Introducing Fitzrovia - in the quiet rain before the storm of Frieze.

Well here we go, yes, this week I roved, I roved and I roved, first around Fitzrovia –that’s a cool new area of London opened up to galleries probably because it is close to the Frieze art fair and so it is easy to steer a car down there after the fair instead of finding a way to the cool East end. Yes! it was fresh because my eyes are fresh, having effectively boycotted contemporary art for a couple of years to think about something else. I guess the best thing in Fitzrovia –ifIdosaysomyself (sic)- was that guy Michael Muller (with an umlaut over the ‘u’) at the Mummary & Schnelle gallery. Yeah! he can really do it, a nice eclectic little show with some mystery, surprise, and multi-media. Hmmm, I had to sit down after that one and slurp some black coffee from my flask –it’s all that keeps me upright these days. Well, I whizzed around Fitzrovia where there’s a new Approach gallery, and a couple of very impressive spaces like Alison Jacques and Modern Art (showing big disturbed landscapes by Clare Woods), then cut down towards Soho and checked in at Anthony Reynolds (a quiet gallery I’ve always respected) where some of that nice ‘Un-monumental’-style sculpture had been installed by Nobuko Tsuchiya.

I then hoofed on over to more familiar territory like Hauser and Wirth, Sadie Coles, Haunch of Venison etc. At ‘Haunch’ (in a lovely old building with sweeping staircases, said to have once been the home of Admiral Nelson’s lover) I really enjoyed Anthony Goicoliea’s Cuban reminiscences as he used black and white photographs and their negative incarnations to attempt to trace in some way lost relatives in Havana and New York. At Timothy Taylor an ex Goldsmiths college man Ewan Gibbs had been meticulously drawing with pencil, copying tourist-y photos of NYC into 5mm gridded papers whooo! And at White Cube (Mason’s Yard) Robert Irwin was just a bit too big an artist for my liking, in a space that is also just a bit too ostentatious for my savoury taste-buds (is Jay Joplin the Mayor of Mayfair yet?). On the way, I bumped into an old friend and internationally renowned artist. He was really out to buy a cool scarf before Frieze begins and the cold spell kicks-in but I managed to swerve him into the new (everything’s new, new,) Frith Street gallery to see the calm old master Giuspeppe Penone’s cool works aaaaaH!

My friend deserted me after that (I know it’s hard to take a lot of me in one day) and so I went to Thomas Dane alone and saw the kind of works on paper that I like by Jorge Queiroz (a man after my own practice in fact). Aaah, truly speculative mark making, where the true alchemy resides! I finished up back towards Fitzrovia at a PV for the Architectural Association showing great planned buildings for London, that were either never completed (e.g. 2nd prize in the Tate Modern competition) or are still in the process of planning or being built (bigger, shapelier towers). To be honest, I couldn’t keep my concentration here, and I’d like to take more time one day to answer the question as to why an architecture show is sooooo different from an art show, even when you might think they could have similarities! Having rested for a day I ventured into the East End on a rainy Sunday morning, which was good, as I found the galleries empty of other less courageous critics, writers and would-be opinion-formers.

Vyner Street looked dour under grey skies but upstairs in the mighty Wilkinson monolith I encountered a really educational installation by Fia Backstrom that taught me all about the colour Orange as the new hue for revolution. While in Nettie Horn’s I must say I was gently knocked-out by the architectural sculpture of one Sinter Verner, wow! At Kate Macgarry’s space Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard have developed their ‘re-enactment’ and answer themes with a film of a young MC dissing her boyfriend into a door security camera. When I got to magnificent Matts Gallery (surely one of the most important and credible spaces in UK) after a longer than expected hike along the untimely Regents Canal you could see the enormous towers of Canary Wharf in the distance disappearing into gunmetal blue drags of cloud. Blade Runner had nothing on this real future I’m inhabiting, the corporate boys have really gone to another planet -have they not? leaving the likes of us kicking around here in the mud of an indecisive and divided society.

