Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
New Art Gallery Walsall
30 July ' 12 September
Reviewed by: Alberto Duman
In 'Futurology' there is a work by Dave Beech titled Mapping the Future, in which the obsessive western practices of constructing maps and deliberating futures are brought together to try to 'empower young people to articulate their desire for change in their immediate locality'. These 'imagined cities', the result of the overlapping of individual students' demands and their spatial arrangement on the gallery walls by the artist, might appear at first glance as an unlikely spatial plan for the future Black Country. But their seemingly far-fetched, anarchic and disjointed results bear, at close inspection, some insights which might be useful with regards to the whole 'Futurology' project. At once, Mapping the Future makes clear, even presented as a patchwork of individuals' desires, what is already happening and continues to happen: the clear transformation of land use from production to consumption in post-industrial landscape. The result is a rather chilling visual description of a developing present, rather than an alternative wishful future. Dreaming futures can be a tool of detachment from contingencies, an act to surpass and re-fashion them in order to envisage a different order, borne out of frustration, disaffection and the search for alternatives. Instead, the bizarre synergy displayed in Mapping the Future presents itself as an epiphany of what is often described as the 'colonisation of individuality' propelled by choices expressed as lifestyles and purchases available on the market. How else can we account for a dreamed future where paintball venues are omnipresent, but where no work options are in sight beside employment in leisure facilities, prisons, or shopping malls? Futurology: The Black Country 2024, is a research project by Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan at the New Art Gallery Walsall, in which 'artists and young people team up to examine the current social economic and political conditions in the Black Country in order to imagine their future'. Hewitt and Jordan's approach of turning an invitation by the New Art Gallery into a complex enabling structure for exchanges between all parties involved, whilst withdrawing their own work from the visible realm of the gallery display, has allowed them to carve a reasonably sized independent space for critical art practice. Responding to the challenge were the work of Barby Asante, Dave Beech, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Simon Poulter and Becky Shaw. If we are meant to take seriously the objective of 'empowering communities' we must accept that 'empowerment' means also being able to demand, to object, to disagree, and to coalesce in order to fulfil one's aims, which might differ from the empowering agent's own agenda, whether this is an institution or an individual, such as an artist. These glimmers of liberating and necessary awkwardness are perceptible in many ways within 'Futurology'; see the account of Poulter's work process moving in between resistance and co-operation within his collaborative remit, or the ways in which Shaw's work questions its own means of display within a gallery context by materialising only three times through the duration of the project. Equally, Asante's deliberate 'devolution' of her powers of artist/leader in her relationship with students, and Crowe and Rawlinson's latent land ownership project are testimonies of a willingness to develop ideas testing the border of the structures that have enabled them. Artistic practice, so we are told, is by its very nature always compromised, and socially engaged artistic practice often struggles more than others to deal with this issue. It might be useful to think of 'Futurology' as a timely and useful episode of a practice that against all sensible advices, struggles to be more than just a 'discourse'.
Writer detail:
Alberto Duman
Venue detail:
New Art Gallery Walsall
Gallery Square, Walsall WS2 8LG
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