Hell Is(n't) Other People:Bloomberg New Contemporaries @ the Camden Arts Centre.

I miss lockdown. I don't miss the fact that people were dying, lying in hospital on ventilators, and that other people were losing their jobs. I'm not a complete psychopath. No, I miss the part of lockdown that saw people, paradoxically, coming together more than ever. Not physically and not in person - of course. You could get lynched for that - or at least be publicly shamed on social media.

I miss the part of lockdown (and this was the first lockdown, not the second where things got a bit nastier) where people started looking out for each other, phoning each other up to see how they are, arranging Zoom quizzes, and generally being what people are supposed to be. Social creatures - not antisocial ones.

Thomas Cameron - Delivery (2022)

In Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 existentialist play No Exit he has a character, Garcin - who is frustrated because the object of his affections fancies another bloke and not him, claim "hell is other people" but hell is not other people. If you think that I would advise you to remind yourself that to every other person in the world you are other people. If you say "hell is other people" you are lacking even the remotest shred of self-awareness. You are other people and if you think hell is other people then you are hell.

Other people are great. If they weren't why would we stay in contact with our families, why would we make (and maintain) friendships, why we would strike up conversations with random strangers in pubs, at bus stops and airports, and why do we tune in to panel and chat shows on television to watch people talking and telling stories?

It's because humans are a social species. Take a look at a large city, a huge building, a railway network, a football team, or a musical group. None of these things could exist if one person tried to build them alone. 'Other people' are required for people to act on their dreams. As Saint Etienne once had it, you need a mess of help to stand alone.

I wasn't sure, initially, what to make of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre. It seemed, at first, a bit haphazard, a little slapdash. But as I walked round it I detected a theme and that theme was the interaction of people with each other. For good or for bad. Other people aren't hell here and they're not heaven either. They're a confusing mix of the good and the bad. In that way, they are much like us - and that's because they are us.

 

Margaret (Weiyi) Liang - With Helen (2022)

New Contemporaroes have been showcasing emerging artists since 1949 (Bloomberg must've got involved later) and giving them a platform to present their work to a wider audience. The venue moves around (Camden Arts Centre last hosted back in 2001) and a group of internationally renowned artists (though Helen Phillipson was the only name I even vaguely recognised) select the artists chosen for the show. 

Fifty-five of them. It's a lot. They're not ALL included in this blog. There's film, sculpture, and painting and there's one or two things that don't quite fit into any of those characters or cover more than one of them. The themes the curators say dominate the show are collectivity, interdependence, care, kinship, climate justice, world-building, networks, border, and identity politics and though they're pretty much all there, for me the over riding theme was friendship and interaction with others. Which would be covered by interdependence, collectivity, and networks I suppose.

You can buy the works if you like but I'm skint enough as it is so obviously I didn't. I just looked at them. One of the most powerful for me was the one that heads up this blog, Delivery by Thomas Cameron. An unremarkable scene of a Deliveroo rider pressing a buzzer to inform a customer their order has arrived.

It's something you can see every day of the week but it says something about the isolated, siloed, lives most of us now lead. We work from home, we eat at home, and we spend much of our lives staring at either our computer screens, our television screen, or our mobile phone screen. It's a convenient life and it suits some but it doesn't suit all. There is, it seems to me, an epidemic of loneliness in our society and it's one that seems likely to become ever more pronounced as technology advances.

James Dearlove - Figures In A Room (2022)

Cai Arfon Bellis - Mirror Arch (2022)

Works by James Dearlove and Cari Arfron Bellis look at the crowded, confusing world of other people and hub-bub and almost seem like good arguments for staying in, living alone, and turning the Internet off. But then I look at the lonely footballer clutching a bunch of flowers in Noa Klagsbald's My Flowers and think that I'd rather be out there, getting amongst it, than living his life.

Football's a team game. One footballer on his own looks sad. Phyllis McGowan's inky, washy, Dear Transport at least makes being alone look fun. There's a difference between being alone and being lonely. A couple of weeks ago I was feeling lonely. It was horrible. Today I am alone. It feels quite nice. When I'm alone I like to get out for a walk, at least see other people going about their lives and feel fresh air. The weather's getting better. It'll be time for an alfresco ice cream soon. It's not all bad.

Noa Klagsbald - My Flowers (2022)

Savanna Achampong - I can be myself here:Red World (2022)

Savanna Achampong - Landscape, Red World, Attire, Red World (2022)

Savanna Achampong - Portrait (2022)

Phyllis McGowan - Dear Transport (2022)

Jennifer Jones - Granboys (2021)

Elene Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia - A Communion Rite 

All of life is a stage, Elene Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia seems to be saying, and so, in some ways, it is. Every person you see out and about has their own dramatic interior life. Many won't reveal it - even when you talk to them. Some will. But scratch the surface of any person's seemingly dull, quotidian, life and there will be a story there. There will be many many stories.

Of course, artists don't have to explain themselves and that can leave some of the work open to interpretation or even, sometimes, virtually impossible to understand. Bunmi Agusto's Labour of Love looked good and Iga Koncka's Dolls Hung By Their Necks was impressive (and possibly a tad macabre) but I couldn't, in all honesty, tell you what the intent of the artist in each case was - let alone if they'd succeeded in fulfilling that intent.

