Unknowable but Certain, an exhibition of painting, music, poetry and film by the great Billy Childish is not to be missed.
The ICA does itself and multi-talented maverick and all-round legend Billy Childish proud, with this fascinating, autobiographical and all-encompassing show of the paintbrush, plectrum and camera-wielding artist's best works, across an exhibition of two totally different, yet symbiotic parts.
Downstairs in the lower gallery, an impressive collection of paintings hang in expressionistic glory. These recent works, all composed from 2007 onwards, resonate with an emotional, even spiritual propensity, which pulsates through the staccato, turbulent brush strokes, eruption of colours and sketchy subjects. There is a kind of wandering, desperate quality attached to works like Man on Snowy Street, for example. Thick, short flecks of paint at once capture the brevity of a single moment and hone an inescapable, pervading sense of misery in the jaundiced face, down-turned eyes and luminous, yellow outline of the lonely subject.
Childish returns time and again to this solitary, romantic figure, particularly in the laboured, cloying streaks and the downcast posture conveyed in Man Walking up a Snowy Slope. In the Robert Walser series, faint horror blends with elegy. In Walser with Boots the avalanche effect and titled angle of the composition add a sense of inescapable immediacy, and a feeling that, at any given moment, the scene portrayed could slide out into the gallery, and reality as we know it. The blurred figure captured in Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow with Footprints becomes muddled into the snowy landscape and the footprints leading up to the collapsed figure, the steps leading up to his death, are a hauntingly real imprint in a composition where colour and backdrop have become merged into a dream-like whitish blur. A still life flower composition and paintings of moored boats on the Medway Estuary, where Childish has lived for most of his life, set off and complete an impressive and arresting group of paintings.
This is only one side of Childish's outstanding artistic output however. In the concourse leading the way to the upper gallery hangs a display of text placards which vocalise snippets of the artist's more polemical practice. This signals a marked change in mood. Upstairs, music taken from Childish's extensive back catalogue of over 100 full-length LPs – the product of an endless string of collaborations – blares out.
The music is melodic and furious in equal measure, indebted to both punk and blues. It provides an apt soundtrack to the tongue in cheek, self-deprecating and defiant collection of poetry and literature on display. In one room, short poems are printed onto the gallery's white walls. The stark, bare effect mirrors the straightforward, often incomplete, draft-like feel of the poetry. The bitter-sweet subject matter reverberating from lines like “I rip up my last 15 quid and sprinkle it over her head like confetti – that's the only kind of wedding she's going to get” is personal and intrusively real, the raw realism intensified by Childish's decision not to correct any spelling mistakes resulting from his dyslexia.
Over in the final room, the record sleeves of LPs Childish has produced, a number of which are played out on loop, create a wall of imagery. On the opposite side of the room, short films are on show, which showcase Childish's arguably less-known role as a member of the Chatham Super-8 Cinema Group. The group uses a second-hand camera purchased at a Rochester flea market to shoot simplistic films.
In an interview with curators Richard Birkett and Matthew Higgs, Childish throws some light on the exhibition's ambiguous title, Unknowable but Certain: “The artist who's really engaged in art and emotional growth will always remain a moving target”. The ICA grants a rare chance to see this “moving target”, this creative and prolific force extraordinaire, pinned down. So get yourself over to The Mall sharpish and revel in painterly, musical and literary goodness – we guarantee you won't be disappointed.
Billy Childish - Unknowable but Certain is at the ICA until 18.04.10.
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