To the East End, where a couple of shows that deal, tangentially, with the
credit crunch confirm my hunch that the crunch is the best thing that has
happened to art in recent times. It is not only a question of providing art
with vivid and meaningful subject matter, although that is a definite plus.
The crunch is helpful in so many ways.For instance, with luck, there will be
a slimming down of the number of galleries operating in Britain. There are
far too many. Art was never meant to be mass-produced on an industrial scale
like this. The map of London’s art venues looks like a close up of Seurat’s
La Grande Jatte: spots, spots everywhere. Also near the top of my wish list
would be the dooming of art fairs. If Frieze and the rest go down, perhaps
we can all go back to recognising that peddling art and looking at it in a
meaningful way are entirely different experiences.
The best thing the crunch can do for art, though, is inspire it: give it
energy, meaning, pertinence and bite. Judging by what Richard Grayson has
come up with in his new unveiling at Matt’s Gallery, that has already
happened. Matt’s is perhaps the most heroic art space in London. It opened
as long ago as 1979 and, although I have missed more shows here than I have
seen, everything I’ve encountered has been ambitious, high-minded and
worthwhile. This is what proper galleries should be like: risk-taking ideas
spaces in which the envelope is stretched and definitions are challenged.
In the old days, Matt’s was in Martin Amis country, on the edge of London
Fields. The development of the East End, though, has pushed it further
afield, and these days getting to it on foot involves a serious wander
through the outer reaches of the Olympics wasteland, past Bethnal Green,
past Mile End, to a converted warehouse across the road from a go-karting
arena.
Grayson’s new display is unsettling from the off. Ushered into a dark space by
a man with a torch, you are plonked onto a plastic chair of the sort village
halls keep stacked in the corner in preparation for council meetings. At the
far end of the hall, a film is playing on a large screen. It seems to show a
church choir that has gathered to sing for you. From the look of them —
overweight, T-shirted, mixed-race, mad-eyed — they seem to be American. And
their song is an insistent choral lament in which a gospel melody has been
combined with a modernist drone. It takes a while to tune into the words.
Then, slowly, you do. And the creepy realisation dawns on you that you have
stumbled into a musical event mounted by an obscure religious cult.
Their song begins with a description of what you recognise to be the world
today: “Because of war in the Middle East and a crisis in oil/Dollar-based
currencies will become worthless and banks will fail.” It’s a song about the
credit crunch. Nothing too outrageous yet. Then the sopranos chime in:
“Hungry mobs will rampage through the cities of the world plundering
supermarkets/They will ransack food stores and there will be a Great
Confusion.” It’s nasty. But not yet chilling. The real horror begins when
the baritones pipe up: “There will be the greatest famine the world has ever
seen, and war, terror and turmoil/And then we will see a new political
genius emerge/Helped by UFOs he will propose and launch revolutionary
economic global changes/ He is the Biblical Antichrist come to confirm the
Holy Covenant.” Reader, I do not want to frighten you unduly, but according
to my understanding of these doomy foretellings, President Obama is almost
certainly the Antichrist. The credit crunch is the beginning of the
Tribulation. And the end of the world is nigh.
Of course, Grayson believes none of this. The words to his creepy gospel
oratorio were taken, I read, from a website run by a religious cult that
used to be called the Children of God, but prefers nowadays to be known as
The Family International. Started in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California,
by David Brandt Berg, known to his followers as “Father David”, the cult
pioneered a method of evangelism called Flirty Fishing, in which sex was
used as religious bait to gain converts. Basing his oratorio on predictions
found on the Family’s website (thefamily.org),
Grayson commissioned Leo Chadburn to write the music and assembled a choir
in Texas to sing it. The results are startling, shocking, distressing,
unforgettable.
Grayson’s piece works as well as it does because everything is revealed so
unassumingly. At first the choir seems merely eccentric: dressed down in
mom-next-door sweaters and faded denims, they seem quintessentially
small-town and ordinary. The camera moves, too, have been modelled on the leisurely
camerawork of a genuine choir recording. The artist does nothing obvious to
force the horror. Instead, he leaves it to grow, Exorcist style, quietly and
inexorably, as you slowly realise that these insane predictions bear a scary
resemblance to world events. Close the book on the 2009 Turner prize.
Grayson should be a shoo-in.
For a marginally more sensible but equally imaginative understanding of the
fiscal circumstances in which we find ourselves, I recommend a visit to the
Chisenhale gallery, where Anja Kirschner and David Panos have produced The
Last Days of Jack Sheppard, an unusually well-made gallery film in which the
exploits of the 18th century’s most notorious thief are paralleled by the
unfolding of the first global credit crisis: the South Sea Bubble. This was
the first occasion on which the irresistible dynamics of booming and busting
were visited upon the British economy: lots of silly people began to invest
in silly stocks and shares, in the silly belief that useless bits of paper
would make them rich.
Across the backcloth of these silly times darted the nimble figure of
Sheppard, a carpenter’s apprentice turned spoon thief who can perhaps claim
to have been the first media nobody to become a somebody: the first Jade
Goody, the first Susan Boyle, the first Jeffrey Archer.
Sheppard was such a lousy thief that he kept getting caught. Perversely, he
was really good at escaping. And with each escape, his notoriety grew. The
18th-century red-tops loved him and lionised him. Thus, Kirschner and
Panos’s brilliant little film draws constant parallels between his
worthless notoriety and the fiscal circumstances that spawned him. We are
watching the birth of a society that confuses celebrity with achievement. We
are watching the birth of ourselves. Made on a shoestring, with cleverly
designed sets and simple but effective visual effects, the film makes a
virtue of its budget restrictions. It reminded me of Derek Jarman’s
Caravaggio and Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.
If all these worrying similarities between then and now are too telling for
you, I suggest you repair to that fine gallery known as The Approach E2,
situated above a pub in Bethnal Green, where you can drown your sorrows
downstairs before sampling a pleasant group show upstairs. Three artists —
Henning Bohl, Michael Hakimi and Amanda Ross-Ho — share a taste for cutting
things up. Ross-Ho hangs bits of white canvas on the wall and covers them in
what looks like examples of 1970s macramé. Hakimi appears to have bitten
into his pictures and taken large chunks out of them, while Bohl makes
jaunty collages that seem to be unfurling before you, as if the glue that
holds them together has come unstuck.
Spoils & Relics, The Approach E2, until June 14; Richard Grayson,
Matt’s Gallery, E3, until June 28; The Last Days of Jack Sheppard,
Chisenhale, E3, until July 21
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