SOME OF THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE HAPPEN ACCIDENTALLY
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
FORTY YEARS ago this summer, a Times correspondent was standing, notepad in hand, in the Bullring, Birmingham. A new art space — the Ikon Gallery — had just opened in an octagonal glass-sided kiosk and the correspondent had been sent to record the public’s reaction to it.
“A retired man in a cloth cap was one of those who went inside to look around,” he reported. “He said, ‘I am trying to bring myself to like this stuff. When you first look at it you think the artist must be going crackers or bonkers, but after a while you can see things in it.’ ”
Given the circumstances, it was a pretty positive response. In 1964, when the artistic enthusiast Angus Skene was first establishing contacts with local art college teachers with the dream of initiating some fresh contemporary venture, the cultural milieu of Birmingham was, at best, moribund.
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“We agreed that Birmingham was appalling,” recalls David Prentice, one of the loose-knit clique that assembled around Skene.
“It is very difficult to describe really how deprived Birmingham was in those days. It was a glum little city . . . there was a bloody-minded ‘Brummie-ness’ . . . which was lovely but it wouldn’t go away.”
What the Ikon Gallery offered was a transfusion of fresh blood. Financed by Skene (but with all major decisions made ultimately by participating artists), it breathed new life into a stifling and still predominantly Victorian climate by promoting contemporary art.
Forty years later, an idea that started out as a madcap plan to take shows round the country in a motorbike sidecar, that found its first premises in a market kiosk, now stands enshrined at the heart of the rejuvenated city that recently made a muscular (but unsuccessful) bid to be appointed 2008 Capital of Culture.
With the aid of a lottery grant, the Ikon Gallery is now established in an old Victorian school which, presiding over a square flanked by swanky postmodernist offices, boasts no fewer than two Mediterranean-style restaurants offering alfresco dining.
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So what if the square is entirely gravelled over? So what if its water feature is all but indistinguishable from an open drain? This precinct presents what is considered by many to be the very paradigm of good practice for inner-city development. The brave new Birmingham which artists dreamed of in the Sixties is coming into being, as the city slowly consigns to a lost era its sprawling acres of concrete tower blocks, its spaghetti junctions and motorways that penetrate its centre.
In celebration of its anniversary, the Ikon Gallery now stages Some of the Best Things in Life Happen Accidentally, a show of work by the gallery’s founder artists, including Prentice’s Kate and the Waterlilies, the abstract canvas which, catching the eye of Skene, was to initiate one of the relationships from which ideas for the Ikon first stemmed, and the work of John Salt, the first to have a show in the gallery.
This is a nostalgic exhibition. It looks back at the history of the Ikon (Robert Groves’s delicate little gold-leaf abstracts evoking the art form from which the gallery took its name) and at the history of Birmingham, reflecting its industrialisation and its burgeoning car industry, its canals and the Black Country landscapes that surround it.
But it is also a show that remembers the creative ambience of the Sixties. Packed with references to the work of pioneering artists — Mondrian and Johns, Hamilton and Paolozzi among them — it records the way in which the pared-down and sober painterly discussions of the late Fifties gave way to the brighter colours and sharper lines of Pop.
It all looks pretty dated. Salt’s photorealism has long since been outmoded. Sylvani Merilion’s interest in space travel is no longer topical. But if the works in Tate Britain’s retrospective of this era have been criticised for being over-familiar, then visitors to Birmingham will find something that they have never before seen — if only because none of these artists became famous. Their role in the Ikon proved, in most cases, the pinnacle of their career. But the work of Trevor Denning, whose vast lip-smacking mouth welcomes viewers to the exhibition and whose painted pout puckers to kiss them goodbye, is certainly worth consideration.
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This show may not be spectacular but it is a fitting celebration of a brave initiative that, under the enthusiastic directorship of Jonathan Watkins, has brought contemporary debate to a city once dismissed as a cultural backwater. Since its move to its current premises the Ikon has shown such artists as Cornelia Parker, Anya Gallaccio, Gillian Wearing and Richard Billingham, the last two of whom are from Birmingham and all of whom have appeared on Turner Prize shortlists.
It organises cultural projects around the city, including a billboard display by Zhao Bandi in the Chinese Quarter of the city. It has collaborated with such traditional galleries as the Barber Institute, with a show by Braco Dimitrijevic, and hopes in the near future to work with Olafur Eliasson.
And all this as well as providing what is acclaimed as the most stylish restaurant in town. A while has certainly passed since the Ikon Gallery first opened in the Bullring. But, as the man in the cloth cap predicted, people have begun to see things in all this contemporary stuff.