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For the uninitiated or non-regular visitor to appreciate Camden Art Centre’s latest artist-selected show – actually an amalgamation of bits of previous shows and suggestions for ones not yet staged at the venue – it also helps to know that the time-travelling curator responsible, Simon Starling, is art’s arch-recycler. He’s transmuted objects, materials, vehicles and ideas from one form to another and he’s now in the business of recreating bygone moments in recent art. His own work is nowhere to be seen, yet is undeniably present in spirit.
For ‘Never the Same River...’ Starling has cherry-picked moments from the building’s 50-year exhibition history, most spectacularly restaging the month-long residency of another salvage expert, Mike Nelson, whose Jules Verne-inspired island paradise-cum-prison oozes the creepiness of a hidey hole only recently abandoned by some twisted mind, despite having first been constructed in 1998. Opposite is a video by Stefan Gec that documents his 1995 performance of falcons being lured into flight around the same, then empty, space – the echoes of the bird’s ringing bells making you aware of the infinite possibilities of the space and the ghosts of works past that it will always contain.
Starling has corralled not just his brethren in the reprocessing game – Des Hughes and Keith Coventry have both recast natural occurrences in bronze just as Henry Moore reprised ancient antecedents in his work – but also those artists who have played with chronology at Camden in meaningful ways. Matthew Buckingham’s short film, ‘False Future’, asks what the medium might have produced had the moving image been harnessed five years earlier, while Douglas Huebler takes a photograph of the exact instant when a woman passes from 1976 into 1977.
In his partial pursuit of the history of the Camden Arts Centre, Starling unearths a little of his own on the way – his great-great uncle designed the Tudor-style Hampstead Central Library as it was first conceived in 1897, a century before the artist himself showed there. More intriguing than what has gone before, however, is what has yet to be. An archival board by Jeremy Millar entitled ‘The Man Who Looked Back’, cheekily hides the most important work here by Francis Bacon, but could perhaps act as a vital guide to the painting. Also notable are young Irish artist (and protégé of one of Starling’s teaching courses) Stephen Lynch’s photos of decommissioned DeLorean parts, encrusted with lichen at the bottom of the sea, and his hand-made versions of its trademark gullwing doors. Why? Well, they’re a cracking joke on ‘Back to the Future’ and so touchstones for this entire, self-referential hall of distorted mirrors.
It could be argued that ‘Never the Same River...’ is often prone to happenstance and awkward juxtaposition while never quite doing justice to the Centre’s undoubtedly rich back catalogue. What’s more is that the show can seem like hard work to get into for other reasons. I, for one, saw very few of these pieces first time around, so to me they can only ever exist here and now, not as objects returning after years spent in storeroom limbo or in orbit around the art world. However, persistence is here rewarded with looking glass-like glimpses into an alternate viewing reality and time’s perpetually shifting sands.