Reports    Published 24/12/10

Bloomberg New Contemporaries

The Turner Prize 2010

Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London
26 November 2010–23 January 2011

by SAM ROSE

Emptied of its workers, the weekend quiet in the City of London has an uncanny air about it. Susan Philipsz has picked up on the strangeness in her current set of installations there, SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London¹. In Elizabethan London the following and intermingling voices of street criers fed into contemporary forms of popular music. These in turn inspired Philipsz, whose recorded voice now flows and echoes around the modern remnants of early London landscapes.

Standing in the City it’s easy to appreciate, even to get lost in, the “heightened awareness of space” claimed for her work, and comparisons with land art, early conceptual “institutional critique”, and even large scale Richard Serra sculpture all seem apt. Among the bare white walls of the Turner Prize exhibition gallery the interaction with landscape is lost, however, and the displaced effect of her Lowlands (2008/2010) inevitably weaker. Especially in light of the regular large-scale commissions for the two London Tates’ main halls – currently at Tate Britain two fighter planes “bought” and brought in by Fiona Banner² – there may be a limit to how “aware” of the gallery space we can be.

At the Institute of Contemporary Arts the Bloomberg New Contemporaries has returned after a number of years, albeit slightly scaled down from the Liverpool version in early 2010. Here, skilful curatorial management of pluralistic contemporary practices can’t always make up for the lack of space and enormous disparity in the artists’ aesthetics. In Alethia (2010) Darren Harvey-Regan’s stuffed bird stares at a photographic reflection of itself in the corner of a large black printed background (made all the more interesting by eschewing the points-scoring craft cleverness of a photorealistic painting), and the quiet poetry is only accentuated by the comic violence of Kristian de la Riva’s line drawn 2-D animation (Cut, 2009) projected nearby. Not everything works so neatly. Given space it may have had some power and humour, but leaning against wall and floor underneath these polished offerings, Mark Walker’s broken painting St Francis of Assisi, The Renunciation of his Worldly Possessions (2009) is left looking like a strangely amateurish afterthought.

It may be a trick of the hang, but most of the works do seem to share in the modesty that has been noted by more than one commentator. The two dimensional work is especially remarkable for its lack of large-scale bravado; even Claas Gutsche’s giant linocut of a house (Hunger (Wüstefeld), 2009) is characterised by a brooding black and white atmosphere rather than colour or technical arrogance. Sophie Eagle’s 2009 Collapse (Endless Column), a digital video of the tower slowly collapsing on a deserted American highway, is gentle and mesmerising rather than jarring or violent (the high modernist ambition of the Brancusi original not destroyed, but gently and even rather fondly let down). Sam Knowles and Rowena Hughes’ interventions into found printed matter – quietly beautiful paintings of starry skies or looping op art shapes done over book pages – are unusually respectful and tasteful. Displayed on an outmoded Sony TV set on DIY pinewood stand, the atmosphere of Emma Hardt’s video of herself playing dice with the sea (Dice, 2009) is so knowingly self-deprecating as to seem almost embarrassed with itself.

This is not something one finds with Dexter Dalwood, back at the Turner Prize, where it is the critics who often seem embarrassed by the easily won slickness of his large-scale paintings. I personally don’t see that a unity of service and refusal to add Julian Schnabel-like faux-expressionist touches is necessarily a show of bad faith. The embarrassment is partly a result of the mocking ease with which quotations from Picasso, Matisse and Twombly are assimilated into the works, as well as the simple seduction offered by the paradox of combining these idioms with representational, “historical” contemporary painting. Placed two galleries away, Angela de la Cruz’s collapsed stretcher-less canvases are rather like a wry comment on the pretensions of such “proper” painting. The luminous vinyl pink of Super Clutter XXL (Pink and Brown) (2006) makes a stunning image for the exhibition poster that is harder to recapture in front of the work. Really it’s not just the visual, but also this strange double status of the works as paintings-cum-“objects” that gives them their enduring interest.

References

1. Susan Philipsz, SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London, 9 October 2010 - 2 January 2011 (Weekends), City of London (Change Alley / London Bridge / Mark Lane / Milk Street / Moorfields Highwalk / Tokenhouse Yard)

2. Fiona Banner, Harrier and Jaguar, Tate Britain, London, until 3rd January 2011