Collect 2012

I have reviewed Collect twice in its illustrious history – ok, once, (2008) and a brief comment at the end of another post, (2009). I then forgot about it until last year when a kind soul reserved complimentary tickets for me and I managed to be away the entire weekend.  I have been inattentive, to say the least.

My first visit to Collect was also its first outing. It was at the V&A and still had the feel of ‘tarted –up’ clutter. It was too crowded – with stuff I mean - and the standard was inconsistent. After another year at the V&A, it moved to the Saatchi gallery near Sloane Square. It was a bold and, in spite of my acerbic comments in 2009, an inspired move. By all accounts it has improved steadily since and, while I cannot comment on any of previous shows, 2012 was a triumph.

The Saatchi gallery is a beautiful, elegantly proportioned space, graced with high ceilings, magnificent wooden floors and plenty of natural light. It is the perfect venue for the display of beautiful objects. The exhibiting galleries all had plenty of room so the work displayed had room to breathe and the audience had enough space to walk around it. In practice, this means that the viewer moves much more slowly around the exhibition than is the case in more crowded venues. It allows one time to think and reflect of the work.

Collect is a serious selling show. That is its primary purpose. It is also a showcase but makes no pretence to being either representative or a survey show. The galleries select their highest quality work and the organisers, by bringing in collectors and media, facilitate the bringing of ‘museum quality’ craft to its potential buyers. In doing so, they are starting solve one of the most persistent and seemingly intractable problems of craft: how to bring the goods to market.

In the process, every aspect of craft exhibiting and selling, from display to the attitude of the gallerists, has become palpably more professional. Collect is also truly international now. It is probably the only high-end, international applied arts fair in Europe. The Scandanavian galleries and artists are particularly well represented and are also a breath of fresh air. There is a strong focus on the ‘upcycled’ work, where ‘trash’ or discarded ceramics, in particular, are remade, reinvented and become entirely new works. In most cases this is the only chance Londoners have to see this kind of work. Craft in London is otherwise parochial, poorly exhibited, (with one or two notable exceptions,) and largely very conservative.

La Ceramica Gallery was a welcome new addition, bringing the work of internationally acclaimed Nicaraguan potters to London for the first time, and Hanart TZ was the first Chinese gallery to show at Collect, bringing ceramics and laquer work  - the latter is a particularly exciting development since, as far as I know, we have not seen contemporary laquer work in this country before. If I were handing out prizes, it would go to the Japanese gallery, Yufuku. All of the work on this stand was breathtaking. Every piece shone with the sheer strength and conviction of its own presence. Graceful, classical, poised - even when entirely un-classical – it was all work you wanted to come back to again and again, just to make sure you really had seen such a thing. The ceramic works of Nakamura Takuo were unforgettable. The colour and patterning was reminiscent of early 17^th Century Japanese silks, glistening, strong colour but subtle – mostly tertiary colours -  and faultlessly composed with a painterly vision. How anyone brings together soft ripe pinks, sombre but glowing maroons, lime-ish greens edged in something darker, and bright ultramarine, is beyond me. I could gaze on this work for the rest of my life and, as soon as I have any money at all, I’m going to make sure I can.

