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 the english museum
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.England in all its glory at London’s Transition Gallery. Cathy Lomax and Alex Michon, directors of the Transition Gallery in Hackney, offer their interpretation of England. A roll call of the blatantly obvious, from the Queen to tabloid hot totties, to Mockney dandies, it’s all “oo-er missus”, “evening vicar” and a couple of Union Jacks for sporting measure. The exhibition begins with a large landscape painting in watery greys, as sublime as a post-war ration book and as miserable as our weather. The rest of the show is a collage of magazine shots, newspaper pages and small paintings of Z-list celebrities. Dotted among this illustrious collection of media monkeys is the odd nod to our heritage - a portrait by Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan miniature and a painting of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Michon describes this as England in freefall, dated and ripe for reinvention. I couldn't agree more. Shame that's all that's on offer. The English Museum is at the Transition Gallery, London, until 11 September 05.
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comment by billyrocker
Aug 27, 2005
I was rather surprised at Jessica Lack's review - the English Museum contained over two thousand archival images of old, new, images with the walls covered top to toe with what seemed like an obesessive collection of found pictures with painted interventions which disrupted and questioned what Lack (almost) refers to as "the bleedin' obvious"Paintings of the "nationalist socialist rally 1962" "Phoebe Carlo as Alice" and "Mary Bell" and "Judge Cherie (Booth) "are hardly the D list celbrities which Lack refers to. These two artists are not presenting a sociological study with pap easy answers on Englishness - the clue is surely in the title - The English Museum - are all these images which they have obviously carefully selected what Englishness means? Elsewhere they have crashed imaginary romantic images taken from The Red Shoes and Rebbeca with tabloid images. The English Museum presents a cornucopia and doubling of images of old and new Engerland. The exhibition questions ideas of Englishness - it does not offer any answers but insted allows the viewer to navigate their way through the images In my experience artists are not on the whole delicate orchids who need to be contained within hierarchical hothouses and given special dispensations to go out into the "real" world and pronouince their elitist ideas. In my experience many artists know that the tabloids exist and even read them now and again (as a break from weighty tomes of Deluze and Guttari, Baudrillard and all their other critical theory mates) Artists live in the here and now (some even watch Big Brother!) artists also make work in London with the threat of bombs on the tube artists also grapplewith the same questions of what it is to be English, with the "complicated, complex" issues of seperate identities and cultures. "More Tea Vicar" - the legend on one of the tabloid paintings is a well known euphamism traditionally used as a saying to cover an embarased silence - in a way it sums up some of the difficulties of making work about Englishness The English Museum is one attempt to bring these issues into the foreground - an no Ms Lack it does not have all the answers - just some very interesting questions.
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