Meanwhile, In Shoreditch…
CONCRETE & GLASS, HOXTON SQUARE 13-27/05/2010
A report by our editor on his fortnight spent making a documentary at the leftfield east London music & art festival.
The first Concrete & Glass took place about a fortnight after all the credit was crunched, in October 2008. It lasted three fulsome days and no one mentioned toxic assets or short selling once. There were probably a few jokes about stern bears, but for the most it feels like a memory of a time before the depression, not after. It’s certainly how I’d like to remember Shoreditch from the time before the fall: thrilling with creativity and possibilities; hopeful, not entitled and wanky.
The opening night, a Thursday, was like a carnival: everyone was happy on the streets, united by common purpose and beer; every door, it seemed, was open, offering art or music. The highlight was Heart of Glass, a sprawling collective exhibition of young talent shown in the catacombs beneath Shoreditch town hall. Later, I got seriously drunk on cocktails and danced to a 70s disco set by Skream. I don’t remember going home.
Then everyone woke up. That was a prelapsarian Shoreditch, a young cultural Eden. The cool scene has noticeably less swagger than 18 months ago, since the trust funds dried up and the start-ups stopped. On weekends and evenings the crowd is very gauche—rather bridge and tunnel, as the New Yorkers say.
*****
The same brains behind the first festival – Tom Baker of music promoters EYOE and art curators Paul Hitchman and Flora Fairburn – reunited this May just past for a second instalment. While the first C&G set itself up as the east’s answer to Camden Crawl (with art!) sprawled across Shoreditch, this was a more modest affair centred around Hoxton Square. Heart of Glass ran at 20 Hoxton Square, while the six or so performances were spread across the gallery, Hoxton Bar & Kitchen or the Macbeth. Both Fairburn and Hitchman conceded raising money was definitely a difficulty this time around.
Actually, this was perhaps to its benefit: the first festival was a bloated monster to worried about big name gigs, like TV on the Radio. It was possible to be so swamped by the music as to not notice the art at all; and vice versa. The focus here, as Hitchman told me, was to “create a situation where performance, art and music meet; and to offers a platform for artists to innovate and collaborate outside of the constraints of commercial exploitation.”
This, he says, is “more needed now than ever.” I couldn’t agree with him more. Though I’m sure we’re all glad to see the chancers on their arses, there are far too many talents squeezed into compromise by the crash. Creating a space free from that is a worthy aim.
*****
Concrete & Glass began on Thursday 13th, with the private view of the Heart of Glass exhibition. It was rammed, as high profile openings with free booze tend to be. PV crowds are always fascinating – the young and too-trendy, the old and too-wealthy, and some odd, awkward characters in dark clothes at the fringes. (These last invariably turn out to be the artists.)
Heart of Glass was one of the triumphs of C&G, with some genuinely brilliant work. Suki Chan’s Sleep Walking, Sleep Talking was my highlight: a 20 minute two-screen video installation inspired by journeys through cityspaces, including footage filmed from the front of a tube, all backed by an eerie composition mixed with field recordings. It was enjoyably somnambulant, but also a powerful consideration of the psychology of urban space. Thomas Lindvig’s living minimalist sculptures were also strong, and I enjoyed Claire Morgan’s suspended 3D geometric pattern made of dead flies on wires hanging from the ceiling.
There were performances that night, the following Tuesday and Thursday and the subsequent Thursday. To review them all would take too long, so to remark on notables: the most traditional ‘gig’ was a buzzy, rammed Sleigh Bells-headlined show at the Macbeth. Sleigh Bells slayed (hmm) with their obnoxious cheerleader punk; handmade analogue synth-sporting support Solina Hi-Fi were breathtakingly loud, somnolent, brutal and brilliant.
David Shrigley curated a gig made up of his mates, including the fantastic, totally fun post-rock revivalists Please, a DJ set from Shriggers himself and a set by Martin Creed (he of the contentious on-and-off lightbulb Turner prize). It was basically just a gig.
Kathy Hinde’s commission for the second week in Heart of Glass was unusual and beautiful: her Piano Migration piece is the inside of an upright piano with motion sensors attached, which play the piano when she projects high contrast videos of birds flying onto the strings. The resulting Cage-like sounds and the videos were then used by a cellist and theremin player as stimulus for a haunting, gorgeously unsettling minimal improv set. It was quietly magnificent. Kind words but little space are also directed at Owl Project and their woodwork iPods, the mLog, and to Volcano the Bear. Both great, well done, go look ‘em up.
The highlight, though – and oh my wasn’t it! – was the final night’s collab ‘SEEN’, between Japanese noiseniks Bo Ningen and the wonderful artist Martin Sexton. A partner piece to Sexton’s giant henge of Marshall amps in St Leonard’s Church down the road, SEEN took place upstairs in the gallery, with Bo Ningen playing their sensuous but violent noisecore in another Marshall amp-built installation. The result was noisy spectacle, physical assault and the act of love all at once. It took my breath away.
*****
Those who came to C&G, either from curiousity or from passion, were blown away for the most part. Some of the work and performances, Hinde’s and the Sexton-Bo Ningen particularly, felt unique and exceptional. I wish more than the few dozen people there had witnessed them. That the festival was well-conceived and -executed, the work all at least worthwhile and often brilliant, and the concept both worthy and tangibly successful, I have no doubt.
It was, I think, a very good thing Hitchman et al did. More modest than the first, less attended, but more adventurous and of more merit; more concise, though elongated in time; ultimately, more fertile and more fruitful than the first for those – the artists and audience – whom it should benefit most.
The east’s scene is now a joke or an aggravation to most, often for valid reasons; but there was a time it felt like something quite magical: people flocked to London for it. If here, in the former Eden, support for the arts is dwindling, then what of everywhere else? In more straightened times those who endeavour to create need all the support they can muster, with culture too often considered an extravagance that’s first to be cut. Really, of course, it should be the opposite.
–MCL
THE THREE PART DOCUMENTARY ON CONCRETE & GLASS WILL BE AVAILABLE TO VIEW HERE ON PLANETNOTION.COM SHORTLY.
Photography by Stephanie Sian Smith
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