The Dark Show at FormContent

The Dark Show at FormContent

21 July, 2008
by: Tom Jeffreys

White walls. Wood floors. Light, bright, airy and silent. This is the gallery we know. The Foxtons wet-dream. Surely, its time is drawing to a close? Yes. Move over White Cube: the Nineties are long gone. Step forward instead FormContent, for it is thy turn in the spotlight. Or rather, it's thy turn now in tonight's inky-night London Hackney blackness.

For tonight and tonight only, The Dark Show, after five weeks in the warehouse spaciousness of Hackney Wick's Wallis Gallery, comes across Mare Street to FormContent. Crammed in now under the old brick railway arches, the show must go on.

We enter through a door in the brickwork into a kind of atrium, fumbling blind at a black felt expanse of curtain. It's moved aside and we continue. Further into darkness. Eyes blink: what is here? Noises, flickered rustlings, a shriek? A light flashes. I bump into somebody. 'Sorry,' I say. 'Sorry,' they say. This is art now.

But what is here? Eyes adjust. Left, a television set facing the wall. 'It doesn't seem to be showing anything,' I say. 'People will watch anything if it's on a telly,' he says. Images come upon it: still shots of faces, with captions to describe their noses: big, button, pug, roman… Hmmm.

Higher up, projected onto the old bricks is a film, mainly black but periodically showing trains entering night-time stations. FormContent is beneath the railway line, and the regular chuntering of overhead trains is what actually gives this work force.

Then, hanging strips of metallic material, kind of GHDed lametta that catch and twist the little light there is. Likewise a gallery-high column of plastic wine glasses; and a sparkly hemisphere on the floor that twinkles its interpretation of the works around it, gaining magic when others go dim. I trip over this too.

A green light comes on and off periodically, a mysterious shape looms over the rear entrance, and over there in the corner, a table. On it a selection of retro sci-fi books neatly arranged around a candle, like part of some occult ritual. The curator comes and lights the candle. We look at the books. I pick one up and begin reading. But, just as my curiosity is aroused, the curator returns and snuffs out the light, plunging the nascent narrative into blackness.

Left again, to a video of raving electro-poppets, voiced-over by a kind of barely comprehensible Hollyoaks-style dialogue. There's definitely speaking, but I can't make no sense of it. Finally, as I recall, a chain hanging from the ceiling. On the end of which, sheets of paper with Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven printed on them. A green light on the chain enables one to read the text, but as soon as one starts, someone trots over and turns it off again. Quoth the curator: 'Nevermore'.

This is so much fun. There's a tangible sense of delight. Also a little of fear. Excitement and confusion too. We are left to our own devices. There's no explicit explanatory message: we don't even know who the artists are. We try to understand. I keep tripping, keep failing. Keep trying. Complex, deceptive, intriguing, coquettish even. Fun, but not only fun: I want art to be this now.

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Tom Jeffreys