These days, everything’s blimmin’ political innit? You can’t eat a bowl of cereal without it turning into a protest about EU farming subsidies or accidentally coughing up a thinkpiece on the economic ramifications of the migrant crisis, and you certainly can’t come to this exhibition without being thwacked over the head with a big old political cricket bat.
This is the last show at David Roberts Art Foundation – a Camden institution that has spent years pushing, nurturing and celebrating contemporary art – and they’re trying to go out with a wallop.
But the art whacked together here isn’t political in a blatant way. Nothing says ‘vote’ or ‘racism is bad‘; this is art about how tiny acts of everyday living can be political, how everything we do is tied into some kind of system of power.
The show kicks off with a room of frog-filled neon strip lights by Dora Budor, flickering and threatening to drop their amphibian loads on you as you walk under them. On the walls, black and white photos by the surrealist Pierre Molinier find him nude and prostrated in stockings. The whole room feels seedy, sensual and private.
There’s more nudity: naked figures splay across the walls in the next room, a man lays vulnerably akimbo in a brilliant Celia Hempton painting, a defiantly sassy woman strikes a pose in a Julian Opie light box (very possibly the only Opie work I’ve ever liked). There are implications of nudity too: discarded fur coats in Zoe Williams’s bright pink neon installation, beads of condensation on Prem Sahib’s black sheet of aluminium.
It doesn’t stop at the body though. The brilliant Theaster Gates drips thick tar down a canvas, Danh Vo frames an electric chair, Megan Rooney rips apart discarded mattresses.
Not everything here is good, but by throwing all of this art together, the show tries to say that just existing is political. Breathing, sweating, shagging, living; none of it’s done in a bubble. Maybe even reading this is political, in its own way. Welcome to the revolution, comrade.
@eddyfrankel