Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Reviewed by: Emma Safe
What better symbol for a dysfunctional city than the lonely green of George Shaw's deserted urban playing field? 'Scenes from The Passion: The Goal Mouth' is conversely so irreligious and dispassionate, painted in flat characterless enamel that the title can only be ironic. Shaw describes a society that has lost faith in itself, a disenfranchised place unsure of its identity and insecure in its future.
He is not alone in this gloomy view. 'Out of Place' comprises eleven artists who, almost without exception, present a sadly bleak picture of the contemporary city. David Rayson paints immaculate photo-real close-ups of litter-strewn housing estates. Oliver Zwink's amazing paper city crumples under the weight of the polluting grey ink sprayed across it. Graffiti is everywhere: scrawled across David Hepher's huge canvases and on the street furniture of Shaw's cityscapes.
Most striking is that all of the works are entirely devoid of people. This seems anomalous given the frenzied human bustle of our contemporary city, yet in a sense it is apt. The arrival of email and the mobile phone, along with fear of crime and distrust of strangers has left our streets empty; at least in a metaphorical sense.
A more socially optimistic voice can be found in Elisa Sighicelli's work. Her light-enhanced photographs appeal to our romantic appetite for urban daydreaming. She represents the city as a locus of intrigue, desire and memory. In spotlighting a particular doorway, window or view, she transports us through the anonymous spaces of the city. We are left piecing together stranger's lives from the tantalising glimmer of clues that the metropolis provides.
A similar intriguing accumulation of memory and experience is explored in the collaborative work of Beat Klein and Hendrikje KÜhne. Their project, Property evolved whilst on the artists work programme at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. For the duration of the residency, every house appearing in the Irish Times property supplement was cut out, glued onto a freestanding card and arranged on a low platform. The result is an irresistible model city comprising houses of almost every architectural style imaginable. The cards, like theatrical facades, are a critique of the property market certainly, but also comment on the impermanence of our cities. Their fragility reassuringly reminds us how temporary and young our cities are despite their pretence of concrete immutability.
At the time of its creation, Property inspired enough public interest to produce a stream of correspondence published in the newspaper and to fill an accompanying booklet. This kind of public dialogue goes a long way to achieving a much-needed shift of attitude. It is all too easy to condemn the city as terminally infected by dysfunction, crime and violence. To their credit, artists Klein and KÜhne are producing work that moves beyond pessimism to inspire active debate rather than simply re-representing the city's problems. It is only through encouraging this kind of interaction and dialogue that the city will escape its reputation as anathema and be able to change for the better.
'Out of Place' shows the city to both embrace and estrange us. Yet, there is at least a third way of negotiating our relationship with the urban environment. Suppose the city was flexible: a plastic form able to be moulded at will, like a literal translation of Jonathon Raban's 'Soft City'? This would allow a more self-determining relation to the metropolis empowering each of us with a real responsibility for urban renewal. This is the stuff of fiction but it concisely describes the dual-sense of individual responsibility and community empowerment necessary to re-populate the dispossessed urban space depicted by Shaw and his contemporaries. Raban expresses a similar sentiment: "We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship..."
Writer detail:
EMMA SAFE
IS AN ARTIST AND WRITER BASED IN BIRMINGHAM.
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