Mark Wallinger is one of those artists who has no coherent style: he has dressed up in bear suits, proposed a giant white horse as a public sculpture, created a mirror TARDIS and taken his turn on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.
Mark Wallinger is perhaps most well know for State Britain (2007), an accurate replica of Brian Haw’s anti-Iraq war protest camp that sprawled outside the Houses of Parliament until its removal in May 2006 under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
Considering Wallinger’s disparate interests and the usual lack of cohesion in his oeuvre, what surprised me about his current exhibition at the BALTIC were the threads that weave the works on display together. There are only four works of art in the main exhibition space (though others occupy the outside of the building and the stairwell), and they work wonderfully together, talking across the room, playing off each other.If the BALTIC is approached across the Tyne via the Millennium Bridge, the first work we see is Self Portrait (Times New Roman), a giant letter ‘I’ on a banner in that generic and ubiquitous font. It is to my mind the only ostentatious element is Wallinger’s colonization of the gallery. Inside, MARK is also a kind of self-portrait, but a far more understated one. With his giant ‘I’ Wallinger claims a whole wall, but with MARK he adopts one brick at a time, chalking his name on bricks around London, reclaiming the urban territory with his ‘mark’, yet only briefly, since we know the chalk will wash away in the rain. These modestly marked bricks are recorded in a series of photographs that plays on a screen in the gallery.