This annual sweep of degree shows has been going since 1949, so a little back story is a welcome intermission to what was originally the ‘Young Contemporaries’. A small reading room display explains how some trippy projections in 1968 by Bruce Lacey’s Light/Sound Workshop were disturbed by a sit-in at the then exhibition venue, Hornsey College. This disturbance eventually became an epic six-week stand for educational reform and something of a precursor to the current ‘Occupy’ movement, which is still clinging to the cassock-tails of St Paul’s as I write.
Some of today’s New Contemporaries are pissed off too – though not as politically pissed off as graduates of art school will be in the coming years, thanks to hikes in student fees and an increasingly polarised marketplace of postgrad haves and have-nots. A smattering of this ‘new contempt’ is felt in two videos sparingly arranged in the first space.
First up is ‘We Are the Robots’ by Samuel Williams, in which a pseudo-prosthetic limb attempts to sculpt or paint at arms-length, with either a drill, brush or saw attached to a flimsy wooden appendage – think Matisse with his long-handled brush, only trying to hammer nails into potatoes. This is analogue art versus a digital future – it’s also about not being taught anything hands-on at art school. Next is Hyun Woo Lee’s short film featuring a sprinkler endlessly spitting out water while the title ‘I Hate This Job’ jerks across the screen 17 times. More revolting stuff is at the top of the stairs, where George Petrou’s loop shows two jagged, mutilated heads in a prolonged face-off, this one lacking the humour to elevate it beyond gear-grinding grimness.
Every show of grouped grads has a silver lining, though, and there is a generous openness in two scene-setting paintings – ‘Hunting Ground’ by Nick Nowicki and ‘Room’ by the aptly named Selma Parlour – as well as an encouraging depth of enquiry in two more videos by Yelena Popova and Hyewon Kwon that both rewrite twentieth-century propagandist filmmaking. This is not ’68, but revolution may yet be coming.