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Plastic Culture - Legacies of Pop at the Penzance Exchange until 3rd of October

From:     Ben Zanoe
Category: Art
Date:     27 August 2009
Time:     04:07 PM

Review:

Among the myriad ripples of an eternal ocean, countless settlers seeking the Terrain Nouveaux of a
surfing life wander the streets of this former Cornish stronghold in the far west, not the so called
artists colony of St.Ives but the terminus known still as Penzance.
The Newlyn Gallery once flickered like an old beeswax candle in the corner of an undiscovered Inn
until the legacy of those parochial painters, mostly London Beaux's or Midland hobbyists who forgot
to go home kept wearing thinner and thinner and an upbeat veneer was desperately required. That's
where the Exchange Gallery joined the new ranks of regional institutions like the Turner in...is it
Margate?,and so on, the idea is to look a bit less obviously part of some localized mafia and to
look as democratic as possible, like a middle aged man breathing in to reduce his waist band, it
works for only a second or two and is not the least bit convincing. Plastic Cultures - Legacies of
Pop runs from July 11th until October 3rd at the Exchange, which as the name implies, is a converted
telephone exchange with a most striking glass feature in the facade, a pretty good but half heated
restaurant is it a cafe?
In the bookshop some the old school semi figurative ogre's growl through the barely concealed cracks
in this democratic veneer and, cool, theres this weird mish mash of art on display curated by
Richard Kirwan who is brandishing these several adversatorial pieces as if he is Dr Livingstone in
deepest Cornwall showing those surf crazed good life seekers some stuff they saw a couple of years
back when they had jobs in London or Birmingham or just a blasted good telly in suburbia. Text book
it most certainly feels like... but the very oddity of this collision says a great deal about the
current state of contemporary art, how it is received en mass Jeff Koons, Mariko Mori, Tony Oursler,
Fiona Rae,Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol. Where have these guys been? Who would have thought that such
an odd collection of internacine elements would hav been a kind of "blank amusement". Arr so thas
what they bee doin in London.......


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