Getting Strange on Seaside Road
HELEN MURPHY & NICK PELLING preview something a little unusual coming your way
Colin Booth: Joy, 2004
It may surprise you to know that we were not familiar with the writings of Victor Shklovsky. But, after talking to the artist Colin Booth about his forthcoming exhibition at the Electro Studios, we discovered that the Modernist Russian thinker was a key part of his inspiration. Shklovsky argued that the essence of art lay in the process of making the familiar ‘unfamiliar’. (He was nearly made fatally unfamiliar with himself by Stalin in the thirties but managed to be protected by Maxim Gorky.) This obligation to transform has been a key inspiration in Colin’s career. It certainly makes sense of the title: Making Strange. It promises to be a challenging and intriguing show.
EMBRACING SILLY
Booth is very difficult to categorise. It would be possible to label him a Conceptual artist with a dash of Dada and Minimalism. But artists do not need an ingredients label, which can only lead to Art-speak of the most pretentious kind. Colin is not like that. His work is often funny. His sun-yellow chairs that are never quite level seem like a prop from a silent comedy. The references to children’s bricks and Dinky toys are soaked in childhood memories. In lots of ways his playful approach feels almost like a lament for the way we lose contact with the wonderful silliness of being a child.
He combines the Modernist love of using found objects – think Duchamp’s Fountain (an old urinal) or Picasso’s bicycle-based Bull’s Head – with the desire to dislocate our complacency about our surroundings. The cool ambiguity of white is a favoured language. He explains that part of the fascination of a found object – be it off-cuts from a furniture factory or yesterday’s net curtain – is the way that once it is back in the studio it has “latent transformative potential.” In the alchemic dialogue between artist and object, Booth finds ways to whisper other thoughts. In that process there is often a tension between what a thing was and what it is becoming. And even after the artist’s intervention the resultant meaning is not always under control. Materials have their own personality issues and Booth has used everything from marble to neon. Inevitably, Booth’s objects slide their meanings around, leaving emotional and cognitive ripples.
FOR THOSE THAT DO
Colin has been the driving force behind the Electro Studios space for many years now. He has made it a key part of the art scene in St Leonards and Hastings by being so willing to give the space to local working artists. His approach is a long way from gallery-as-museum for big names or dead members of some arbitrary canon. It is for practitioners of art to use. But now, after almost two decades of creating, Booth is taking a fortnight to expose his work to that other most transformative force: the viewer’s gaze. This show is likely to be a mind-spinner; but as the old poster says, we must Keep St Leonards Strange.
The show opens on Friday 6 September at 6pm. It continues on Saturday and Sunday, 7-8 September, from 1 to 5pm. The show is also open on the following weekend, 13 – 15 Sept. It is part of the Coastal Currents Festival. There are also 3 offsite locations: Graze on Grand Parade, Collected Fictions and Black Gull Books on London Road.
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