Bunmi Agusto - Labour of Self-Love (2023)

Iga Koncka - Dolls Hung By Their Necks (2023)

Alexandra Beteeva - That's more home to you than your house (2022)

Jeremy Scott - Margate (2023)

Osman Yousefzada - Migrant Godxx II (2021)

Which is fine. Not everything is for me. It was when I reached the works by Alexandra Beteeva and Jeremy Scott that MY theme for the show started to fall in place. These are quite simple paintings of people enjoying moments of friendship, romance and intimacy perhaps - again it is in the viewer's eye and mind to make those calls, and they are all the more warming for it. Osman Yousefzada's migrant may be making friends with a fish or it may be, more likely, a comment on migration and the dangers of crossing the world's busiest shipping channel in search of a better life.

Bessie Kirkham's Little Blue Oscar certainly isn't sleeping with the fishes. He looks very comfortable in his bed, dreaming the dreams of a fortunate man, Jill Mandeng's peculiar elephant man seems to be a fan of the German national football team, and Alannah Cyan's Pistol Packer's just one step from getting his massive cowboy dick out. Though I bet not all cowboys have large penises. I'm not sure how that story started.

Bessie Kirkham - Little Blue Oscar (2022)

Jil Mandeng - Grasslands I (2022)

Alannah Cyan - Pistol Packer #2 (2022)

Sidney Westenkow - I only lose sleep over it on especially hot nights (Wolf) (2022)

Holly Sezer - My Greatest Friend (2023)

Holly Sezer also uses Association Football, and its overpriced jerseys, to show bonding and friendship while Emerson Pullman's Equilibrium shows a man in a fetching stripey top who looks sad yet contented. As if he's listening to Leonard Cohen or Scott Walker.

Ranny McDonald's chucked a cute dog in there, Yingming Chen's made a papier-mache mooncake (not sure why, artists eh?), and Haneen Hardy's Mesopotamian Victimes of Climate Change is, along with Thomas Cameron's Delivery (surely the original title was Deliveroo), my favourite piece in the show. Which is odd as on the surface it hardly fits in with the theme that I have decided for the exhibition.

Yet climate change is something that directly relates to people. It was caused by people and it affects people. It will affect people far more in the coming years and decades. If you wanted to make a case for hell being other people then climate change, like war, would be a good place to start. Yet climate change and war are not caused by OTHER people, they are caused by all people.

Emerson Pullman - Equilibrium (2022)

Ranny McDonald - You Run My Mind (2023)

Yingming Chen - Imprint - Mooncake mould*2 (2021)

Haneen Hardy - Mesopotamian Victimes of Climate Change (2023)

I found Hardy's work chilling and bleak yet at the same time compelling and beautiful and though Helen Clarke's Propagation seems to be mining the same theme I found it less effective and I certainly didn't find it beautiful. Even if it did have a certain obscure charm that reminded me of the work of Carl Andre or Sol LeWitt.

Helen Clarke - Propagation (2020)

I'd thought that was the show done but there was a bonus room, an Artist's Studio, and that room was dominated by Zayd Menk's massive, and messy, 4.3.2?</>_-, (a catchy title, there are actually other bits in the title that I can't even generate with my keyboard). That was a fun one as I actually got to interact with, er, .... myself.

That's me holding my phone up in the first Menk image. Lots of cameras, wires, screens, a beaten up old office chair like the one I'm sat on now as I write this, and lots of technological stuff I'm a million miles away from understanding. It's fun but the point, I think, is to ask the viewer, the man on the street, how much agency we have in our lives when technology is advancing so fast. I used to think technology was just a tool we could harness but now I don't know. Do we bow down to our new masters, do we try to control them, do we welcome  the singularity? I'm not quite there yet but every time a computer asks me to prove I'm not a robot I start to wonder why I, a human, am having to prove to a robot that I'm not a robot.

Emily Kraus - Stochastic 12 (diptych) (2023)

Zayd Menk - 4.3.2?</>_- (2022)

Zayd Menk - 4.3.2?</>_- (2022)

Zayd Menk - 4.3.2?</>_- (2022)

That's not right, surely? I welcome technology (it has done wonders in the fields of medicine and that's just one example) but I also fear its endless march. Technology, the Internet, AI, social media - much of it is still in its Wild West phase. Unregulated, it destroys the lives of adults and, most worryingly, children.

It needs to be controlled in some way but nobody seems certain how. For me, I try to enjoy technology but I try also to get outside and enjoy nature too. I also try to enjoy the unhellish company of other people. On Saturday, Pam and I walked along the Beverley Brook and ended up having a lovely Italian meal in New Malden, on Wednesday I went with Jade to a fantastic Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk, and last weekend I spent FIVE whole nights back at my parents' house.

A record for recent years. We watched quiz shows, went for walks around Tadley, drank tea, ate Greggs and went for a couple of meals out, and we even talked about important (and non-important stuff). This weekend I'm off to North Wales to see Michelle and my wonderful god-daughter Evie and I can hardly wait. Hell isn't other people. Quite the opposite.

Joseph Ijoyemi - Free the Obas 1 (2023)

Efrat Merin - Loneliness of a Time Traveller I (2022)