The New Obsolete

The New Obsolete

28 August, 2009
by: Katuschka

Whilst highly publicised Tate Modern and Saatchi Gallery expositions are all well and good, the beginnings of a cult are incubated in the underground and as an art critic you are lapse if you're not hip to the shadowy fight clubs of the art world. Viral sites burrowed into the guts of the net or London student collectives putting together Stendhal-inducing work advertised only by a tweet or Facebook post all seem to elude my tech-savvyless brain. So imagine how excited I was when I came across The New Obsolete (curated by Peter Lewis) - a gypsy caravan collective of Leeds Metropolitan art students organising pop-up shows in cities around the country.

If the aesthetic of the underground is a pendulum swing between the naïve camp of Ed Wood and the self-aware postmodernism of John Waters, then art in its self-imposed seriousness is doomed to fall into the second category. However, there's something quite charming and earnest about The New Obsolete in its haphazard collection of cheap materials and wide-eyed probing of what constitutes obsolescence – it is the little show that can.

Stand-out pieces include Eoin Shea's boards, covered in acres of tiny scrawl, designed to be trampled on; a medley of high and low culture - menu chalkboards, the Rosetta Stone and Vanessa Feltz's Big Brother meltdown coming together in an unlikely but effective artefact. Marion Harrison's study of the impermanence of images in digital media is a thought-provoking look at unsung Flickr snappers and the superfluous nature of copyright, and Ashley Dean's large, 'What the butler saw', steampunk-style peep-show box is perhaps a hark back to the days when the stick and hoop were more exciting than the Avatar trailer.

But where would art students be without their derivative, pretentious and frankly bizarre work, and The New Obsolete doesn't disappoint, on entering you almost fall over Michael Burkitt who is sitting with a backpack staring up at a blank spot – what can it mean? A comment on the banality of global travel in a hyper-connected society or did someone let one of the crack addicts in? - Liz Harbottle's snapshot of a girl with 'Artist' scrawled over her mouth (yawn – call me when you go through your Catherine Opie stage and several blurry video loops including a 'rickroll' are other slightly clunky takes on the theme.

Some interesting statements are made about the artistic reincarnation of old technologies and how postmodernism redefines the concept of obsolescence using a hefty dose of nostalgia - and once you get bored of that you can have a good bitch about the wacky art-weirds. Perhaps one of the student's lovely parents said it best, bewilderedly tapping at Burkitt with her shoe, asking 'So, is this art dear?' to her exhibitor daughter. A valid question, someone's Mum. In a sea of Rick Astley, Metro Newspapers and fence-sections I'm no longer sure myself. 

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Katuschka