(Source)

I like London. The sense of a thousand cultural synapses firing around me at once is wonderful compared to the dozen or so in my current town. London has my kind of crowds; people who move fast, don’t care when they get rained on, and aren’t so timid around traffic. They don’t even seem cowed by the art.

I rarely leave London without a trip to the Tate Modern, but on the way I take a detour to see Chiho Aoshima’s City Glow, Mountain Whisper at Gloucester Road tube station.

It’s an interesting space for art. Every few minutes, the viewing is interrupted by an incoming train, and the carriage windows perform random, hit and run framings on parts of the work.

The contrasts in it are fairly trite, but there are some subtle tricks of form. It’s aesthetically polished, fashionable and has a good effect on the station. Curvy SF buildings and calm mountains all bear impassive faces like manga noh masks, and the urban ones look like teched up zombies. There are some nice touches such as a mountain face calmly spewing a waterfall, and others peeking over the low horizon. Fairies dance between the two extremes.

Situated in the arches, it’s reminiscent of the better pieces of graffiti that pepper daylit parts of the underground and the run into St. Pancras. It’s merely slicker, higher concept and officially sanctioned work.

At the Tate, a few artists catch my attention: Inka Essenhigh’s work seduces me with an American echo of the British cultural wasteland. Erwin Wurm makes people laugh out loud. A couple look really pleased when I tell them how they can recreate the effect of Olivo Barbieri’s tilt shift aerial photography in Photoshop.

Video Quartet, by Christian Marclay, is a lovely and humorous film made of music and sounds snipped from other films. Four projections run in parallel, combining clips that run a gamut of 20th century culture. Classical pianists are cut up, set against each other, mirrored and repeated, then joined by some deep south guitar and harmonica. A female singer sustains a high note on one screen, then progressively repeats over and intersects herself on all four. Screams fade to powerful sustained notes, which segue into lounge singing. This is a a well produced cultural mashup, slickly presented in an institutional space.

Ishi’s Light, by Anish Kapoor, is immediately engaging. The statement speaks of creation mythology and the band of reflected light being more than the surface. Children dance in front of the sculpture, resolutely not giving a stuff what it says on the wall. They want to look at their distorted reflections and see the responses of their peers. At this level of interaction, Ishi’s Light is a chic funhouse mirror. No denigration intended, it’s what people do with it.

It reminds me of going to see The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall a few years ago. Children were running around playing games under it, old couples lay on their back waving limbs at their distant reflections. Curious people wandered under the half sun diffuser and gazed at the bank of sodium lamps behind. The space was full with sounds of human life, not hush. Such exhibits are refreshing.

I’m jaded because I accidentally became director of a gallery once. It was a voluntary cooperative affair, run on a shoestring of donated things and donated time. Due to a shortage of volunteers, I was thrust into the role with scant relevant experience.

When I first got involved, the previous incarnation of the gallery had been run into a dead end, and we needed to gut and reinvent it. While clearing stuff out, we tossed a tray of dead stationery and junk into the empty space. We’d left the doors open, and a visitor ambled in and spent ten minutes or so circling the stationery and bending down to look at details. None of us wanted to embarass him, so we hushed ourselves, carried on working until he left then nearly pissed ourselves laughing.

He taught me something about our audience though: Some people deeply respect the space itself, then whatever it contains by default. Over the next year I got sick of context heavy crap with statements written in the third person by the artists themselves. I also tired of seeing good work under-exposed and under-appreciated.

During the same period, Britart appeared on TV near some friends with little connection to art. “You hang around with these fuckers.”, they said, “What does this shit mean?”. There was contrasting talk at the gallery of educating the audience. I am not against this, but obviously it can’t be forced on people. Few are willing to pay the time and energy costs of analysing art deeply. I don’t blame them, it would be like trying to talk to every single person who passed you on the street: meager returns on a huge cognitive load. There is so much art that viewing it has to be about finding things significant to you, your network, your culture. I curate my experience of art.

Working in white space taught me not to revere it. You can stick just about anything in there, and someone will bow to it. Others will feel intimidated, and would rather assume they don’t understand something than conclude it is shite. Seeing this happen regularly and turning over many exhibition proposals made my reactions savage and quick. I think the most important thing to teach art audiences is that they’re not just “allowed” to dislike pieces of art, it’s their prerogative to like or not for any reason.

For example, Sam Taylor Wood’s Still Life has a good aesthetic and an interesting context. However, a large part of my reaction to seeing fruit rotting at high speed was to go “Cool!”. That’s exactly the reaction it would get on YouTube. Problem? Bonus? I think they’re the wrong terms to frame the interaction. It’s just difference in appreciation and understanding, without which culture would be dead. Expecting or demanding a specific reaction to a piece of art is bound to be an exercise in frustration.

Nonetheless, institutional involvement seems to set people on the back foot. It shouldn’t. A field as subjective as art is one where people should be the least accepting of authority. It’s not that I want to see institutions rotting, underfunded or mothballed, I’d just like to see more signs of life in their audiences, who at present seem to be allowing much art to be an abysmal, one sided conversation.

I used to meet a lot of people who never went to see art because they felt humiliated by it. They assumed they wouldn’t be able to understand. White space intimidated them. The Tate Modern is often noisy though, which seems healthy.

I think the future is a middlebrow convergence of institutional and peer to peer models. Every peer on the social network has the potential for cultural production, regardless of institutional approval. Chiho Aoshima graduated in economics and entered the art world with no formal training. Something found in an uncurated space such as a craft fair, a street or the net might not usually be high on idea or even craft, but it’s not impossible.

I can’t leave without spending time in the Mark Rothko exhibit. It’s hard to describe the effect his work has on me. It’s like the awe of a cathedral made secular and compressed into a few large canvases. I don’t feel the oppressiveness associated with them, instead there’s an intense peace here. The people sauntering in front of me perform chaotic hit and run unframings of the work. They’re all being quiet here, and it suits the work, but I’m glad it’s not the case in the other galleries.

I have time, so take the long way on the Circle Line to see City Glow, Mountain Whisper again. The towers in it are lit up, and appear made to contain many people. Further round the line, dirty arches have had their graffiti thoroughly scrubbed off. Small chunks of culture that have been edited out, their closest reach to preservation the temporary signs of their passing. I wonder if they were any good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 20:39 and is filed under Art, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.