Whitechapel have an absolutely incredible show on by Elmgreen & Dragset. It begins with an installation of a disused public swimming pool. The attention to detail is amazing – from the peeling wallpaper and the subtle smell of chlorine to the invigilators wearing guard uniforms, we found everything like music to our ears; becoming almost giddy with joy every time we spotted something else. There were also individual artworks dotted around this construction; a toppled bronze beefcake on the poolside and a lumpy aluminium rock, too bulked-up to use the trampoline, a slug, the changing room doors with a handle on both sides, and the urinals at the back, with their exposed plumbing entwined in a lover’s knot.
The fictional tale that goes alongside this part of the show is that this is the old Whitechapel swimming pool and after it was shut down in the 1980s, there were the club nights, the squatters and the illegal raves. It was an institution, proper old East End. The Whitechapel pool has been sold to some art hotel and resort corporation. It will soon be a spa, with reduced-price membership for locals on Wednesday afternoons and slack time for wellness junkies and gym bunnies.
The Whitechapel pool is a comment on the privatisation of public amenities and spaces, the corporate taking over from the communal. Sadness and humour overlay one another in this arresting double-take. We almost feel bad by revealing what the artists have done so whoever is reading this can also falter on the threshold, momentarily speechless and gawping, confused and amazed.
Heading towards the rest of the show you see the gallery’s Perspex donations box on the landing is full of rubbish. A single trainer, an old Oyster card, a bronze OBE decoration (bought on eBay), a remain flyer, a starfish and a bottle of poppers nestle among dollar bills and fivers. Easy to miss, unlike the lifelike sculpture of a sleeping baby in a carry-cot, left beside the ATM at the top of the stairs. It’s very destressing. The sleeping child is a modern infant Moses, adrift in the stream of money. Or no money. It is almost a Victorian parable. The rest of the older works, white sculptures of figures, aren’t really to our fancy but we were still riding the high of what came before and so didn’t’ care at all.
The approach gallery was next; titled ‘Eight Universes and The Machine’, the artist Hun Kyu Kim has painstakingly created eight parallel universes across eight paintings, comprising four seasons, night and day. Numerous hybrid animals within each painting symbolise a social status such as scholar, artist and labourer. The worlds created by Kim are imagined to be controlled by one huge machine – neoliberal capitalism – which has been the dominant and increasingly pervasive economic system of the contemporary world since the late 1970s. Despite the insanity of depicted in the paintings, they come across as very beautiful.
The works are the first eight paintings from a much larger ongoing project that the artist is embarking upon, which he refers to as The Big Picture. A huge endeavour, meticulously illustrating – in obsessive detail – a story combining Korean fairy tales, political history and folklore, as an original science fiction epic. Defining himself as a storyteller, Kim’s images of fragmented and scattered narratives tangle together to make a more complete and cohesive picture. Each story works as an independent entity, but shares a common world full of imagination, informing a single overarching narrative.
