Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
MOT, London
12 May – 17 June
Reviewed by: Tom Morris
As you enter the MOT space – high up in the wonderfully creepy council block of Regents Studios in Bethnal Green – you’re faced with a rather peculiar sight. A grainy Super 8 film shows a man hopping around on an industrial spring, slashing paint on to panels of paper along the wall in front of him as he goes. This is Sprungfederzeichnunden, the filmic documentation of Rudolf Polanszky at work on his ‘dynamomanic’ paintings back in the early eighties. A set of these pathologically abstract, twitchy little paintings is hung opposite. Whilst the painting method resembles Jackson Pollock on a space-hopper (with canvases placed back on the wall), the result looks like a Kandinsky on ecstasy.
Polanszky is one of four contributors to ‘Daisychain’, a group show of sorts, curated by Bruce Haines. Franz West has contributed two of his poster designs; Rachel Harrison two sculptures. There are also five of Richard Forster’s wonderful works on paper. Forster draws monochrome, intricately photorealist images of hypermarkets, waves, and cityscapes with a spellbinding attention to detail. The very fact that this is pencil, and not black and white photography, signifies a striking talent. Indeed, Forster’s landscape of Walsall is easily the crowning glory of this show. It is cleverly placed next to the window here on the fifth floor, reiterating the murky industrial panorama of the East End of London that we can see outside.
These sorts of group shows, an abundance of which turn up every summer, are not easy things to get right. Often self-indulgent on the curator’s part, they need a firm hand to make them thematically and visually cohesive. In the case of ‘Daisychain’, its title is a trifle over-confident bearing in mind how disconnected all the works seem from each other. What relation Franz West’s posters or a drawing of a cat has with Polanszky bouncing about on a spring is anyone’s guess.
Maybe it is just the venue, but the exhibition has the cluttered feeling of a teenager’s bedroom: lots of things on the wall – each meaning something to someone – but generally just a disjointed muddle, without any tempo or curatorial voice.
Plonked in the middle of all this is Rachel Harrison’s mixed-media installation Double Vision. Harrison’s work comprises a video accompanied by two framed images of Simon Le Bon, and a sculptural still life of two garden gnomes and a plastic houseplant. The video shows a motionless frog sat by a pond, waiting for a buzzing fly to dash past the screen now and then, but never comes his way. Water trickles, and an aeroplane roars overhead. It is rather like me in relation to this show: all this noise around me, and none of it making sense.
Writer detail:
Tom Morris is a freelance art critic.
Venue detail:
MOT Gallery and Studios
Floor 5, Unit 54, Regents Studios, 8 Andrews Road, LONDON E8 4QN
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