Two by two: British duo Noble & Webster shared private obsessions in a SoHo gallery and erected a public sculpture in Rockefeller Center

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Out in the Hampstead section of London stands the Sigmund Freud Museum. It's the large, not-as-depressing-as-you-might-suspect brick house in which the father of psychiatry lived--having fled Austria after the Nazi takeover--at the end of his life (1856-1939). In addition to containing Freud's books and collection of antiquities, the museum is rentable for conferences and banquets, and as a film set. It's also apparently available for the--ahem!--insertion of works of contemporary art that have to do with, well, Freudian stuff. Tracey Emin and the Chapman Brothers have left their mark, and so, too, during the winter of 2007, did Tim Noble and Sue Webster. (The couple-team met in the 1980s as art students at Nottingham Trent University and have been collaborating ever since.) Their offering was a two-piece exhibition titled "Polymorphous Perverse," consisting of a skanky assemblage called Scarlett, concerning the workings of the unconscious, and one of the couple's patented sculptures-that-cast-pictorial-shadows, Black Narcissus (both 2006). Last February, the two works were transported to Deitch Projects' clean, white-walled art gallery in New York's SoHo. Out of the id, as it were, and into the superego.

Scarlett is a motorized, table-top jumble of broken doll parts (hey, there's an artistic scoop!), electric motors and wiring, along with various containers of unappetizing fluids. When this Rube Goldberg manifestation of the unconscious is switched on, a baby seems to drink its own urine, something excremental goes in and out of a doll's asshole, and dire deeds appear to be visited upon dismembered birds. (Why is it that Brits in general love small animals, but hip British artists love dead small animals?) More wires, electrical gear and some oily boxes occupy the space beneath the table.

"What a mess the unconscious is!" the artists say, essentially. It just goes its own bloody way--doesn't it?--regardless of how the world's protocols (e.g., minding one's manners in an art gallery) would have us behave otherwise. In an adjacent Deitch room, a spotlit clot of black rubber casts of Noble's penis (perhaps not quite the scale of the late John Holmes's, but impressive nevertheless) and Webster's fingers magically throws a double shadow portrait of the artists upon a wall. This particular couple's unconscious is apparently a lot neater and more targeted than everybody else's: just a little heterosexual hand-job.

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"Like Freud," observed psychoanalyst and art writer Darian Leader in Time Out London about the Noble & Webster exhibition at the Freud Museum, "these artists realize that sexuality isn't just about fucking. It's about the strange mixtures of pleasure and pain that can fix on any part of the body." Or, as a standup comedian whose name I forget once said, "How do you like living in a world in which you can open a Sears catalogue to a random page, point blindly to an item and know with certainty that somebody out there wants to sleep with it?" Which brings me to a nagging apercu: isn't it odd that such a universal as the human unconscious is depicted by Noble & Webster in such a historicized, localized manner, namely eccentric English garage workshop technology circa, say, 1977?

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And what is it about all this anarchic sexual tinkering that sets aflutter the hearts of academic art historians? In the oversize-format catalogue for the show, the renowned--yea, revered--Linda Nochlin writes, "I approached the thing with considerable caution for a lot of reasons, many of them, I slowly came to realize, totally irrational, having to do with my own inner condition, my deep aversion to, and avoidance of, that great unplumbed cesspool of the unconscious...." C'mon, isn't this all kind of common and tame by now, having filtered down to horror movies that 'tweens go to see at the mall? There's not even an eyeball getting slit by a straight razor in the piece. And there's so, so much of this kind of art around; my first thought was "Dash Snow with a reference library." Finally, for all the iconography and catalogue words about the messy confluence of sex and doo-doo, Scarlett doesn't smell in the slightest. Sometimes, I guess, an assemblage is just an assemblage.

For Noble & Webster fans who'd rather they eschew our Freudian innards and stick to visual parlor tricks, there was an alternative: Electric Fountain, a 35-foot-high public artwork, installed concurrently on a corner above the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. The metal sculpture mimics the arcing sprays of a classic fountain, and some bluish neon tubing and zillions of programmed lightbulbs furnish the approximation of water in motion. Simply said, the piece really works. It's big, clever and cheery, with a kind of friendly, G-rated carny vibe emanating from its unavoidable tinniness. What about the work's carbon footprint though, compared to that of a regular fountain, with a motor pumping water? Noble & Webster used a new kind of LED bulb, the publicity material says, "creating brighter appearance while using less energy." Highly ecological, you might say. But ol' Sigmund would probably have called it merely anal-retentive.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster's "Polymorphous Perverse," which debuted at the Freud Museum in London [Nov. 8, 2006-Jan. 7, 2007], was presented in New York at Deitch Projects [Feb. 29-Mar 29, 2008]. Electric Fountain was on view at New York's Rockefeller Center [Feb. 27-Apr. 5].

Author: Peter Plagens is a painter and writer who lives in New York.

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