ARTISTS TALKING

Millais Gallery, John Hansard Gallery, City Art Gallery, Southampton
1 July – 23 September

‘North and South’ is a multi-site, multi-artist exhibition intended to examine the contemporary condition of the English national identity and encourage “a national cultural debate on contemporary society”. Named as it is and making siblings of Southampton and Sunderland – cities sited (loosely) at England’s extremities – also suggests an exploration of regional contrasts.

It is probably significant that most of the work involved limited transformation of materials and instead veered towards documentation. Identity was found in appropriated and re-presented objects (beer cans, underpants, footwear) and the use of traces (photography and video). That old stalwart ‘irony’ was thick on the ground: there was Monopoly for Tramps, made from found objects; a St George’s flag made from red toy soldiers arranged on white canvas; and a video parodying the absurd affectations of local news presenters.

Overall, it tended to be superficial tokens of identity on which most of the artists focused, rather than a close interrogation of what makes us tick. Individuals in a crowd were isolated on a white Lowry-esque ground to be considered via body language and fashion choices; vitrines presented twee High Street fashion accessories as museum artefacts; and photos of strangers were presented with the artist’s musings on their clothes and hairdos.

But if much of the observation was like this – reading lives from surfaces – perhaps it is because this is how we live now. Whilst we are at war in two foreign lands, our prisons are filled to bursting and global warming is threatening to turn our country into an archipelago, we are concerned with Beckham’s foot, Posh’s frock and the vacuous ramblings of a bunch of fame-hungry nobodies in the Big Brother house. But, of course, we are more than this, and there were highlights in the show that said so: the stills in the Yvonne Buchheim video – transitory but telling glimpses of how we live in and react to our environment – and the Thust and Raban videos which, though much older than most of the other work on show, gave far more powerful insights into people’s feelings, attitudes and reactions.

There was a video piece by Robert Grose which I found rather exploitative, in that it featured a blind busker who whistled for money in a shopping precinct and had been persuaded by the artist to perform Jerusalem. But when I was in the other adjacent rooms, Jerusalem – now disembodied – was still intermittently audible between the other sounds as a ghostly whistled echo, and it struck me that perhaps, unwittingly, this captured how we experience our national identity. We don’t think about it most of the time, but somehow it is there, intangible and fleeting, just around the corners of our minds.

Stephen Riley

Dr Stephen Riley is an artist and writer based in the south of England.

stephenriley8@hotmail.com | www.stephenrileyart.com