- Venue
- South London Gallery
- Location
As I entered my kitchen this morning, eyeballing last nights washing up on the draining board, I pulled open the blind and stared at the ever present sight of the downstairs tenants backyard. It's full of rubbish. Not that you can really tell what it is – bits of wood sticking out of roofing felt, scrap metal rusting in the rain, a plethora of weeds growing out of, through and into everything, all creating a jungle effect that tends to grow bigger by the year. Sometimes there might be a plastic carrier bag caught in the fauna. I can call this vision to mind at will no matter where I am, such is its familiarity seared into my memory.
Walking around Stay forever and ever and ever, a group exhibition of eleven artists curated by Andrew Renton at the South London Gallery, I couldn't help but think of this back yard and various other random recollections from my past. Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas' assemblage is made from everyday materials – hats, shells, shoes, dirt – all suspended from threads attached to a T-shaped timber frame construction covered in broken glass, which itself is hanging from the ceiling. It all suggests that anything you've ever touched or seen can be art. However, far from recalling Duchamp who famously took the piss by exhibiting a urinal in 1917, this work calls to mind personal memories of similar items adding weight and history to whatever the possible narrative could be.
All this is further expanded upon by Georg Herold's Rude Museum I and II where throwaway objects are displayed in a ramshackle vitrine calling to mind childhood day trips to the museum. There's nothing of any value here though, just cigarette butts, small tins of paint, nails, bits of wax, etc. I guess it's ultimately some kind of elevation of the ordinary into the revered and precious. I kept thinking of my neighbour's backyard.
Elsewhere, Spartacus Chetwynd has left behind evidence of performances in two sculptural objects. Slumped in the corner is Hokusai's Octapai, a huge octopus brought to life from a 17th Century erotic print, and falling apart at the back of the gallery is The Wall, a reconstruction of the opening sequence in the Incredible Hulk. When I say reconstruction, what I really mean is, large bits of cardboard have been stuck together and then painted to resemble a demolished brick wall – all across it someone has scrawled ‘DON'T MAKE ME ANGRY!'. Quite amusing but I couldn't help feeling lost by the absence of the green one himself – it was like watching one of those 100 Greatest Angry People TV programmes, getting a split-second clip of the thatch haired Hulk throwing someone over a car, and then irritatingly cutting back to the moon faced Jimmy Carr making some glib comment about the Hulk looking a bit green around the gills. I guess what I'm saying is; you want to see more, but unfortunately, as with all performance art, you just had to be there at the time.
Martin Boyce's constructions reminded me of dark, lonely walks through gritty urban environments like West Croydon. Telephone booth type structures stand empty and devoid of any means of communication, covered in graffiti. They make you feel quite desperate.
The only thing that really lightened the atmosphere a little was Monika Sosnowska's fragmented sculpture helpfully entitled untitled. Angular black blocks litter the floor looking as if the ceiling has just fallen through, the only give away that it hadn't being the intact paned roof above me. The digitalised nature of the rubble made it feel exactly like I was in Tron, walking around in a computer program, completely unable to fathom exactly what I was doing there.
As is the case with most contemporary art, nostalgia and recycling of imagery are the prevalent themes in this exhibition. One is constantly reminded of personal history as objects spark the grey cells to recall snippets of past thoughts, feelings and sights (that backyard again!). By naming it after a lyric from a Kylie Minogue song we are immediately transported into an ephemeral world where everything is throwaway, but just like an earworm, I can't seem to get this exhibition out of my head.
