Jim Lambie’s sculpture Bed Head looks all dolled-up and ready to rock. Featuring thousands of plastic buttons hand-stitched on a mattress, at first sight its cheap and cheerful materials appear to be a glittering jewel-like encrustation. There’s something of a teen-hood’s brash front to this painstaking haberdashery: showy like a pair of customised jeans or a jacket decked in badges of allegiance to music and causes. Yet if Bed Head wants to look the part, it’s gone a bit too far, risking overkill with that earnest, enthused sewing of baubles. Meanwhile, the mattress itself seems a little grimy, flat and pathetic, pushed out of the way, against a wall. Worst of all it’s a single. Beneath the flash surfaces there’s a poignant hint of teenage insecurity, the inner conflicts and unfulfilled yearning of youth.
Currently included in the Hayward Gallery’s summer show, The New Décor, Bed Head’s ingenious use of humdrum materials and junk shop treasures is typical Lambie. So too is the invocation of pop music’s sparkly, fleeting attractions. A former member of The Boy Hairdressers, the band that became Teenage Fanclub, music counts among the Turner-nominated Scottish artist’s first loves. From jazzy op-art floors covered in vinyl strips to turntables decked in glitter, his work has as much “shoo-be-do” as it does “ooh”-factor. Bed Head plays on music culture’s tribal call and the anxious urge to be part of the gang, exposing latent desire through the most ordinary household objects.
Bed Head is included in The New Décor, The Hayward Gallery, London until September 5.
