Sky Arts - Zoo Art Fair Review

October 2008

Walking into the splendid vestibule of 6 Burlington Gardens, the off-the-wall tone of Art Zoo is immediately set by the security guards. Eastern European conscript look-alikes, they stand ramrod straight in their battle fatigues ready to take on the excited hordes of London’s art world.

With galleries, project spaces and artists collectives from fifteen different countries exhibiting, the 2007 Perrier-Jouet prize winner for best artist, Karen Black, seems like a good place to start. Sadly, I just can’t get excited by a slew of cotton wool balls strewn across the floor and soaked in chalk dust and face-powder. Not even the artfully placed sheet of pink toilet paper and the ambiguous title Walk Away from Gilded Rooms stirs me. The label describes Black’s work as ‘made up of the everyday stuff of the world,’ but her raw materials are not transformed nearly enough to create a fresh perspective.

Much more thought-provoking is an exhibit from London/New York’s Museum 52: a tall, shiny black column is draped with the supine form of a stuffed swan. Its wings drape elegantly down the sides and its long neck is tied in a knot. This unexpected detail is initially funny but then suggests a rather poignant memento-mori - is the knot, a symbol of eternity and memory, there to remind us that everything, however beautiful, dies and decays?

Another eye-catching concept piece is La grande allée du Cháteau de Oiron from Cosmic (Galerie Bugada & Cargnel) in Paris. A giant photograph of a permanent installation, it appears, on first sight, to be a straightforward image of a grand 16^th century French country house. However, its visually unremarkable drive is in fact made up of the crushed remnants of a destroyed tower block – that failed symbol of modern utopia. Cyprien Gaillard’s work is a quirky mix of vandalism and romanticism, and a comment on the accelerated nature of contemporary obsolescence.

Plenty of pieces were odd more than anything else – a stuffed magpie on a neon-lit branch, a graffiti-covered plaster arm-cast big enough for a pharaoh’s statue. But hurry along and see for yourself. There are over fifty exhibitors working in every medium, including film, to choose from– so if the high concept art doesn’t grab you there are genuine pieces of crafted work which will cause you to linger longer than it takes to read the caption.

By Angie Hudson