A banquet in a Victorian sewage pumping station? Tom Jeffreys is disappointed.
Guerilla Science + Bompas & Parr + the craziest piece of Victorian architecture I've ever seen = a mad, brilliant evening of food, drink, learning and fun. Right? Wrong. I'm at the amazing Crossness Pumping Station, way out east of London, for the Dirt Banquet. It's all part of the Wellcome Collection's Dirt Season, a series of events that seek to reappraise our attitudes towards hygiene, and that includes their current, excellent, exhibition, Dirt.
I first heard about Crossness Pumping Station when I interviewed contemporary artist Serena Korda, back in November. Serena has produced a work for the Dirt exhibition that consists of a stack of bricks, each one including dust from a range of local people and organisations, including, appropriately enough, some long-dead ladybirds and brick dust from the basement of Spoonfed Towers. She's also produced a hilarious video performance piece, filmed right here in Crossness, which is on display tonight at the Dirt Banquet.
And Crossness really is something else. Designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and Charles Henry Driver in order to solve London's sanitation problems, and constructed between 1859 and 1865, it's a monument to engineering ingenuity and attention to detail. After years of disrepair, it's now being restored by a passionate troupe of volunteers. It's also a Grade I listed building, and quite right too – it really is a dazzling (and bonkers) place. The outside is like some kind of Norman or Byzantine cathedral with the top flattened off, whilst inside, it's a mass of red and gold, ornate wrought iron, pistons, wheels and furnaces. At one time, each of the four pump engines could shift six tons of sewage per stroke. In both engineering and aesthetic terms, Crossness is an astonishing place.
But the glory of Crossness is let down by an event that not only lacks sparkle but is also, in places, just genuinely bad. The ubiquitous Bompas & Parr have come up with a menu that seeks to explore the relationship between dirt and food, and it certainly does that: Papua New Guinea mud cakes, bacterial jelly, natto (a horrible Japanese fermented bean thing) and ambergris (sperm whale vomit) all effectively challenge Western ideas around hygiene. As does the arrival of a large plant pot. It's filled with soil, and diners must rummage around for parts of their main course. There's definitely something different about eating on a table covered in earth, but the problem is that Bompas & Parr aren't really chefs. Consequently the food itself isn't massively innovative nor does it even taste that great.
Worse, however, is to come, in the form of speeches from anthropologist Val Curtis and epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, joined by professional sex worker Catherine Stephens. Nothing irritates me more than nonsense couched as science, and Curtis talks nothing but nonsense. She asserts that we find things disgusting due to evolutionary mechanisms, utterly skating over innumerable problematic issues: like cultural difference; like etymological circularity; like the fact that, actually, most children have to be trained to feel disgust. She's therefore in direct contradiction to the main thrust of Wellcome's nuanced exhibition. Surely better speakers were available?
But the vilest part is the screening of a video that attempts to encourage people in the developing world to wash their hands more. Paid for by Unilever (if I remember correctly) it's effectively an advertisement for soap, and one that, if screened in this country, would surely fall well short of Trading Standards guidelines. The fact that here it's pitched as some kind of do-good solution to the world's ills is inappropriate, deceitful and, frankly, fairly offensive.
The whole evening culminates in a damp squib in the form of a 'brown note'. It's supposed to consists of a sound of such specific frequency that it causes humans to lose control of their bowels. It fails, of course.
Crossness is one of the most brilliantly bonkers places I've ever been to. The saddest thing about the Dirt Banquet is that I'm sitting here, in this beautiful, insane, wonderful place, and all I want to do is leave.
Read Tom's review of Dirt at the Wellcome Collection.
Crossness is open to the public from time to time. It's so amazing and you really should go. Click here for visiting dates.
The Dirt Banquet is part of the Dirt Season. Click here for the full programme.
Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.
Image credit: Zoe Cormier.
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