Part storyteller, part draughtsman, Bronstein transforms the ICA into a tableau and invites us to inhabit our Regency past
London's Institute of Contemporary Arts has had a chequered history, to say the least. I have known it since the early 1970s, and ran a series of talks there in the late 80s and early 90s. Directors and staff have come and gone, votes of no confidence cast and recast, and the premises have undergone several revamps. I remember all the fuss when the carpets were pulled up in the first floor galleries. Phew, that was radical. There was even a proposal, by the architect Will Alsop, to move out and rehouse the ICA on the disused pillars of the defunct railway bridge at Blackfriars. But still it's there in Carlton House Terrace, and Norman Rosenthal's blood continues to decorate a patch of wall following a fracas in the offices.
But the ICA was always filled with some of the most creative and oddball characters around, working in what always seemed to me to be an atmosphere of rivalry, penury and barely concealed psychodrama. I remember nights passed out in the loos, painter Fiona Rae cutting off Jeff Koons's tie at a sherry-fuelled afterparty, the time Damien Hirst refused to say anything at all in an interview. It was always lively, if not an altogether convivial working environment.
One perennial problem besetting the ICA has always been to get different departments ? film, theatre, talks and exhibitions ? to work in concert. Building-wide projects have often floundered, not least because the layout is a warren, a collision of incongruous and competing makeovers, a palimpsest of refurbishments, trendy initiatives and regrettable enthusiasms. As if to symbolise Gregor Muir's recent appointment as executive director, and what a press release calls a "new era" at the ICA, the clocks have been turned back to 19th-century Georgian London with Pablo Bronstein's exhibition Sketches for Regency Living. Somehow, and with an elegant insouciance, the show manages to bring the place together: it saunters through the building, from the main gallery to the theatre, up the stairs, through the upper galleries and on ? further still ? to the grand salons of the top floor.
In Bronstein's Tragic Stage in the downstairs gallery, a dancer skips and gestures, poses and preens, as though conversing with an invisible friend, or interrogating the absent sculptures on several vacant plinths. The side wall dividing the gallery from the adjacent corridor has been removed and one can watch her while leaning against a low parapet, uncovered in Bronstein's remodelling of the main space. Beyond the dancer is a huge canvas depicting a Georgian terrace with colonnades and a square, a perfect rendition of a splendid project that might have been designed by John Nash himself, the original architect of Carlton House Terrace.
Built between 1827 and 1833 and commissioned by King George IV, you might think the king ordered the terrace with the ICA in mind, wanting it to have the best location possible to signal the monarch's avid interest in avant-garde film and art, radical conferences and gigs by achingly hip bands. But he didn't. The ICA only moved here in 1968, and George IV, like today's monarchy, was notoriously uninterested in post-queer gender studies, the return of Marxism or Gothic theme nights.
Bronstein's stark, black-and-white rendering of a corner of Regency London owes something to Nash, but also reminds me of Giorgio de Chirico's surreal Turin: the light falls over an empty architecture, the shadows ruled with absolute precision across the eerily unpeopled buildings. This is architectural drawing as theatrical backdrop. The dancer, dressed in a fanciful Regency outfit designed by Mary Katrantzou, gets up from her orange fibreglass chair (one of several deliberate incongruities) and struts her stuff.
Further on, in the ICA theatre, Bronstein has installed a space-filling box with high arched windows ? and an exterior whose walls are topped with a decorative moulding. Inside, the walls are a dark blue. Light streams into this theatre-within-a-theatre through the false windows. It is a life-size model in which no life seems to be going on. You could take this as a metaphor; you could take it as an intervention; you can enter then leave again. I like it.
Lining the walls of the stairs are 66 drawings of Designs for the Ornamentation of Middle Class Houses. Relief swags and roundels and all sorts of decorative fripperies decorate house-front after house-front, doorway after doorway, as you climb through the building. At first, the drawings appear identical, but each is slightly different. They make you pause and wonder about time ? were these made yesterday, or a couple of centuries ago? Are they pastiche, or the real thing? Is there a real thing?
After a while it's the real ICA which feels incongruous ? the modern signage, the doors to loos and offices, the attractive and frightful people you meet on the stairs. In the upper galleries are a number of large-scale, looser and more fanciful drawings of mad architectural adventures ? among them the Relocation of Temple Bar, and the Erection of Paternoster Square Column. The foxed-looking sepia-tinted drawings are made even more out of place and time by the diminutive hordes of toiling workers that people them; the racketty scaffolding, the gangs-of-men-with-ropes technology, the drawings themselves hung in wormy-looking, cumbersome old picture frames. They're fun.
Also in the upper galleries are bizarre pieces of furniture ? a huge, lowering cabinet and a pull-out baize table that almost looks like a lawn emerging from a Gormenghastian Gothic edifice, and a pair of repro-antique consoles that may be pulled together, opened up, and converted into a kind of secret travelling bed or divan. Every so often a gallery attendant wordlessly moves the furniture, reveals the hidden drawers and bedding, opens and closes pull-out details, lowers little fold-away steps, demonstrates the carpentry and the secrets, then just as impassively closes the doors, rolls away the consoles, and continues to keep an eye out for ne'er-do-well visitors. It's the ICA, after all, and you get all sorts in there. It was ever thus, probably no more today than in Regency times; eccentrics and iconoclasts are always with us.
A final hike to the top of the building ? more drawings on the stairs, more of Nash's architectural splendours ? and the show ends with a flat-screen TV, and on it another of Bronstein's costumed dancers, walking, or rather flouncing in the sunlight and shadows, in front of Carlton House Terrace. The screen goes blank, then she does it again. And again.
Bronstein plays with the idea that the past persists in the present. He imagines a lost period with modern eyes: think Peter Greenaway's movie The Draughtsman's Contract, or the spoof historicism of Neil Stephenson's Baroque cycle of novels; think the falsehoods of Heritage Industry Britain. Think also the ICA, lodged precariously and impecuniously in Nash's building, and the conceits of culture now.
Bronstein is part architectural draughtsman, part fabulist. In his way he is a storyteller. He gives us a set, a few props, some scant stage directions, and lets us imagine the rest. He's also a pretty good critic of recent architecture, especially of the follies of late 20th-century postmodernist style, to which his art often alludes. Coinciding with this exhibition is the publication of the second edition of Bronstein's 2008 Postmodern Architecture in London, a little gem of a book in which various hideous London landmarks, from Janet Street Porter's former house in Clerkenwell to the MI6 monstrosity at Vauxhall Cross, from Paternoster Square to the National Gallery's Sainsbury wing, are given a terse going-over. Bronstein also provides little line drawings illustrating these marvels, each building shown in a state of impending ruination. Writing of Marco Polo House in SW8 ? briefly home to the Observer ? Bronstein comments that it is "often regarded as the most vulgar building in London, if it is to be considered a building at all". But Bronstein is no Prince Charles, railing against the modern, or even postmodern. He slips between genres and times, places and spaces. His art is playful and elusive, barbed but not barbaric. It's a Regency thing.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/16/pablo-bronstein-art-review-ica
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