Artangel – The Concise Dictionary of Dress (and others)

Artangel is the organisation who make me want to do nothing but think about art and how it’s made, all day. Artangel overcomes the problems of contemporary art – that it is so often feels slight and amateurish (rushed, cheap) and imagines, schemes, cajoles, slogs and induces vast, complicated, expensive, deeply memorable experiences.

This summer’s Concise Dictionary of Dress was a 45 minute tour* of 11 installations composed of specially commissioned objects and display hardware and articles from the archive of the V&A, accompanied by a series of definitions. I was unthrilled by some of the accompanying text of the first work, Armoured. “3. Inviting attack by being prepared for it, provocative. 4. Heavier. 5. Sustaining belief in the inside and the outside, the invulnerable space and the essentially unprotected body”  reminded me that Freud was a shit-head. A shame, as the installation, in an arch on the edge of a building high enough to see all over London, was one of my favourites.

The exhibition was held in Blythe House (a former post office sorting office and currently the archive of the British Museum, Science Museum and the V&A), reaffirming that Artangel have the surest touch when it comes to choosing venues and that the venue is as often as much a part of the work as the objects it contains.

*Our guide was polite but very firm, reminding me so much of how appallingly middle class people behave in their time off.  They just do it in theatres as opposed to branches of Yates.

I’ll go to any Artangel project I can organise myself (and sometimes another person) into attending, namely:

Stifte’s Dinge – Heiner Goebbels (2008) -I saw this with Alix who managed to review it very decently.

Night Haunts – Sukhdev Sandhu (2006) – The website for this project is excellent, although you should probably look at it at three in the morning, to get the full effect. Alix and I attended the final ‘Nights of London‘ event, ‘Because the Night‘, which took place in the (out of use) Bethnal Green town hall, which included  readings by Sandhu (I have fond memories of the jokes told by sewer workers), works on paper displayed, magic tricks, music by Scanner and a bar, of course.

Kuba – Kutlug Atman (2005) I attended this alone towards the end of the run, the building was grubby and there were almost no other visitors. I think might be the best way to see Artangel works, so you can get completely lost in them. Although you may end up running screaming from the venue having totally lost your sense of self.

The Cremaster Field – Matthew Barney (2002) – This was the first ever screening of all five films, in sequence,  of the Cremaster Cycle, which felt like the work that took over the world in the mid-zeros. Admittedly, anyone with a passing interest in film, opera, architecture, vaseline, murder, musicals, TT racing, broad-shouldered women, legless women, process art, vaseline, men in kilts, men in suits, men in leather aprons, escapology, demolition derby, the Masons, bees, home-made tapshoes and vaseline, will find plenty to enjoy. (Although it took me two years to recover mentally from a pub conversation in which a group of us speculated as to the specifics of his proclivities.)