Art

This smartly irreverent group show on the dissemination of public information feels particularly pertinent to the current media moment in which the violent subjugation of Tibetans in China can play second fiddle to the Mills/McCartney divorce debacle on the nightly news. The medium becomes the message once again in a variety of contexts that link the politics of contemporary communication with the visualisation of language as an art historical construct. Incorporating works from the late ’60s to the present day, the technological mood weighs heavy with the whiff of yesteryear, but the central tenet – to question the means through which one receives data, of any kind – is received loud and clear.

Humour – whether treacle dark or surprisingly romantic – is the chosen delivery device of the majority. Both Dick Jewell and the ubiquitous Bob and Roberta Smith have defaced the pages of newspapers and magazines to funny effect. But where Smith’s hand-signed and insult-labelled editorial pages moonlight as scrapbook commentary on authorship, social stereotypes and the arbitrary nature of celebrity culture (Amy Winehouse is a ‘loony’ and the comparatively benign David Jason a ‘wanker’), Jewell’s abstract purple scribbles over ‘unexpectedly iconic’ individuals in the Evening Standard simply bolsters the already ludicrous slant of the item itself.

Leigh Clarke’s hopeful re-workings of Hackney Gazette headlines (‘Couple Caught Kissing in Park’) resonate more powerfully as takeaway posters than permanent statements on canvas, while Lucy Harrison’s film of a bingo caller, reading out local library book titles in an empty Lincolnshire social club, offers a tender portal on to issues of class and education. The late Ian Breakwell’s obsessive large collage ‘1969 Diary’ and critic Peter Suchin’s miniature, motorised ‘black box’ display of works from the 2007 group show ‘Planchette’, meanwhile, appear to echo the complex Russian doll sentiment of the exhibition at large – one ideological standpoint emerging from the fish and chip wrapper of another.