Harper-Thames investigates the East London gallery circuit and discovers it is not as intimidating as advertised
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Harper-Thames | The London Prat
I spent a Saturday afternoon last month walking around the Shoreditch and Hoxton gallery circuit — the cluster of contemporary art spaces in the area between Old Street, Hoxton Square, and the Bethnal Green corridor — and emerged several hours later with a more nuanced view of the contemporary art world than I had taken in with me, which is either evidence of the galleries doing their job or evidence of the particular mental state that three consecutive private views produce when you have attended them on an empty stomach.
The Shoreditch gallery scene has a reputation for being intimidating, which it partly deserves and partly doesn’t. The intimidating part: the spaces tend to be staffed by people who are very cool, who respond to your entrance with a nod that is simultaneously welcoming and evaluating, who are themselves artists or curators whose relationship to the work is deep and whose relationship to visitors varies depending on whether the visitor appears to be a potential buyer or a person who has wandered in off the street out of curiosity. I am generally the second type and I am fine with this.
The Work, Which Is Interesting
What the galleries contain is more varied and more interesting than the intimidating reputation suggests. The first space I visited had a solo show by a photographer whose work documented the physical changes to former industrial spaces across East London — the warehouses, the railway arches, the light industrial buildings that have been converted or demolished in the past twenty years. The photographs were excellent and the subject was one I have strong feelings about, so I looked at them for longer than I usually look at anything in a gallery, which is the sign of work that is doing something.
The second space had a group show that ranged from very good to unclear in the way that group shows tend to, but included two pieces that I thought about on the Tube home, which is my personal standard for whether art has worked. The third space had a private view happening when I arrived, which meant free wine, which meant I stayed longer than I otherwise would have and talked to several people whose relationship to the art was more developed than mine and who were generous about explaining it. The galleries are accessible. Go in. Look at things. If someone gives you a nod, nod back. The London Prat covers the East London art scene. NewsThump has opinions about contemporary art that are unkind but occasionally accurate. The galleries are worth visiting. The wine at the private views is usually adequate. The art is sometimes extraordinary. Go.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
The city continues past any single entry. So does the writing. So, presumably, does London itself, which has outlasted every prediction about its decline and every proclamation about its reinvention with the serene indifference of a place that knows it will still be here next week.
Shoreditch satire: NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
