Visual art review: Matthew Darbyshire: T Rooms | Gordon Schmidt: The Soul Is Easier To Know Than The Body

By SUSAN MANSFIELD
Published on Thursday 16 February 2012 00:00

MASS-produced art is a legitimate target, but Matthew Darbyshire’s mockery ends up missing the mark

Tramway’s main exhibition space is a veritable aircraft hangar, and the shows which work best in it tend to be those which take on its scale: Martin Boyce’s Our Love is Like the Flowers… turned it into a suburban park at night; Henry VIII’s Wives built a 1:1 replica of Skara Brae inside it; Christophe Buchel used shipping containers to transform it into a multilevel prison/aircraft crash investigation site.

Matthew Darbyshire creates within it a kind of gated village, which then becomes a framework in which to place other works of art made with collaborators Owen Hatherley, Jacob Farrel, Scott King and Rupert Ackroyd. The viewer wanders along “streets” created by trompe l’oeil canvas banners which, well made as they are, also serve to accentuate the falseness of it all.

Darbyshire’s work is about the way we live now, particularly the way in which design is constantly copied, reinvented and kitsched-up to produce a meaningless postmodern melange. While previous works – such as his installation for British Arts Show 7 – have focused on furniture and consumer goods, the sheer size of Tramway enables him to create his largest show to date and turn his attention to the outdoor environment.

He sets out his subject in the first piece of work, a 25-minute film written and voiced by architectural critic Owen Hatherley. The “T-Rooms” of the title are the poky, low-budget newbuilds which swell the edges of towns and cities and spring up overnight in “regeneration areas” where old council housing (some of it better quality and more spacious) has been demolished. “This here is what people want,” drones Hatherley, as the camera slowly pans over characterless windows, pitched gables and balconies too small to stand on. “It’s what we all want.”

T-Rooms, he says, manage to be “homely and sterile… mass-produced and individualist, ultra-modern and traditional”. The drive to create an identity for your home is tempered by the sense that too much of this would somehow be offensive to the neighbourhood. What we have instead is faux-regionalism: oast-house features in Kent, mock Tudor in the Cotswolds, and in Glasgow, design features derived from Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

In the West of Scotland, we’ve long been familiar with “Mockintosh”, elements of design borrowed from Glasgow School of Art, or the Willow Tea Rooms, and bowdlerised into a kind of design language which can be applied to everything from glassware to blocks of flats. Here, Darbyshire deals it out in spades: every street lamp, window or wall in his virtual village has a rendering of it, but standardised, mass-produced and gaudy in a way that Mackintosh never intended.

Another “splinter project” – a smokers’ shelter in the Mockintosh style made with Rupert Ackroyd – echoes some of Glasgow’s street furniture. Three photograms, made with Jacob Farrel, reference the decorative shop fronts or “virtual shops” adopted to cheer up recession-hit high streets. Their shining, sumptuous colours attract without telling us exactly what they are attracting us to, and that, perhaps, is the point. It’s consumerism creating a cover for itself, a cheerful illusion to hide the fact that the real thing is no longer working.

Ways of Sitting, part of an ongoing collaboration with Scott King, may be the most interesting work here. King’s satirical quotes – which spare no-one, from Anthony Gormley to Jamie Oliver – are juxtaposed with objects mirroring style magazine layouts on Ikea-esque shelving. Each object relates to the elephant form, from a pink velvet statue of Ganesha to a footstool made from a real elephant’s foot, a relic of colonialism which intrigues and repels in equal measure. This is the territory where Darbyshire is most comfortable, the way objects which once had meaning are reduced into a mishmash of style rather than content (and often very little of either). But, you might just overhear the voice of Hatherley saying: “This here is what people want… it’s what we all want.”

Darbyshire is clearly driving at something, and it’s something more than elitism. Yes, objects created by top-grade designers get copied and end up in the pound store, but it’s hardly a crime to take what masquerades as good taste and make it affordable. There is something uncomfortably voyeuristic about his virtual Mockintosh village: who are we, the gallery-going elite, dwellers in tenements and town-houses, to sneer at others for buying themselves a better standard of living?

So if T-Rooms is going to work as an artistic statement, it must do more than this. Perhaps, by looking at housing and design, Darbyshire can hold a mirror up to the darker forces in society: how property developers sell the dream of home-ownership, then feed that desire with substandard dwellings; how, in service of the same dream, a generation were sold mortgages they would never afford, in order to line the pockets of builders and bankers.

Perhaps this is why Darbyshire’s suburban cul-de-sacs are so eerily quiet, why they feel not only empty but devoid of life. His houses may have air conditioning vents and security lights, but there is no evident relationship of inside to outside. In fact, there might not be an inside at all, just a vacant space on the other side of the banner. His homes are not just a dream, they are an illusion, a breath of wind would blow them all away.

Meanwhile, Gordon Schmidt, a young Canadian-born, Glasgow-based artist is interested in revisiting articles of culture in a very different way. He takes existing works – a book, a film, a painting – and re-presents them in new ways. Here, his subject is a 1964 made-for-television dramatisation of Sartre’s Huis Clos.

Splitting the action between three projection screens echoes the three characters in the drama, and the way the film takes on a third dimension, albeit within a tight, enclosed space also mirrors the dramatic action. It’s unsettling and clever, though perhaps not much more so than the original. In “re-presenting” cultural material, it helps if you choose work which is as strong as this in its original form.

Matthew Darbyshire: T Rooms

Rating: ***

Gordon Schmidt: The Soul Is Easier To Know Than The Body

Rating: ***

TRAMWAY, GLASGOW

• Matthew Darbyshire until 11 March; Gordon Schmidt until 26 February.

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.