Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 at ICA

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 at ICA

22 November, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys picks out his highlights from a slightly disappointing survey of the UK's brightest young art talent.

Like their counterparts in music and fashion, art types are fond of trying to predict the next big thing – be it an artist, a style, or, more boldly, an entire movement. But more often than not it ends in failure. Art is a notoriously heterogeneous arena of creativity, and for every sweeping assertion about the state of the art world, by and large the opposite argument could be made just as convincingly. Nonetheless, exhibitions like Bloomberg New Contemporaries force us to try.

Opening this week at the ICA, Bloomberg New Contemporaries sees work by 40 of the UK's finest final-year graduates and postgraduates, as selected by the panel, which for 2011 is made up of three artists – Pablo Bronstein, Sarah Jones and Michael Raedecker. As is the case every year, the works selected tend to reflect the preferences of the panel, but, given that alumni of New Contemporaries include Grayson Perry, Anish Kapoor, the Chapman Brothers, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst, it's fair to say the show does a good job of spotting future big names. In short, if a decent survey of emerging art talent exists, this is it.

So what are we to make of the art world this year? Well, the most obvious aspect is that over half the artists on show come from outside the UK – which either reflects this country's tradition of multiculturalism and tolerance, or suggests, more cynically perhaps, that financially struggling arts institutions are keen to get their hands on the extra dollars charged to international students.

Either way, the results are a little disappointing, with little of the immediacy or political awareness that one might expect in these times of riot and protest. Painting in particular is extremely weak this year, as photography – and not massively interesting photography at that – predominates.

The other major criticism is the return (as if it ever went away) of arch art-world cleverness – the kind that produces an immediate wry smile or nod of recognition, before fading away to nothing. Samuel Williams, Hyun Woo Lee, Poppy Whatmore, Minae Kim and Jonathan Trayte all fall into this category for me. Their work relies on the visual pun or the neat expression of an idea, and to that extent it succeeds, but it just leaves you (or me at least) wanting something more.

In amongst all this, however, there are works that manage to linger in the mind. Cornelia Baltes' untitled (bird) is a strangely beguiling composition of a rook on a window ledge, subtly manipulated in post-production. From a quick look at her other photographic works, Baltes is clearly someone with an eye for an image and a knack for imbuing the everyday with something seductively misleading.

I also like Sarah Brown's minimal little drawings with their cryptic titles. In particular, there's a very clever moment where the smudge caused by her fingers represents the fingerprints left on a front-door, presumably as part of some sort of crime. Being therefore both itself and a representation of itself, this deft little mark is a sign of an artist with real clarity of thought. The let-down is the drawings themselves, which are technically not as strong as they ought to be.

The real highlight though – and this is rare for someone usually bored to death by video art – is a video piece by Korean-born artist Hyewon Kwon [above] that charts the history of a workhouse through a series of short sequences. Politically charged, it explores ideas around the social function of architecture, the relationship between the individual and the systemic and the inevitable failure of utopianism. Punctuated by dates, each sequence utilises exactly the same footage in the same order, but overlaid with different commentary, in order to suggest perhaps that all means of presenting information are equally carefully selected, controlled, distorted. All information is misinformation, it seems to suggest, and more.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries is at the ICA until 15th January 2012.

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

Tom Jeffreys