London, March 5-12 2003

Gustav Metzger, Stewart Home, Wolfe Lenkiewicz
T1&2Artspace, East End

Don’t visit this exhibition on a cold day. The building – an old gin factory – is semi-derelict, and the lack of heating makes it impossible, for instance, to watch lengthy films that explore boredom: ‘not punk rhetoric’, says Stewart Home. ‘I’m into the real thing, which is actually rather interesting’. His re-presentation of Eisenstein’s 1928 film ‘The Golem’ with subtitles borrowed from Paul Wegener’s version and a loudly insistent soundtrack by the Finnish punk rock band, 'The Dolphins,' may be ‘rather interesting’ when viewed in a heated room. Standing on a concrete floor in sub-zero temperatures, however, I found it intensely irritating.

Wolfe Lenkiewicz’s film ‘The Park’ has an inaudible soundtrack; the narrator’s voice seems to have been fed through a synthesiser. The addition of subtitles suggests this is deliberate – a way of creating distance, which merely interferes with one’s comprehension. Beautiful; images of a park in Bethnal Green (people walking, empty swings dangling) are interspersed with found and modified footage (a dog running, a man shooting, someone on horseback). Snippets of newspaper are used as windows on to the past, so enabling the history of the area to be explored. Images of Hitler, Churchill’s face and voice, shots of Moseley’s Blackshirts and a barrage balloon floating overhead remind us of anti-Semitism and the war years. The ugliness of the politics contrasts with the beauty of the images – to potent effect.

Gustav Metzger, who is famous for producing auto-destructive art, has filled the basement with 100,000 newspapers. He invites you to pin cuttings onto boards labelled ‘Disaster’, ‘Extinction’ , ‘Work’, ‘Info overload’. ‘Biotechnology’ etc, ‘ I want to stimulate discussion about the danger we are in. The world is collapsing’ says the 77 year-old artist. Given that newspapers and radio and TV bulletins bombard us with this kind of information 24 hours a day, his intervention seems somewhat superfluous. If anything, we need less analysis and more action; anti-war demonstrations could achieve far more than cut-and-past operations.

Sarah Kent