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Review Feb 12 2010 « | »
Tim Etchells at Gasworks Tim Etchells solo show including UK debuts of Art Flavours and City Changes at Gasworks

Rob Gallagher

Can ice cream be used to metaphorise human subjectivity? That was the question Craig David set out to answer on his 2002 UK top 10 single 'What's Your Flava?'. Coincidentally or not, it's also one of the questions posed by Tim Etchells' 2008 piece Art Flavours.

Shown here alongside the similarly witty, similarly word-oriented City Changes (also a novelist, essayist and playwright, Etchells is nothing if not a verbophile) Art Flavours saw the artist commission ice cream maker Osvaldo Castellari to produce four gelato flavours inspired by staple terms of art discourse: body, archive, memory and spectacle.

A video shows Castellari being walking through the themes by critic and curator Roberto Pinto, the gelaterist becoming ever more anxious and incredulous as the gallerist outlines dominant currents in contemporary artistic practice, switching, with the same offhand eloquence, from a discussion of Situationist detournement to a potted history of the Rwandan genocide.

A kind of You've Been Framed vibe pervades proceedings; both men seem somewhat wary of the camera, as if worried they're the butt of a cruel joke. And, to an extent, they are: Etchells is asking whether we should take critical discourse seriously, why art now seems suspicious or ridiculous to many people, whether attempts to broaden its public appeal can ever amount to more than sugar coating and spoon feeding.

Maybe the key point in the conversation comes when Pinto attempts to reassure Castellari that he'll be okay because he knows how to do something - a fact which, Pinto seems to be implying, distinguishes him from the majority of artists and cultural critics.

This issue of what it is artists actually do - or used to do - is central to the piece. Didn't making art used to be like making ice cream - a skilled and creative process of production aimed at bringing people sensory pleasure? Juxtaposing shots of Castellari mixing up gelato in brushed steel vats and Pinto cooking up critical propositions on his brushed steel Macbook, Etchells invites an interrogation of what 'doing' means.

Ultimately, though, the piece is optimistic in tone; the film finishes with Castellari - initially so daunted by the brief that he visibly begins to sweat - proudly presenting the fruits of his labours, reconciled (however temporarily) to the idea that art has a place in the 'real' world.

Ausra Linkeviciute

Tim Etchells himself has described his art practice as a time and space in which something happens - where a staged or implied event is in the process of unfolding in front of the viewer. Art Flavours - one of the two pieces presented at Gasworks as part of his first solo exhibition in a public London gallery - perfectly accentuates this central concept of Etchell's work.

The video presents an encounter between an art critic/curator Roberto Pinto and a gelato specialist Osvaldo Castellari, where the latter is given a task of translating four key contemporary art concepts (memory, body, archive and spectacle) into ice cream flavours. According to the artist, the work is intended to play with the im/possiblity of translating the elitist language of art criticism into 'new edibles for the public', but doing so it also raises other important issues.

Apart from giving the spectator an accessible lesson in art appreciation the work draws attention to the notion of art as a multi-sensory experience. Primarily seen, artworks can also be heard, felt, sometimes smelled and very rarely tasted. You find yourself yearning to try this ice -cream, this artwork. Would it taste different? Would it taste of 'memory' or just same old raspberry?

And where in this case is the art - work itself? Is it the video - the documentation of an event we are watching, the conducted experiment or maybe the ice-cream? The artist is equally difficult to pin down, as the work appears more of a collaboration between Tim Etchells, the critic and the ice-cream maker where each plays an essential role in producing the work.

Somewhat less engaging City changes presents 20 framed inkjet prints of the same text altered 20 times and rendering each change visible with a differently coloured font. Starting from a very boring place where nothing ever changes and where life is 'like watching paint dry' we travel back and forth through cities experiencing different levels of change, stability, order and chaos.

Each story reflects on the same urban structures - governments, police, scientists and also the seasons, childhood, friendships and migrating birds. The work is like a game teasing the viewer with an imposed need to contrast and compare, to take in all manipulations at once, to comprehend the full picture. It's easy to find yourself contemplating a personal favourite city - or a favourite version of the same city - real or imaginary.

Tim Etchells solo exhibition is showing at Gasworks until 28th March 2010. For more information see their website here.

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