No not Plato's...but the basement gallery of the Ikon Gallery in its past home on Birmingham's John Bright Street.
 |
| Hugh, David, Michelle, David, Ms. Mol, Paul 1981 |
Ikon had opened its doors in November 1978 with three exhibitions! Making the most of the cavernous premises (formerly a furniture warehouse) it utilised its light and airy ground floor for shows by the American artist Agnes Denes and local art school lecturer Harry Snook. But the dark voluminous basement space housed the majority of works in an Arts Council Touring show Scale for Sculpture.
 |
| Harry Snook: Untitled Painted Wood Relief 1978 240 x 145 cms. Sadly I never took, or lost the slides of this opening show other than this image of Nicholas Munro's |
I aim to write separately about the other shows that happened between 78 and 81 whilst I worked at the gallery but here I record my recollections of those basement shows - some of which are, to my mind, some of the most extraordinary of those times anywhere in the UK. Beginning with The Depot, Kulchur Piece #4 by Jochen Gerz. As Hugh Stoddart (Ikon Director 1978/81) says in his memoir for As Exciting As We Can Make It, Ikon in the 1980's) "I showed [him] here before others here had heard of him" and the undertaking of this enormous piece was a challenge for the gallery in a variety of ways.
In the first place correspondence was so much more difficult back in those times (especially when working across country boundaries) and Jochen was rightly very precise in his requirements. I was responsible for the text panel and without computers I had to go out to a design company to have it produced - it took several weeks and a handful of failures to get it right! Paul our Gallery Manager had to source the whole tree that made up the central element arrange and organise the labour to get it into the space (we had a goods lift but most planks didn't fit). And then there was the painting...it had to be clad in photographic opaque (this came in smallish bottles and likely is unknown to many under 50 or so as it was used to spot blemishes on negatives in analogue photography). It hadn't occurred to me how much we would require and so my hunt for enough extended down to Coventry!
At some point in the show's run (April-May) a fashion company thought it might be a good backdrop but by the point of their arrival it had begun to pong a bit and grown some very interesting fungi. Gerz is a fascinating and often controversial artist and his first UK appearance certainly marked out the way in which the huge basement could be used to experiment. In July the French artist Bernard Bazile arrived from Paris armed only with a suitcase that contained 'Le Grand Serpent' an extremely long string of beads occasionally festooned with bits of sponges and other matter that - in an overnight stay - he arranged around the room.
As can be seen...the room is very large so it is almost impossible to show how the piece looked...but a detail reveals its nature. The scale of the space and the lighting (brighter than several other artist had it) made it a little less successful to my mind than the others featured here.
The next occupant - Max Eastley - who followed on in August 79 created far more dramatic work (s) that utilised sound as much as vision. Eastley was already known to me through his recording on Brian Eno's Obscure label New & Rediscovered Musical Instruments that he made with David Toop. His trademark 'instruments' filled the space with odd scratchings and rustlings and both looked and sounded superb giving the environment an eerie and unsettling quality.
The beginning of 1980 saw an even more ambitious project in the space. Ron Haselden had the idea of taking a simple folded paper cone and blowing it up in scale. Really blowing it up that is; by creating a machine that would slowly spool out newsprint generously supplied by the Birmingham Post from the ends of reels used in production.
 |
| Me (left) Ron & Hugh discussing the issue |
Over the summer I was given the opportunity to tour the Midlands Art Schools and make an exhibition to fill Ikon. Amongst some very talented artists I was taken by an extraordinary installation (from I think Coventry?) by John Crowther that we relocated in Ikon's basement. It was quite a substantial work comprising two elements a kind of auditorium with a slide show and another sculptural work alongside.
It was a phenomenal work by a young artist who I cannot find any information on at all at this distance. Whether I have his name misremembered or he simply didn't go on to make work goodness knows. Sadly there were several shows that as far as I'm aware either went unrecorded or the evidence is elsewhere. That autumn for example saw Imagination Is the Venom Passing Slyly Through the Vein (Brian Catling, Stephen Cochrane with Lol Coxhill, Stephen Dilworth, David Duly, Tom Gilhespy, Richard Mackness, Jayne Parker, Ian Sinclair, Elaine Shemilt and Sue Wood) in the gallery with works such as Dilworth's King & Queen - two large glass sandwiches that gave off another powerful odour in the basement. In 1981 Gerald Newman's very discreet text & sound piece was February's occupant. Newman, whose work was often included in early surveys of conceptual art, was noted for the spare visual components that used light and text.
But perhaps the most controversial show took place in March of that year. It would have been fairly pointless to attempt photographs of Diamonds Are Forever by Chris Burden a single diamond (or was it) hanging in the middle of the blacked out room. A curtain was erected just beyond the bottom of the staircase that led from the ground floor with a thick rope to lead the intrepid viewer on a merry dance around the lightless space meandering around until they bumped into a plinth. The diamond hung from the ceiling at around average adult height and was pierced by a tiny shaft of light from a model railway headlight projecting from a small steel tube. At least that was the idea though aligning the light to do its job was an ongoing nightmare for Gallery Manager Paul. There are quite a few conflicting accounts of the 'performance' as his CV terms it but it was a prank of the first order!
A few weeks later the gallery mounted 'Canada In Birmingham' in which seven artists showed work from across that nation. Perhaps the most extraordinary work was that of Irene Whittome on the ground floor but Ian Carr-Harris and David Craven took spaces in the basement to show sculpture and paintings, or installation/wall objects if you prefer.
