You shall know our velocity, a-n Magazine, April 2006, p. 6
Review by Mike Golding

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
21 January – 25 March

‘You Shall Know Our Velocity’ at Baltic features sixteen artists from the north east of England, and this would seem to be the limit of its curatorial ambition. The result looks like an ‘open’ exhibition with all the faults common to the genre: the work appears disparate, is of variable quality and is badly installed. This means that even the good work, and there is some very good work here, is poorly served.

One of Nisha Duggal’s works, Wish List (a screen-based text work), is encountered outside the toilets, so it must be viewed through the consequent flow of human traffic. A screen showing three of her other pieces is positioned in the café in such a way that daylight rakes across it, making the work unreadable. Graham Dolphin’s animation of fashion magazine images, Four Seasons, is projected across the entrance hall onto a dark brown wall, and his 1500 Images Of Kate Moss In 60 Seconds is displayed on a computer screen in the shop window. Consequently, both pieces are almost overlooked and difficult to see. Another of his pieces entitled 70 Beach Boys Songs, a vinyl record into which the lyrics of seventy Beach Boys songs have been scratched in minute letters, appears to have been positioned so that it relates formally with Alex Charrington’s round paintings. The point of Charrington’s work is that he has constructed a machine to make his paintings; but this fact, which gives the work its conceptual impetus, is not revealed to the viewer.

Wolfgang Weileder shows House, Birmingham, a time-lapse film of a breeze block structure being built and unbuilt simultaneously. A hypnotic work, it has been crammed into a corner so that any contemplative experience is denied; and there is no space to view his large pinhole photographs. Miranda Whall, another artist of consequence, has been badly done too. Two watercolour animations of herself masturbating have been coyly tucked around a corner. They are so close together that the sound from one piece interferes with that of the other. Why have these works been chosen to sit together and why have they been so badly treated? The exhibition has been so obviously under-resourced that one can only speculate as to whether the whole exercise is a cynical attempt to plug a hole in the programme. Perhaps it was felt that the artists, being ‘local’, should be grateful to have been included at all.

Baltic is in a privileged position, taking a lion’s share of the arts budget in the region, and it should have a relationship with the local artistic community. In this instance there has been an abdication of curatorial responsibility and worse, this show pays lip service to the idea of valuing regional artists.

 

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