Rumours of this show being catastrophically bad are unfounded
Commuter train fares will rocket by up to 10 per cent from January, rail operators announced
More...
The West End art trail
By Ben Lewis, Evening Standard 15.08.08
Pornography and mythology: Haunch of Vension
Simplifiying art: White Cube
Pop art and design combined: Simon Lee
Final stop: Corked
Look here too
August is not a hot month for London's art world but there are still treasures to be found. You shouldn't automatically head for the Tate, Hayward or Serpentine — because big museums won't give you the frisson of being on the front line of contemporary art in London and the off-season can give leading galleries a chance to put on interesting shows which aren't designed to pay the rent. Nevertheless, careful editing and
a small amount of legwork is required, so we have designed the first ever central London art walk.
1. HAUNCH OF VENSION
Mat Collishaw
We start at the Haunch of Venison in Haunch of Venison Yard off Brook Street, just up the road from Claridge's, the hotel-of-choice for the art world's richest dealers and collectors.
At Haunch, Mat Collishaw, one of the less well-known Britart generation from the Nineties, is engineering his own revival of late 19th-century symbolism. It's technically accomplished, dynamic and colourful. On the lower level of the three-floor gallery, there's an unprepossessing remake of Arnold Boecklin's legendary symbolist painting The Island of Death — a flat-screen TV and video with changing weather conditions, as if the location had been filmed with a time-lapse camera. The better stuff is upstairs.
In recent years, many painters have revived specific art historical styles and now conceptual artists are following suit — hence Collishaw's techno-neo-symbolism. But Collishaw has also returned to the history of the period. On the second floor, there's a complicated installation of projected images called Shooting Stars, in which computer-controlled data projectors twist around at speed, flashing images of Victorian child prostitutes on different parts of the walls. It looks great, even if Collishaw's own symbolism is a little crass.
There's Victorian retro-technology here too. On the top floor, Collishaw has executed a highly illusionistic contemporary Zoetrope — the spinning mechanical device with still images, which produced the effect of filmed movement in Victorian times before the advent of cinema. Collishaw's zoetrope, with its flying eagles, barking dogs and sex between a maiden and a human-animal hybrid, merges pornography with mythology.
Until 31 August (020 7495 5050,
www.haunchofvenison.com).
2. WHITE CUBE
Sarah Morris
Upon leaving the Haunch, walk all the way down Bond Street, pausing at any designer shops whose names you recognise to ask if they have any sale items left.
At the bottom of Bond Street, turn left, cross Piccadilly and take the first right down Duke Street. Halfway down on the left is a small portico leading to one of London's oldest courtyards, Mason's Yard, in the middle of which stands a fashionable concrete block: the White Cube gallery. Head straight for the basement. Here they are showing the abstract geometric paintings of Sarah Morris.
Morris exemplifies how, in the Nineties, many directions in modern art became simplified (some might say, debased) into decorative formulae, often by British artists represented by White Cube. Morris's paintings are inspired by, if not based on, the grid-like geometries and soaring perspectives of contemporary urban architecture, and they usually look like a photo of a skyscraper in which all the windows have been coloured-in.
In this exhibition, topically, Morris has applied her style to Beijing's street plan. They are instantly impressive, a quick hit of visual adrenaline — but with their sleek and sharp execution they leave one with little to reflect on (masking-tape art, a friend of mine once sneered). Not good art, then, but interesting as a sign of its time.
Upstairs, Morris is also showing an interminably slow, fashionably Left-wing film about the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by the PLO.
Until 6 September (020 7930 5373, www.whitecube.com).
3. SIMON LEE
John M Armleder
After five minutes, leave Morris's film — either yawning deeply or angered by its naïve art school Leftism — and retrace your steps to Piccadilly. Before turning left towards Green Park pop into Fortnum & Mason and taste its Turkish delight, which is popular with the MA students across the road at the Royal Academy. The sugar rush should propel you onto Berkeley Street up on the right, and to the sugary John M Armleder show.
John M Armleder, born in 1948, the oldest artist on our tour, combines pop art readymades and design, usually in large installations. He is a veteran of the lo-fi Sixties art movement Fluxus, which drew in the composer John Cage as well as the artist Joseph Beuys.
For this show, Armleder has covered the walls in I-say-wall-drawings-you-say-wallpaper, with motifs of oval dots (a spoof, surely, on Britain's best known spot-painter), scorpions and acorns.
Paintings are hung onto these backgrounds. An enigmatic canvas, half of which is blue, the other half red, sits on one wall; in front of it, even more enigmatically, an upturned wooden chaise longue that looks like a piece of weathered garden furniture but which is, I was informed, a “design classic”. Other walls are full of seductive, treacly “pour paintings”, in which all kinds of substances, from acrylic to varnish to industrial paint mixed with metallic dust, have been poured down canvases.
Until 29 August (020 7491 0100, www.simonleegallery.com).
4. THE GALLERY IN CORK STREET
Corked
The final stop on our tour is on Cork Street (this time, consult your A-Z, on how to zigzag from Berkeley Street to Cork Street). Once the centre of the London art world, Cork Street has seen better days, and I advise you to walk down it without looking left or right.
At No 28, Cork Street Gallery has been taken over by veteran street art collectors and dealers Urban Angel, from Essex (where else do street art collectors come from?). Here they are exhibiting 50 street artists from all over the world.
Banksy isn't here but they do have Banksy's printer, Ben Eine, who delivers his signature combination of stencils of children from Fifties colouring-in books, CCTV signs and splodges. Also noteworthy is the Israeli Know Hope, who makes work out of cardboard, across which a spindly character in a stripey jersey ambles carrying a heart or linking hands against a background of traffic or electricity pylons.
Aficionados of street art are convinced the movement is here to stay but at the moment it lacks certain of the qualities which define contemporary art. It desperately needs to change the ubiquitous clichéd theme of the kids (sensitive and innocent) struggling to preserve their identity in the anonymous hostile urban environment. That's the message of Britain's social workers — street artists need to think up something more confrontational.
Until 29 August (08700 111 652, www.urbanangel.com).
10°c
11°c
