LUX
New Wave of Contemporary Art: Various Artists
13 OCTOBER 2021 – 6 FEBRUARY 2022
180 Strand, Temple, WC2R 1EA
£18
LUX is the newest video installation exhibition held at 180 strand. Their previous exhibitions have ranged from excellent (The Infinite Mix) to pretty bad (Strange Days: Memories of the Future), and have predominantly been video based. LUX differs from previous shows in that firstly, instead of being free, it comes with a pretty hefty price of £18. Rather than being an exhibition around video art and expressionism, it is focused on light and perception. The intro statement hypes you up immediately, claiming some of the tools used here were originally reserved for military use but have since become democratised – “making it accessible to the untethered creativity of individual artists and collectives”.
Like previous exhibitions, the work is made up from twelve different international artists. We start the exhibition with some television screens in the shape of flowers – a work which claims to be creating multiple different forms which are completely unique to that moment. You then descend a 24m red-lit tunnel, reminiscent of the hilarious ‘womb’ tunnel featured in Kendall’s birthday party in the last series of Succession. It was funny then, and it’s still funny now. Unfortunately, the somewhat puerile and abstract works continued in this fashion.
At it’s worst, a work titled BLUESKYWHITE (the second part to the red vagina tunnel) showed two rounded screens with blue skies, eventually engulfed in blackness. Overlaid was a poem about how suspended gas and fine particles due to global warming may reduce global temperature and eventually turn the blue sky white, which was played very queitly and made the work even more eye-roll worthy. There was another work ‘unicolour’ by Carsten Nicolai which was supposed to toy with viewers perception of colour: instead, it was a Microsoft PowerPoint from the early noughties, or a version of teletext that your dad was stuck on and couldn’t figure out how to escape. It was too lacklustre for a work based around vibrancy. Hito Steyerl's video installation This Is The Future and its accompanying multi-channel installation, Power Plants explore the affects of Artificial Intelligence on human society. Whilst the concept is interesting, the work is convoluted, jarring and in my opinion doesn’t really know what it’s trying to say. It jumps between points without finishing some and feels like it’s trying really hard to discombobulate its audience – that is until one pretentious and self-assured human claims to really ‘get it’. Much of the descriptions at LUX and quite frankly a lot of 180 strand’s exhibitions are like this, to the point where I tend not to read them as they almost ruin the work with their uppity, nonsensical bullshit.
At its best, Cecilia Bengolea’s ‘Beastiaire’ was pretty cool: a work of scanned body images of the artist which morphed into different creatures via three-dimension video animation. Cao Yuxi’s work ‘Shan Shui Paintings by AI’ showed how a deep network algorithm used a data model to paint it’s own version of unlimited and continuous landscape paintings, taken from thousands of pixels of original landscape paintings creature by mankind across the globe. What you see is a continuous, brush-stroke style which is reminiscent of continuous waves crashing against the ocean floor – it’s beautiful, for a short period, but you tire of it soon enough. The coolest work by far was Universal Everything’s ‘Transfiguration’, which see’s a giant walking figure metamorphosing from water to fire, to lava, to plants, to fur and beyond. As he walks, the sound effects mimic his material composition, and the transitions between different states and forms is both mesmerising and effortless.
The last room contained two more works, the first a reimagining of renaissance paintings – digitalising it and making into tiny circles that appear like water droplets. Kind of cool for 5 seconds, before you realise the original is much more impressive than whatever take on it this is. The second is a work titled ‘Starry Beach’ by a’strict: a dark multi-sensory installation that allows you to sit and walk in surging waves. Maybe decent for a photo but gets dull pretty quickly. Part of the description for this piece was:
“the unit’s unprecedented digital interpretation of waves and ability to powerfully choregraph water within an interior architectural space successfully envision the marriage of contemporary art and technology at it’s finest, stimulating the viewers subconscious and evoking our shared associations with and reliance on water.” Take that for a pompous exercise in the underuse of commas.
Overall, LUX has a few interesting works in it. The concept of AI and digital artwork is incredibly current, with the rise of NFT’s and the metaverse – however, I felt that the majority of the exhibits here fell flat. It’s not from want of trying, more so that the descriptions of the exhibition and the works rile it up to be something much more mind blowing and exciting than it actually is. Whilst the exhibition did show me the power of AI and digital in contributing to the creative realm of artwork, it didn’t threaten humanity or our place in the world in this sphere whatsoever. Whilst the great works of human artistry remain engrained in the minds of many, almost all of the works here were nothing more than forgettable.
OVERALL RATING: **
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