Ice Cold in NW1

I’ve written before about hunting for art. That time was in a multistorey car park in Peckham. This time it was in the bowels of the University of Westminster on Marylebone Road, rattling unlikely-looking Sunday-lockdown academic doors and wandering cavernous pillared warehouse spaces before stumbling finally into the exhibition.

Entering through the exit, as we did, the immediate impression is of darkness, liquid and straight lines. A moment of adjustment, then the Knightmarish realisation that you are standing on a narrow walkway between sharp-edged pools of water.

With each minute that passes your eyes adjust, and now you see figures silhouetted against paler, flickering screens, railings and steps, a higher floor where images play on screens, and patterns of light dancing on the walls.

Gradually it makes a sort of sense.  A long bench between square pools of dark water, into which you can dip your hands, making ripples which are projected and multiplied on the walls. Screens you can walk around and behind. Upstairs, four films play simultaneously and side by side, glimpses of life among the ice: chunks of melting glaciers held up on the deck of a boat like glassy fish; men chipping icicles off the side of boats; an Inuit woman explorer; huskies; igloos; and calving icebergs.

And through it all a real coldness, a nip in the air that doesn’t match the rest of the building, a cool, damp, half-clean smell.

Out of Ice by Elizabeth Ogilvie in association with British Antarctic Survey is at Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, until 9 February 2014.

JapanCanal Dreams: David Blandy Anjin 1600

A walk along the Regent's Canal in post-work rush hour, under the wet brick bridges almost flattened by aggro cyclists, past the back of new-builds, pubs for prats and still-standing horror estates then back to street level to find the Rose Lipman Building, improbable home for David Blandy's new exhibition Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark (even more improbably sponsored by Deutsche Bank, among others).

The centerpiece is Blandy's film about his own relationship with Japan, his lifelong fascination with its aesthetics and culture, which plays at the back of a large, dark, tranquil 'Japanese' garden (built by Rhino Rock of East Peckham). Surrounding this are a number of other installation pieces which allude to the same themes: cultural appropriation, video games, anime, control (embodied in AAS's majestic sci-fi control panel of oscilloscopes and mysterious buttons).

The installation is slick and atmospheric, and communicates Blandy's genuine feel for this culture: in  its otherness, but also its familiarity for those of us who've grown up with arcade games and manga. I'd like to watch the film again at a quieter time, so may be braving the streets of De Beauvoir Town again in the near future. 

Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark is at the Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Road, N1 5SQ. 13th September - 26th October 2013, Wed-Sat 12-6pm. Late night opening Thursday 3rd October, til 9pm. There are also talks and workshops accompanying the exhibition, see website for details.

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty…? Damien Hirst and the Art and Science of the Body

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Strebbing the Suburbs (Just like Quiet Riot did)

Two astonishing aerial dance events in ten days? It must be 'a summer like no other', as the Mayor of London's lackeys' t-shirts are saying. This time it was in the unlikely setting of Victoria Park, Finchley. Free to all and a huge crowd had turned out.

A green crane towered over the suburban trees and picnicking families. Indian string music began and a host of dancers took to the stage, a ballerina in a glittering red dress and Kathak dancers, the stage ringed with parasols and floodlit in red, purple, white. Masses of white balloons floated up and away over the dark-grey trees.

As it went on, the music and the not-quite synchrony of the dancers became trance-like, the taka-taka tongue-clicking and the tapping toes, the flicking heads and expanding, contracting circle of dancers, building into a transporting whole. Unlikely people were drumming their feet in the audience.

Seven giant white bells rose high into the darkening sky, releasing balloons as they went, and transformed into seven white angels in dresses who threw glitter into the wind. The trees sparkled. As the crane swooped and circled over the crowd, there was one breathtaking moment after another;  fireworks, flashing lights and powder unreal against the navy sky.

Traipsing home through the park afterwards, red streamers still hung in the trees where they'd fallen. I thought of the Mary Poppins books - the quiet, orderly park always the place where reality melted at the edges and other worlds could slip in. Where statues come to life and shadows escape their owners, and a woman with a parrot-headed umbrella floats down on an unexploded firework with her feet neatly turned out.
 

Bells is a collaborative spectacle created by Theater Tol (Belgium) and Akademi (London) combining aerial theatre and Kathak dance. It was presented by Artsdepot and is part of Showtime, presented by the Mayor of London.

