In keeping with a dreary fashion for scientific/academic nomenclature within the arts, Bilateria opened last thursday at Five Hundred Dollars on Vyner Street. A group show of up and coming (they are always either up and coming or emerging) artists the name is taken from Bilateria Triploblastic. Me neither. I wikipedia’d it. It’s a highly scientific denomination for organisms arising from three primary germ layered ova that possess bilateral symmetry – having a front and back and an upside and a downside. The press release simplifies this definition as “possessing both a mouth and an anus.”

So why not call it Mouth and Anus? Or call it digestion? Perhaps that wouldn’t provide the snobbery and pseudo scientific resonance of using latin/scientific terminology. Its not like Bilateria is in the common vernacular is it?

Who were they expecting? Virgil? Juvenal? Pliny the Elder? Or perhaps a group of biologists specialising in embryonic development of the digestive tract in vertebrae?

Judging by the show they could have easily called it “talking out of an anus.” Predominantly conceptual work, consisting of a painter, painting crude awful abstracts. A performance piece so badly produced it was an irrelevance. Some half decent photography, a sculpture consisting of freight straps strung from ceiling to floor to form a small wall and some text printed onto the walls of a gallery relating to a phone call the artist had on a clairvoyant hotline.

Apparently, “the decision to conceal or omit information is at the heart of all the works.” Lending itself to the kind of nebulous airy fairy work that perpetuates in the name of avant garde art theory. Take the performance piece, the artist sat on an office type swivel chair with a wire going into her ear, presumably listening or commenting on what she was hearing down the wire. Next to her was a bedside table with some scotch and a glass on it. But the gallery was far too loud to hear what she was saying – so whatever auditory wisdom was being said was drowned in the ambience of the opening night. Of course she could retaliate to these claims by pointing out that this only added to the central theme of concealing and omitting information. But that would be a copout of epic proportions; this was sloppy dismissible art. Get a microphone and amplifier, get some professional standards.

The paintings were worse, the press release claiming that Ramsden, “obliterates marks by over painting, layering her images and editing what can be seen and what can be imagined underneath the seemingly automatic movements of her brush.” How she can edit what can be imagined is frankly beyond me, although she’s succeeded if she thinks I can imagine anything of any merit underneath the surface of these clumsy, crude and ineffectual daubings.

I want to like Adam Parkinson’s work. A transcript of two conversations with fortune tellers about the direction of his work. Its witty, dry, and charming and its a good idea, even if it does have the whiff of the bourgeois about it. Ultimately people on clairvoyant call centres, and tarot card lines are rarely people who believe intrinsically in the supernatural or the power of divination, but people who are paying their bills via a minimum wage job thrust upon them by the vagaries of unfair monetary distribution. I should know, I’m poor, I have worked in call centres and been offered a job doing tarot readings.

It really is pampered kid from the right side of the tracks takes piss out of the hoi polloi and anyone whose parents weren’t wealthy enough to put their kid through university and a post grad in Edinburgh. But then maybe he worked his arse off or got a scholarship, either way this could be an overly Marxist, class orientated reading of it. It all depends what hat you wear when you look at this work.

The sculpture by collective Charlesworth, Lewandowski and Mann consisted of heavy duty straps they use to load down freight on the back of lorries. Tied taught to a frame, they stretched from ceiling to floor, forming a wall of straps or possibly representative of a door. Its a considerably banal piece, I suppose if you are excited by all things conceptual then this work could provide a springboard for deeper meditation. But then why not just open your fridge or stare at your washing machine on a spin cycle?

Or why not get a grant from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and make work that stares inexorably up the conceptual anus that modern art is disappearing into?

Highly Recommend you go the pub instead.

Until 6th September @ Five Hundred Dollars, Vyner Street.