Nought to Sixty

ICA, London, UK

I’m sorry I missed the first instalment of the ICA’s ambitious new rolling project. Programmed over six months from May to November this year, ‘Nought to Sixty’ promises to provide space for 60 emerging artists based in the UK and Ireland in the form of week-long exhibitions, performances, talks, interventions, off-site projects and film screenings. A monthly magazine gathers information on exhibiting artists, essays and a ‘gazetteer’ – a section profiling ‘activities and resources within the emerging art scenes of Britain and Ireland’ such as artist-run spaces or peripatetic curatorial organisations. The project’s watchword is definitely ‘platform’ rather than ‘survey’ – that is, coming from below, rather than above. The magazine’s first page states emphatically that, ‘the season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multi-faceted portrait of the emerging art scene […] and to provide a space for exchange’, acknowledging the institution’s ‘founding role as a club for artists and a laboratory for experimentation’.

Admirable sentiments indeed, but also a handy caveat for what could amount to a thoroughly mixed bag of practitioners. That said, I was largely impressed when I visited last night. The standout piece was Seamus Harahan’s Valley of Jehosephat/Version – In Your Mind (2007), a two-screen video installation featuring hand-held footage of the Bloody Sunday commemorative march in Derry, Northern Ireland. Depending on at what point you entered, the solemn, surreal and frequently sublimely beautiful images of crowds moving through foggy streets were either accompanied by Bryan Ferry’s ‘In Your Mind’ (1977) or, when the projection flipped to the opposite wall, Max Romeo’s 1978 reggae track ‘Valley of Jehosephat/Version’. The effect was a vividly familiar one: the awareness that while the unfolding events are somehow significant, momentous even, one cannot help one’s attention drifting to the edges of the action (in this case the attendant television crews and other spectators) or providing one’s own internal and incongruous soundtrack. This is dense and intriguing territory, but few artists manage to make such convincing inroads into it with such lightness of means.

Alastair MacKinven, who showed paintings and sculpture in the neighbouring room, also sought to unbalance the viewer. His wonky, expressionist renderings of M.C. Escher’s famously wonky (but immaculately rendered) infinite staircase are accompanied by oddly elegant handrails attached to the wall nearby. The idea that viewers might need to steady themselves because of the sensorial power of a painting is itself hilarious, but it is doubly funny when the paintings in question are themselves quite so off-kilter. 

A performative video work by Aileen Campbell was less enjoyable principally because it was the viewer who was expected to do the performing. Onscreen text commanded the reluctant audience to make vocal noises according to the size and colour of circles moving about the screen. The exercise seemed less moronic when we were shepherded into a neighbouring room, swapping places with the other half of the audience. There, a film featuring shots of musicians and a ship moving along a river was accompanied by sounds similar to those we had just been coerced into making next door. It might have been our own voices, or it might have been a live link to the other half of the audience. Either way, the work threw more light on the awkward social dynamic of an art audience forced into participation than it did on the overlooked (or ‘over-listened’?) formal qualities of the human voice.

It was pleasing however to see three artists’ work that fitted together so well – not so much in terms of style, but in the way it responded to the formal restraints of the galleries, the show and the ambitions of the wider project. In other parts of the ICA building, Matthew Darbyshire had appropriated lighting designs from locations as diverse as the windows of Selfridges department store and the lobby of Hackney Community College, creating deliberately bland colour-field installations from unwittingly bland corporate branding. Part of his installation, in the gallery’s front windows, will remain in place over the next six months, changing colour as the show progresses. I’m looking forward to seeing what new work will join it. 

Jonathan Griffin