Mister Trippy

The Whitechapel Gallery re-opened this month and what a disaster its expansion turns out to be. The new spaces, created from the acquisition of the old library next door, are poky. The circulation is appalling, I kept having to stop because other people were in my way, and no doubt they felt I was in their way too. There are endless heavy doors throughout, presumably to reduce fire risks but these ugly items induce feelings of claustrophobia. There are also a lot of stairs and level changes which add to the cluttered and alienating atmosphere. On the plus side, the light is good throughout the expanded gallery, but the overall effect is still extremely depressing. Obviously any conversion is going to be a compromise, and so losses and gains must be weighed up, but here as soon as you go inside you can see the losses heavily outweigh the gains. The innate imbalance between these two knocked together buildings is badly compounded by the unsympathetic programming and piss-poor curation that blights the re-launch of the gallery.

Having doubled its exhibition space, you’d have thought the Whitechapel could put on a decent Isa Genzken retrospective. But rather than utilising the new spaces, Genzken’s Open, Sesame! is crammed into the old galleries. Worse still, false – and I trust temporary – walls have been added, resulting in the old galleries feeling nearly as poky and cramped as the new spaces. Far too much work by Genzken has been rammed into the space allocated to it and as a consequence, it looks like absolute shit. Given room to breath, some of Genzken’s output strikes me as at least potentially interesting, but you can’t judge it properly when it has been shoe-horned into less than half the space it requires.

The new space the Genzken show might have been spread across has been allocated to less worthwhile projects, such as an incoherent display called Passports: Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection. The earliest work in Passports dates from 1914 and the most recent from 2001, as a result it comes across as a completely random exercise in cod curation. That said, the selector Michael Graig-Martin clearly has an agenda since he not only includes his own work but also that of the more famous alumni from his period of tenure at Goldsmiths College in New Cross.

Craig-Martin strikes me as akin to Narcissus if he’d been condemned to using only mud baths, rather than washing in clear water, i.e. an extremely dull reflection of more general art world nepotism. Goshka Macuga’s Bloomberg Commission in another of the new galleries is considerably more irritating than Craig-Martin’s flop precisely because what could have been an exciting and informative piece of local history suffers at the hands of an artist too lazy to undertake proper research. The subject of Macuga’s installation is the display of Picasso’s Guernica at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1939. A full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s painting depicting the most infamous fascist atrocity of the Spanish Civil War thus becomes the centre-piece of Macuga’s botched attempt at local history. For me the tapestry by Jacqueline de la Baume Durrbach is less interesting than many of the documents on show in the room. The history of Picasso’s painting and the politics surrounding its display are fascinating. Unfortunately, Macuga has made no attempt to properly order the few items she’s gathered in relation to this, the overwhelming bulk of which appear to come from either the Whitechapel archives or the anarchist bookshop located next to the gallery.

Given the complexity of the material Macuga has failed to engage with, careful selection and proper interpretative texts were required if she’d wanted to produce a successful installation. That said, in order for useful interpretation to take place, the items on display first require proper identification. When I went there was, for example, a photograph of a protest in London labelled as dating from 1938. A cursory glance at this shows the demonstrators to be wearing flares and other fashions associated with the early to mid-1970s. They are holding banners to protest against Franco’s treatment of the Carabanchel 10. Carabanchel Prison was built between 1940 and 1944 by political prisoners and it became perhaps the most notorious symbol of Franco’s repressive fascist regime in Spain. The prison wasn’t even operational until 6 years after the incorrect date Macuga provides for this photograph. A quick web search led me to the Steve Nelson papers held by New York University Library, where dated Carabanchel 10 items are listed as being from the 1973-75 period. However, you don’t need to do a web search to see that the dating of the photograph is wrong, this is obvious just by looking at it.

Likewise, a series of 10 pre-war pamphlets on producing agit-prop art materials are displayed, numbered consecutively 1 to 9, and then 11. There is no explanation as to why pamphlet 10 was not displayed, nor any indication as to whether 11 was the last in the series or not. There was also a display of contemporary agit-prop material leading up to the anti-G20 protests in London earlier this month, all provided by Freedom Bookshop. Anarchists only make up a tiny minority of anti-capitalist protesters but if you go to the anarchist bookshop sited next door to the Whitechapel Gallery and ask them for anti-G20 material they aren’t going to provide a representational sample. So what we get is solely anarchist propaganda against G20. In this way, Macuga manages to completely misrepresent anti-capitalist activity as being essentially anarchist in character. I would imagine her sponsor Bloomberg are very happy that the broad movement opposed to the financial system from which it profits is thereby reduced in this particular representation to one of its more marginal factions.

Macuga has a reputation as a wily networker, and she appears to me typical of many contemporary career artists who treat their CV and professional contacts as far more significant than the slight works they produce to facilitate their occupation of elevated positions within the cultural world. Likewise, Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick has more of a reputation as a networker and deal clincher than an exhibition maker.  That is not to say Blazwick has not curated numerous shows, but on the whole they have not been particularly memorable. She is, however, highly regarded as a university level teacher specialising in areas such as art advocacy, that is explaining and metaphorically selling contemporary visual culture to those unfamiliar with it. What Blazwick has done with the Whitechapel expansion reflects more general trends in culture, and is very much in keeping with the activities of her predecessor at this institution Nicholas Serota, who in more recent years has overseen the re-branding of The Tate. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that walking around the expanded Whitechapel left me with the impression that Blazwick had paid far more attention to sponsorship and revenue streams than aesthetic issues. As director that’s her job, and it keeps her in a job, that’s the way commodified culture works.

Given the many important shows the Whitechapel has hosted in the past – including not only Picasso’s Guernica but also This Is Tomorrow in 1956 and the first really seminal post-war exhibition of photography in London, Ida Kar’s 1960 solo show – it is pitiful to see the gallery reduced to such a sorry state after its thirteen million pound refurbishment. But then capitalism and capitalist culture can only go backwards, they have no where else to go.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!