The show will be on 2nd August in Lewisham and 4th August in Chiswick. I recommend it for a gentle blurring of the edges of the real.

Strebbing brilliant but...

Yesterday Elizabeth Streb’s action hero dancers from Brooklyn took over the monuments of London, working their way over from the City in the early morning to a spectacular finale on the London Eye late at night. The bits I managed to see – the Human Fountain in Trafalgar Square and the Speed Angels outside the National Theatre – were astonishing. However (and I want to get this out of the way first) the decision to brand the whole event as a ‘surprise’, meaning that even the date was kept a secret until the very last minute, and the locations and times of each performance were only revealed about half an hour beforehand, was a poor one.

Like many others, I read about Streb in the Evening Standard some weeks ago – death-defying dance stunts performed outdoors, one day this summer, free across London - and it leapt out to me among the Cultural Olympiad events as something I really wanted to see. I was slightly confused by the lack of any date mentioned, but assumed this was down to last-minute organisational issues. When I realised that this was in fact an intentional part of the event itself,I assumed that it would at least be essential to the performances. 

What happened in the end was this. Halfway through Sunday, with other commitments and plans in place, I realised on Twitter that the ‘One Extraordinary Day’ was now happening, and more than half over. In a rush, not ideal with a toddler in tow, I legged it down to Trafalgar Square in time to catch most of Human Fountain. A four-storey rig stood in front of Nelson’s column with platforms on three levels, and on these were a multitude of figures in bright red bodysuits, flinging themselves from the platforms in a variety of poses and combinations, landing on the floor with an almighty crash, then picking themselves up to run back, clamber up the side and do the same again. Over and over, red bodies falling, flinging, scrambling, crashing, an astonishing show of bravery pushing at the limits of human endurance. At times verging on difficult to watch,but more difficult to turn away from. Streb’s dancing is less gendered than any dance I’ve seen, with strong, muscular women and men performing the same incredible moves. 

Afterwards, I guessed that the next performance would be somewhere towards the South Bank, reasoning that they’d been moving westwards throughout the day, and it was obvious where  the last event, ‘The Human Eye’, would be. Hopefully I meandered down Northumberland Avenue and across the bridge at Embankment, eventually finding the embryonic event at the National Theatre, where a very very tall structure was being set up in the outside space. We camped out on a step, subsisting on very tasty hot dogs from the van parked nearby, and by 8pm had been in our almost front-row seats for over an hour when three dancers in vivid red came out. Streb has been quoted as saying that music is the enemy of dance but the soundscape here really added to the atmosphere. The dancer in the middle looked terrified as she was attached to her harness. 

Then they were winched into the air, where they sometimes posed like trapeze artists, sometimes flailed like puppets, up and down, sprawling red figures against a sky which turned from grey to white-scattered blue as the evening wore on and the sun lit the buildings. Planes and helicopters and birds flew past, seeming almost to touch the three red human marionettes who squirmed on their strings. Some of it seemed tightly choreographed – presumably it all was – but at other times they appeared lost, helpless, and chaotic, snatching at the air as their feet cycled madly. 

It was a great, eerie, performance, and I would have loved to stay for the late show, the undoubted masterpiece, but starting at 10.30pm with a one-year-old and no chance to plan in advance, it was off the cards. At least I got to see some of it, unlike the writers of the plangent messages on Twitter and Facebook, begging for a bit of notice to give them a fighting chance of getting there on time. The refusal to do that, to help out those who were desperate to see it with the basic information about when and where, just seems like a perverse way to treat your potential audience. 

I can see the idea in theory, that this was a shocking series of events where superhuman figures suddenly appeared out of nowhere, leaping across the monuments of London, but in practice it can’t work like this. In practice there are many people there for a long time in advance, rigging, planning, putting up crowd barriers, not to mention all of those ‘in the know’, the press, those who’ve just blundered along. By the time the event starts it’s very obvious indeed that it is about to happen – indeed there are huge banners proclaiming ‘Surprises Streb’ all around.  

