If I Turn and Run

Iain Sinclair

  • 45 by Bill Drummond
    Little, Brown, 361 pp, £12.99, March 2000, ISBN 0 316 85385 2
  • Crucify Me Again by Mark Manning
    Codex, 190 pp, £8.95, May 2000, ISBN 0 18 995814 6

Here they come, marching north out of Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who have lost their reindeer. At Shoreditch Church, they dress to the left and march west under the railway bridge. It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the street. This is top dollar, scratchcard art. Either it works in one hit or forget it. If it doesn’t jab you in the eye as you drive past in your cab, keep going. The names involved in this pitch are so hot, you might as well frame them and leave it at that. Now the cultural ambulance-chasers know where Hoxton is, they won’t leave it alone. This is here and this is it. The back-story is more complicated.

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[*] Atkins and Sinclair have worked together on a number of projects.

Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000 » Iain Sinclair » If I Turn and Run (print version)
Pages 17-20 | 5710 words