Room Divider

Issue 44, September 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Wilkinson Gallery, London
2 July – 15 August

By Rebecca Geldard

One enters this group exhibition – on what it is that makes Modernism so different, so appealing today – with the expectation of being in safe hands, for it’s been curated by writer and critic Michael Bracewell. Even so, the experience is akin to a cool breeze down the back of the neck in a post office queue. Bracewell’s reductive approach to the job of ‘auditing’ the movement’s major themes and motifs gives one the sense of order imposed, a route through the historical mire, despite the diversity of the selection, which includes Italian product design and a ballet score.

This is not a survey-style exhibition, but rather an intuitive response to the circularity of our preoccupation with the modern and the sense of (time) fracture its reinvention evokes. Bracewell situates the viewer between American and European sensibilities via two text fragments: from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and from the sleeve note of Roxy Music’s debut album, Roxy Music (1972). Both speak of the difficulty of locating the present at the point of cultural turn. A 1936 photograph of a Black Mountain College performance taken (and likely inspired) by tutor and Bauhaus artist Xanti Schawinsky, meanwhile, offers a Venn-diagrammatic glimpse of the past as if to summon a flavour of the era’s legacy: the perceived romance, perhaps, of a comparatively politically engaged and contextualisable period of interdisciplinary experimentation.

In the starkly organised downstairs space, this sense of dislocation and the viral nature of appropriation central to the exhibition are brought into physical play. In Hanna Schwarz’s spare film I Love the Body (2009), an androgynous woman strikes avant-garde theatrical poses in the punk/new wave-revivalist spirit of contemporary music videos. On an adjacent wall, Tim Head’s squirming grid of computer data in real time (Sweet Bird, 2004) brings to mind the condition of light on the closed eye – extraordinary pixelations that seem born of machinic, as opposed to biological, processes. The narrator of Simon Martin’s 2006 film on Memphis Design’s classic 1981 Carlton room divider, in the upstairs project space, describes the influence of design on the everyday as if some form of cultural contagion, creating “a place of perpetual refurbishment and all-purpose vernacular”.

An actual Carlton in the main gallery lives up to the role prescribed as totemic exhibition centrepiece, its spikily retro, half-decorative, halffunctional laminate surfaces offering associative segues into the various designs for life all around. Christoph Schellberg creates a stylistic contradiction out of the pursuit of trends (for both craft and mass-produced objects) with his neighbouring panelled screen, for each apparently naff ceramic-tile formation has been lovingly reproduced in squares of batik (St Barth, 2010). While Linder’s charred LP, on which cover-girl Karen Carpenter appears with flowery innards (Charming Maid, 2007), also reminds of the market and other forces shaping what it is we ‘see’.

One might take any single work here and extract some sense of ‘now’ from it, but Bracewell’s point appears less about the modern shape of things than the compulsion to locate it. If looking for a map, however, one could do a lot worse than Richard Hamilton’s graphic interior Chiara and Chair (2004) – its disappearance point (a ballistic blob in the middledistance) describing, perhaps, that attempt to separate the many layers of self and high- and low-cultural reference.



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