Reinvention of Allan Kaprow's YARD reviewed by Frieze

Pope L’s reinvention – entitled ‘Yard (To Harrow)’ (all works 1961/2009) – was staged indoors. The gallery stank of oil and grease, tyres scattered everywhere, shelves and desks covered in black, body-bag-like tarpaulins. Visitors were encouraged to climb across these rubbery outcrops, fumbling in the gloomy space, which was illuminated only by flickering white and red lamps and the odd dim, closed-circuit television screen.

Placed next to a grubby wall mirror, a large speaker played the sound of foghorns and train whistles, over the top of which Pope L’s voice delivered a compelling sermon, extrapolating ideas of race, compromised morals, political chicanery and ecological damage from Yard’s material components, and Kaprow’s more playful theories. ‘Rearrange the tyres, rearrange your morals’; the world described by Pope L’s ‘Yard (To Harrow)’ was indeed harrowing – more suggestive of polluted groundwater and body-bags shipped back from Afghanistan than 1960s happenings.

‘Hayes’ Yard (Sign)’ could be found in the New York Marble Cemetery – the oldest public non-sectarian burial ground in New York. With its inhabitants interred in vaults beneath the ground, the cemetery is a long stretch of grass which Hayes filled with dozens of signs, including political campaign placards (‘Free Huey,’ ‘Huckabee endorsed by God’); signs advertising lawn mowing or decorating services; sad signs (‘There was a Santa here but some crackhead took it’); angry signs (‘If I catch you dumping you are dead’) and religious signs (‘R U Sure U R Saved’). While Pope L’s take bore a more formal resemblance to Kaprow’s original, Hayes’ looser – though no less rich – interpretation resisted this; her ‘Yard (Sign)’ was more about a fidelity to the work’s spirit than making a Kaprow cover version, in this case perhaps the idea that a work can exist both within the context of art, and somehow outside of it too; that participation in culture and society necessitates having to deal with conflicting voices and beliefs far messier than those found in the Neverland of many ‘relational’ art works.

At Queens Museum of Art was McElheny’s ‘Yard (Junkyard)’; a composite digital aerial photograph of the ‘Iron Triangle,’ a nearby area of scrap-yards and car repair workshops that is soon to be demolished and redeveloped. The image was projected onto a large wall that encloses The Panorama of the City of New York, a huge, handmade scale model of the city commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair. Although a simple visual consonance could be detected between McElheny’s and Kaprow’s ‘Yard' – tyres, scrap-heaps, cars – I struggled to connect the spirit of Kaprow’s happening to this portrait of a condemned neighbourhood; it wasn’t so much the loose interpretation that was problematic, but that this flat documentary image required little physical engagement on the part of the viewer; it seemed stand-offish, uninviting. I did, however, happen to notice a set of small signs newly placed around The Panorama, detailing the number of foreclosures in each borough of the city – a sad picture of what happens when others decide to rearrange their morals.