East End Academy at the Whitechapel

And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. [Eliot, The Wasteland]

The East End Academy at the Whitechapel is like a mutant bio-explosion after the fallout: lots of remnants and dead ends but quite vigorous, so worth seeing. The reviews... Guardian: E is for Art, Observer: Go east, young man, and Waldemar Januszczak in The Times: it does have street cred:

The art of the East End has a particular feel to it. It favours the transformation of cheap materials, it pulses to the rhythms of a hedonistic urban life, it’s lippy, it’s jokey and it seems determined to whistle while the world burns. If art could run, this stuff would scarper at top speed from the doors of any academy. If I had to force some respectability onto it by calling it something, I’d call it London Dada.

Louise Brierley and David Harrison both go for an unheimlich, fall-of-society feel in their paintings. Januszczak again: "The imagery has a post-nuclear tristesse to it, as if this were what we humans had mutated into". Harrison's feathers-and-sellotape dove impaled on anti-pigeon spikes is the best of his sellotape-and-wire-and-drawing sculptures. More creatures-of-flight in trouble: Zatorski and Zatorski's The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp is a simple emotional trick - a Philip Glass-soundtracked video of a wasp on its back, laid on an image of flowers (looking like dayglo skulls), twitching as its clock counts down. Its abdomen telescopes, and you can't help reading it as laboured breathing. The terminal hour, though we're with Waldemar - perhaps the terminal 10 minutes would have sufficed. Not subtle or complex, but sad.

Emer O'Brien's photos, Contemporary Amnesia (2004), use deserted lidos, the rusting baskets once used in their changing rooms, a blinkered donkey, an abandoned playground, and an obliterated dog's carcass as an obvious memento mori of our culture's need to move forward at speed, and forget our leavings. Other remains: Christoper Stewart's shadowy C-type of a ramshackle antenna as might be cobbled together by a community trying to retain arcane and poorly-understood technology.

Caroline McCarthy's Promise (2003) has tv-dinner packaging placed in flower pots under halogens. The plants on the packaging lids are cut out and stood up. It's neat, but you want to see more: Where are the plastic food trays themselves? Are the original meals in them, bloating as mould and bacteria take hold? If only the trays had been in situ, full of earth and compost, with a tiny irrigation system made from bendy Ribena drinking straws and cappuccino stirrers, running off a motor driven by loyalty card points...

Peter Peri's drawings are the pick of the show. He builds up shapes, images, blocks and structures with hair-thin and hair-like lines. The delicacy of the drawings is reminiscent of the precision work of process-artist Jonathan Callan and cartographer-artist Jason Wallis-Johnson, but Peri's works feel more tangibly thing-ful than representations of things, so instead of seeing pencil linework you experience delicate fibres, XXXSmall vesicles, ephemeral feelers and micro-scale threads.

The drawings here (Decoy, Sub and Supplement, all 2004) are about growth and accumulation, though - if memory serves - Carl Freedman had a Peri drawing at the Oct 2003 Frieze show which spoke of subtraction: a block worn down by time and the elements. This growth is simultaneously wildly organic and carefully artificial: Sub looks like a Superstudio proposal whose anti-graffiti paint has evolved out of control, spawning tendrils like a seaweedy aircraft carrier. But it also seems architected, the result of a painstaking accretion of filaments, like nest building. Growth/manufacture. Machines for generating interpretations with the property of distraction. Affordable. Beautifully terse-eloquent.

East End Academy pictures here and here.

The next show at the Whitechapel will be Paul Noble's Nobson Newtown drawings (and other work), in Sept-Nov 2004. His Unified Nobson Newtown map is rather good.

Comments

[peter peri]

nice review,any time rod would like to see more work at the studio he'd be very welcome.

[rodcorp]

Peter Peri at Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2000:
http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/artist_single.php?aid=73

What a great year. Marta Marce and Andrew Mania as well:
http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/artist_list.php?app_year=2000