- Venue
- Electro Studio
- Location
- South East England
To be beside the seaside, beside the sea. Quite popular at the moment for the art world in the South East, what with De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, Towner in Eastbourne, Turner in Margate and soon to be Jerwood in Hastings. Big venues with sea views and strong reactions from the locals. Silently sandwiched between the nearly completed Jerwood and the De La Warr Pavilion, in St Leonard’s-on-Sea sits a far smaller venue that is holding its own.
LIDO at the Electro Studios, named after the actual lido that used to exist opposite the venue, but that now exists only as a grassy void. LIDO it would seem crept into town under the cover of darkness, a low-fi and low key venue that has some intelligent curatorial decisions and connections to make this place something to look forward to.
Richard Webb currently gets the space to himself and even the venues web site to intervene with.
‘Anaglyphs’ I am told from the press release, is a series of Google sourced photographs. I am unsure if the three photographs on show make up the whole series or are part of, but these 3-D photographs minus the 3-D glasses leave us bleary eyed and bleary minded as to what is going on. What look like American Deep South religious congregations, full of fanatical praising, sweat and miracles (one image has a sign reading ‘Come & Expect A Miracle’) left me feeling that I was missing something. Missing the belief and the faith that these images show people have? Maybe, but I knew that anyway. Webb deliberately producing 3-D images and not providing us with a way to view those three dimensions forces us to miss something, and I guess that is the point.
‘Intermission’ is a digital drawing, vertical lines of red, blue and green, representing the phosphors of a Sony Triniton television. As a static object that can only reflect back the viewer of the work it simply remained a frozen moment for me. Having seen before hand what Webb has done to LIDO’s web site though, an invasion of something similar to the frozen ‘Intermission’ on the wall, but alive and hypnotic and strangely addictive. It may not be in the gallery itself, but the work in/on the web site is an invasion that lingers longer than the work on the wall.
A film plays, filtered through the red, green and blue of ‘Intermission’ and most televisual roots. ‘RGB Planes’ had me surprisingly fixated in a way Warhol brought to everyone’s attention. Abstracted through the colour, slow motion footage of what appears to be plane crashes, interior and exterior shots. I am not talking about cinematic big explosive stuff here, what crawls through in Webb’s film is much more real, and for that it becomes quite frightening. I wanted to find out where this footage came from, what happened to the people I could kind of make out, and was it real or was it fake? Keeping with that threatening airline theme is what was the weakest work for me. A large shop/pub light box protrudes out from the wall behind the film. Titled ‘Threat’ it is a simple text work. It states “The current threat from international terrorism is severe. This means that a terrorist attack is highly likely.” Now I am sure that Webb is an intelligent enough man to not have to explain what severe means by telling us that it is highly likely, so I have to start guessing. Is this a famous quote from someone like George W that I don’t know about? Am I missing the joke? Should I know who said this? The choice to put it on a lightbox in the way it was did make me think of an airport, those long corridors with glowing arrows and exits, and yes not one of us takes a flight anymore the way we used to, pre 9/11. That and my missing link of understanding left me thinking that yes, ok, there is a threat out there, but in the day to day reality the threat is far more likely to be found lazily shuffling through the town centre a couple of miles away. Closer to home and less extreme perhaps, but equally as frightening.
‘The Art World’ lies heaped in the corner. It is in a bit of a mess. You only know it is the art world as it tells you on the label next to the work. What I am describing is a pile of laser cut polystyrene letters, letters that spell out ‘The Art World’. These clean, white and I imagine somewhat fragile letters look broken and upset. On the information I read on the work it told me that “the viewer remains indisputably on the outside”, but I would disagree with that. If there was no other information there to tell me what the pile of letters on the floor were meant to spell out then yes, I would leave unclear as to what I had just seen and be outside of all understanding, but I know it is ‘The Art World’ in a pile on the floor. They have just let me in. I play the game; go along with the point of the work. I read about the intention, the fragility of the material used mainly for packaging or protection of another more vulnerable object, the art world not really being an art world, but a club of sorts that you can be in or out of. Does the art world need protecting? Will it not charge on regardless, caring little about whether we jump on board or not? We are the delicate ones, the sensitive to opinion. I agree with Webb in that we can remain on the outside (the unreadable letters), but then it is up to us to toughen up and dig deep.
It is worth the trip, heading a little bit off the beaten South Coast art path to Webb’s work and it is also worth keeping an eye on this unexpected venues programme as it seems it has great intentions, and I now have similar expectations.