So it’s hardly an instantaneous appearance, just a needless annoyance which makes it impossible for those with prior commitments to work, family or anything else to attend this once-in-a-lifetime event. Even worse, it makes it truly impossible for those with disabilities who need additional time to plan and make their journeys. Instead, this favours those who can drop everything in an instant, the able-bodied, the rich (who can jump in cabs, and probably know what’s happening weeks in advance anyway), tourists, and random passers-by who might well enjoy it, but not as much as those who would really have loved to see it and would have made the effort, if only they’d had the chance. Videos here and Guardian picture gallery here

Sorry that so much of this review is about the logistics rather than the performances, but art happens in the real world where people live. (And unlike all the Proper Reviewers, so do I.) In short, this is an amazing dance/action company whose performances stand up on their own merit and they don’t need gimmicks like this to impress anyone.

You are not a drone: The Cult of Quatermass

The Cult of Quatermass took over a basement in Hackney last night. Maps of communication networks and an old Periodic Table are tacked up above the wooden control desk, where a reel-to-reel tape is flanked by flickering video images and an oscillator screen with green lines arcing across it. The panels on the walls are a mass of clunky buttons, switches and knobs, delivering an instant nostalgia kick. And you can touch them (yay). Some seem to shift the noise which fills the air; others don’t have any discernible effect.

The creators emerged unannounced and unsmiling. Willing acolytes crowded the stairs as AAS twiddled dials, stopped and started tapes and climbed ladders to produce a sustained performance of droning, pulsating sounds. There was squealing at the upper reaches of the sonic spectrum while low thrums made the walls vibrate. Sometimes a thought-defeating chaos of noise, at other times different signals and voices seemed to make themselves heard and something more defined and rhythmic took shape as sounds meshed mid-air.

AAS were impassive and focused as they operated the controls and picked their way silently through the crowds of receptive listeners. Upstairs, bottles of Red Stripe swam in a barrel among splintering icebergs.

At first, without introduction and with no obvious moment of beginning, it seemed kind of shambolic and inexplicable. Then it gradually exerted a quasi-hypnotic pull so that the restlessness you felt after 1 minute faded away, and after 10 minutes you could have carried on listening more or less indefinitely. Rising and falling with the sound, dipping in and out of thought and pure hearing. There was something compelling about the slightly clumsy, amateur way it was carried out, the unremarkable clothes and the way that they had to push past people which made it quite genuinely odd and intense.

The Cult of Quatermass was commissioned by Pil & Galia Kollectiv for Xero, Kline and Coma and is developed from the earlier AAS project, The Quatermass Code (2006) which took place at BlocSpace in Sheffield.

It is a sculptural installation of a laboratory control room containing video works, an audio work and machines for producing sounds that can be mixed, live, by the audience. The narrative is built around the characters of Professor Quatermass of the British Sonic Research Unit, a drone band called Samekhmem, a cult of people called ‘Receivers’ and the ‘sacred eternal drone’ that is the obsession of Samekhmem, Receivers and Quatermass alike.

‘Silence. Even a vacuum may contain vibrations. Space itself is the dark matter we seek. All of time is compressed into a single vibrating filament, a new form of religion emerging from alphawaves.’

– Journal entry three months ago

The video and audio works draw inspiration from a range of cultural references and practices including: J. G. Ballard, Situationist dérives, audiomancy, William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, and glitching.

The Cult of Quatermass is at xero, kline & coma, 258 Hackney Road, London E2 7SJ, until 21 February 2012 (weekends only, 12.00-18.00).

For more information go to aasgroup.net or contact: info@xero-kline-coma.com

Can I Wick It? Yes You Can

Hackney Wicked is an art festival whose location at the far reaches of the Overground saves it from the wanky excesses of Shoreditch-Hoxton.

For three days, this area of scruffy streets and half-empty warehouses is transformed into a world of colour, music and bustle. As we came out of the station, a punk choir (the Hackney Secular Singers) was singing under the railway bridge, which was festooned with posters and flyers. Immediately it felt like something amateur and sprawling, a genuine community festival rather than a corporate association of venues and agents.

It centres on the 600+ artists who have opened their studios to the public for the weekend, plus gallery-based exhibitions, collaborative happenings, outdoor events (such as a coracle regatta and a re-enactment of the Cuban blockade), film screenings, and lots of live music, food, and colourful stuff to look at. The atmosphere was laidback, with a good mix of arty types and families, and best of all everything was free.

