Paradise Garage at Eighty One

31 January - 23 February
Wednesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm & by appointment
81 Curtain Rd, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3AG

www.eighty1.co.uk

Curated by Henry Kinman, including work by: Joe Crowdy, Matthew Darbyshire, Nic Deshayes, Anthea Hamilton & Julie Verhoeven, Jack Lavender, Simon Mathers, Oliver Osborne, Myles Painter, Prem Sahib, Marianne Spurr, Jesse Wine

Not many people know that I had a past life as an interior designer. On one of the last jobs I worked on, I helped design the offices for a large international, 'hip' advertising company. There were these ‘ironic' moose sculptures, industrial brushed metal workstations, and funky curved ceiling panels. I left design because I didn’t see a future in it. Well I guess I did, but I just didn’t think I would get much satisfaction out of picking an endless stream of slightly different quirky objects, designing slightly different ‘cool’ ceiling panels and picking out slightly different ‘somewhat’ unusual (though not too much so) finishes for desk partitions.

I turned my mind away from all that stuff to become an artist but it seems to me that more and more this ‘stuff’ has followed me anyway. Time after time I go out to see ‘art’ and find a trendy decorated showroom instead, and it's worth questioning why this might be the case.

I’m in Shoreditch tonight at Eighy One with this in mind, looking at some brand new Nike sneakers presented as formalist adornment to an exclusively black and white themed conglomeration of purchased objects. 

Detail of Matthew Darbyshire work

I was about to write ready-made objects, and thus contextualise it within some history of conceptual art, but it’s really not that at all. Ready-mades originally shocked and offended (think Duchamp and his fountain) and made the viewer really question the status of the art object, but everything here is seemless and tastefully matched. And against the rough concrete floors, it all looks just great.

There is very little questioning here, and to be fair the show blurb just says that the artists will ‘explore the attraction of homogeneous design and the fetishism of commercial aesthetics’, but i think words more akin to ‘regurgitate, reformat and reproduce’ seem more honest.

In a strange way there’s something quite sincere about the work in this show. There exists, you can tell, a real deep love for the material, a sentiment that the world needs to be a more aesthetically balanced and put together place. And maybe it says something about where this generation finds itself today: too busy at work in their low-paying (multiple) jobs, crushed under austerity, and with precious little energy to protest - it’s no wonder that they’re just looking for the pleasant comforts of a balanced and equilibrious home.  

Work by Marianne Spurr

Sculpture by Jack Lavender

Looking at Simon Mathers' painting

Framed posters by Myles Painter

Object by Anthea Hamilton & Julie Verhoeven

Work by Matthew Darbyshire

Another object by Anthea Hamilton & Julie Verhoeven

Rotating sculptures by Matthew Darbyshire

Fluorescent installation by Joe Crowdy 

Textured (styrofoam?) surfaces by Nicolas Deshayes

Advert with additions by Matthew Darbyshire

Video work by Myles Painter

Sculptures by Jesse Wine

Matthew Darbyshire conglomeration

Work by Oliver Osborne

Hung plastic work by Marianne Spurr

'Magnum Opus' (N/V_Projects) at the Dye House

33 Nutbrook Street, Peckham

10 January - 26 January 2013
Thurs-Sat 1-5pm
www.nvprojects.co.uk

With Darren Banks, Anna Crystal Stephens, Simon Davenport, Leo Fitzmaurice, Matthew Johnstone, James McLardy, Daniel Shanken, Gesa Troch, Lewis Teague Wright, Nina Wakeford


This last Thursday night my oyster card got the best workout its had in a long while!

That means that my evening started in New Cross at Goldsmiths with a lecture by the performance artist Ron Athey (which left me agitated - I think what it’s supposed to do), after which I continued on to New Bond Street, where, amongst the designer shops and plastic mannequins, I saw (or tried to see under the mass of people) the latest BANK show at MOT International, then headed down to Peckham to the opening of Null/Void Projects' group show, and finally, caught the new overground train up to Shoreditch to (unfortunately just miss) ‘Young Gods’ at Charlie Smith Gallery on Old Street.

But enough name dropping! How could I possibly sum up such an evening? It’s impossible, though it left me with a feeling that one of the best things about London is the variety and diversity you can find all in one night. The way that little blue card can whisk you from extremes of wealth and commercialism, to, well, the opposite. A dim sum of private views, a tapas of streets, a buffet of experiences. So let me just send this little love letter to London as I try to wrap my head around what it feels like to be young and alive in a city that has more than I’ll ever hope to discover. 

