Matt Copson, Serpentine Galleries

In a characteristically superficial speech before this “play without actors” by young artist Matt Copson, the first in a series of monthly artist-led immersive events at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, Serpentine co-director and all-round impresario Hans Ulrich Obrist cited cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s consternation at the fact that art exhibitions generally do not address our five senses, in the way that ancient rituals once did. Obrist is right that the success of A Woodland Truce lies in its refutation of disciplinary boundaries. However, this is not in terms of its empirically multisensory address (scarcely novel after the turn-of-this-century explosion of relational aesthetics and participatory art). Instead, this is because it is a genuinely pluralistic work which ignores generic dictates to combine apparently disparate elements in a way which amounts to a whole, but never one which subordinates its parts.