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Eloise Fornieles performed on the opening night of the show, undressing as she placed notes into a carcass.
Curated by the space's 23-year-old director Maria Baibakova, her Tennessean gal Friday Kate Sutton and London-based curator Nick Hackworth, this is the largest exhibition of new British artists on foreign shores since 1995. It transforms the old chocolate factory into an approximation of a bustling artistic metropolis, noisy, brightly lit and with so many different things going on around you as to make keeping a finger on the pulse all but impossible.
"We wanted to show what's going on in London right now," explained Sutton. "What's interesting to me about London is that it's this metropolis, this enormous global capital, it's always receiving new people, new ideas, new kinds of trends, but there's not a distinct London style. We wanted to reflect that diversity in this urban setting."
The 22 artists share little in terms of age, cultural background or style but are united in that almost none of them will be known to Muscovite exhibition-goers. In the strictest sense, there is little natural about their work; from Diane Bauer's expansive comic-book graphic canvas to Toby Ziegler's jumbled metal sculptures, together they comprise a distinctly urban environment. This contradiction was what the curators had in mind.
"As of last year, more than 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, so the urban environment is now the natural environment," Sutton said. "So we took this idea of the country garden that you can cultivate all you want, but you're still going to get these strange sprouts going in all directions. You can plant flowers but they're going to grow anyway."
Douglas White's "Counsel" is as London as it gets -- the two black, burnt-out recycling bins with empty wine bottles melted into their walls, found on a council estate in Battersea, could have come straight out of J.G. Ballard's macabre modern cityscapes. "I see it as a work of opposites as in it's artificial, but it has these natural forms," he explained. "It's very anthropomorphic. They have this sort of human quality, they're very stately figures, and I'm mixing that with this very disposable, aggressive mode in which these were made. Violence is creation."
Violence of a sort also defined Eloise Fornieles' opening night performance "Carrion." Surrounded by a wide pile of old clothes, Fornieles sat glowering in front of a desk, periodically undressing to place notes of thanks or apology written by spectators into a stripped animal carcass hanging behind her. What distinguished it -- and will make the show suffer without it for the rest of the run -- was less the potential shock value than its compelling visual immediacy, something several of the other works lack.
Since stylistic links between them are for the most part tenuous, and thematic ones all but nonexistent, this can conspire to leave a visitor lost. The artists in "Invasion:Evasion," the all-Russian show that occupied the factory last, were equally diverse, but thanks to sharp curation and the benefits afforded by the site-specific project, they were able to complement each other.
"Natural Wonders," on the other hand, could have done with some town planning -- a street sign here, a road map there -- to give a better idea of where we are and where all this leads to. This London may well be a garden full of unearthly delights, but ultimately strolling through it is curiously unsatisfying. It seems almost as if, perish the thought, there was more to pick from Moscow's equivalent generation.
"Natural Wonders: New Art From London" runs until April 4th at Baibakov Art Projects gallery. 6 Bersenevskaya Naberezhnaya, 3rd floor of the Krasny Oktyabr factory. Metro Polyanka. Tel. 230-3930.