I'm going to leave you with some pictures from the group show curated by N/V_Projects; the exhibition put together sculptural work by emerging artists:

Nutbrook Street, on the way

Outside the gallery

Detail of James McLardy's work

Floor work by Leo Fitzmaurice

Brochures laid out in a fan shape...

Detail of Anna Crystal Stephens' work

Daniel Shanken's sculpture (without flames)

Another work by Daniel Shanken

Detail of Nina Wakeford's installation 

Jonas Mekas at the Serpentine Gallery

5 December 2012 - 27 January 2013

Serpentine Gallery
www.serpentinegallery.org

The Serpentine Gallery

There’s something about coming to the exhibition of a 90-year-old (and still living) artist that makes you approach what you’re seeing with reverence, or at least with all of your senses attuned, trying to absorb as much as you can from this life lived, trying to divine its secrets, and feel the reality of the artist’s mortality. For this exhibition really is about life, lived and felt, looked and celebrated.

The exhibition is comprised of films, poetry, installations, objects and re-mixes of the artist’s work. Almost all of the pieces shown are given the date 2012, which seems rather unexpected and unusual, but makes everything feel especially present and addressed to the present audience.

There is a certain modesty to the show. Poetry and images are plainly printed on A3 paper and attached to the wall with clear tape, or small grey nails. Nothing feels commercial, or forced, or glamourous for that matter. It is clear that the substance of the work is the content of the work, we are not intended to question the art object or ascertain sarcasm or irony, and as a result I feel I can relax while looking at the work because the terms of engagement are so clear and understandable. 

Poetry and images from films

I also came away from the exhibition feeling as if I had spent time with the artist. It was not just his personalised, heartfelt introduction to the show (“I was blessed by angels to live a happy life”) and often disarming and frank statements about each work, but the way his image and voice kept showing up amidst the footage.

Segment from opening wall text

I especially liked this explanation for an installation of sixteen monitors called Lavender Piece (2012), where the machines are stacked four-by-four, all showing different films: “No special meaning is intended outside of the immediate experience produced by the simultaneity of sixteen moving images and sixteen soundtracks”. How refreshing!

And of course that’s all it is - but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily simple. The images careen, the sound buzzes, gallops, there is a breath, a cycle to the images, a rhythm, a hustle, a whir, then a rallentando that almost misses, then hits the next beat. This grouping together of monitors feels like it’s saying something about the sequencing of time. Perhaps what we call our life is merely another name for a unity with many strands and rhythms running simultaneously.

Next, I come to WTC Haikus (2010), a film that commemorates the ‘presence’ of the World Trade Centres in New York, where the skyscrapers appear and reappear, often as two blue-grey shadows in the horizon of the people living their lives before them. There is always the  tremor of life in these films. Everything passes, everything moves, everything changes, but no less sweet does it make the feeling. On the soundtrack, piano chords slowly progress.This is a love letter, an acknowledgement of a profound presence that made the city a beautiful place.

I move from work to work and the images continue to sprawl out before me - the modest, the stunningly beautiful and quotidian, all of them streaming through his (and now my) imagination. I find myself wondering if these moments that Mekas captured were particularly special, or did they become special just because he captured them? 

There really are so many flows of images that make up the exhibition, that it’s inevitable not to start looking at it as a whole and asking, What does it all mean? The simple answer that pops into my head feels like something the filmmaker might say: ‘Well, it means that it was there and he saw it, and he filmed it’. I’m secretly quite excited with this answer, and the promise that art could be a metaphor for living, and a way to actually register what it feels like to be alive and present and aware.

Indeed, there is something essentially spiritual about this work: a belief in the meaningfulness of life. In a life absolutely uncommercial, unfaddish and unintellectualised. Instead, life as simply a series of modest experiences in a variety of places, sometimes with other people. I hear the voice of the artist over the projection in the large central room: “it’s just images passing by”, “just images for me and for a few friends”, and then, “my world is not so different from anybody elses”.

As I head to leave I have the idea that there is also something inherently elegiac about this exhibition. While I feel I know some about the kind of life Mekas shows in his work, I also sense that there is something deeply past about all of this. This world of sensations and people and feet on green grass and smiling at friends from across the garden on sunny afternoons. This analogue life where time progressed, swinging and swaying in a manageable way counting out the beats of life. It’s going, maybe it’s already gone. I mean look at those Bolex cameras under the glass display case, they look like dead corpses.

This fear rises in me...will I be able to feel like that? Is it still possible? And as I head back out into the now dark day, I think I know the answer.