- Venue
- ICA: Institute of Contemporary Arts
- Location
The Dispersion art exhibition at the ICA has met with a very mixed review, from the very bad in the daily papers; "the performance is flaccid and there is no obvious outcome" (Charles Darwent The Independent) to the very good in the art/culture specialist magazines; "tricky and liminal group show, of the very kind that should be the very lifeblood of the institution" (Ossian Ward Time Out).
The main theme running through all the artists work on display is the appropriation and surfeit of images in today's urban culture, from Seth Price re-editing his own previous films to Anne Collier re-presenting the images by Steven Meisel once they have been used and incorporated into the real world. However most of them do more than just re-use images, the pieces make the viewer step back for a moment and consider what these images mean in the world today and how we as individuals relate to them. For instance the creases and pins left visible in Anne Collier's Folded Madona transport the viewer not into the picture but into the bed room of the teenage boy whose poster it originally was.
Dispersion has been accused of exploring aesthetics which are too niche and therefore not catering for the average art viewing public by Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times. Although some may leave the exhibition feeling segregated and confused, if all art exhibitions were made to be easily understood and a pleasant day out were could artists and curators explore their more complex and intricate themes? This criticism has been particularly applied to Henrik Olesen's Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social Culture I-VII (2007) a self confessed archival piece of work looking at and exploring an alternative to the traditional art historical canon. The piece’s rapidly put together style looks more like an ideas board than a polished art piece, enhances the concept of looking at and constantly revaluing our accepted ideas of the importance of art works. The pin board style finish of the art work makes the viewer feel as though they could add their own post cards, images and comments to the boards in order to make a continually changing and improving history of art archive.
One of the most interesting pieces on display is the film showing Hito Steyerl's search for bondage pictures she posed for in her twenties entitled Lovely Andrea. This piece is a fascinating exploration through archives of S&M pornography and the people who create, maintain and use them. The search is most interesting because of the juxtaposition of Steyerl herself as a human looking for an image of herself which has essentially turned her into a commodity mixed up in the relations between sexuality, power and money. The piece fits with the main theme of the exhibition of appropriation of images by linking the bondage images to images of webs and bondage references in everyday life such as the children's cartoon Spiderman.
The biggest disappointment in the show is Hilary Lloyd's work which is an obsessive recording of the marks left by the painter who had previously used her studio. This work I feel does not really fit in with the main issues and theories of the show, instead it explores the ideas of previous existence and apparently 'tracking the psychological dimension of the economy of production' (ICA press release) Here for once I am in agreement with Darwent from The Independent that it is 'barely pretty and bland' which isn't really worth a visit.
The accompanying book for the exhibition is well worth a read with essay's from three of the participation artists as well as numerous essay's about each of the participating artists. The book explores all of the issues in the exhibition and will give those left a little confused by the 'too conceptual' issues explored by the art works a more clarified understanding of the show.
I feel dispersion is an important exhibition because of the way it makes us pause to think about the images forced upon us everyday, it makes us take a moment and to reflect on how the images affect our lives and the lives of the people in the images having been turned into commodities instead of actual people. The subconscious takes in so many of the images in today's society that instead of remembering and appreciating the occasionally interesting and important image we block them all out and struggle to remember anything at all.
