Get out the tube at Lancaster Gate, just opposite the Royal Lancaster Hotel, a place that, whenever I see it, always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable as it inevitably brings back memories of when I first moved to London in the mid ‘70s and got a job with the Post Office in telephone accounts. By the kind of carelessness that arises through a lack of concentration – something not entirely unfamiliar to youthful, young men who have many more important things to think about than the accuracy of phone bills – I inadvertently managed to overcharge the Hotel by about £30,000 – equivalent to an awful lot more money in today’s currency. The Hotel paid the inflated bill without question and were as embarrassed as I was when their auditor queried the amount, got me to check the meter reading, realise my mistake and refund the cash. Not my finest professional hour.
Oh well, live and learn. I walk through Kensington Gardens to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery for Simon Denny’s exhibition Products for Organising. This is a very strange show, not so much sculpture as 3D displays. Slogans, logos, diagrams and organograms have been aggregated together in a hotchpotch of corporate jargon speak and motivational mumbo jumbo all presented on a bunch of free-standing display panels. I’m not sure if this is a spoof, ridiculing our brave new world of PR spin or whether it represents actual examples of some kind of business theory, proposal, system or analysis. It’s all a bit like a nightmare, capitalist techno update on the preserved lecture notes that good old Joseph Beuys used to scribble down in chalk on a blackboard, after a hard day coyote-whispering.
It’s also slightly reminiscent of another scene from my professional past when my old university friend, the writer Roger Osborne, and I pitched an idea to our commissioning editor at Random House for a follow up book to our succes d’estime, Counting on Arthur. That was a hilarious, humourous novel in diary form about my previous life working in an office. Carving the Banana, the putative new book, which we spent a year writing, was a parody management advice manual for upcoming young executives who wanted to get ahead in business – or How to Get Hard in the Corporate Jungle – as our subtitle helpfully elucidated. Of course, such was the nonsense written in the real versions of these self-help books that parodying them was all but impossible but in the end it was the sales team at the publishers who vetoed the book. They said it wasn’t funny enough but I suspect the real reason for their antipathy was a sense of recognition that they were pretty close to the examples of people we were taking such fun in mocking. Suffice to say that should any of those gibberish-speaking buffoons get to see this particular exhibition, I’m sure they will thoroughly enjoy themselves. I’m not sure anyone else will.
The art may be a bit spurious but the walk through the park is wonderful, especially at this relatively early hour with a slight mist adding a charming atmosphere to the delightful, autumnal arboreal colours. As I stroll along I can see the lumpy white outline of an old shire horse, out for a trot, echoed in the distance by a chunky marble form that I take to be an old Henry Moore sculpture and one can almost sense the questing vole passing feather-footed through the plashy fen, as William Boot would put it.
Anyway, enough of that particular Scoop and on into the original Serpentine Gallery. Passing through the portals means exchanging the pleasures of the natural world for a celebration of the manufactured gadgets and geegaws of our marvelous, materialistic, consumer society. All this is presented in the hyper-realistic, simple stylized illustrations of Michael Craig-Martin. This Svengali to the Young British Artist Trilbys has filled the place with a bright, but not quite garish, cornucopia of everyday household essentials and associated paraphernalia: a mobile telephone; an energy-saving light bulb; a can opener; a briefcase; a watch; a torch; a bag of chips. A ton of other similar stuff all in varying colours and sizes now decoratively adorn the Gallery walls.
For those old enough to remember the Generation Game, Craig-Martin’s miscellany of modern day essentials would provide enough material for a couple of conveyor belts’ worth of prizes. While this might be sufficient to bring a glow of nostalgic warmth to dear old Bruce Forsyth and his fan club, I can’t help thinking that maybe art should be a little bit more demanding. Surely art should offer just a little bit more intellectual diversion than that presented by a parade of objects that mimic the component parts of a memory test for contestants in a 1970s Saturday evening quiz show.
Having said that, the exhibition undoubtedly looks all very seductive and the presentation is immaculate, and maybe I’m showing my age in expecting anything more from art today.
Continuing the walk through the park and down Exhibition Road offers the opportunity to rank, in descending order, a trio of statues. In gold medal position, stuck halfway up the Royal Geographical Society building on the corner of Kensington Gore, comes the newspaperman and adventurer David Livingstone. Next, in the foyer of Imperial College is a suitably imperious Queen Victoria while across the road, in a glass case outside the Mormon Church, a very caucasian Jesus Christ may feel a little disappointed to pick up the bronze.
Finally, a bit further on, is a new public sculpture – an enormous shiny polished tin can out of which are spilling dozens of other, smaller shiny polished tin cans. When Soak Becomes Spill is the work of Subodh Gupta who, according to the accompanying plaque, is India’s most famous modern artist. I’m not sure whether the work here is an homage to a French dance or a Belgium boy detective…Cancan or Tintin.