Bank exhibition at Trade Gallery
Trade Gallery occupies the ground floor of One Thoresby Street, an artist-lead studio and gallery space that also houses The Attic and zine and publication shop Triple O.G., in Sneinton, Nottingham.
Trade’s latest exhibition, Bank, has been all about the multi-disciplinary artist group of the same name which worked mainly with paint and sculpture. However, this exhibition focused solely on their video works, including FuckShitWalk, Viper / BANK TV and Conference.
Bank was active between the years 1991 and 2003. Yet my generation, who lived through the nineties but was too young and stupid to engage with anything outside our own bubbles, were more subservient to the rather clichéd image of the nineties: Cool Britannia, the music of Oasis and Blur and their rock-star attitude which spilt over into alternative comedy; comedians such as Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer; and in contemporary art, the Young British Artists, or YBAs, which most notably included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
In contrast to this, Bank offered a comic and brutal relief from the jargon ridden, pretentious and absurdly pompous art world of the nineties, which was driven by rich collectors who capitalised on the work of the YBAs.
Bank, for example, mocked powerful art dealer Charles Saatchi in a fake exhibition poster which they sent to galleries. They also took on Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in ‘Viper / BANK TV’, which was a television channel broadcast over two days featuring over 130 artists. And in their FAX-BAK service, they took exhibition press releases, faxed them back to galleries with added corrections highlighting theoretical inaccuracies and grammatical mistakes.
Bank member John Russell said that the idea for FAX-BAK came about while he was invigilating a gallery and reading the press release. He writes: ‘Invigilating exhibitions is fundamentally pretty boring. There is a lot of sitting around, often without anyone to talk to. [These were] the days before smart phones, laptops and WiFi made spending the time pissing about on the internet an easy option.’
I find myself invigilating an exhibition at this present moment, the one I’m writing about. I’m pissing about on the internet and reading the gallery material, sitting at the picnic bench in the court - a social area situated at the intersection of Trade’s three video rooms. I’m secretly typing down what gallery manager Anneliese Krueger has to say about the show, hopefully to use as material for this review. She says: ‘They were really just a small group of close friends having a really good time.’ In turn I’m having a good time and feeling as though I’m part of the gang.
It’s coming to the end of my six hour shift invigilating the show and I’m surprised to find I haven’t gone mad already. I’m still giggling to myself every fifteen minutes at the same joke in Conference, singing along in my head to the tunes of Viper / BANK TV and feeling slightly awkward at the constant climatic groan of FuckShitWalk. I am able to share this enthusiasm with visitors who have come and gone throughout the day. As one viewer says, ‘[the videos] draw you in from the very beginning’.
Bank included Simon Bedwell, John Russell, Milly Thompson and Andrew Williamson, with David Burrows and Dinos Demosthenous featuring in the early years.
Trade Gallery’s next exhibition, Ruth Beale: Bikes, Caves, Raves, opens on Saturday 10 May.
Trade Gallery website
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