The Plant That Stowed Away – Reviewed

A new exhibition at Tate Liverpool takes as its departure point the docks on which the building stands, before plunging us into the depths and beyond. Mike Pinnington reviews The Plant That Stowed Away.

The suite of black and white photographs capture, individually and together, post-industrial landscapes. They are, simultaneously, texts to be read, deciphered. They amount to a semiotics of the kind of desolate urban hinterland that calls to mind the Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. They picture, by turns, tarmac, girders; a bridge, locks and canal sides; barbed wire and a submarine. The pictures by Chris Shaw, made between 2007 and 12, have titles like The Jungian Analysis; The Seat Under the Sub; Risen so majestically from a single cell in the primordial ooze; Weeds Vs Docks; and The Road to nowhere is paved with good intentions.

Positively dystopian, they present a tussle between nature and the man-made, and make for a haunting and poetic beginning to the new exhibition at Tate Liverpool, which takes its title from one of Shaw’s annotated photographs: I see no ships but the plant that stowed away. This near contemporary departure point sets us on a journey that takes in the birth of Liverpool’s docklands either side of the Mersey, and the trade which saw items and bodies flow through them, to their eventual decline.

From Shaw’s Weeds of Wallasey on the Wirral, we find ourselves hurtle back through time, making landfall on the opposite side of the river. Atkinson Grimshaw’s Liverpool Quay by Moonlight (1887) pictures the then brave new world of horse and cart, riding upon cobbled roads flanked on the one side by masts of ships and on the other by merchants’ shops – in which the latest exotic goods from far flung corners of the Empire could no doubt be found.

The quality of the light Grimshaw managed to capture is remarkable: gas street lights dot the painting; an omnibus’ phosphorescent headlight flickers eerily, cutting through the descending mists of the gloaming, and shop windows practically hum, spilling a warm glow onto the pavements amid the scene.

Leaving the port of Liverpool (infamously the then second city of the Empire), we set sail, and find ourselves immediately plunged beneath the waves by Lubaina Himid’s Underwater Plant Life (1995-2008). The gnomic grid of a painting depicts fish, a trio of men, and a seashell among other items. Its watery swirl of connotations catches Matisse’s nearby The Dancer (1949) in the irresistible pull of its undertow, perhaps redressing the balance – in a small way – of slaves lost at sea, murdered, during this shameful period.

Around the corner, Wangechi Mutu’s regal You were always on my mind (2007), fuses plant and animal alike. The majestic godlike hybrid borrows from various elements of the natural world to produce a vision straight out of Afrofuturism. Wearing a stalagmite crown of coral, the figure surveys its watery domain – in congress with Matisse’s limp by comparison cut-out, and the Earth mother of Turner-Prize nominated Delaine Le Bas’ Talay O Puv, O Zeisko Tan Part I (2021). A flowing textile of fantastical symbols rooted in the mythology of the artist’s Romani heritage whose title translates as Under Ground Is Where The Heart Is, its upper section seems to suggest a flying saucer.

Opposite, we swap the Earthly realm for a lunar landscape, in works drawn from Cristina de Middel’s science fictional photographs, The Afronauts (2012). De Middel supposes an alternative history of space exploration, envisioning a newly independent Zambia rivalling the Cold War super powers of the US and Soviet Union to strike out for the stars. The series, rich in a narratively seductive alternative reality – in which Capitalism and Communism were faced with an optimistic (however unlikely) third way – interrogates the colonisation of space that swiftly ensued and continues unabated.

The exhibition is brought to a poignant close by Kader Attia’s Oil and Sugar #2 (2007), a four minute 30 second film that evocatively puts into conversation the components of its title. A neat structure of sugar cubes, on which gallery founder Henry Tate’s fortune was built, is swiftly eroded by the fossil fuel to which we are still addicted. Straddling the beginnings of the institution and the present day, it asks us to consider the complex and troubling tensions between extraction, wealth, philanthropy and the ongoing destructive urge to plunder – whether of the land, its people and their culture, or (as is usual) a combination of these things.

Mike Pinnington    

The Plant That Stowed Away continues @ Tate Liverpool until 11 May

Images, from top: The Plant That Stowed Away installation view ©  Tate (Gareth Jones); Chris Shaw, Weeds of Wallasey, 2007-12 © Chris Shaw; Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool Quay by Moonlight (1887); Wangechi Mutu, You were always on my mind 2007 © Wangechi Mutu; Cristina de Middel, Hamba from the series The Afronauts 2012. © Cristina de Middel/Magnum Photos