Roy Voss, at Matts, showed an impressive installation in which the human condition was rescued as something simultaneously Romantic (huge landscape backdrops) and kitsch (table lamps in the design of lighthouses or fishing boats -you know, you see them in flea markets). Hmmmm! suitably moved and reassured (and for some reason reminded of my grandfather) I marched over to Chisenhale –again slurping from my daily litre of espresso- and was again pleasantly relieved to see a very convincing layout by David Noonan. Here retro references ran riot as black and white images of black-clad dancers with way-outmoded white pan-stick makeup cavorted on wooden supports around a floor lined with 70s-style hessian carpeting –check this out, it’s a collision of History, photography, sculpture and dance that looks oh-so now! The monochromaticism was mellow music to my muddled eyes after the outside world had smothered them in iPhone-style multicolouration. More highlights of the East were Vilma Gold where Jennifer West had gotten her students to kiss many many metres of movie film with lipstick before she transferred it to digital and projected the resulting psychedelia in this (yet another cool, new) gallery. By the time I reached home I needed a long hot bath. My umbrella had done its best but my suit jacket was damp and my socks, having been let-down by a pair of aging shoes, moreso. Here I began to reflect on the nature and purpose of Contemporary Art; what it does and does for us in comparison with say, History, music or shopping.

To be honest I felt somewhat relieved that artists are continuing to explore and exploit these ever-renewed spaces and materials, all this history and all this possibility, whether it might be of value or not. And in this respect, art remains courageous, even if it is unfashionable in these sceptical and ironic times to say so. I have come to the conclusion in fact (‘ere I go) that Romanticism is alive and well in one guise or another, if only in the idea that to be or try to be an artist is necessarily unlikely, famously foolhardy, necessarily unnecessary, and unbelievable. We need new waves of candidates for whom the ambition of ‘artist’ is remote and unlikely, so as to sustain this speculation and Romanticsim in each new generation. Art only goes stale when monopolised by those who CAN do it, those who have the time, opportunity, education and confidence to do it, while what keeps art from sinking into mannerism is the constantly updated and renewed invitation to the most unlikely candidates to have a go and to simultaneously speak of unheard things.

This strange ambition thus remains (despite a recent sense of complicity) a complete alternative to the utilitarian thinking that has led us through years of intoxicated excess into world market crash. Fitzrovia is full of history, dudes like Paul Nash, Rimbaud, Augustus John, Virginia Woolf, Fuseli, Constable, Dylan Thomas and the spy Donald Mclean all have stories there, and this is what we need I think, a little history, like the opposite of sugar, too occasionally douse, dour and sour us, (‘the purpose of philosophy is to sadden’ I think Gilles Deleuze once said) into knowing just what a tough-call life really is, art really is, tough and absurd, and THEREFORE up for grabs by any subjectivity wild and brave enough to attempt an unfettered illustration of their experience. Art is still the place to go further, to think more strangely, to get out from under a suffocating carpet of objectivity and common sense. Fitzrovia used to be all ‘rag-trade’ wholesalers incongruously planted just behind Oxford Street, between Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road, but also featuring some lovely old squares and incorporating a bohemian period in its history. What we call the East –around Bethnal Green, Hackney Road, Mile End etc. is also crawling with history, disused industry (the canal itself was of course once all for industrial traffic) ripe for renovation by artists, whose economy seems to ride different waves, so that it can be up when the standard economy is down. Isn’t that where the big last wave of British art came from, the disused warehouses and closed shop-fronts at the end of the Thatcherite reign?

Maybe a time like that is coming around again, the world is now not only polarised but shattered into shards and fragments of difference. The cool cars will creep down from Frieze to Fitzrovia in a week or two, while along Vyner Street the car mechanics in greasy overalls will still be fixing London Taxis next door to cutting edge galleries. At the next global summit, world leaders will again be confronted by radicalised youth and protected by shining policemen, the U.S has gotten itself into a whole host of veritable Vietnams now, and amid all of this, the artists and the curators who rescue and provide a little space from the mega-rich metropolis or the murk of the down-at heel city, continue to proffer, like weird waiters at a l-o-n-g last supper, possibilities that might go otherwise un-noted and unconsidered in the great debate concerning what it is and how it is to be human.

END