Reviewed:
At Home with Art, Draiocht, The Blanchardstown Centre until Sep 1st (01-8852610)
Sodom and Gomorrah, Alessandro Bavari, Storehouse (fifth floor), St James's Gate until Oct 5th (01-4084800)
500 Pounds of Common Earth . . , Roman Vasseur, Project Arts Centre until Sep 22nd (01-6796622)
A great deal of contemporary art is expressly designed for galleries, public spaces and, at a pinch, for the capacious residences of the wealthy. Some years ago Professor Colin Painter had the idea of commissioning works of art amenable to mass production and designed for the "ordinary" home. After a great deal of effort involving the collaboration of the Tate, Homebase and various other interested parties, he succeeded in enlisting the efforts of nine leading British sculptors who, in consultation with nine British households, produced a series of marketable artworks. At Home with Art documents the process of research, design and production and gives us a chance to look at the work itself. It has to be said that the artists, including some of the best known names in the British art world, including Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and David Mach, threw themselves into the project with tremendous energy and commitment. It is one thing to make and exhibit your work in the culturally privileged context of a fine art infrastructure, quite another to immerse yourself in the mundane demands of the wider world, where you really are putting yourself on the line.
The artists had the choice of producing something purely aesthetic or something functional, and Gormley went for function with a vengeance, devising a set of wall hooks. They are simple, elegant forms, "a re-invented nail" as he put it, but, at first glance, they do look as if things might slide off them, particularly if you are not the tidiest person in the world and tend to pile things onto every available hook.
Of all the artists, it seemed as if Mach was most used to working in the public sphere - he generally avoids conventional galleries and museums - yet it sounds as if he had the hardest time. His plans to design rugs based on holiday themes (though they look quite good in the photographs) did not work out well. Still, he came up with what is probably the best, wittiest and most economically functional object: a beach towel. This beach towel bears a representation of a section of beach, in sandy ochres and yellows, adapted from a photograph of "one of the most beautiful beaches in the country", close to where he grew up, in Fife. I'd certainly buy one of his towels, which has to count as success in terms of the project.
Arguably other participants were more adventurous in trying to create objects that take on the challenge of producing fine art objects, yet the results are mixed. Richard Deacon's molten metal forms look like mutant versions of those formations of china flying ducks. Angela Bulloch's tuning fork is somewhat maladroit. Alison Wilding produced a distinctive vessel that is functional and, though not conventionally beautiful, aesthetically pleasing.
Richard Wentworth's dinner plates impressed with gold leafed fingerprints are engaging if whimsical. But then, whimsical sells. There's a touch of whimsy, as well, to Tony Cragg's garden tools equipped with big, unlikely looking handles. Permindar Kaur's shower curtain embellished with stylised stick figures is better in concept than reality. The most beautiful object is perhaps Kapoor's lamp, with its tear-shaped profile, though it does rather resemble an electrostatic stereo speaker. Painter's project is unlikely to engender a revolution in design, but it was a worthy, thought-provoking exercise.
Arriving in the midst of a fair amount of hype, Alessandro Bavari's phantasmagoric digital paintings in Sodom and Gomorrah: a reportage from the lost cities, is a bit of a damp squib. Admittedly, in terms of the installation, Bavari has his work cut out for him. The Storehouse, which has quickly established itself as a fixture on tourist itineraries, is designed to constantly remind you that you are somewhere, that you are having an experience. So the environment is busy busy busy, endlessly diverting. Part of that diversion involves hanging Bavari's paintings behind glass, suspended over a circular void in the midst of a mass of distracting detail.
In a plain, understated room, they might look exotic, but in this frenetic context they almost blend imperceptibly into the background. There are other problems with the work, though. Fellini could teach him a thing or two about depicting decadence. Despite the plethora of hi-tech methods invested in making his images of strangeness, in terms of visual imagination they lag far behind the sheer other-worldly quality of, say, Fellini Satyricon, the product of an earlier technological era. In this area he is up against cinema and television and cannot really compete.
Roman Vasseur's 500 Pounds of Common Earth, 1 Metre Cubed, Transylvania to London, London to Dublin is also a bit of a let-down, at least if you expect anything more substantial than a crate of earth deposited in the middle of a room. Despite the sheer intractable density of this object it's all very much in the head. A big crate with a mass of documentation pinned to the walls relating to how it got there amounts to a fairly cerebral kind of event.
Presumably, the various associations rather than the substance of the thing itself were what tickled the fancy of the various curators who have weighed in behind it. Those associations are, most obviously, Count Dracula's journey to England in Bram Stoker's novel, the Dublin connection with Stoker, and the present-day exodus westwards by economic refugees and asylum seekers from parts of eastern Europe.
Vasseur, perversely, notes that he has tried to avoid reference to certain myths, i.e. the vampire myth. Is this a bit of arch disingenuousness? For of course he has done the opposite. His entire project is clearly based on Stoker's book and, more to the point, references past and present are just about all the exercise has going for it. 500 Pounds . . . is garlanded with a series of ancillary lectures and discussions, and it needs them. Left to its own devices - or, let's say, in the harsh light of day - it would soon fade to nothing.
