Art

Five excellent artists are on display at Hats Plus. I urge you to see them in this King’s Cross artist’s studio with its rickety stairs and Jack-the-Ripper period wall-cracks. Dan Mitchell has been rustling up the most sophisticated Photoshop pictures since Photoshop was invented, labouring over his web-harvested material and its presentation until a technically and philosophically airtight piece is produced. His subject matter has always been ‘shocking’ but that’s because you haven’t learned anything and still need to be shocked.

John Cussans has been around for ages, trying to tease you into a state of awareness and forward-thinking about art. In this show he has created a nasty little prison of love imagery in the basement kitchen section, with his painting of a murdered female face opposite a found eighteenth century beau whose expression says, vainly, ‘If only I could have saved her’, and a projected Marlene Dietrich on the third wall. Downstairs plays the most enjoyable piece; a film by Antoine Catalla comprising a looped section of contemporary porn. The female protagonist looks hysterically into the camera from her position astride the unseen other party. Accompanied by an unpleasant, repetitive soundtrack, her face melts digitally. It doesn’t have to mean anything because it looks really good.

The show as a whole is well-meaning but about ten years too late. It is no longer viable to bask petulantly in the ‘trauma’ of a supposed new ‘dark age’. But another word about the venue: it’s a great little experiment, and it’s worth paying attention to things that happen there. Hats Plus gives us a scene and provides a locale for seriously enjoyable art-play, with a way of thinking that provides at least the feeling of meaningful rebellion against the art world, futile or not.