John Frankland You Can't Touch This, 1992-1993

John Frankland's 1992 installation "You Can't Touch This" has to be remade, from scratch, every time it is shown. Constructed from simple wooden frames and tightly stretched foil, it has to find the appropriate location in the gallery for its illusion to be conjured. It is a work that presents a number of paradoxes: as a sculpture it is monumental in scale, and yet its materials are so ephemeral as to be almost throw away - literally, you can't touch this, or you will break it. Sarah Kent described the work as "an illusion occupying the same space as the thing it portrays; a three-dimensional drawing rather than a sculpture or an architectural structure". The work's construction, of wooden frames each covered with stretched material overtly references painting, while the slab construction and slick glossy surfaces recall the work of the minimalist US sculptor Donald Judd. The work could be understood in purely autonomous, aesthetic terms, and Frankland has spoken about a "somatic experience" of sculpture, an understanding of it through the body, an experience of scale, of the taught fragility and seductive reflectiveness of the foil.

Equally, however, this installation, which takes it's title from the 1990 hit by hip hop star MC Hammer "U can't touch this", is deeply rooted in real life, and seems to prove it's enduring importance by accruing meaning over time. The year it was first made the UK was in recession, and it was also the year that the UK crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In that context the depiction of an opulent corporate lobby was not without critical drive; almost twenty years later, after another, even greater fiscal crisis and multiple financial scandals, "You Can't Touch This" presents us with a vision of the paper-thin veneer of corporate probity which is, if anything, even more resonant.