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Review Dec 18 2009 « | »
The All of Everything at The Arts Gallery Mike Ballard's all wall installation that marks the end of the Arts Gallery on Davies Street

Louisa Elderton

We are face to face with 'the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning'. The viewer is encircled by this phrase as they walk through the final exhibition at the Arts Gallery in Mayfair; visually, it is inscribed on the floor and forms the central heart from which the whole installation emanates, whilst aurally it bellows out of hidden speakers to fill the space. Fittingly entitled The All of Everything, Mike Ballard's large scale installation encompasses the entirety of the gallery, engulfing walls, floor, pillars and ceiling, and saturating them in monochrome shapes and images. Paint, collage and film combine to create an atmospheric sci-fi environment. The exhibition is a melting pot for Ballard's numerous influences, both cultural and art-historical which include: Pop Art, the Italian Renaissance, 80's graffiti, comic book art, ancient Egyptian art and the music and cosmic philosophy of Sun Ra. These influences are strikingly tangible and fuse to conjure an overall effect that is reminiscent of Keith Haring's New York Pop Shop - currently recreated in Tate Modern's Pop Life: Art in a Material World. Two film works inject dynamism and are nestled in the eyes of a giant pharaoh; psychedelic colours contrast with the surrounding black and white space and quick edits posit a flickering projection that hypnotises the viewer. Its pupils simultaneously dilate and explode, constrict and implode with pulsating imagery. The New York subway train that thunders out from the ceiling above, threatening to flatten smiling cherubs and devour the viewer, finds its double in this film and this uncanny sense of déjà vu is unsettling. Ideas of space and time travel are prevalent and extend to the silkscreen prints and lightbox works displayed in the reception area, with titles such as Astro Traveller 1 and Galaxy Rays reflecting stellar imagery - although these are hung too high up the wall making close examination difficult. The subtitle of the exhibition reads Art will eat itself. This can be interpreted in differing ways: art feeds off historic influence to remain fuelled and energised on a continuous trajectory; art (or possibly the art market?) will devour itself and ultimately self-destruct. There is certainly something apocalyptic about the show - destruction and death are themes that pervade. An anarchic version of Michelangelo's omnipotent Creation hand releases explosive lighting bolts; the grim reaper hovers on one wall, his face a reflective void. These seem to allude to the looming demolition of the Arts Gallery, which is being levelled to make way for Crossrail after ten years of showing work by emerging artists. Ballard has 'selected guardians for the gallery as it goes to the other side of time', into another realm beyond the physical, as the trains that Ballard introduces become real and plough through the memories that were created by this space. The All of Everything is showing until the demolition of the Arts Gallery in 2010 at 65 Davies Street, W1K 5DA. Open Monday - Friday 10am - 6pm, Saturday 11am - 4pm. Nearest Tube Bond Street. Admission free.

Anja Savic

If I had 2,146 words I would without the slightest of inhibitions, copy and paste Part I of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and call it my review. For in the moments when I blotted out the sounds of "The Last Broadcaster" which were emanating from the kaleidoscopic eye sockets of the skeletal sphinx, it were the words of this epic poem that syncopatedly beboped through my mind:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall."

From within this gallery, we too, may listen to "Terror through the wall," and we surely will hear it, in the impending cadence of the gallery's destruction. As I glance at the date of the opening, 09/12/09, I think, what more fitting way to bid adieu to the decade that began with the big bang of the twin towers, from which further destruction seemingly became the only possible digestif du jour, epitomized by Ballard's graffitied reconfiguration of the Cartesian cogito to read "I bomb therefore I am." (Again, Ginsberg inevitably comes to mind, and his "Hum Bomb,"-"Whom bomb? We bomb them!...Who bomb? You bomb you!...What do we do? Who do we bomb?..."Whom bomb? We bomb you!")

How coincidental, how fateful is it, that not only the winner, but the runner-up of this year's Turner Prize, Richard Wright and Roger Hiorns (announced only two days prior) were both nominated for works whose fate is to be destroyed? Unlike the old masters of Velázquez, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, who were commissioned to fill monumental, ethereal and seemingly eternal spaces such as the Escorial, the Louvre, St Peter's, the artists of today create works as destined as our age's edifices seems to be-for ruin.

To borrow from Derrida's love of ruin, will our experience of art become something "precarious in its fragility," that we can only love as "mortal, through its birth and its death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, of [our] own-which it already is or already prefigures?" Are the hollow eyes of that skeletal sphinx but the stygian mirror of our society?

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