Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) at Camden Arts Centre

Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) at Camden Arts Centre

20 December, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys lauds Simon Starling's creative approach to curating at the Camden Arts Centre.

It's sort of obvious to point out that time doesn't function in quite the linear manner that we sometimes sloppily assume it to. But then that doesn't mean that it's not something worthy of exploration. In fact art is sometimes at its best when it's exploring something already known, but in new and/or unexpected ways. As Alexander Pope memorably wrote in his Essay on Criticism: “True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.”

This, I think, is a useful starting point when considering Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts), the Simon Starling-curated show that opened this week at the Camden Arts Centre. With a title in part borrowed from Heraclitus' idea that you can never step in the same river twice, the exhibition constitutes a celebration of the consistent levels of innovation that the centre has displayed over the past five decades (as well as twenty years of pioneering artist residency programmes). It's both a retrospective survey of the institution's past and tentative thrust into the future.

What Starling has done is to come up with a system that is simultaneously straightforward and complex, and then, to a more or less controlled extent, let that system play itself out logically. Basically he's selected works from previous exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre and put them in exactly the same position as they were when previously exhibited. The resulting exhibition contains work by a range of artists (like Susan Hiller, Francis Bacon, Francis Upritchard, Francis Alÿs and Keith Coventry) that demonstrates quite how influential the gallery has been.

In terms of layout, it also means that the exhibition has an unusual and unique rhythm. Parts of the gallery are bare and nearly empty, whilst in other areas, separate works are bunched up far too close together. In short, the logic of Starling's curatorial strategy results in something that runs contrary to the accepted logic of curation itself. One potential problem here is that – like the Barbican's Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art back in 2008 – the curation runs the risk of riding rough-shod over the actual works of art themselves. It's a tricky balancing act, but I think Starling has got it pretty much spot on.

The reason that the show works is because Starling doesn't just juxtapose (with all the associations of contrast and collision that this overused word implies) but he also draws delicate little lines of connection and similarity: like the horror and anguish of Bacon's painting of 1945, the same year as Hiroshima (explored in a work on an adjacent wall); or the idea of the museum evoked implicitly by exhibiting works of design (by ISOKON and Liberty's) and ironised in Francis Upritchard's Sloth, the first work one sees when entering the exhibition.

Mike Nelson's A studio apparatus for Camden Arts Centre... is also recreated here, and the way it radically alters the internal structures of the gallery links to the fact that the architect who designed Camden Arts Centre was in fact Simon Starling's great-great-grandfather. Interestingly it was originally built as a library. And the archival nature of Nelson's work – which seems to be some kind of attempt to categorise a notion of 'everything' – is instructive here. As is the sense of chaotic clutter amidst the calm.

What Starling makes us think about is that a moment is never simply a point on a line. Akin in some ways to Derrida's notion of the jetty, every moment, every act, every completed work of art, not only draws upon the past but also juts out and forward into the future. The archive – explored here both (more or less) implicitly – understands itself with reference to the future perfect. Hence perhaps Starling's inclusion of three previously unexhibited works, each a mini-rupture that posits a range of possible futures. This is what will have been.

Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) is at Camden Arts Centre until 20th February 2011.

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.

Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

Image credit: Mike Nelson
Studio Apparatus, 1998
Courtesy and copyright the artist

Tom Jeffreys