Tom Otterness fashioned a race of standardized cylindrical figures, genus homo Babariens, and put them around the middle space of this gallery in friezes at the tops of the walls and as an entry gate around the door leading into this space from the outer room. White as the walls themselves and suavely tucked against the soffit, these bas-reliefs of cast, squatty, distinctly Babar-like people told a number of stories simultaneously. The characters divided into female, male, a King, and some androgynous small fry. The mass of them were hard at work, mostly carrying a large spherical load or a stocky cylinder. On the left side of the room a long sequence had a surging row of single-file females moving toward the back wall. Similarly, a comparable array of male figures, the crowned King waving from his car in their midst, marched along the right wall. Once arrived, their same-sex congeniality literally took a fall: in the left corner a swarm of loaded-down females struggled to climb a floor-to-ceiling ladder; to the right, their male counterparts faced the same obstacle. A more dramatic narrative also developed along the top of this back wall: to the left, females pulled a penis and scrotum off a pedestal and hoisted up one of their own people, while the King lay nearby, his body severed. At top center a seated figure, Saturn-like, was eating a small crowned figure while giving birth to another. To the right, the King variously kissed an elephant’s ass (Babarous!), was seen in stocks, was pulled down from a pedestal and borne away by the multitude. Farther on a car, the royal vehicle presumably, lay overturned, while a figure struck an already cracked globe with a hammer.
The male/female dichotomy also operated in the three-sided frieze around and above the entrance to this room. Males carrying balls and columns came up and slipped down one side, females the other; once on top the two came together gingerly—at one point a female violently shoved a column into a male. The inner side of this wall held a more variegated assembly of figures, animals, geometric conventions, and weaponry: cones and cylinders mingled with missiles, females, males, and prehistoric animals dead and alive, in an enigmatic passage.
Fragments of the long friezes, sometimes painted or glazed and all colored with graphite, along with what seemed unique pieces, all colored and wall-bound tableaux, were positioned around three of the gallery’s walls. Parts of the larger narrative, isolated in this manner, were called The King’s Fall or Female Revolution. The sole white tableau, Hermit Philosopher, got center stage beneath the Saturn frieze. In it a seated, scowling male glared out from a rough concave niche, holding a compass, a cone and a small skull at his feet.
Four related pedestal-supported skull grotesques interrupted the unity of scale and discourse of the friezes and tableaux; their expressionist tenor was alien to the mirthful drama of everything else shown. The only freestanding piece, again pedestal supported, which added to the comic verity of the friezes was Baby, a black female child lying on her back, holding aloft a scored globe in her left hand. Otterness has come up with a universal motif here, relevant without being topical, legible without being glib. He can address human relations without injecting an overarching ego. At last, some little people who are not fairies.
—Richard Armstrong