In one building alone, you could visit more than thirty studios: there’s a huge amount of work to take in, ranging from the memorable to the forgettable, but this plenty adds to the enjoyment. You know you can’t see everything, so just enjoy what you can. Highlights included Michael Nagle’s haunting photorealistic portraits and Natalie Thakur’s addictively odoriferous leather goodies. The Mother Studios building itself has spectacular views across the River Lea to the half-built Olympic stadium.

Down the road in a graffiti-blazoned yard, an old punk band howled about ketamine at a loose knit crowd of bikers who were chugging cider, balancing on old tyres, dandling punk babies, and flashing metal-skewered breasts at onlookers on the balconies of the neighbouring posh flats, while bull terriers and rottweillers squirmed on the hot concrete. It all looked convincingly hardcore, but this being an art festival, a discarded Guardian Weekend was blowing around, affording the extra pleasure of seeing Lucy Mangan's face stomped into dusty nothingness under oversized boots.

Meanwhile, as the sun set over Queen’s Yard, most of the stalls had packed up, though the jerk chicken was still drawing a queue. A woman in a turquoise net skirt was on stage, wrangling with a sound engineer, while footballs bounced lazily around the tarmac, smokers clanked bottles by the metal-glowing canal, and the diggers across the water had stopped for the day.

The festival finished on Sunday with a ceremonial burning of a wicker man. This was its third year; I’ll be back in 2011, and not only to see how the stadium is getting on.

Back to Life, Back to Surreality: The Surreal House

Surrealism hovers on the boundaries between the pretentious and the raw, between self-indulgence and horror. Both sides were on display last weekend at the Barbican Weekender, a two-day festival to tie in with the Surreal House exhibition. The Centre was alive with surrealist follies, some veering a bit too close to the dreaded world of Cirque, but others (the maze, the small children intent on building cardboard houses) capturing something genuinely fun and off-kilter.

The exhibition itself is thoughtful, wide-ranging and disturbing. The meaning of ‘surreal house’ is twofold: both the ‘domestic interior’ as symbol and object within surrealist art, and the influence of surrealism on architecture. En masse, the works here demonstrate that the house does indeed have a powerful place in the imagination and the unconscious.

At the entrance is Donald Rodney’s In the House of My Father, a close-up photograph of the artist’s hand; on his palm rests a tiny sculpture of a house made from scraps of his own skin , removed during one of his operations to combat sickle-cell anaemia (which killed him in 1998, at the age of 37). Next to the photograph, in a glass case, is the sculpture itself, entitled My Mother. My Father. My Sister. My Brother: miniature, tumbledown, delicate, horrific.

I’ve seen this photograph before, but it works here as a powerful way to introduce the theme of the exhibition. Being trapped in your own skin, your own family, your own self: the home as a place of safety but also as the site of the most primal childhood terrors; the materialisation of the unconscious into physical forms; the bedroom as the site of birth, dreams, sex, and death.

The lower level of the gallery has been partitioned into a series of irregularly shaped rooms with intriguing titles (Press to Enter!, Femme Maison, Panic Space). These initially appear somewhat disorganised, but resolve into a coherent whole as the exhibition continues.

Visiting these rooms is like exploring a fairground house of horrors, as you round cardboard corners in tentative semi-darkness. This works well to put you in a state of childlike apprehension and vulnerability. Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Black Bath), a cast of a bathtub in black rubber, is ominous and huge; escaping from it, you’re confronted by Freud’s chair, oddly spiderlike in its backlit glass case.

The ‘Who I Am’ room, apparently focusing on the notion of the house as self, is a series of horrors: an anonymous engraving from 1505 of a Tree Man (after this Hieronymus Bosch), a grotesque hybrid of man and wood, ruptured, split, mad-eyed, a face at the top and furniture at the bottom. A film of Andre Breton’s house plays at one end of the room. This is the self/house as broken, bodies sprouting into inhuman profusion.

Another room is dominated from above by Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy, a grand piano suspended upside down in the air, its keys madly sprung out. Every so often, with a resonant low note, the piano comes (back?) to life: the keys retract to their correct positions, the lid closes, the piano plays a tune before exploding once more into frozen agony.

