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Review May 27 2009 « | »
Funhouse at the Hayward Gallery As I enter the Hayward Gallery's project space, Matthew Derbyshire's new installation has me momentarily discombobulated. In fact, I......

Emma Bennett

As I enter the Hayward Gallery's project space, Matthew Derbyshire's new installation has me momentarily discombobulated. In fact, I wonder if I have stumbled into the wrong part of the building. Because, the thing is, it doesn't look or feel like art, just an uncannily familiar array of those 'visitor friendly' furnishings one might chance upon in any number of recently jazzed-up arts centres.

There's a tiny table decked by very snazzy little chairs: a child's conference suite above which LCD screens flicker in cyan, magenta, purple and neon green. There are posters and banners on the walls, trendy trainers on the skate-ramp style display units. There's a madcap wobbly handrail which leads from nowhere, to nowhere. And it's all set on top of one of those shiny, clattery aluminium floors, the kind which I associate with spindly chrome chair-legs scraping backward in shit café bars, new-build bistros. Grating it certainly is.

Derbyshire has described his project as "a dysfunctional funhouse": a space in which physical participation, play, would seem to be invited, expected even, but where any sort of tangible engagement remains impossible. "Fun" is endlessly referenced here, in the numerous architectural and design motifs on view, each of which has been appropriated from a real-life chunk of post-millennial Britain - from the braying bull which sits at the heart of Birmingham's Millennium Point complex, via an oversized ear from the Orange shop in Glasgow, to the silhouetted figures which leap skywards, arms outstretched on banners for Tower Hamlets' "Time for Health" campaign.

As a viewing experience it's brash and vacuous, alienating and disingenuously odd. Lonely. And yes, it doesn't look or feel like art. Indeed, the somewhat depressing realisation which dawns as I wander distractedly about this over-lit, over-wrought space: in many ways, this feels more like life. Life, that is, in the urban public spaces of Britain, circa 2009.

And this is exactly Derbyshire's point. By pulling together examples from across the public and private sectors - retail design, financial services, cultural regeneration projects, healthcare provision - he not only points to the ubiquity of this stuff, but also its unnerving sameness. This design language may rehearse the rhetoric of diversity, inclusiveness and choice, but Derbyshire's recontextualisation of its key figures shows it to be pitifully wide of the mark: all slick rainbow jollity, and dad-at-the-party attempts at urban streetwear. "Individuality" rebranded as a pair of wacky wellies.

This installation could be seen as one great cynical quotation, an artistic gesture wreathed in sarcasm, flanked by huge inverted commas. An "isn't this fun?" with the not-so-tacit subtext of "no it isn't". But there we go. Life in the noughties. Anyone for Wagamama?

Funhouse is at Hayward Gallery's project space until 12 July, Admission Free, and their website is {here}.

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