Nought to Sixty
ICA, London, UK
Seamus Harahan, Valley of Jehosephat/Version – In Your Mind (2007)
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, Et Sick In Infinitum (2008)
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.
Matthew Darbyshire, installation view
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
Responses
Added by jonathan_griffin,
An update from the second outstanding instalment of ‘Nought to Sixty’ that I’ve managed to see (I was sad to miss Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ film Trail of the Spider (2007–8), screened in the week before):
On Monday night shows opened by Mike Cooter and Alexander Heim, accompanied by a performance by Emma Hart and Benedict Drew. Hart and Drew used projectors of all kinds to throw light out from the central stage over and between the heads of the audience. Each machine was ingeniously adapted to become a semi-automatic musical instrument – producing sounds through the whipping of a loose end of film against a drum skin, for example, or the amplified clicking of a slide changer. The result was a gleeful cacophony of noise coupled with extremely delicate light effects, at the centre of which Hart and Drew pounded a bass drum and a hi-hat to which were fixed tiny closed-circuit video cameras. What was so refreshing about the event was the artists’ clear delight in experimentation: the work’s playful intelligence was quite unlike the humourless self-seriousness of much work in this vein that has preceded it.
Mike Cooter and Alexander Heim’s exhibitions in the galleries upstairs were less exuberant and more considered in their quests for fresh territory. Cooter’s carefully presented installation ‘Original Intent’ detailed his investigation into the relationship between the rightwing American legal scholar Robert Bork and that famous cinematic MacGuffin the Maltese Falcon, a reproduction of which Cooter spied on Bork’s shelf during a television interview. As with Heim’s installation in the gallery next-door, while the work pointed towards diverging paths of philosophical, social and political enquiry, it relied on gentle visual rhymes and coincidences to lead the viewer through potentially difficult terrain.
Heim’s exhibition combined a video projection, two large papier-maché sculptures and several earthenware bowls fixed to the wall. The video, Three Seasons (2007), includes images of grimy melting snow, an indoor swimming pool and wind battering bushes and trees. Heim establishes an elemental poetic vocabulary from urban mundanity, which is incarnated in the simultaneously abject and elegant sculptures nearby. In certain bowls (perhaps the fruits of a college evening class?) puddles of glaze collect in the centres, recalling the melting snow; the film’s soundtrack includes chimes that could well have been produced by striking two bowls together. ‘Nought to Sixty’ is developing into a rich network of connections between practices and approaches in which the curators, as with the artists, understand the value of a rich network of highlighting difference as much as affinity.
