Visual art review: MAtthew Darbyshire: T Rooms, Tramway, Glasgow

SOMETIMES contemporary art gets a bit dreary. And sometimes it gets really dreary. And sometimes it gets the kind of dreary that makes you want to scream and kick it over. And then you remember you’re a responsible adult, and a newspaper journalist, and not meant to do that kind of thing.

I first saw Matthew Darbyshire’s new exhibition T Rooms at Tramway after a meeting with a friend. Tell me what you think, he said. I sent him a text: “words cannot describe how much I dislike this show”. And he texted back promptly: “oh I think they can”. And then my editor emailed. And so they must.

T Rooms, a pun, one must assume, on the ubiquitous Charles Rennie Mackintosh industry, takes the vast spaces of Glasgow’s Tramway and carves it up under the conceit that the space has been sold for development and is currently under a “building wrap”, the kind of banner used to cover construction or undeveloped sites before completion.

The wrap depicts a soulless village development, with elements of suburban housing, urban flats and light industrial structures. There are down pipes and ventilation shuttering. There are big industrial arches, redeveloped as shop units. All are decked out in the bright hues used on urban streetscapes during development. The architectural style is so-called developers’ vernacular: bland, cheap and easily reproduced with a (site-specific) dollop of pseudo-Mackintosh detailing.

Within this overwhelming structure are a series of mini-collaborations: a film also entitled T Rooms, made with the writer and architectural polemicist Owen Hatherley; a series of Untitled Photograms with Jacob Farrell; and a wall-mounted installation, Ways Of Sitting, consisting of MDF shelving holding consumer objects, from watering cans to footstools themed around elephants with apparently satirical quotes by Scott King.

Finally, tucked in the corner, is a smoking shelter, which, with its Mackintosh references and harled render, evokes the language of street furniture and the way that Glasgow University’s Mackintosh Museum is a fake encased in concrete after Mackintosh’s original flat was torn down.

Darbyshire, originally from Cambridge, is a London artist in his mid-thirties. He shows with Herald Street, a hip and reputable commercial gallery, teaches part-time in a decent art school and has graduated through a number of important recent surveys like the ICA’s Nought to Sixty series of short solo presentations and the British Art Show. Indeed he last showed at Tramway as part of the latter’s tour.

In recent works he has produced medium-scale installations packed to the gunnels with the bright objects you might find in Ikea or Dwell, high street examples of mid-century modern, smattered with kitsch, dayglo Buddhas and eastern touches. They draw on the urban developer’s equivalent of the show home, and on the way that corporations from burger bars to mobile phone stores use colour and design.

Quite where Darbyshire’s art actually stands has always seemed unclear to me; at times he seems an arch moraliser on the Ruskin model, at times a weary shrugging observer. It can be hard to tell. All of us struggle to stand outside the all-enveloping miasma of consumer capitalism. And, if not all of us are aspirational loft-livers, all of us have been affected by the disasters of housing policy and mortgage lending. Sometimes I think he protests just a little too much: on the face of it, he certainly spends much more time in Ikea and Next interiors on a professional basis than most of us spend in a lifetime.

The film T Rooms is indicative of these problems. Hatherley is a fantastic public speaker, a brilliant polemicist, whose critique of our undoubted failures in social housing, town planning and urban development is compelling. In the film his voiceover apes both the soothing tones of a developer’s sales video and the patronising distance of a third-rate sociologist. The result is a mumbling, inaudible disgrace, a whispering down to its audience. And compared with an artwork like Graham Fagen’s Nothank, an examination of the failings of the New Town phenomenon in Irvine, it is hollow, disconnected and lightweight.

There is also much confusion about T Rooms’ target. It seems to be some of the developments in Tramway’s neighbourhood. The adjacent Utopia development on Barrland Street is actually quite liked by some of those who live there, but the terrible Plaza at Eglinton Toll has been a Carbuncle award-winning disaster. Where in Glasgow you do find Mockintosh, it tends to be in the kind of social housing development, or public/private partnership that actually radically improves people’s lives.

The kind of building that young planning radicals love is a mixed blessing. Nearby Govanhill, for example, has a fantastic tenement streetscape, but the social conditions, lack of investment and history of owner neglect mean that local campaigners are still fighting against what have long been recognised as shockingly anomalous slum conditions.

There’s mileage in all this kind of thing of course. So much mileage, for example, that the Glasgow artist Rhona Warwick made an artwork about the Utopia development a few years ago: a text and performance based on a real telephone conversation about building specs with the developer, in which the artist’s escalating desires for her own mini utopia get out of control.

And the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie took her own fight against Mockintosh so seriously that she retrained in applied arts and is heavily involved in the crossover between fine art and design.

Darbyshire’s T Rooms has no sense of that kind of personal investment, or proximity to these issues, no real sense of the confrontational in its easy targets, nor does it appear informed or analytical in the local context.

It is as cold and bland and off the peg as the cityscapes and streetscapes it purports to pastiche. If its critique is actually aimed at the developers and corporations who exploit both our fundamental needs and our aspirational follies, T Rooms never addresses them directly from its safe little haven in the gallery. «

• Until 11 March. www.tramway.org