It’s not quite clear what this has to do with houses. The exhibition leaflet says it’s ‘reminiscent of an airborne castle and is principal among the phantoms of the house’, but really I think it just adds to the atmosphere, as do Louise Bourgeois’ creepy, overspilling mounds of sculpture. Some other reviews have criticised this lack of tight conceptual focus:

Yet at times it could be said that the curator has taken anti-modernist irrationality too far. It is often unclear which way to turn when moving from one space to another. It is necessary to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get into the curator's mind, even when the often-baffling combinations of artworks are explained using wall text.

Personally, I'm not bothered by somewhat tenuous links if the artworks in question add to the enjoyment of the show as a whole. I didn't bother trying to 'get into the curator's mind' (especially as much of the wall text is practically unreadable in the darkness, never mind what it says) or to turn in the right direction; I think this exhibition is much better if you let yourself go a bit, wander vaguely, soak up the atmosphere. Without trying to, I did see everything that was there, in a fairly logical order and with no doubling back.

There is far too much here to do justice by listing individual works. The curators have included Big Names, with top-quality pieces by Dalí, Magritte, Giacometti, and so on, but this aren’t necessarily the most striking. Where it really succeeds is in the architecture of the exhibition itself. On the lower level, from within the house, it’s an unnerving experience of going through doorways and around blind corners; from above, there are strange lines of sight, cardboard roofs and blank windows, sculptures seen again from a new angle, visitors wandering around. This works brilliantly, as the upper level deals with surrealism and architecture. It’s an inspired melding of form and content.

Architecture featured includes Kiesler’s Endless House, models for a house based on the shell, the egg and the womb, and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the house that represented twentieth-century Modernism, photographed here after it had fallen into disrepair, along with many other architectural models which strive to materialise the unconscious into external built forms.

The are also many, many films to see, ranging from documentary footage of performance art (someone cutting a house in half, with great effort), to relevant clips from longer films (e.g. Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris), and even entire movies, such as Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, in the ‘Electric Cinema’ – a mock-up complete with comfortable battered red velveteen seats.

Visiting this exhibition isn’t simply viewing art assembled in a gallery space; it’s an affective and absorbing experience in itself, which makes it well worth the cost of entry.

(I had planned to include here a write-up of Tai Shani’s exhibition-linked performance piece, ‘Last Night I Dreamt I Was Venus from Beyond the Mirrors’, but I’m disinclined to put more thought and effort into writing a review than she did into devising and rehearsing it in the first place.)

The Surreal House, Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS. 10 June – 12 September 2010.

Overexposure: Exposed at Tate Modern

There’s a familiar trajectory when you visit a big exhibition, especially one dedicated to a single artist and arranged in chronological order. Typically, they begin with the artist’s first stumbling steps towards developing his or her distinctive style. These early works usually make sense viewed retrospectively, but tend not to grab you on their own merits. Combine this with the real-world adjustment to being in an exhibition (the need to toggle all of your own switches from ‘walking and going somewhere’ to ‘standing and being somewhere’), and exhibitions can often initially seem alienating, confusing, or dull. Stick with it, though, and the first drafts gradually give way to the more fully realised works, in a journey that takes you about ten minutes but probably took the artist twenty years.

Exposed takes this narrative and turns it on its head, with an exhibition that is instantly accessible, but becomes increasingly alienating. It doesn’t take much mental effort to look at photographs and video, our most familiar visual forms, or to think about tabloid subjects such as fame, sex, and violence. The first room features high-resolution close-up photographs of people walking the streets of New York, taken without their knowledge or consent - leading to a landmark legal case in which one of the subjects took the photographer to court, and lost. This introduces the main issues which dominate this exhibition: the ethics of photography, and the politics of looking and being seen.

(Oh, and America. It should be mentioned that the exhibition as a whole is overwhelmingly dominated by works from the USA: tenements in Tennessee, Hollywood stars caught unawares, strippers in San Francisco, street scenes in New York, discarded litter at the Mexico/USA border. Fair enough to an extent: if the twentieth century was the century of photography, it was also the century of America. It’s a shame, though, that the Tate couldn’t have put a more British spin on the idea. America is hardly short of exhibitions of this kind, and even if, as I suspect, this is targeted at transatlantic summer tourists, more could have been made of its real-world location. There are no photographs of London at all; Shizuka Yokomizo’s intriguing snaps of strangers at the windows of their homes, the only ones taken in the UK, are not distinctively British. This seems a missed opportunity.)

