Art Review

Us & Them; Great Eastern Hotel, London EC2.

by Pablo Lafuente

Hotels, especially those at the top of the scale, hang art on their walls. Prints, paintings, reproductions, even sculptures, are installed not just to give the guest something to look at, but to fill the space and make it seem like your own house. "Us & Them", an exhibition held at the Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Street, East London, has a different intention. By placing art in a commercial environment, curator Jaime Ritchie intends to part with the idea of art as a simple commodity and to stress its ability to create discomfort and express contradictions - but without denying its commercial value.

The debate on the relation between art and money has always been fierce, but never conclusive. Asking "Us & Them" to come up with the answers would therefore be unfair. What the show does achieve is to raise some problems by placing site-specific work in a context that doesn't easily accept it, or even recognise it.

In that sense, some of the pieces do better than others. Coming into the hotel's foyer, you find Mark Hosking's Wassily A&E,an installation with five of Marcel Breuer's Wassily chairs, three of them in the original state, one partially unmounted, the last two transformed into stretchers. The piece introduces an element of randomness within the formality of a hotel foyer, but the impact is too direct. It's not that the work is not good - Hosking has been producing interesting art for a number of years now - it's that the inappropriateness of the piece is too obvious. The same happens with Ben Woodeson's sculptures on the first floor and at the bottom of the lateral staircases, or Dallas Seitz's two DVD projections. Interesting work, but not subtle enough for the location and the show.

In contrast Paul Hosking's animal sculptures, hanging like mirror balls from the ceiling of the hotel's hall, work perfectly.

Highly decorative, with glittery skins, they go unnoticed at a first glance, to emerge later as disturbing, even threatening, elements. Look closely, and the obsessiveness behind their construction, and their strangely contorted figures, suggest something is not quite as it should be.

The same effect is achieved with Andrew Miller & Duncan McAfee's unnerving 10-hour Clocks in the main foyer, or with Mark Cannon's The Smaller is to the Larger as the Larger is to the Whole, XV, an aluminium and Formica platform mounted on the wall. It could be part of the hotel decoration until close inspection reveals a splodge of white oil on the surface. It's at these moments, when the work quietly disrupts the space and the dynamics of the hotel, that "Us & Them" becomes a really good show, rather than a show of good work.

Art Review July/August 2002. Page 94 - 95