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From: Rog
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 11 April 2004
The future is barren, a place where flowers grow but never flower, where the sun shines weakly like a false smile, where people walk around in drab clothes and see no reason to excel or even just be happy. The future is contemporary for most who live now. Now is in the dead false interior which is the ICA, a stunningly ugly mausoleum like its neighbour Buckingham Palace.
In the ICA they try as much as possible to block out the light, boarding up windows, ruining the well-proportioned rooms with screens and false walls, to stop the awful half-hearted, nihilistic, art-non-art, from being illuminated. The curators love video projections which can keep the deadened spectators miserable in the dark watching images stolen from surrealism and adverts.
The Becks futures: let us see the artists most defeated. Let us see the artists with the most minimal ambitions, let us see only work that says all can be artists, that nothing is great or beautiful, only the pernickety little emphemera, the lint and dust and fluff of life is all you shall see. There is a place for the small-scale and the unnoticed, but when twee humour and minorness, and boredom, become dominant, then we are closing to living in some Orwellian nightmare where lies are truths.
If I describe the art it will sound better than it is and I more reactionary and conservative than I am. Go see it. It left me depressed, with all its pathetic ugliness, and the art didn't even make me feel that, it was that the artists and the systems that produce them should encourage and promote such art that left me feeling the future is dead for the foreseeable future.
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