Sorcha Dallas

Could there be more diametrically opposed vocations than poetry and politics? One, after all, demands introspection, fidelity to language and empathy for the human condition, while the other, if the past New Labour decade is anything to go by, requires bravado, mastery of spin and utter contempt for basic levels of veracity.

An exhibition devoted to the differences between the two would make for fascinating viewing. This show deals less with the obvious contrasts between political and poetical mindsets, however, than with art that broaches political subject matter from a quiet, poetic perspective.

Its springboard is the slogan ‘The Personal Is Political’. Coming to prominence via the women’s movement during the 1960s, the phrase is an acknowledgement that feelings of exclusion and exploitation are not individual but shared by many factions of society; moulded and enforced by the broader political, economic and social sphere. In an art context this finds a correlative in what curator David Thorp describes as ‘poetic conceptualism’ – a way of working that involves personal feelings informed by and often pitted against dominant political ideology.

You might think that the heyday for this kind of art was forty or so years ago, during the era of conceptual and feminist art (and you’d be right) but its continued relevance is explored here in the work of four contemporary artists for whom the 1960s and 1970s were childhood years, if they were experienced at all. Born in New Zealand in 1977, Kate Davis re-visits that art being made during her infancy to test whether the questions and complaints of thirty years ago have been addressed. Waiting In 1972; What About 2007? consists of three television sets, their innards removed and replaced with coloured, ceramic sticks that sit in front of a drawing of the artist grappling with an easel reads as negative, white space. Ideas of positive/negative, active/passive and their relationship to progress come to the fore, not least because the title of the work refers to a poem by Faith Wilding, Waiting, which presents a woman’s experience as a series of quietly devastating moments of delay.

The work of Olaf Nicolai, born in 1962 in Germany, also has a retrospective air; he presents a sheet of blue carbon paper, once used to make copies on typewriters, as an Yves Klein-type monochrome that, by its nature, cautions against claims for originality.

Formed in Paris in 2004, the collective Claire Fontaine shows a video during which we are informed how to pick a variety of locks. Its title, Instructions For The Sharing Of Private Property, seems like a call to action. Its presence, by the electronically-activated entrance of a swish Mayfair gallery, is perhaps an admission of contemporary art’s impotence.