London is of course one of the world centres of art - the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square has well over 2000 priceless works, and the National Portrait Gallery is extremely popular - as are the more contemporary Tate Modern and Tate Britain. In fact, a list of London's main galleries alone is enormously lengthy. You could read the listings for days and still not find something to see - or worse, find many things to see but with time for only one. I was round at my brother's flat in Whitechapel last Saturday with a loose afternoon in prospect, when a bit of culture was suggested - a trip to a gallery. However, it was to be like no gallery - or art installation - I'd seen before.
It was called Simply Botiful, by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, and was on display at the Hauser & Wirth Coppermill on Cheshire Street, near Brick Lane. If you live in London or will be there before March 18th 2007 (when it closes), and have an interest in unusual/untypical/ unsettling art - then I strongly urge you to read no more of this post (surely a first for a blogger). Go along with no preconceptions, as I did, and you'll get the best out of the exhibit. I'm going to describe what it was like, and I really can't help giving everything away about it. So please, you'd be better served by going off and watching the telly. In fact, that might apply to the rest of you as well - but I'm going to describe it anyway.
According to the PR blurb on the gallery website, Büchel "creates spaces where the audience encounter claustrophobic tunnels, dead ends and psychologically unsettling scenarios." I had no inkling of any of this, as my brother didn't tell me a thing about it - other than the fact that it involved climbing ladders. This point was made again when we arrived at an anonymous red door in front of a backstreet grey brick warehouse. Mark pushed a door buzzer, and we walked into a small 70's-style hotel lobby. A man came out of the office and gave us a clipboard to read - we had to sign a waiver absolving the gallery owners of any blame if we were injured or damaged our clothing inside. Still not knowing what to expect, I signed and we walked up the carpeted stairs.
The first thing you notice is the sheer abundance of stuff, and the interactivity. The first half-dozen rooms were a furnished shabby hotel, with untidy beds everywhere, and countless personal possessions in the rooms. You could walk around unhindered, looking and picking up the bits and pieces, exploring, trying to find clues as to what it might be about. Almost instantly we found one - a small hole sawn into the back of a wardrobe, hidden by hanging clothes. With me going first, we crawled through and came out in a room with a destroyed moped in a tank, a small wire cage, bags of rubbish, and ear-splitting death metal music. Fingers in ears, we rooted about looking for an explanation, before scrambling back through the wardrobe into the room and on to the other parts of the hotel.
Just as your mind has processed that it must be a cheap hostel for immigrant workers, or sex workers, or something, you turn a corner and there in front of you is a warehouse. On the other side a staggeringly vast concrete room stretches out, filled with junk. Countless fridges sit by a production line, shipping containers stacked high, caravans, mobile homes, heaps of rusting junk, a container lorry. Mouth agape, you go down the steps and wander round. This is where the interactivity really begins. You can open the fridge doors and look for things - one we found had a memorial plaque on, like a bench at a city park, for example. The container in the picture above had a recreated sweaty living area, with 2-bar fire, TV, piles and piles of items (books, curios, clothes, all kinds of stuff) - and of course the ever present beds.
Also in that picture is the articulated lorry. You can hoist yourself up into the back and walk around it - you can just make out hanging sheets and bunk beds. There must have been ten or more, all with musty sleeping bags, lamps, and books - as if the occupants had just nipped out for a smoke. Suddenly in the gloom you find a small hole cut into the floor of the lorry. Letting yourself down onto cinderblock steps, you come out in a tiny, low-ceilinged room carpeted in Muslim prayer mats. A narrow corridor - barely wide enough for one person to squeeze down - leads to a round room. Here it's totally dark, so my brother and I used our phones to shine some light around - the room had a ring of simple chairs, bibles and dozens of Page 3 pinups on the wall.
These seemed to be continuing themes - everywhere were beds, religious symbols, things to do with poverty, pornographic images, and of course junk. But was it junk, or items of importance to the people involved? The rooms looked unsettlingly lived-in, some with food still on the tables in a Marie-Celeste way. Each time we scrambled through a hole or up a ladder it resulted in more personal effects, more religious imagery. The one that stands out was a container wallpapered with pages of girlie mags, with a freezer in the corner. Wandering over, you get a shock when the freezer has a ladder in it, leading into a rocky hole about 15ft deep. So down you go, and end up crawling on wooden duckboards along a gloomy shaft. Eventually you come out inside a massive marquee, surrounded on all sides by earth. A single block of it stands in the centre, and walking round it reveals two Mammoth tusks sticking out, as if the whole thing is buried there. On the way back Mark noticed one of the geological bands of rock in the dig wasn't rock, but bobbly white Polystyrene.
This becomes the big question of the exhibit - how much of it do you accept? How closely do you look? It would have taken hours to open every fridge, look in every drawer. It was very easy to get carried away - I got politely told off by a member of staff for climbing a ladder that wasn't part of the show (bolted to the side of one of the containers) - by that point I was in full Jungle Jim mode, trying to climb everything. My brother said he noticed a post-it note with a phone number on it. Was this part of the exhibition? Were we supposed to ring it and find out a secret, or a clue, or something? Or had a visitor simply stuck it up wanting to be a part of the installation? Or was it completely unimportant and meant nothing? On the way out we stood on the metal balcony at the end of the hotel part and watched people wandering into containers or rooms, miss the secret passages, and walk out. What did they make of it? What did I make of it? I loved it.
Simply Botiful runs until Mar 18 2007, at the Hauser & Wirth Coppermill, 92-108 Cheshire St, London, E2 6EH.
Coppermill website. with 57 photos of the exhibit
Youtube video taken by a visitor in the Mammoth marquee, giving a great idea of the claustraphobic nature of the tunnels. Luckily when we were there, we only had two other people to wait for (you can only go down the freezer in pairs).
