I remember a time not so long ago when Bermondsey Street was somewhere to buy antiques at the Friday morning flea market. Recently, it’s become a trendy and busy thoroughfare, boasting the latest and largest of London’s commercial gallery outposts. Judging by White Cube Bermondsey’s inaugural show, ‘Structure & Absence’, it is now also somewhere you can contemplate the profundity of abstract thought, while browsing millions of pounds worth of contemporary art.
I’m not overly concerned with issues of local regeneration (although south London should welcome this football field-sized mega-mall on its doorstep) but with the implications of yet another art barn opening in an already congested marketplace. Walking through the airy hall of White Cube’s former storage warehouse – now buffed and shined with gallery-ready concrete floors and acres of wall space – it seemed to me like a perfectly logical move, against all my initial instincts and despite it having been described to me variously as an airport hangar, a mausoleum and a white elephant.
This surprisingly harmonious experience had everything to do with the first exhibition and not much to do with the antiseptic architecture, although this neutral, fluoro-lit-bunker look is one currently favoured by Swiss private foundations and new-build museums in Miami alike. There’s a coolly reflective air to the three spaces in ‘Structure & Absence’, which each revolve around one or two Chinese scholar’s rocks on plinths – naturally-formed limestone or malachite sculptures usually kept in gardens or on desks to aid deep thinking or prolong one’s philosophical musings. Favoured by Confucian scholars of the Ming and earlier Song dynasties, the rocks’ shapes, shadows, channels, ridges and arcs were thought to be of great benefit to imaginative or meditative thought – a screen-saver of a fish tank is as close as we get to this expanded headspace nowadays.
The rocks in the first room are highly textured, elemental and full of organic spikiness (no rock should be too sharp-tipped, lest it lack the required feng shui) and are surrounded by some very muted abstract paintings and collages, ostensibly also about finely observed surface incidents. A pasty white Robert Ryman is flanked by odd textile panels by Sergej Jensen and a pixellated pile of stones rendered in painterly dot matrices by Gabriel Orozco. These depictions of lyrical stones speak to each other, the fake milky marbling of one picture conversing with the smoky swirls of another. If this sounds like I’d become unhinged from the reality of Bermondsey Street by this point, then that’s the point – I can’t quite recall my state of mind on either visit.
Another room of harsher, geometrical grids – Damien Hirst spots and pillboxes, Andreas Gursky apartment blocks – is less convincing in relation to the pensive stones at their centre, although it should be noted that some scholar’s rocks were carved or enhanced with cloud shapes or grottoes, so there’s still often man-made artifice to be found in objects seemingly blessed by the forces of nature.
By the final room of darker, degenerating rock formations and spectacularly eroded crevasses – reflected in Jeff Wall’s cold storage caves and Wade Guyton’s holey canvas – I’d been lulled into looking at some familiar White Cube stablemates in a new way and even into stoking up the old synapses to the point where I wondered about the possibility of achieving enlightenment through contemporary art (answer: not yet).
While not a wholly original show (there was a Danny Moynihan exhibition entitled ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ in London about five years ago), ‘Structure & Absence’ introduces White Cube Bermondsey as an elegant, minimalist riposte to the brash rivalry being played out in the commercial gallery scene at the moment. White Cube’s pre-emptive strike against two big New York players – David Zwirner and Pace Gallery, both threatening to arrive in London within a year – is one of stealth and subtlety.