Mariko Mori: Rebirth, Royal Academy, W1 - review

Caught in a cosmic zone of pulsing LED lights, which can make for 'ridiculously banal' viewing
Into the light: Miracle 2001 is inspired by Mori’s Buddhism-led meditations. Picture: Alex Lentati
14 December 2012

Mariko Mori’s first museum exhibition in London since her Serpentine Gallery show in 1998 begins promisingly. A six-metre-high curvy glass monolith stands in a tall, pure white space. The menhir-like form is also white but with gentle hints of LED light slowly pulsing and spreading within.

The light’s movements come from a programme which responds to real-time data from an observatory in Mori’s native Tokyo. The datum monitors neutrinos —subatomic particles which result from radioactive decay, emitted by the sun, the earth’s atmosphere and supernovas, the explosions resulting from a star’s death.

The different types of neutrinos dictate the colours. When I saw it, the tones were pale and muted, which worked beautifully in the context of the colourless space, as, from afar, the monolith seemed to hover, to be made of light rather than containing it.

This work is called Tom Na H-iu II (2006) and is archetypal Mori in its fusion of the ancient and the modern — new technology and contemporary astronomy meet primal forms and, in this case, an idea drawn from ancient Celtic standing stones which would be portals for souls to return to earth.

Much of Mori’s work links the body, the cosmos and spiritual beliefs. In Tom Na H-iu II, you can take or leave her theories because the work stands on its own without them. But as you move through the show, elegantly presented though it is, her ideas get progressively irritating and the art increasingly flimsy.

In Miracle (2001), a series of manipulated photographic images in circular frames are inspired by Mori’s Buddhism-led meditations. They are appallingly clichéd, like high-art versions of the nicknacks you find in shops in Glastonbury — hyper-real Technicolor skies and circular forms which are both cosmic and cellular. Nearby is a hanging pendulum made of 108 glass crystals, apparently signifying reincarnation.

Transcircle 1.1 (2004) is a cluster of totems on a bed of stones, each one glowing with different colours informed by the movement of the planets in the solar system — it is a kind of Manga Stonehenge, yet all the mystery and power of those ancient forms is missing.

There is nothing essentially wrong with Mori’s subject matter or the beliefs she describes, of course — it is the glibness of her delivery and her lack of critical rigour that grates. The show’s nadir is a new work, a glowing circle in front of a simulated waterfall which apparently symbolises the “eternal circle of life”. Like too much of this show, it is ridiculously banal.

Until February 17 (020 7300 8027, royalacademy.org)

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