We Built This City

E Voila – here we have a group of crafts people, we could call them makers, working together - collaborating - on a project in Kensington, London’s fanciful West End: land of tallish stately houses, painted white, land of locked shared gardens in fashionable squares that aren’t square, land of the Temple of the Applied Arts and The Royal Dinosaur Paddock, Land of the most excellent Polish restaurant, Daquise, descended from Polish inward migration round one, (circa 1945). Here, in a swanky, if ever so slightly frumpy, naff part of the metropolis, was, (trumpet blast):
We Work in a Fragile Material!!
A charming group of Swedes with green fingernails had come to build us a new city. Quite unlike those pesky Danes that preceded them a few centuries ago, they built, wove, constructed, plaited and stuck things on and painted them.
Well, imagine my surprise to find, here in Kensington - KENSINGTON of all places - a Greenham bender!! Sisters – we’ve arrived! We are in Kensington. A Bender in SW1!! No, seriously, it gets better – this bender is ‘supported’ by South Kensington Estates. We’re part of a cool urban regeneration project. Whooood a’ thought it? They even had a spider web !!!!!!
Now, for those youngsters who have absolutely no idea what a Greenham bender is, check this out. Those nice people at the Guardian have made us our very own website – here.
So, ‘We Built this City’ was a faultless exercise in marginal refuge/ee migratory construction, combining basket weaving, papier mache, other kinds of weaving, and the careful tearing up of the Metro, London’s esteemed free newspaper.
It resembled a cow’s stomach, it had four chambers, all of which looked like they were chewing cud. The ‘skeleton’ of the structure was - oh, you know, basket weaving material, and there was chicken wire and papier mache stuck on the chicken wire and painted in parts and, I loved this bit, decorated here and there with pistachio nut shells – the makers having first eaten the said nuts presumably. This was a real Greenham touch.
Inside things got really dinky. There was, as I said, a spider’s web woven out of string, cute little papie mache cups and a tea pot and some ‘clay pots’ made of papier mache and light bulbs on long wires – now we didn’t have them at Greenham – and candles – we had tonnes of them.
‘It’s supercraft’ said one of the team. ‘We also make non-material things but we bring our craft minds to it.’
And ‘supercraft’ it was. It was also funny and delightful and cooperative and un-precious. I wrote this the same weekend I saw it. It was the latest offering of the 6pm project space, curated by Marie Torbensdatter Hermann and hosted by her and co-curator Edmund de Waal. For no particular reason, other than having got distracted by something else, I am posting it now, almost three weeks later and, coincidentally, the Crafts Council’s flagship enterprise, Collect, opened last night at the Saatchi Gallery. This is the Craft Council’s annual fit of decorative craft debauchery, an absurd fetishisation of binge-consumption, belching quietly in time to the theme tune of late consumer capitalism. You can almost see those posters, cant you? Labour isn’t working – brilliantly crafted politics at the time, courtesy of the watchmaker’s son, even it did consume itself into oblivion. Shudder. Ah well, I shall repair to a supercraft tent – now, where did I put those bolt cutters?

Collect and other animals

So, finally some thoughts on the rank evil that is Collect.
website here

I admitted that I didn’t get there this year, and I’ve a feeling I didn’t last year, or if I did it was spectacularly unmemorable. The most memorable year for me was when I stumbled in on the coat tails of the White Rabbit, who kept pulling a gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and muttering, ‘my ears and whiskers, so much FLIM FLAM,’ before scampering off into the undergrowth to edit his parish council pottery review. I clearly remember finding myself in a room full of weird shaped china, with a large table, in the middle of which was a miniature celadon tea pot, over which was slumped a giant sized dormouse, with whom, apparently, I was to have ‘supervision’. Since the dormouse continued his slumbers, oblivious to the world, I slipped past and into another vast strange room, in which I found ‘Ratty’, sitting in a big chair on a stage, and on either side of him – actually he’d had his gender reassigned and was now she – on either side of HER, were a Badger, called Julian, an extraordinarily cantankerous fellow in a velvet smoking jacket, and a Toad, called Grayson, in a ludicrous flounced frock with bells and ribbons. They were discussing death, coffins, and sarcophagi. The more cantankerous Badger got, the more Ratty tried to intervene, and the more Toad just said ‘toot toot’, greatly to the amusement of the audience; apparently he had a very fine collection of very fast flash motorbikes, and just wanted to show them off. Badger and Toad both made clay pots in their spare time it seemed. Ratty talked and wrote about them, the pots, not B and T. Eventually Toad flounced off, climbed into primrose yellow car and, with one last ‘Toot Toot’, sped away. Ratty scuttled off and investigated the rest of the Collect sewer, and Badger growled at everyone and brushed up his velvet jacket. I went to look for the dormouse and his ‘supervision’ again, but was told he’d retreated to his tank with a group of other rodents to do some thinking. Apparently he had to rethink the entire 20th Century. No wonder the poor chap was comatose. I gloomily wandered out into the February sunshine and found my sister on the Temple bank, who nudged me awake, gave me good strong cup of tea, and said ‘Well whatsortofmug goes to Collect anyway?’
for a different take on collecting, consumption, and how to drink a mug of tea click here