REVIEWS JAMES IRELAND
JAMES IRELAND:
YOU MISTAKE MY HORROR FOR LOVE
ECONOMIST PLAZA, LONDON
21 MARCH – 4 MAY
You Mistake My Horror for Love, 2007. Photo: Matthew Blaney. Commissioned by the Economist Group.
Curated by Nour Wali, Contemporary Art Society, London
The Economist Plaza is not the most romantic spot in London. A paved Plexiglas-fi lled landscape frames with two single-frame dog-legs jutting
grey breathing space in the middle of three 1960s of_f_i ce blocks designed out at right angles, it’s the kind of thing Mies van der Rohe might have
by the godparents of Brutalism, Alison and Peter Smithson, it’s the lifeless approved of; hell, he might even have called it a pavilion. The two coloured
stage set for a decrepit vision of a corporate living-death. That’s not to say, fi lters provide variously hued orange and blue ef_f ects – so rarely seen in
though, that it’s either without glamour or utterly unlovable. The space has grey London skies – while the two mirrors refl ect the sky and surroundings
provided the backdrop for a number of fi lms – most famously the opening like angular lakes. On one hand it’s a stand-in for nature; on the other, it’s a
sequences of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) – and is adored, by reminder that there’s nothing natural (let’s leave aside those two branches
those with an architectural bent, for marking the moment when Modernism for the moment) about this glass-and-concrete place at all. Perhaps, you
appeared in the heart of London. Still, it’ll never lose the feeling of being could think, that’s precisely what the essence of a city is – a mix of comfort
little more than an assembly point for a horde of grey men counting their and alienation.
money in concrete and glass cages. All of which might make it seem a This, of course, might be one way of attempting to fathom the rather
strange choice of location for James Ireland’s Neo-Romantic sculpture cryptic title that Ireland has appended to the piece. Indeed, you could add
You Mistake My Horror for Love (2007). something to that about the distance between the idea and the reality of
But when you fi nd that the work in question is comprised of a things. And in a way you’d be getting close to an understanding of what the
bit of steel-framed modernist glazing, equipped with the occasional success and failure of Modernism was all about. Or perhaps it’s what art’s all
coloured fi lter, a couple of tree branches and two mirrors slapped down about: imagining you saw one thing (a Romantic landscape), when in reality
on the ground, it doesn’t seem that strange at all. Arranged in a line of four you saw another (steel and Plexiglas). Mark Rappolt
one.linthree.linseven.lin ARTREVIEW
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