Art’s a business. All the work you see in London’s galleries is for sale, all the work you see in its museums has been bought. It’s something we’re not meant to think about. We’re meant to believe in art for art’s sake and pretend it’s not this global commercial undertaking. But there’s no commercial thinking in Honey Suckle Company’s show at the ICA.
This German collective (founded in 1994) fuses fashion, art and music to create work that centres on ideas of open living, free communities and all that good Berlin squat hippy shit.
A band of robotic mannequins greets you as you enter the show. A kick drum kicks itself, a harmonium pumps itself and a guitar tickles its own strings, strumming out a sad chord. The ground is littered with rubble and sand, the band is all static figures in angular, sculptural clothing, like a Malevich painting exploded all over them. It’s a post-human performance in an apocalyptic world, a psychedelic band for broken minds on a broken planet.
Next come vitrines filled with photos, schematics, objects and clothing. They’re kind of like snapshots of ’90s Berlin art – wild, free, dirty. Videos of raves and performances just reinforce the seedy do-whatever-the-hell-you-want vibe.
Upstairs, you find black and white photos documenting grimy dancing and shattered cities surrounded by an installation draped with fabric, human voices echoing around staircases to nowhere. The final work is just an empty white room. The whole thing climaxes into nothing.
It’s like Honey Suckle are saying that all that free living has culminated in this big old dead end. You feel like this is a document of a radical past; a past that’s long, long gone. Now the artists have moved on and are living new, different lives. The radical potential of their ideas was achieved and then it died. You just wish that they offered you a radical future with all of that past, too.