To Chalk Farm tube station and then start walking up Haverstock Hill before turning off to get to the Methodist chapel half way along Prince of Wales Road. Well, it is Sunday so it seems an appropriate place to visit today, although I’m not so much seeking after spiritual sustenance as artistic enlightenment. And that’s just as well since the building was deconsecrated – or whatever it is that the Wesleyans call the rituals they perform when their congregations decline to such an extent that they decide to vacate a property – many years ago and is now home to the Zabludowicz Collection. This is an organisation that famously prides itself on trying to stage exhibitions that show the absolute most cutting edgiest of contemporary artworks and I have to say that the current exhibition is no exception. Emotional Supply Chains brings together work from 18 artists in order to, ‘…address the constructed nature of identity in the digital age…’ and, ‘…explore how a sense of self is fabricated via a supply chain of objects, ideas and experiences.’ Which, initially at least, sounds a bit like the usual kind of meaningless, pretentious artspeak waffle that curators like to poot forth. I suppose the idea is to come up with a brief of such all-encompassing obscurity and nebulosity that it can incorporate any style of art, and deal with any kind of subject matter, and so act as the umbrella under which just about anything can be happily gathered together and presented as an art exhibition.
But one shouldn’t always rush to judgement. Although, I confess, that’s exactly what I did when I first visited this exhibition a few weeks ago. Nothing on display really grabbed my attention so I raced round the whole show and was out the door in about fifteen minutes. I think part of the problem, for me at least, was that I got the feeling that a lot of the artists chosen to show here were straining a bit too self-consciously hard to make work that tuned into the absolutely most zeitiest bits of the zeitgeist. In retrospect, however, it did occur to me that I might not be entirely qualified to critique their efforts quite so quickly and confidently since it’s been a while since I considered myself completely in tune with the contemporary milieu. In fact the last time that happened was probably so long ago that people, including myself, were still wearing flared trousers.
Anyway, in the interests of open-mindedness and fair play, I felt I should return, take another look, and try to give all the artworks a more considered, viewing. After all, there are many examples of once respected critics and commentators being very rude in their reactions to exhibitions highlighting the latest developments in art, only to find that art history subsequently made fools of them all. Dickens, for instance, wrote an incredibly silly and sarcastic attack on the Pre-Raphaelites when they first emerged and just about all of the contemporary hacks delighted in slagging off early exhibitions from the Impressionists, and Fauvists. And then a few years later when Matisse, the head Fauve, had been accepted into the arts establishment he, in turn, was among those who were horribly snarky about Braque’s first displays of Cubism. More recently Clement Greenberg, the most respected American critic of his day, was utterly contemptuous of Pop Art when it started to supersede the Abstract Expressionism that he so admired. And as for the Damien Hirst generation of YBAs well, most people who were no long Y thought most of the As were NBG and were happy to say so quite loudly. Consequently, I think the lesson to be learned from all these examples is that one should probably take note of the old Bob Dylan lyric about not criticising what you can’t understand since, as I may have mentioned before in previous blogs, it does seem to me that the times definitely are a-changin’.
At which point it’s perhaps worth referring back to the gallery guide containing curator Paul Luckraft’s brief introductory essay, from which I quoted earlier. In fact, far from being just another potential entry for Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner, I think he’s correctly pinpointed one of the specific phenomenon of today’s new age. And that relates to how people’s self-perception has subtly, and not do subtly, started to evolve. This, of course, has been driven by the rise of IT applications that have totally transformed what used to be the age-old development of personal friendships and relationships, and the casual interactions that they used to entail, into the business of so-called social networking. And it’s a business not just for business – with all the associated corporate opportunities for data-gathering and monetisation to be exploited – but for each individual too. Nowadays there seems to be an almost obligatory requirement for everyone to try to professionalise what were previously considered to be a vague set of social skills, into a campaign of personal marketing, self-promotion and brand development. This, in turn, inevitably leads to all kinds of conflicts between the real self and the digital persona that has to be projected out into…oh well, if you’re really interested in all the theoretical implications of this kind of speculative stuff then it’s probably worth visiting the exhibition, picking up the gallery guide to have a proper read and looking round at the art. Although maybe this last bit is not so important since I’m still not sure that any of the artworks actually add very much to the debate, either by illustrating, developing or even resonating very much with the arguments.
With that caveat in mind, I do think most of the artists here are genuinely trying to engage in some kind of dialogue to sketch out our place in the new digital age, albeit they’re all having a hard time making much progress. Frankly, they seem to me to be floundering around – or maybe ‘experimenting’ is a better choice of word – still searching after a suitable language with which to makes their points or argue their corners. Suffice to say that they’re using tools that are old and, I suspect, inadequate to try to navigate a path towards these new horizons. The artists here seem mainly to favour a mixture of collaged sculptural assemblages and video films with serial jump-cuts, but I’m not at all convinced that these techniques, that are really pretty ancient now, will ever be up to the task of illuminating the new world in which we find ourselves. After all, back in those happy bell bottom days when the ‘60s started to swing, the tradition of using oil painted still lifes and landscapes had to give way to silkscreen printing, acrylic paint and a language borrowed from advertising and commercial design in order to capture the essence of what was going on then. I think a similarly radical shift of techniques, styles and media will be needed to truly reflect the enormity of our entry into the new digital age. In all honesty, I just don’t think any of the artists here have got very close to making that very quantum leap.
As I’ve said before, maybe I’m reading everything wrong and just too stuck in my old ways to recognise what’s going on although, even after a second visit, very few works struck me as memorable let alone added anything useful to Luckraft’s writing. Either way, I’m happy to get out the way and let others have a look but, before I depart, tradition dictates that I should name check a few of the artists. So, in the order in which they have appeared dotted throughout this text are: Simon Denny and his installation of items replicating those once owned by the file-sharing pirate Kim Dotcom; Neil Beloufa’s manipulated video documentary projected onto a shattered kaleidoscope of glass and mirrors; Ed Fornieles’ interactive scrapbook diary tales of American college kids behaving badly; Pierre Huyghe’s manga animation character walking through a computer-generated lunar landscape; Daniel Keller’s interconnected glass tanks full of green algae sludge; and Aleksandra Domanovic’s twin videos connecting news title sequences from former Yugoslavian TV stations with found footage of rave parties and their locations.
