A London Eye - Beaux Arts (June 2000)

London art is burgeoning at all points of the compass so it’s impossible to give an adequate overview. However, the following derivé gives a taste of what’s to be found in any direction travelled across the city.

The Tate modern is a monumental post-industrial building dwarfing visitors and shrinking the art within it. Newly-built galleries strive to boost the aura of classic examples of modernism but so-far the building itself steals the show and despite the spectacular conversion and comprehensive lighting, industrial history still haunts its lofty corners.

Media spectacle created by the Royal opening attracts a new audience who crowd galleries, lifts and escalators and queue to view Louise Bourgeoise’s appropriately huge, heavyweight steel tower installation. For me the highlight of the new display is the modest but no-less profound evocations of the sublime horizon in photographs by Hiroshii Sugimoto.

Here, beautifully printed black and white oceans meet planes of grey sky and melt into voids as, here at least we’re reminded of a scale in excess of the surrounding architecture and are reassured that on an over-exposed, over-exploited planet there is still a place that will always remain unreachable.

Along the river from the new Tate, a smaller ex-industrial building - ‘The OXO Tower’ - is hosting a sprawling group-show simply titled ‘Beautiful’ . Several retail units on various floors of the tower have been used to create a rabbit-warren of art to wander around what is generally a showcase of up-and-comings in a purposefully purposeless eclectic mix featuring a few big names.

Tomoko Takahashi has contributed an installation of tightly re-composed detritus -including materials from the Tate Modern’s dustbin- strategically placing coloured boards and expressively daubed black-marker dots to draw the eye in and around discarded timbers. But most intriguing are saws and tape-measures as-it-were arrested in mid-use as if we observed a flash of frozen time. Jessica Stockholder, Kurt Schwitters and Jeff Wall’s carefully ‘Destroyed Room’ come to mind as we admire the unique energy of a practise bearing on profound issues of orders and values.

Hew Locke debuts a voodoo-like deity doll assembled from gaudy bric-a-brash (sic) found amidst the minor exchanges of London’s street markets. ‘Red Menace’- as the figure is titled, towers over us elevated on a tall cardboard plinth. Streaming scarlet hair all-but hides a tiny tattooed face as the creature touts a toy machine gun labelled ‘Made in England’ alerting xenophobes to fantasy fears of otherness and questioning loyalties to imagined-nation (sic). The whole erupts with explosively coloured plastic flowers, writhing limbs and ferocious fabrics bottomed out with magnificently multicoloured high-heels which add gender-disruption to an already disturbing spectacle.

Amidst myriad paintings and painters Mark Foulds’ piece stands out for the bravura of its splodgy abstraction and the show’s only video -by James Gaywood- presents the carefully framed bow-wave of a boat which confuses the square form of the projection screen by surging relentlessly at a diagonal across the surface, seeming to move in one direction while actually travelling in another.

‘Beautiful’ is alive with a ‘Just Do It’ spirit of invention and diversity, but ultimately the work just survives the unflattering context of small-business retail units redolent of the enterprising 1980s ethos which spawned them. Nevertheless the show serves its professional purpose as a well-located, well-timed check-list of potential curate-ables.

Further up the Thames, past a new view of Big Ben framed by the huge ‘London Eye’, having negotiated surging crowds of tourists you eventually come to Vauxhall where traffic replaces people as the prime obstacle to progress. Here Milch gallery is hosting some Berlin-based artists in the second half of a show called ‘Gift’.

‘Gift’ in German translates as ‘poison’ and the show -who’s first half took place in Berlin featuring British artists- loosely plays off this

double meaning. Gallery windows have been roughly painted in translucent white by Remy Markowitz and the atmosphere is mildly oppressive but it’s hard to pin down which of the artworks is primarily responsible or whether the show does truly communicate the treacherous contradiction concealed within its title.

Stefan Beck and Patrick Huber install several aspidistra-like house-plants on marble-topped MDF plinths to evoke the life and death of wavering taste. These gaunt memorials stand against a complex backdrop made from hundreds of reject ‘snaps’ rescued from a film-processing factory. The piece is called ‘Nobody Anywhere’ and reeks of painful ordinariness.

Ute Lindner has re-used machine-plan drawings found in her disused East Berlin factory studio. She isolates small sections then enlarges them enormously in 3mm rubber sheet which is cut out and pinned to the wall. What was once a strict guideline for manufacture becomes a slightly sagging visual conundrum hinting at something other-than mazey abstraction but never clearly recognisable. Claes Oldenberg’s soft sculpture and Simon Periton’s doily-mania come to mind.

Leave Milch, negotiate busy Vauxhall Cross -a car-ravaged intersection dominated by the idiosyncratic architecture of the MI5 building - then catch a bus to meet the river again at Battersea where the Royal College Of Art’s sculpture department is holding its MA show.

Here the outstanding artist is Tricia Easton who subverts disowned domestic objects in a disturbing update on surrealism; adding socks to chair-legs and ripping surface panels from doors to reveal strange honey-comb-patterned insulation lurking beneath. The institutional context makes it difficult for this work to speak its mind but the potential is obvious for Easton to assert herself as a powerful new visual linguist.

Another bus-ride takes you to RCA’s main building in Kensington which hosts the college’s painting show. Here, two hot new potatoes for the art-world to handle are Markus Varta and Claire Pestaille. Varta uses his big illustrative wash paintings to build environments; like the playful bar installed here complete with high stools, Jack Daniels and cool music.

Auction catalogues, decadence, self-salonisation and the Royal; Academy summer show influence Claire Pestaille’s serious-looking indictment of art’s commodification. Gazes, found in a number of Sotheby’s Catalogue old-master paintings are isolated by doodling and graffiti-ing to reveal eerie historical continuities. Pestaille sticks out a brave neck to truly comment on her medium rather than merely displaying safely sold and red-dotted canvases.

The final show on this brief tour takes place across the road from the RCA beyond the recently-renovated Albert Memorial in Kensington

Gardens. Here at the Serpentine gallery is an inappropriately elegiac exhibition of work by the late Felix Gonzales-Torres -a charming, influential and dynamic artist who’s legacy is somewhat dulled by the managerial approach to curation found here.

Works famous for their emphasis on dispersion, event and flux now seem museified and orphaned confirming that their very point was their live-liness. To repeat some of these works renders them all-but meaningless. Thus we see an empty podium on which a go-go dancer once performed and collect sweets and paper sheets from generous stacks -but all rather dutifully, self-consciously, citing a well known piece of art while unfortunately condemning it to art history.

© 2000 Paul O'Kane

previous... | next...