temporary insanity

Two fun things last night: 

El Ultimo Grito at the Aram Gallery. I like the Aram Shop (on Drury Lane). It's hard not to be sucked in to four floors of perfectly laid out imaginary room settings. Like going to six dinner parties in a row, snooping about to have a look at how other people organise their living spaces, their lives. There's something strangely voyeuristic about furniture shops, but without the creepy element of actually spying on anyone. It's like you're being a voyeur but the subject of said voyeurism is an alter-you, a you in an imagined reality. A you with a nicer dining table.

Anyway, at the very top of the Aram shop is the Aram Gallery. Surprise, surprise. El Ultimo Grito's show is split into three parts: cardboard tables, glass models, and quotes as design. The tables are made of cardboard and resin and sit uncomfortably in the space. Not that there's anything wrong with the tables, but EUG present them as an alternative design and production method for more permanent dining tables (whatever that means. presumably tables that last longer than one meal...), bit of a dangerous gamble given the number of gorgeous tables scattered throughout the shop floor. Given £5,000, I'd much rather pick something from Aram's collection than take home a blood red resin-lacquered table made of cardboard. 

Then, there's the 'Found objects: Dialogues' series of amateurish photographs of Roberto and Rosario which are overlaid with well-known slogans/quotes (e.g. you are born modern, i'm lovin it). There's an interesting idea here - the appropriation of certain sayings/terms as a vehicle by which marginalised groups alter/reclaim the balance of power - but one gets the sense that EUG don't really mean it; this isn't about making a statement (political, intellectual or otherwise), it's about playing around with words. Perhaps that's why the work feels so flat: it's poorly designed and less than compelling.

For me, the exhibition was redeemed by the utterly delightful and exquisitely crafted pieces of glasswork on display. So called explorations of architectural archetypes, the glass pieces represent alternative interpretations of a hotel, a spa, an apartment building, a theatre, and a car park. The whimsical presentation had me chuckling out loud: the glass pieces are set on white pedestals, with naive pencil drawings of the 'building' drawn directly on to the pedestal. Wonderful. Sometimes less really is more: if the exhibition had consisted solely of the glass pieces, it would have been sensational. As it was, the unfocused clutter of the tables and the photographs only detracted from the creativity and innovation so clearly evident in the kind of imagination required to create, quite literally, an entire new world out of glass.

(both photos from Aram)

Temporary restaurant at the Corinthia Hotel. After Aram, we cabbed it over to Whitehall Place and wandered through quite a lot of scaffolding before finding the entrance to the building site that is the soon to be (in October 2010) Corinthia Hotel on the site of an old MOD building. Corinthia have cottoned on to the pop-up trend that's manoeuvred its way into the luxury market: brands from PPQ to Selfridge's have opened pop-ups with reasonable success. The restaurant in the Corinthia is slightly different, of course, because it's merely a precursor to the real thing. A corner of the grand ballroom (the ceilings are amazing, thanks in part to a false ceiling whacked up in the MOD days) has been boxed off with temporary walls for the restaurant. It's tiny: four tables, thirty-two covers, and one open kitchen. It's all Glyndebourne chic, a nice aesthetic for a temporary restaurant, but I have to say, for a vegetarian the actual experience of eating in the place was pretty dire. To be fair, I was eating there for free and it was a four course fish menu (I don't eat fish either...), but a bowl of leaves (yes, just leaves) is not acceptable from a chef about to open a restaurant in a five-star establishment. My fish-eating accomplice was more than delighted with everything put in front of him, but he is a man... No really, it looked delicious and I'm sure it will be a marvellous place to eat once the restaurant is open to the public. The experience itself went some way toward making up for the bowl of leaves and the plate full of parmesan cheese (you don't want to know), thankfully. There's something sickeningly fun about being in a place not open to the public and I love the company that has enough balls and ingenuity to open a temporary restaurant on a building site to build up publicity for their venture. And installing a full-size bathroom from one of the hotel's suites was a stroke of genius: more people were talking about the bathroom than the restaurant. I hope the next invitation from Corinthia is for one of those suites...

(rubbish, furtively-snapped pics)