ARTS REVIEW
It’s one of the year’s ‘zaniest shows’ according to the Telegraph – and while it is certainly memorable, what actually is the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, currently docked at London’s persistently alien Barbican centre? The principle is simple. Gather a lot of contemporary art, including many things that one might not consider within the bracket and present it all as if through alien eyes, with works themed into communication, rituals, totems, etc – so, while some galleries choose circumspect pretension as their shoehorn, the Barbican’s weapon of choice is contextualisation. A bold idea, but the execution is not what it might be.
When News Hour’s correspondents arrived at the gallery, the show had already been running well over a month. As such, the staff appeared bludgeoned by the relentless oddity of their surroundings. The gallery was nearly empty, and a request for two tickets was met with a knowing, almost rueful grin. Suspicions of a scam were raised when your correspondent was asked to record his full credit card details on an unofficial looking piece of paper in exchange for the audio guides. We were assured that the details, kept in a less than durable-looking box, would be returned. They were – but we would advise readers to make sure they destroy this gift to identity fraudsters shortly after. Do London’s feral youth really covet these unwieldy MP3 players and 1980s headphones so much?
We suspect that whoever is behind the guide wants to write sci-fi comedy – while it makes the occasional interesting point (it is not bad on Warhol), as time wears on it becomes increasingly lost in its own mythology, which is useless if you’re not in on the joke. The illustrative signage similarly apes The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and a sense of the faux-clever art that appeals to nerds, self-justified through arrogance rather than elegance, pervades much of the lower left hall. Just because you think about something a lot does not make it a good idea, or nice to look at.
Amid all this pulverising nonsense, though, are some gems – Jeffrey Vallance’s Cultural Ties, an installation presenting the correspondence between the artist and assorted heads of state, in which he offered an exchange of neckties, is gentle and fascinating. (He is also responsible for the Blinky shroud downstairs, but we’ll let him off.) It is something that you wouldn’t see elsewhere, and this strange opposition of works is the exhibition’s strongest point. Is it art? By the time you get through looking at the bloodstained table and horrific accompanying video to Luette Mit Rucola, you won’t care – it’ll simply be nice to not be watching someone being mutilated, an experience that inducted a dizzying cold sweat in your correspondent. It came bracketed with some not dissimilar art that had a ring of the stranger end of Scandinavian work, but were student projects by comparison.
There are other highlights, most of them photographic (and one particularly beautiful sculpture by Barbara Hepworth), but not enough. The sense of this exhibition is that the curators suddenly realised what they’d taken on about halfway through, and steamed on regardless. A bold strategy, one which would serve them well in marketing, but it needed more innocence, inclusiveness and intelligence to really work.
The show runs until May 18.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 