'Necessary Illusions': A Response

It was on a dank, windy and miserable Sunday that I stumbled hung-over along London’s Southbank to see ‘Necessary Illusions’: Central Saint Martins’ MA Fine Art interim show at the Bargehouse in Oxo Tower Wharf. A friend involved in the project had asked me to give a written response to the show, and I was curious to see how a group of emerging artists and curators had responded to the raw and eerie space of the Bargehouse – an emotive “Art Deco edifice”[1] that stands slightly back from the cultural thoroughfare of the Southbank parade.

As a recent art graduate saturated with the theoretical rhetoric of Goldsmiths’ College and its ilk, I struggle with notions of criticality, self-reflexivity and the problem of how to write about art, especially art only half-made. The words which follow will attempt to describe my sense of the CSM show, to act as a witness statement, and a subjective account of my mental and physical interaction – my spiritual encounter if you like – with the ‘Necessary Illusions’ exhibition.

Despite the cold and hostile surrounds of the Bargehouse, the first room of the exhibition gave the impression that this was to be an exciting and ambitious show. Several brightly coloured human-sized tubes hung suspended from the ceiling, accompanied by a board of photos documenting a performance piece by Ruben Montini that had used these weird props on the opening night. The photos depicted assorted performers stripped naked bar these fabric tubes draped over their bodies. Much like the strange remnants left behind from a Paul McCarthy performance, one could discern the recent occurrence of an event despite the industrial gloom. It was to be the first of many pieces, I realised, that implicitly sought to challenge a hierarchy of power.
In the corner stood a sculpture by Antonis Tzikas; a conical jumble of found objects and discarded rubbish, a hurricane rendered motionless and in fierce opposition to the performance piece. Later I was to find a similar sculpture by another artist, Kirsten Linning, in an upstairs room, both works igniting ideas of transition and of flux: of art still in its emergent stages, under construction; a concept that echoes behind the curatorial foundations of ‘Necessary Illusions’.

Moving onwards and up the first flight of uneven cement stairs, a cacophony of sights and sounds bombarded me, and with difficulty I tried to look at all these fragments individually and with a critical eye. Work after work maintained an experiential element: one had to walk through or around, listen in or watch. There was a significant emphasis on the idea of the observer and the observed. Films various showed supermarket shoppers purchasing groceries, or depicted bird’s eye views of Indian streets, or watched people facing one another blankly, as in the four screen projection by Josephine Reichert. I felt that this focus on observation made the viewer more aware of their own actions in this chilly space; how they were looking, how they appeared to others while they looked, and ultimately: how their look affected the work and its meaning.

Seven itineraries had been created by the MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice students from Chelsea College, the purpose of which was to suggest alternative journeys through the exhibition according to particular illusory meanings such as ‘modern myths’, ‘logocentrism’ or ‘architecture’. I appreciated the ambition of this task – the sheer audacity of trying to classify artwork-in-the-making according to these huge conceptual perimeters – and felt it an intelligent way of recognising the borderless intellectual confines which influence the making of art. I also liked the way these guides proposed different journeys into and around the Bargehouse space, whilst highlighting the political and creative connections between seemingly disparate artworks. It seemed that the Chelsea students, like me, struggled with the popular insinuation that the role of curatorial practice and art writing is to impose meaning or a structure of thought onto a visual artwork. They had responded sensitively with these tentative pathways through the art space, and had focused upon the seven alternative “fictitious constructs” as a “necessary illusion”[2] that highlighted the ephemeral nature of the show.

The ‘Necessary Illusions’ exhibition problematizes the plight of every emerging artist: how to make work despite the perpetual crescendo of political and aesthetic dogma. Once upon a time I believed that all art must have a message and that it should instruct in some way, helping us to realise something new about the world. Inquiring exhibitions such as this one counteract that belief. They brazenly recognise that art is much more than any imposed meaning, that it is something deeper, soulful, and more penetrating. Words and language are like the echoes that ricochet off the hard concrete walls of the Bargehouse; empty, yet always there in order to challenge and disarm us from experiencing the art in any pure or uncorrupted way.
In other words, I felt that it was the theoretical content of the itineraries – their unabashed failure to find a grand narrative and an overarching passage through the exhibition – that ultimately reinforced the strength of the works in and of themselves.

As I walked back along the Southbank, my thoughts turned to the piece I would shortly be writing about the show. ‘How does one accurately write about an art exhibition?’ I thought, ‘and how does one convey in words the subjective experience of walking through an art space?’ I would have to accept, I realised, that my piece could be nothing more than another illusory representation of the experience of walking through, yet another alternative to navigating the ideas and the work.
But that was probably enough, for now.


[1] From An Architecture of Illusory Meaning, a Necessary Illusions Itinerary
[2] http://criticalism.org/news/necessary-illusions