Review

Marriage is Punishment For Shoplifting
Reviewed by Richard Battersby



Scarborough. Her tourism boom spearheaded by the Grand Hotel's 1867 launch as one of Europe's first and largest giant purpose-built hotels more likely comes to mind than associations as a creative stronghold. Four towers representing each season, twelve floors the months, fifty two chimneys the weeks and 365 bedrooms the days of the year, a magnificent testament to C.19th energy, still looming over the town, beacon of more elegant, slower-paced times. Now one of Yorkshire's 'renaissance towns', with a vibrant music and arts scene fuelled by Hull University's School of Arts and New Media Department, 19% of the economy comprising creative industries with the UK's first free Wi-Fi seafront and harbour area and one of Europe's fastest internet connections, Scarborough is laying claim as the UK's most enterprising place in the 2008 Enterprising Britain Competition. The creative industries have recently played a significant role in the regeneration of northern towns, and, from the evidence of recent events, Scarborough is no exception.

It is July 25th 2008 and as I walk up the high street I can see a grey poster the colour of Scarborough's sky on a not-so-sunny day announcing 'Marriage is Punishment For Shoplifting: This Way'. Sure enough just past the Brunswick Shopping Centre we walk up some steep steps into a temporarily out-of-use Georgian office building. Ex-office room number one's blue carpets and walls are complemented by Richard Battersby and Chris Grieves' Evening in Knightsbridge After The Credit Crunched (2008), acrylic painted directly onto a Homebase roll blind, lit through the window stained glass window-style, the daylight illuminating an imagined interior of what might happen if kids were allowed to invade the penthouses of the richest of the rich Credit Crunch victims. Anarchy rules as fires are lit, joints puffed by under-5s and White Ace downed as the party atmosphere breaks out at Number 1 Hyde Park, where reportedly the world's most expensive flat was sold for one billion pounds, before the plans had even been laid. In the next room, Maggie Hall invites us to crouch down and peer into her little hole in which lines are fighting each other in the kind of street war that might erupt outside one of the two clubs just round the corner. Up the stairs and we're into the big green room, doctor's waiting room-like, where Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth's projection of a blind on a blind does exactly what it says on the tin, but in a calming way, whilst on the walls Kate Owens' Country Cousin series' delicate forms run down the walls ice-cream-on-your-kid's-face style, in a way the British summer rarely allows these days. Over in the bay window Sophie Rogers switches on her power point presentation Carpet Impersonating Midges as well as a fence (2008), her army of northern midges haunting our imaginations before a restless night camping out on the moors, wife complaining about the lack of sleep and kids angry at an absence of entertainment, a north English version of Eraserhead's family dysfunction. Next door Augustus Veinouglou has brought all the way from sun-baked Greece a little man crafted from masking tape, that creme de la creme of the art student tool box hanging on for dear life before a possible plunge into the office fireplace. Lucky the curator's dog has been tied up outside. Up more stairs and into a darkened room, Sophie Rogers' Man With The Longest Cock, an oversized man's oversized penis, ejaculates over us like a cascading chandelier, as we ponder over Potter Brompton's pottery spinning before us as if marriage might be punishment for stealing the plates from the top cupboard, second punishment being a life of free-fall ejaculation into empty rooms. A different woman has been next door, Mrs Tuckerman, hurling the contents of her car at the office in disgust. A large photograph, What is Love? is splayed carelessly across the window, in which the artist lies in the sea face down whilst her friend stands on top in a commanding position, a sort of collaborative human sculpture that might make Gilbert and George smile, and then choke, on their daily kebab. Cigarette filters are strewn across the floor in amongst a laptop which plays a sequence of images recording the artist's journey from her Edinburgh home, via the studio, to Scarborough, an automotive autobiography cut short by the arrival in Scarborough. Up another, this time very steep, flight of stairs, takes us to the final sequence of rooms. In a small low-lit room, Hall presents more moving images, this time what looks like some form of moss decaying and re-forming at break-neck speed, perhaps what might've been viewed from Sterling Moss' racing car presented in Dimitra Polychronis' film of his Le Mans 24 hour, replayed over and over again, early C.20th dynamism brought to early 21st Century Scarborough.

Mike Myers' exclamation 'Garf, marriage is punishment for shoplifting, in some countries' was made in Delaware, as 'no special' a town as Scarborough. But from the evidence of this show, some pretty special things can happen just where you're least expecting it. Scarborough might be stuck out on the famous East coast desert, but it may not be for much longer if more shows like this one are allowed to take place.


Marriage is Punishment for Shoplifting
18 York Place
Scarborough
August 2nd and 3rd 2008

http://marriageispunishmentforshoplifting.blogspot.com/