Head over to Victoria Station and then get a train to go off to the seaside. It’s a sort of spur of the moment decision made a couple of days ago when I noticed there was an exhibition of works by Jean Arp on display at the Turner Contemporary gallery down in Margate, and the Trainline app showed that I could get there and back for only £14. There is a downside to making the journey, however, and that’s the sad fact that the decidedly slow-speed locomotive never gets above 40mph as it has to keep stopping at variously quaintly named stations, like Meopham, Birchington-on-Sea and Chestfield & Swalecliffe – evidently ones that Mr Beeching must have overlooked when he was making his rationalising culls back in the 1960s. Anyway, after taking almost two hours to cover the 76 dull flat miles, I finally emerge from the station to be welcomed by the kind of matching dull grey sky that seems to be the absolutely appropriate meteorological metaphor to convey the sort of chilly depressing atmosphere that pervades British seaside resorts during their long lonely out-of-season months. To be fair, on my admittedly very brief tour of the town and its seafront attractions, the ambience and architecture of Margate came across as not being too bad – neither quite as tawdry nor twee as some of the other coastal towns I’ve visited over the years – and the small sandy beach even looked quite attractive in its current depopulated state. Though whether the location is transformed for better or worse during the summer months, when it presumably fills up with a transient population of day trippers and holiday makers, is hard to estimate
As for the gallery, well, at least that’s easy enough to spot. It’s the uninspiring modern building that, from the outside, resembles a pair of warehouses or a small industrial manufacturing unit. Of course, my opinion of the merits, or otherwise, of the architectural facade is very much that of the lay person – the man in the street who groans when confronted with a concrete walkway and a bland glass grid edifice – and I can’t remember whether the consensual critical opinion of the establishment professionals was more or less favourable when the place first opened up back in 2011. Then again, I suppose one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover as it’s the insides of the structure that count the most, and the ground floor foyer, café and shop all seem functional, sensibly laid out and not too oversized. Though, doubtless, in a year or two an ambitious new gallery director will arrive with plans to make a reputation by fundraising for the enlargement all these facilities and the addition of the extra administration offices that are such an essential part of any self-respecting art complex these days. But I digress – what about the actual display space? Well, somewhat to my surprise, I’m pleased to be able to report that these seem to be basic, unflashy but variously sized and entirely adequate and suitable to reasonably present the exhibitions that currently comprise the mixed offering of works that are currently on show today.
As already mentioned, the main reason that I’ve embarked on my expedition to these eastern extremities is to take a look at the Arp retrospective but before reaching that it seems only reasonable to take a quick look at the other stuff that’s on show, starting with a smallish room hung with what looks to be a line of frankly fairly amateurish figurative paintings. If this were displayed in the ICA or one of the more adventurous commercial galleries in town then I’d assume it was the work of some kind of Conceptualist making a point about how the analytical deconstruction of varying modes of representation impacts on the viewers’ perceptual reasoning, or some such modish theorising. But, having read the explanatory information panel, I discover the pictures actually are a selection of figurative paintings by amateurs – works chosen from submissions made to the annual John Downton Awards, an open-entry competition designed to encourage the artistic creativity and aspirations of the local teenage population. Clearly indicative of the kind of well-intentioned out-reach activity intended to encourage the more daring of the indigenous residents to step through the doors and join the out-of-towners like myself (who, I judge, appear to make up the majority of the visitors today), I think it’s probably best left up to the locals to decide the merits of the exhibition and whether it’s a good idea to encourage their offspring to indulge in these kinds of libertine pursuits.
Following on from this, the next display spans ground floor and first floor and comprises a series of small paintings and large figurative sculptures by John Davies. Given the overall title of Ghosts by the artist, the sketches of scarecrows and parade of mixed-shape mannequins are certainly all a little bit disconcerting, and while references are made in an accompanying leaflet to de Chirico, Beckett and TS Eliot, they made me think more of Ensor and his quirky, carnivalesque masks. Impressive in a slightly creepy kind of a way, I can’t help thinking they represent the kind of imagery destined to generate nightmares in the minds of any youngsters or sensitive adults who might bump into them unannounced, and perhaps they should come presaged by some kind of a health and safety warning.
Speaking of which, there actually is a danger notice outside the room that announces Tracey Emin: My Bed & JMW Turner, although it merely states that the display, ‘…includes material that may not be suitable for children’. But I don’t think it’s just the famously soiled material that is a potential health hazard for the innocent – I’d be inclined to suggest that this spuriously contrived conjunction of artworks is offensive to the sensibilities of just about all sentient beings across the entire span of ages. And it seems to me that this union of painting and sculpture rivals for incongruity that proto-Surrealistic encounter on the dissecting table between the sewing machine and the umbrella. That, however, was a famously chance encounter whereas this assignation has apparently been deliberately curated. So, what on earth is supposed to be the connection between these two artists and their works? Well, as is fairly well known, Emin endured her turbulent formative years growing up in Margate while Turner, having achieved his eminent status as the country’s greatest living artist, used to visit the place incognito in order to dally with his mistress and enjoy the local sunsets that he claimed were the best in Europe. As for the art, the three Turner seascape sketches on display edge towards the kind of near abstractionism that his contemporaries described derogatively, though not entirely unreasonably, as slapdash amalgamations of soapsuds and whitewash. And the Emin bed is the…well, it’s just an old mattress with a scrunched up sheet and the assorted accompanying detritus of tissues, dog ends, underwear and other items that all but the most slothful of students and exhibitionistic of artists might typically choose to tidy away rather than brazenly flaunt as some kind of titilatory entertainment for the amusement of the general public. While it’s easy enough to make an artistic case for Emin’s objet trouve or ready-un-made bed being an apt representation of her unhappy lifestyle at the time of its making (or unmaking), the linkage with the Turners seems to me to be a quasi-Post-Modernistic, and wholely disreputable, attempt at shameless sensationalism. And the best the gallery can come up by way of a justifying excuse is that the swirl of the Victorian painter’s brushstrokes is an expressionistic mirror of the chaos of the YBA’s bohemian lifestyle before she became so rich and successful that she could afford a maid to clean up after her.
Enough of this nonsense and on to the two large rooms stuffed full of the drawings, collages, and sculptures of Jean Arp, one of the founding fathers of Dada, that most strange and seminal of all the Modernist movements upon which the art of the last century was grounded. And this looks to me to be a really very thorough and comprehensive summary of a life spent doodling, designing and generally playing around with a simple set of wobbly biomorphic shapes. Over the years, Arp seems to have graduated through different degrees of dimensionality starting with line drawings then engaging with his trademark wooden reliefs before ending up producing a series of small sculptural forms. Unlike many of his friends and contemporaries who identified the first half of the 20th century as the machine age, and eagerly incorporated mechanical templates into their dynamic creations, Arp seems to have found inspiration for his particular brand of abstractionism in the more holistic curves and hollows of the natural world, or at least in the kind of archetypal shapes that have evolved over time through the random interactions of inanimate forces on animate forms. And I think it’s probably because Arp was so skillful at referencing these very basic and ancient time-worn shapes that his works have retained their timeless appeal and make this exhibition such an unqualified sensual pleasure to wander through.
Finally, exiting the gallery, but before trudging on to the station and taking the slow slow train back home, I can’t resist walking down to the nearby shore and paying my respects to Antony Gormley’s Another Time, another one of those rusting cast-iron life-casts of the nation’s most ubiquitous contemporary sculptor that has evidently taken up residence in what I feel rather pleased to have discovered to be a rather interesting little cultural outpost.
