contemporary monkey

Ikon Gallery's summer offering of everything

Ikon Gallery violated one of my pet peeves from cultural institutions by organising a retrospective of its own existence. Ordinarily the realm of magazine publishers through distribution of anniversary issues, releasing new content is fairly non-existent. It’s like going to your granny’s 90th birthday where she recounts her memories of every year. In the end, it provides the average citizen a good reason to give it a miss. Especially in the summer.

To be fair, San Francisco’s MOMA is doing the same thing this summer, with the vast space of the museum devoted to its collection. Entitled, “75 Years of Looking Forward”, SF MOMA sneaks around the obvious reference to the past by assuming the collection was made for future generations. A neat trick, but it’s the same result as that of magazine publishers: an easy, and less interesting, content generator.

Usually these things are “activated” as they say in not very good art-speak – produced, as the rest of humanity would say – for revenue producing purposes. If National Geographic magazine, for example, has a 125th anniversary issue, other than the ad sales people who are thrilled beyond belief to have an accelerator to reach their target, it matters much less to readers. Because museums don’t profit much from this type of strategy, my guess is that someone at gallery central had a brilliant idea that didn’t pan out at the last minute, and the historical closet was raided for second-best ideas.

The Ikon summer show, entitled “This Could Happen to You: Ikon in the 1970s”, is Part Two of what probably retroactively became a bigger idea. Part One, as no doubt it will now be called, was a show exhibited in 2004 based on Ikon as a seed of an idea: “Some of the Best Things Happen Accidentally: the Beginning of Ikon”. Extrapolating to the future, my guess is that, sometime around 2015 we’ll see something like “Life Under Thatcher: How the Ikon was Plunged into Darkness”.

When these sorts of things pop up, in whatever medium they exist, my strategy is to blitz through the the event like Hitler in 1930s Poland. It won’t be important to remember the artist, because, like 95% of contemporary artists, most were forgotten in the memories of the public about 5 years after their arrival. Instead, I found two over-arching themes for this show: 1. drugs and 2. stuff.

The Ikon adds too much intellectualism into the drug addled days sandwiched in between the revolutionary 1960s and consumerist 1980s. Describing an animated piece by Ian Emes for Pink Floyd, the exhibition guide reads, “…it chimes in with a kind of abstract painting that came to the fore in the 1970s, hard-edged, flat and large-scaled, essentially formalist in its proposition.” Um OK, but really it was all about the drugs and watching the colours bleed and dance and bounce around our brains. Oh to be young and naive like the kids in the galleries these days.

“Stuff” was represented throughout the exhibition via not painting, but not sculpture either. The result of two floors of exhibits suggest the typical 1970s artist had tired of traditional art media. Canvas that is more sculpture than painting; medical equipment that bears no relation to its title; spray guns loaded with paint in place of brushes; drug-induced images resulting from reflections off a car bonnet; variants of the colour green on horizontal canvases. And of course the Pink Floyd animation, with, oddly, individual cells on display (something you’d more likely see in a Disney/Warner Brothers store of the 1990s).

An Ikon recap for those who have a summer to be using up, and have no time for indoor activity: drugs, stuff, materials, history, remembrance, waiting for part three, and when do the hallucinogenics kick in, are my take on 1970s art in Birmingham. Sounds like the 1970s generally.