Review: Condemned, at the Dead Wallis Gallery – Private View 11th March 2010
Resignation was my first reaction to what appeared to be just another collection of themes that seem to be highly popular yet completely restrictive among contemporary Art students.
It appeared to be a visually confusing survey of whimsical nostalgia and fantasy set amongst more overtly responsive illustrations of destruction. This seemed only to create or propagate an informational bewilderment that I felt many of the works (most of which were left Untitled) were trying to deal with.
It was like browsing like a travel brochure offering holidays from contemporaneity, added bonus – time-travel.
The initial locus of my confusion centered around a huge (and of course, on-trend, drippy and gestural) portrait of Margret Thatcher (Maggie, Nick Lord, 2010), which, with its highly visible positioning and recognizable iconography dominated the experience of the show. In itself it appeared meaningless at least in any worthily critical sense, especially given the plethora of empty ironic portraits of questionable icons available anywhere with a student population. The zenith of mindless appropriation of increasingly benign political position maybe.
But, when considered against the various meanings of the exhibition’s title Condemned an objective, rather then pessimistic, view of the predominance of works entering into fantasy and nostalgia could be made.
For example, the attempt at time/space-travel circulating around specific works such as Kevin Fitzpatrick’s painting Bedroom Window 1 with its, ostensibly, non-nostalgic 1980s/1990s retro aesthetic. The exhibition can be read as setting up a temporal circularity loop, that is taking the viewer, through the nostalgia of the work, back to the 1980s/early 1990s, but bringing them back to the present by context and the creative processes engaged in the by the artist in order to state the exhibition’s critical and political position.
Condemned therefore began to refer to, not only to the status of the soon to be demolished building, but to the student artist condemned to perform and engage in this closed-off nostalgic, economic and thematic circularity.
This could, on one hand be read as a curatorial critique of the increasing regularity with which a contemporary historicism is deployed through nostalgic re-enactment in contemporary art. However, from a more political position, with the portrait of Margret Thatcher working in combination with Kevin Fitzpatrick’s paintings as visual, historical markers, the curation of the exhibition makes a loop between the current cultural context and the recessional period of the 1980s/1990s.
It becomes political both, in suggesting a contextual cultural/societal parallel, therefore Condemned becomes descriptive of this latest generation of artists, that is, bound to re-enact the past, by virtue of its similarity and availability as a definite and hence welcoming reference. But also, and this links into a need to make sense of the hyper-informational present, through (yet more) appropriation and assimilation of historically definite and de-contextualized referents from the past.
The exhibition brings into question the seeming ignorance to cultural context of the works that have taken up on the (self) destructive connotations of Condemned, that represents an alternative strategy to more nostalgic works, which is in their creation/appropriation of narrative and meaning into more imaginative/fantastical versions of explaining the present.
One video I particularly liked for its subtle parody on the artistic ritual and spectacular repetition was Charlie Sandford’s Untitled (2010). A looped, static, view across a lake with nondescript scrubland behind was repeatedly interrupted by a cyclist (fully dressed and presumably the artist) riding off the bank and into the lake. The cyclist then gets out of the water and cycles off, only to return riding straight back into the lake. This performance repeats several times until the video then loops itself.
In this video we see both the circularity that loops amongst the works visually symbolic of temporal space; but also a circularity in its repetition, both in the performance, the video looping and not to mention its availability as reproducible resource, the work iterates and reiterates and reiterates (ad nauseum) the repetitious burden of contemporary visual practice, that is, an almost inescapable condemnation to appropriate, re-mediate and re-enact context.
These works seemed at best to act as a foil between experience and what, it seems, the artist would hope ‘real-life’ would be understood it as being.
(Invitation/Press Release)
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am delighted to extend to you an invitation to the private view of the CONDEMNED at the Dead Wallis Gallery.
CONDEMNED looks at the nature of the immaterial; reacting to the temporary, throw-away nature of today, exploring the preservation and the lack-of preservation of the things we own, it reflects the instability of society, our own inferiority and how we perceive art.
This is your first opportunity to check out the next breed of artist, with works spanning all aspects of Fine Art from sculpture to video, installation to painting and photography. The exhibition sees a collaboration of over 20 up-and-coming undergraduate artists from Chelsea, Goldsmiths, Central St. Martins and Kingston.
The exhibition is located on the site of the old Wallis Gallery at Main Yard in Hackney Wick and will be the last ever show to grace this brilliant space before its imminent demolition. We are sending it off in style.
The viewing will be from 6:30pm until 9:30pm on Thursday the 11th of March then the space will opened publicly from Friday 12th through to Sunday the 14th.
Join in.
Rory Beard
Curator
CONDEMNED
