Ernesto Neto at Hayard Gallery

If dropped from outer space into the middle of Ernesto Neto's The Edges of the World at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre, the befuddled observer might think she found herself in a surrealist camping store. Under a scrim of lime green nylon sky, rainbow-colored tents rise, their skins pulled taut over skeletons of industrially pre-fabricated, "flat pack" supports.



These tents would be completely impractical for the concerns of the conventional, terrestrial camper. Made of nylon stocking material, they would be highly permeable to the inevitable rainshowers that accompanying any decent camping expedition. As suggested by the intermittent, cylindrical apertures at upper right in the photoraph, they are also made literally porous, thus open to mosquitoes and other insectile visitors. These tents do, though, come with their own perfume; their skins are lined with chamomile, lavender and other herbs.



Unlike the grid structures of the floor and ceiling of the typical modernist art gallery (as visible in the photograph above), Neto's tents are variously and insistently biomorphic. Beyond their references to skin, pores and bones, these structures are anchored to the ground by bulbous, "feet." It is as if monsters are playing dress up in the nylon stockings from which the forms are made.

Now, Old Ken know very little about Señor Neto or the range of concerns in which he works. Closest to my ken is Tropicalia, an exhibition at the Barbican in London in 2006, which offered a vision of the psychedlic fusion of art, music and politics in 1960s-early '70s Brazil. The immersive environments and playful situations of that exhibition (a sandy beach constructed in the middle of the gallery for example), certainly recall the interests of Neto (who is also Brazilian). But, in the emphasis on multi-sensorial interactivity, shelters with nomadic impermanence and what might (evasively) be called "architectures of the impossible", Neto also seems to be pressing on a number of international, post-modernist buttons.



What was perhaps most satisfying about the whole enterprise, though, was the childlike wonder of the question I kept asking throughout it: how did they fabricate this? The contrast with recently-resurgent techniques like 3D visualization is suggestive. Whereas Avatar and its numerous imitators are created by acts of CGI wizardry that stand far beyond the comprehension of most viewers, Neto's environments are imminently comprehensible. Using everyday materials (press-board, nylon, gravel and so on) that are always visible as such to the viewer, we are nonetheless transported into a fictional world that approaches the sublime as we imaginatively reconstruct the incredible labor and skill required to make it. Anthropologist Alfred Gell has a telling phrase for exactly this kind of enterprise, which works its magic precisely by advertising its apparent humility. This both a technology of enchantment and an enchantment of technology.

Against a stultefying spectacle like Avatar, what feels to Old Ken as invigorating and refreshing about this "industrial light and magic" (to steal a phrase from George Lucas) is its demonstration of just how much world-making can be done with so little.