THis month Etic Lab's @alien_ontology was excited to perform with 0(rphan)d(rift>) as part of amazing line-up @CGP_London with #PlastiqueFantastique and @benedictdrew. #SkeenNight
Standing at the corner of a slightly scruffy south London park, the Cabinet gallery cuts quite a profile. It is a mini-art tower on the site of what was in its 18th-century heyday a lavish, high-tech and romantic pleasure garden and, arguably, the site of Britain’s first public art gallery.
Cabinet was for the past 20 years run from various London sites before gallery directors Martin McGeown and Andrew Wheatley, together with Charles Asprey, scion of the Bond Street jewellers, commissioned Trevor Horne Architects to create a new base. Its launch exhibition, a one-man show of the gallery’s longstanding artist Jim Nutt, opened on Friday.
For believers in psychogeography, this might be an ideal spot for the new venture. The idea that the weight of the past might influence the way the present unfolds seems to manifest itself here. A garden of earthly delights was replaced by Victorian terraces, which were then condemned as a slum and the land returned to parkland before its current revival.
For two centuries from 1660 to 1859, Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, was the capital’s pleasure machine. It was the birthplace of mass entertainment and catering; it housed the city’s first purpose-built pavilion for the performance of music.
For the spectacles staged here, artists painted huge canvases, part-theatrical backdrop, part-public display, of battles or romantic scenes, moralising tableaux as mise-en-scène for the “supper-boxes” which were often themselves the settings for less moral scenes.
Spring Gardens, as the four-acre site was also known, was a landscape of leisure where courtiers, courtesans, carters and carousers mingled. James Boswell, in his 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson, described it like this: “Vauxhall Gardens is peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation; there being a mixture of curious show — gay exhibition, musick, vocal and instrumental . . . for all of which only a shilling is paid; and . . . good eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale.”
...The gallery is a surprising, 12-sided block of brick which mixes the material language of the railway arches, postwar council estates and industrial archaeology which define the streets of Vauxhall to create a playful memory of the architecture of entertainment.
Its multi-faceted form is intended to evoke the polygonal gothic-style “orchestra”, the elaborate bandstand that once stood at the centre of the gardens. But its complex, irregular form is also a clear response to the dominance of the “white cube” (christened by Brian O’Doherty). This near-inevitable minimalist container for modern art has seen something like an abdication of architecture from art, an admission of defeat for design in the face of the inevitability of a globalised neutral language.
But this is an attempt to create something more unexpected and complex. It is also part of a conscious effort to reinvigorate the edge of the park as a place of culture and entertainment. It joins an ecosystem of galleries that includes Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery (in another superb brick building).
Asprey, McGeown and Wheatley chose in Trevor Horne Architects a relatively quiet practice (both aesthetically and in terms of presence) but one that has made a significant impact on the London art scene. Horne’s contributions have included Victoria Miro’s impressive east London gallery, the very fine ICA space and a studio for Michael Craig-Martin.
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MercurysBall2 ago
Etic Lab on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/eticlabuk/status/1065258031020150784
0(rphan)d(rift>) http://www.orphandriftarchive.com/
Lots of demon talk http://www.orphandriftarchive.com/becoming-cyberpositive/orisa-bleed/
Avatar Tools for Engineering Demon Convergence in a Space :: 1999 http://www.orphandriftarchive.com/becoming-cyberpositive/syzygy/avatar-tools-for-engineering-demon-convergence-in-a-space/
Yeah, nothing to see here folks...
MercurysBall2 ago
Standing at the corner of a slightly scruffy south London park, the Cabinet gallery cuts quite a profile. It is a mini-art tower on the site of what was in its 18th-century heyday a lavish, high-tech and romantic pleasure garden and, arguably, the site of Britain’s first public art gallery.
For believers in psychogeography, this might be an ideal spot for the new venture. The idea that the weight of the past might influence the way the present unfolds seems to manifest itself here. A garden of earthly delights was replaced by Victorian terraces, which were then condemned as a slum and the land returned to parkland before its current revival.
For two centuries from 1660 to 1859, Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, was the capital’s pleasure machine. It was the birthplace of mass entertainment and catering; it housed the city’s first purpose-built pavilion for the performance of music.
For the spectacles staged here, artists painted huge canvases, part-theatrical backdrop, part-public display, of battles or romantic scenes, moralising tableaux as mise-en-scène for the “supper-boxes” which were often themselves the settings for less moral scenes.
...The gallery is a surprising, 12-sided block of brick which mixes the material language of the railway arches, postwar council estates and industrial archaeology which define the streets of Vauxhall to create a playful memory of the architecture of entertainment.
Asprey, McGeown and Wheatley chose in Trevor Horne Architects a relatively quiet practice (both aesthetically and in terms of presence) but one that has made a significant impact on the London art scene. Horne’s contributions have included Victoria Miro’s impressive east London gallery, the very fine ICA space and a studio for Michael Craig-Martin.