“An art space is a factory, which is simultaneously a supermarket—a casino and a place of worship whose reproductive work is performed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video bloggers alike” - Steyerl (2012)
Steyerl summarises the feeling I want to express about how the workers, participants, customers or even worshippers in these spaces now converted into galleries are simultaneously the spectator and the spectacle. The spectator is essentially looking at themselves or rather their lives through someone else’s eyes, producing art by existing, consuming their own existence, sold to them via “the grift shop gallery”. As the world gets eaten up by itself, self-obsession is driven by the illusions we ourselves create, as we want to be perceived in the ‘right way’, to be looking to be doing the ‘right thing’, even though you’re an individual. What is reality? Come back down to earth, turn left onto this side street off of a main road, inside the shell of what used to be a Victorian public baths and laundry facility:
“Five Hides…[took]…place at Manor Place in Walworth, [a] Victorian building taking its name from the Manor of Walworth, described by The Domesday Book (1086) as being “five hides” in area: enough land to support five families or to produce £5 in taxes.”- Stavri (2021)
The shell is occupied by the work of up-and-coming artists brought together by Eric Thorp and Nicholas Stavri (Thorp Stavri). Unlike the white cube, this space is lit differently according to the direction the sun is pointing towards, it works with the space, with the earth to portray ‘authentic’ ideas about the world we live in. The outside is inside, and the inside is outside. The community space turned art space, just to show you some pieces of art about people, some of these artworks take on the character of a person, they are anthropomorphic, squatting in a community space destined to become unaffordable housing.
During this exhibition, there was 2 workshops, one for people of all ages and abilities and one specifically…
“Aimed at black women aged 18+ the 3Ms workshop focuses on promoting mindfulness and healing generational trauma through meditation, movement and making – the 3Ms. Participants will discover the spiritual links between craft and mindfulness practice while also learning a simple embroidery technique.” Next Saturday (Gbewonyo, 2020)
These workshops were both free of charge and all materials and refreshments were provided, aimed at helping and giving power to the local community. Often Art galleries, showing big names in ‘the art world’ make people from the local community feel othered and left out, they repel the average joe, the every-man or the marginalised and create a space specifically designed to stimulate the middle and upper classes. Here though at ‘Five
Hides’ we see representation of the people usually othered actually exhibiting work, which makes people feel comfortable or at least you’d hope so, I certainly didn’t get an uncomfortable feeling when I entered the space, it felt very natural. This feeling of inclusivity was a key goal set by Stavri (2021) here in the exhibition’s press release:
“Five Hides will celebrate the space and open it up to the community once more before it’s potentially gone forever.” A celebration of space, using the whole space, taking up space.
O’doherty (1999) talks about how the white wall acts as a frame for the unframed picture, like the white cube then, but against a crumbling grey/brown wall in a shell of a public baths, a picture isn’t just a picture it is also the whole space, it lends its quality to the space and the space lends its quality to the picture. Art then in this space takes on less of a holiness, it stays grounded, it has listened to the people, it has looked at the world now vs before, especially the work of Anna Reading, who uses chip shop forks and sea shells, metal rods and various other materials to create sort of relics from a dystopian future where sea levels have risen and fallen, a critic on the environment we have impacted, a highly polluted environment, like London, Poor London, unclean, overpopulated, squashed in, whilst 1.65% (2358 homes) of housing in Southwark lay vacant (https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=b9c617fb-8dc0-4e83-92f5-4f1b640bb2c1/, 2020). Empty houses are like relics, without inhabitants they fall into disrepair.
Figure 1: Photograph by me (Jack Halford) of Anna Reading's 'Feeding Frenzy' 2020 concrete, shells, sand, bitumen, wire, chip forks, gloves, ceramic, glass, board and metal.
Figure 1, Feeding frenzy (Halford, 2020) works really well in this shell, it’s one of the smaller works in this exhibition but to me that gives it more importance, it’s like an urban fossil. Anna said, “I wanted the scene to have a sense of chaotic ecosystem and existence.”-Westall (2020), well it certainly does, it echoes the state of the immediate environment. Art doesn’t help with gentrification though, it facilitates it, it’s a socio-economic painterly paradox. Art critiquing the way things are, will turn into commodities themselves for the rich to trade. Social critic is a trend ongoing; you wear your shit covered glasses and receive shit loads of attention, with the right amount of love and hate you acquire status and wealth, although the art at Five Hides isn’t sensational, it is very organic, it feels site specific, like it could be changed, disposed of, evolved or developed further as it moves from one space to another, it feels right in a public setting and would feel out of place in a residential one, a private one, which makes it like a displaced person, people carry with them scars from experiences, injustice, artworks retain their scars also, their tears or scrapes and light
damage, if an artwork is made to embrace these movements then it can outlive us all. No need for conservators, focusing more on archiving instructions on how to create such works will be more important in the future, like computer code. Ideas can’t be killed, but people can be buried. Physical Evidence will seem abstract to future generations without preserving context. As working-class people are moved out of properties purposely left to rot by their owners, their history maybe lost or cleansed over, land is a palimpsest that is constantly being overwritten by the powerful minority that doesn’t need these huge spaces, these shells need to be occupied by the creatures who lurk in these streets, not the ones who fly by in shiny reds and shop in designer boutiques or grift shop galleries. This feels exciting, a new road is being carved out for the next gen of artists.
Bibliography:
Gbewonyo, E. (2020) 'Next Saturday...' [Instagram].5 October. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CF8_dlTl9N4/ (Accessed: 7 May 2021).
Halford, J (2020) Feeding Frenzy at Five Hides. [digital photograph] (J Halford’s Private collection)
O’Doherty, B. (1999) Inside the White Cube. Canada: University of California Press.
Stavri, N. (2021) Email to Jack Halford, 23 March. (I asked him to send the press release to me, that’s what I’m referencing here)
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=b9c617fb-8dc0-4e83-92f5-4f1b640bb2c1 (2020) (Accessed: 18 May 2021).