamental inequality – for what could be further from hardscrabble South Central than a royal park in the wealthy oasis of London’s South Kensington? And what could be further from a would-be shared space in inner-city LA than a former teahouse with, on my visit at least, only gallery staff in it? What’s further from the whomping rush of funk than the sound of your own footsteps? Is your mind free enough to supply what’s not here, despite everything that is? If not, per Halsey, maybe you should work on that.

Martin Herbert is a writer based in Berlin.

First published in Art Monthly 482: Dec-Jan 24-25.