Review: Tom Dale - Memorial Drag Strip

Two daredevil stunt ramps – one shooting straight up into the roof, the other crazily corkscrewing to the right; to ride either would be suicide. Tom Dale’s ‘Memorial Drag Strip’ presents the viewer with gruesome ramps for the imagination, obliging the viewer to consider their bathetic trajectories and inevitable self-obliteration. Named after the sites of Evel Knievel’s historic stunts, and emblazoned with stars and stripes, Dale’s work attacks the propagandistic showmanship that enshrines western achievements, and asks to what extent such achievements are in fact empty bravado, auto-inflation, all talk.

With the invocation of Vladimir Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the Third International’ (the Soviet Constructivist project that ultimately proved beyond the technical capabilities of its time) in the ramps’ haphazard wooden framework, Dale’s sculptures are further revealed to be meditations on the pie-in-the-sky vainglory of the modernist project. ‘Memorial Drag Strip’ exposes modernism as a neo-Charge of the Light Brigade – a glorious but doomed effort, with high casualties and without decisive gains. Dale, like Tennyson before him, suggests that ‘someone has blundered’.

[Review by Thomas Keane]