Report from Flow’s roving branch office: Kevin Collins currently situated in Chelsea, London.
Tiny flashes of sun broke through the grey gloom as pedestrians leapt over puddles and clashed brollies like strange warriors wielding 12-pointed, eye-level weapons.
I was on my way down Kings Road to the Saatchi Gallery, which has a rather wonderful photography exhibition currently showing. Rather wonderful and rather strange.
Photographs have become such a common current medium that the line between “high” art and the very basic phone images that flash as one casually passes by is very slim. I am never sure which are really good and which are really bad – but therein lies the magic of work selected and shown in a gallery as “art”. Much like the sticky pastries at Patisserie Valarie on the damp square at the gate of the gallery, some look tasty and some look like heartburn waiting to happen … but you won’t knows until you’ve consumed them.
I wander from room to room of this cleanly designed revamp of a barracks now transformed into a wonderful set of galleries. Curious works by artist John Stezaker, who juxtaposes two portraits of Hollywood B-grade stars of yesteryear to make fascinating personas, emerge.
The work that is the highlight for me is a portrait of the queen – whose diamond jubilee is currently noted by joyous tea mugs and bright, smiling memorabilia at every store – with her eyes closed, titled Lightness of Being by Chris Levine, but hung alongside some very grubby images of women posed alluringly on pick-up trucks and broncos by an American photographer, Laurel Nakadate. Engagement and repulsion side by side.
The Saatchi Gallery has done its job of amusing and appalling me. Thank you, Charles Saatchi, for being an art addict and for keeping me thinking.
- Kevin is presenting a paper on fine arts education at tertiary level in South Africa at a conference organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Apart from being a strategist at Flow Communications, he is a respected artist and academic.
- Read more on Kevin’s London adventures: Keeping your feet dry and Kevin Collins presents at the Great Grey Glorious Courthold