Scott King, Matthew Darbyshire

Issue 51, Summer 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Herald St, London
9 April – 15 May

By Chris Fite-Wassilak

With brightly coloured knickknacks adorning tastefully sparse furnishings, and what at first appear to be insightful and inspirational quotes from artists and famous figures lining the walls, Scott King and Matthew Darbyshire’s dual exhibition could easily be imagined as the reception for some 1990s yuppie executive. While we idly await our meeting, Darbyshire’s Untitled Homeware No. 14 (all works 2011) has the cubicle-jockey’s frosted-glass-and-polished-steel coffee-table present us with a flocked-plastic fluorescent-pink elephant vase holding a set of plastic orchids. In the second room is Untitled Homeware No. 13, a yellow Buddha with a blue Union Jack tied around his neck – another hip blasphemy emanating that particular sincere ironic cool of recent decades. The unattributed quotes, though, sit off-kilter to your typical corporate aspirational wall texts: plans for a fleet of ‘Taliban Library Vans’, or the artist of a certain Angel of the North describing how, in preparation for creating work, he would ‘drink heavily, take coke, crack, LSD, heroin – anything to reach the right transcendental state where one can see right through society’. It’s right at the back of the exhibition that you find Art and Politics: A Reappraisal, a text decrying a certain kind of ‘Wiki-Art’ where ‘”rare” but “cool” information’ is repackaged as art commodity. The texts certainly seem to be just such a beast, choice quotes unearthed and proudly held up – and all of a sudden it’s possible that the whole installation is somehow the same, as if Darbyshire and King found online images of the inner sanctum of the chief executive of Urban Outfitters and replicated it here.

The titles of King’s text canvases each provide a breadcrumb trail; dutiful searching online to verify their ‘Wiki-Art’ status reveals that they take their names from a sprawled set of articles and memoirs, but the quotes are King’s imaginary insertions and addenda into the lives of Victor Burgin, Irving Kristol, GG Allin, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley. King’s trail of references is both reading list and hit list; some are whimsical jibes at historical heavy hitters, such as US secretary of state Henry Kissinger describing, in his 1992 memoir, Years of Upheaval, accidentally wearing one red sock and one yellow sock to a meeting with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, or the darkly comic image of French Marxist philosopher – and eventual wife-strangler – Louis Althusser, in his The Future Lasts a Long Time (1992), hopping across his spouse’s freshly mopped kitchen floor on one foot. The texts could appear as the sort of private jokes that run through your head while you’re reading, but instead of making the works more personal, their status as ‘fake’ found quotes posing as conceptual .Pop art increases their distanced self-conscious hipster stance.

Darbyshire and King share the method of inhabiting the garb of commodified Pop, using its remarkably easy back-and-forth absorption and reabsorption of a range of different ideologies. This gives a sense of easy one-liners and quick punchlines, but it is this fluid surface they are willingly skating upon and mapping, in the way Darbyshire’s Homewares, for all their shouty colours, fade quietly into the background, or how King’s texts, even once they slowly unfold, still manage to feel like quick soundbites. Here they provide the decoration for the boardroom where the terms and conditions for how Pop will continue to eat itself are endlessly negotiated.

See this article with full illustrations, plus the entire Summer 2011 issue of ArtReview magazine free on your screen, here.