Out in Hoxton/Shoreditch for First Thursday in December, and it’s like walking through a art-warp, from concept through Stuckist street art and back to concept… with some in-store life-theatre just in case…

The fun of First Thursday is the unexpected. Who will have the crowds, who will have the gimmick, who will have the art, who will have the liquor and the loud music?

Leo Verryt, a Camberwell artist, is up for the night and volunteers to act as photographer―not that he was asked for his opinion on the matter.

I have a few of Leo’s early pen and water-colour pieces in my own tiny collection here at the Mansion. I have always loved them―simple drawing, unpretentious colouring, but with a lot of acid in what they choose to discuss. Leo does most of Tom Phillips’ bronze work and his own output these days is mainly 3D, reshaping found objects.

KK Outlet on Hoxton Square is always a good start. It is one of the things I like most: a shop where it is not immediately obvious what it is selling, or if it is selling anything but just likes being there, being cool and friendly. There are books, of course there are. And works of art―why would there not be? But it is not a bookshop neither is it a gallery. Here is what it says on the website:

• KK Outlet is a multifunctional office combining a communications agency with a gallery and bookshop.
• This hybrid environment is designed to help deliver original creative solutions for the development of brands, products and content.
• As the name hints, it is an outlet for different aspects of work from advertising to product development, and from design to publishing.

How sweet is that? They don’t have bullet points or any crappy office report nonsense on their website, btw, I just added that in.

There is already a major crowd when we arrive and it takes some excusing, pleasing, thanking to worm through to see what’s happening―which is an auction! There is lots of stuff for sale, and cheap, £5, £10, £15, that sort of price, mainly found pieces, clever things, toys, ornaments, primary colours.

It is coming on 100 years since Marcel Duchamp exhibited the first ready-made in New York and at KK you see why it just gets more and more popular. Setting out ordinary objects as art, or if not putting them up as art, forcing them out of their functional context―there is nothing to say, it is refreshing. In KK, for me, it was impossible not to wonder at why I might love a piece of mechanically moulded plastic, designed by an automaton in Shanghai to be sold for pennies for the least discriminating collectors, infant children.

There is a really hot blond at the edge of the crowd and I ask her to put her finger on the johnny of this little porcelain dandy-man. She does it and I get Leo to take a photograph. I don’t why, but it makes me feel flustered―in a good way, I hasten to add. In this state of mind, I put my head in the bone of an animal skull and get Leo to photograph that too, which helps defuse the situation.

Leo wants say thank you to one of the bar-persons in the Electricity Showrooms, not because she is pretty and shapely and blushes when he makes her laugh, but because she is a fine, upstanding individual who helped him when he was lost. Ah yeh, ta-de-da-da. I wait by the X tree while she brushes him off.

Next stop is the Signal Gallery on Curtain Road. The Signal looks like a gallery. It has pictures, 2D pictures, in the window and on the walls, all the walls. It is a group show. There is some work still there from last month, David La Fleming. The new work, by Dale Grimshaw and C125 has a street art feel to it, densely structured, heavy colouring, spraycan highlights.

They are also true to street art’s extreme methodological conservatism: no found objects, no conceptualising,

no hankypanky with multimedia: graffers use oil paint, straight down the Stuckist line from Jan Van Eyck to Billy Childish. The main surprise in C125’s portrait of a rapper is in what it is, a portrait of a rapper in oil on board. Grimshaw’s Painting Is Such Sweet Sorrow hints at kitsch, with its suggestion of Tretchikoffian sentimentality.

At Kaleid editions on Redchurch Street, the exhibition is the Grand Plasto-Baader-Books, a take on Johannes Baader’s Das Grosse Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama, a reference that tells us that we have come back out the other side of the art-theory warp to return to the land of found objects, ready-mades, concepts and hankypanky with multimedia.

And what should happen, but right then there, as I am chatting with curator Deeqa Ismail? Yes, you guessed! We are treated to spontaneous, as-it-happens in-store drama. Without  a blink or a blush, scarcely interrupting the conversation, Deeqa turns to a curly-haired young fellow and tells him to empty his pockets. He does it, pulling out a fifty-pound note. She holds out her hand and he gives it to her, then quickly leaves. I am looking this way and that, trying to figure out what has happened. Leo has been spending quality time trying to see how the camera works and ―some photographer!―has missed everything. Deeqa quietly explains that the little weasel, who has left the shop, had stolen the fifty from a jar on the desk in the office.

The great prophets of cultural chaos, Tristan Tzara and Antonin Artaud, we are thinking, were  accurate in their predictions. What is happening here on Redchurch Street tonight is a kind of evolution from the script of Père Ubu.

Across the road at Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery, we find the crowd as thick as―given what just happened, better not to say the word. At the door we are greeted by Rob Rubbish, a thoroughly convivial fellow who presses all sorts of paper into our hands. The Neu Gallery is right out there on the concept trip. The main wall has been set with shelves on which are rows of ink drawings contributed by a number of artists. We like the one by Harry Matt, which sells the moment we fetch him for a photograph. It is written in ink with a brush, in a delightfully sloppy calligraphy. The text, in full, reads: ‘Paul McCartney is a cunt’.

Exactly. Or as Artaud would say―exactement.

More Pictures from First Thursday, December 2009

Tags: Art + Design, Curtain Road, First Thursday, Hoxton, Kaleid editions, KK Outlet, Maurice Einhart Neu Gallery, Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, Signal Gallery, Studio 1.1, Trolley Gallery

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:19 pmand is filed under Art + Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.