“Rum, sodomy, and the lash” is an aggressive exhibition, as suggested by its title, which was taken from a quote often (mistakenly?) attributed to Winston Churchill as a characterization of the naval tradition. In the mid-1980s, the Pogues would adapt it as the title of their second album. That curators Ed Atkins and James Richards hijacked the name for this group show in Isabella Bortolozzi’s second space, Eden Eden, seems apt given the presentation’s (dis)content: a compact but noisy barrage of freak formalism, runaway narratives and piratical punkery.
The show commences with three glass panels resembling doors suspended from the ceiling with metal supports, untitled works from 2014 by Tony Conrad. Each “door” has a tiny hole drilled into it. Too small to be glory holes, they are better sized for peepholes—unneeded, since the surfaces are already transparent. Yet amid the noise of the techno-mediated voidosphere— referenced in the same room in Ed Atkins and Simon Thompson’s News, consisting of a television playing broadcast news nonstop (on my last visit, it was live CNN coverage of protests in Taipei against the Taiwanese prime minister’s meeting with his mainland Chinese counterpart)—it helps to have our eyes directed.
The most sonically domineering work is Morag Keil’s Civil War (2012), with tiny speakers encased in Tupperware containers blaring a collage of screams and video game violence. The point gets across very clearly, making it hard to concentrate on the wall texts positioned throughout the exhibition, the work of a collective entity calling itself Contemporary Art Writing Daily. Their idea is to interrogate the norms of art writing and exhibition-making from within; so one text is a poetic response to Conrad’s glass panels, while another ironically posits the wall text as an assaultive, dictatorial presence.
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