The first theme is ‘The Unseen Photographer’, featuring photographs taken surreptitiously with all manner of devices: cameras which appear to point in one direction while really capturing another, cameras disguised as books or hidden in pockets, or taken with extreme telephoto lenses. Some of these, especially the very old ones, are fascinating: a nineteenth-century snapshot of two young women sharing a book on a train shows a casual familiarity that a posed photo could never achieve. However, as shown most clearly in Lewis Hine’s photographs of child miners and factory workers (he was hired by the National [i.e. American] Child Labor Committee), these are mainly interesting for what they show, not for the process of showing. This is photography as documentation: evidence at the time, now vividly real social history.

The next theme, ‘Celebrity and the Public Gaze’, is less distinguished, save for a very early paparazzi shot of Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir in Paris. Slebs on display here include Garbo, Jackie Kennedy, and Paris Hilton; we’re veering into Heat territory. This exhibition contributes to the ongoing culting of Alison Jackson by including two of her large faked photographs of celebrities. Whereas the real paparazzi pictures confront us with the torment of those photographed (and have potentially serious consequences), Jackson’s pseudo versions add nothing to this.

From the very first room, when you as a viewer discover you’re looking at photographs of people who absolutely did not want to be looked at in this way, you are placed in an uneasy position. This feeling intensifies as you proceed onto theme 3, ‘Voyeurism and Desire’, with pictures taken secretly of women in changing rooms, unsuspecting couples having sex in cars, or young girls in the streets of a provincial town. Other than Susan Meiselas’ compelling photographs of carnival strippers and their audiences and Kohei Yoshiyuki’s documentation of the bizarre goings-on in a Tokyo park, few of the works here seem to have much to say about voyeurism and desire, as opposed to simply being expressions of voyeuristic desire. This is a problem. The Tate’s write-up talks of ‘the viewer [being] implicated in acts of voyeurism’, rather than ‘blam[ing] the camera’, but that’s not really an answer.

It is when you reach the set of rooms dedicated to ‘Witnessing Violence’, that this feeling of implication becomes overwhelming. In quick succession, you are presented with suicide and genocide, lynchings and shootings, executions and death camps, battlefields and bodies. These images are detailed, explicit, and horrific. But whereas a Francis Bacon painting (say) is allusively horrifying, which is to say it creates a sense of mortality and corporeality in a non-literal way, these are simply documents of actual appalling things that have taken place. And personally, I don’t want to look at piles of bodies at Dachau, or a man lying dead in the street, for aesthetic or intellectual pleasure. This is not about avoiding the reality and the horror of life, but because it is distressing and unnecessary (and maybe even, to use a contentious word, wrong) to peer at them.

Displaying these photographs doesn’t per se raise interesting questions or do anything worthwhile. Yes, photographs like those of a suicidal black South African man on a high ledge, and then jumping from it to his death in front of a jeering crowd, are sickening, but what does that prove? The Tate claim that such photography may ‘allow us to bear witness to a victim’s suffering’, or alternatively ‘anaesthetize us to the horror’, but all I saw were people gawking in a way that undermines their own dignity, as well as that of the broken bodies on display. There are better, cleverer, subtler ways to interrogate man’s inhumanity to man - and the role of the spectator in it - than to become part of the heartless crowd of onlookers.

Having been through these rooms, I was in a bit of a daze by the time I reached the final theme of ‘Surveillance’: a shame, as this section includes some fascinating projects by Sophie Calle and enjoyable works dealing with spying, military and civilian watchers, even if the stuff about CCTV is hackneyed.

There is a lot to see in this exhibition, and much of it is gripping and powerful. Undoubtedly it is worth visiting and taking your time over. However, as the Tate themselves state: 'Exposed explores the uneasy relationship between making and viewing images that deliberately cross lines of privacy and propriety’. The thing is, though, they really do. It's not necessarily the job of art galleries to find and show the most gruesome, intrusive pictures that they can. Maybe it actually isn’t right to hang or to look at some of these photographs. Man cannot always bear this much reality. No, nor woman neither.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera, Tate Modern, 28 May - 3 October 2010