Patel and an array of hobbyists have populated a former-Weatherspoons in Croydon – the latest instance of British art’s fixation with ‘low culture’
British artists habitually reach for the creative capital of craft practices. It’s a history streaked with both snobbery and philistinism. Grayson Perry fondly recalls selling pots made in evening classes for a far higher price than the class’s teacher ever could. Tracey Emin capitalised on quilting and appliqué techniques before endorsing Tory austerity in 2011. A century ago, the Bloomsbury Omega workshops made lampshades look like upturned colanders, while Roger Fry wrote in repulsion of the cheap pattern-clash of middlebrow interiors. Artists who play with ‘high art’ and ‘low culture’ often direct their scorn towards both. Hetain Patel and the more than 250 hobbyists contributing to this Artangel-commissioned show make an exception.
Inside Grants, a defunct department store on Croydon High Street, is an ex-Wetherspoon pub that Patel has rechristened ‘The Hobby Cave’. The temporary name aptly describes its labyrinthine interior, stalactitical with colour and texture. Cabinets of curiosities display K-pop merchandise, fortune-telling school rubbers marked with ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and pebbles painted with iconic packaging and cartoon characters (think Brillo and Feathers McGraw). Each display demands a description as meticulous as the attention their eclectic contributors bring to the objects of their enthusiasm.
His name on the playbill, Patel invites pop culture and amateurism into the fold. By itself, this approach is familiar and unremarkable: Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s similarly pseudo-anthropological show Folk Archive dates to 2005, itself no great innovation. Artists’ fascination with folk cultures is a neo-Romantic story traceable through Perry and Deller to Paul Nash to William Morris and William Wordsworth. Artists might turn the telescope on the rituals and craft practices of England with radical intent, but that radicalism is questionable. Fine art, distinguished from craft in the eighteenth century, has continually defined itself by transgressing that distinction. In contrast, being too broad and pluralistic to stake a claim to a single class or cultural position, Patel’s Hobby Cave evades romanticism’s ethical dilemmas.
Patel’s own contributions are more cuddly than arch: Ford Fiestas and Escorts turned real-life Transformer robots, or covered with carpet the pattern of his grandmother’s living room rug. Patel’s handmade Spiderman suits perch on seats styled as stylish cord-handled shopping bags, off-duty heroes running errands. Behind a partition of hanging quilts, a mesmeric short film plays on repeat, depicting hobbyist wild swimmers, dancers and cosplayers as if it were the extended cut of a BBC One ident. Patel foregrounds the tactile pleasure afforded by hobbies and craft practices. His Spiderman and Ford commodities are retrofitted with vibrant patterns and soft textures, manual craft techniques which demand that each object be touched. The mass-made is rehabilitated with a physical and emotional hospitability. It’s a cosy space, but it’s haunted by the absent presences of the contributing hobbyists. There are strong feelings here, obsessive and nostalgic, appropriating whatever’s at hand to produce objects as unhinged as they are impressive.
Unlike his winking postmodern forebears, Patel has made earnest work. Here, craft as a hobby is a source of manual pleasure and a gaping repository of cultural memory. Come As You Really Are’s biblical flood of hobby-objects knocks aloof discernment off its feet and demands to be aesthetically appreciated in its own terms.
Come As You Really Are at The Hobby Cave at Grants, Croydon, through 20 October
