Watching Huw Lemmey's 'Ungentle'

I didn’t think I was going to write a review ever again. I went to a gallery and had thoughts in my head. The following is somewhat a review of some art and somewhat a review of galleries. Not to spoil it but at this point, it’s hardly going to be a favourable review of the gallery.

Why the fuck are art galleries the way they are? I suppose the same could be questioned of anything. Theatres, gyms, shops and restaurants are all the way they are because of conventions. In a theatre, performers go on a stage, an audience sits in the seats, set pieces are moved around, lights fire from overhead and ice cream is served during an intermission. (I work in a theatre). The building facilitates these conditions. In a gallery, paintings go on the walls and sculptures on the floor. Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. The room is white and boring so as to not upstage the as-boring art. As for video or performance, the windows are covered and the room is black. The end. Galleries are pretty unadapted for their use. Someone—I’m not naming names—would be better off putting rocks or leaves in a circle elsewhere (maybe outside) rather than lugging them into a white-walled gallery with a concrete floor to bore the shit out of all of us.

Who’s job was the benches? Someone in the SV offices has to fess up.

I went to a gallery the other day. I went to see Huw Lemmey’s Ungentle at Studio Voltaire. It’s a forty-ish minute-long video-film; it’s a video shot on film about a fictional English spy voiced by Ben Wish about being a spy and also being a gay spy. The film moves through the English countryside and parks and streets, cruising grounds and the site of historic espionage training. The video’s good, I’d recommend going to see it if you want. Wishaw’s clipped English accent reads cliches, they seem, from pulpy spy genre writing. The spy is talking about an early lover, ten years his senior. He says Alfred took him in the fields where he lived and then he, the spy, ‘took him in his mouth’—an intensely tame and much-used way of writing ‘I gobbled his cock.’ So polite. Out on the street, maybe cruising in a public bathroom, down on knees in a piss-soaked stall, whispered in ear, ‘let me take you in my mouth.’ Another lover, the one that recruited him into a Cambridge-Five-style double-agent ring, is spoken of in the voice of Paddington Bear and Q from those James Bond movies. He says, ‘For me, for him, I burned.’ For me, for this, nuh-uh. The video is funny, its intriguing, in its duality of tweeness and grit, merging fact and fiction, and all these various tones. Cruising (1980) meets Goodnight Mr Tom (1998) meets a spy movie I haven’t seen.

The vibe.

The space, the gallery, is a cinema and a black cube. At the same time, audiences are invited in at regular intervals to catch the beginning of the continually looping film. Unlike a cinema, the film is screened inside a large room with exposed rafters where the only soft, sound-absorbing furnishings are two cushion-topped benches and a pair of curtains that divide the built-in café-bar, Juliet’s, irritating patrons from the gallery cinema. The film is shot great, the writing’s cool, and the editing is lovely, but the sound is bad. Likely due to the architecture, the hard surfaces force a reverberation in Wishaw’s voice. Vocals bounce around the room, off every wall. It doesn’t appear to be an intentional choice, integral to the video—which is way too soft and reliant on the conventions of a well-produced film to be intentional. It seemingly is part of the convention of art galleries to adopt none of those found in cinema, like soundproofing or tiered seating banks. Instead, the subtitles that play on every alternating screening are obstructed by the audience in front of the rear bench.

I don’t get art galleries half the time I’m in them. There’s something that’s like a complete utopia about some of it. Imagine being able to enter a cinema whenever you liked, walk into an auditorium and sit down to enjoy a film without bothering with tickets. The dream. It’s great that there are films in galleries—that part, I’m not mad at. Wish sometimes they’d just play a movie or something, walk into Talbot Rice Gallery or the ICA and they’ve got Chocolate (2000) on or You’ve Got Mail (1998). As before, why are art galleries the way they are? No idea. It can be done, I’ve seen exhibitions with soundproofing before once, one time. No! Twice, two times. Galleries, for the most part, in my experience, are just radical-adjacent sites of business-as-usual.

—Andy x