Artist Profile: Harland Miller - LONDON KICKS - Fashion, Music, Art, Film, London and Going Out

May 3, 2008 at 16:50

White Cube, London N1, and Shoreditch Town Hall, London EC1, until 10 May

It's so terribly hard to avoid sweaty chaffing when art and literature rub too close; more often than not you're left with little more than the painful blotchy rash of the illustrational, or a dull, throbbing textual didacticism – in either case, something substantively less than the sum of two parts. Harland Miller, a fantastic writer and engaging artist both, has achieved several very impressive feats in the curation of this show, not least the extraordinary list of contributing artists, and while the exhibition does not quite transcend this fraught dialogue between image and text, its enthusiasm goes a great way to nudging the experience that one inch closer. Wonderful as it is to go to the opening of a new show of contemporary art and find yourself barged aside by all sorts of kids and mums and students and such, keenly peering at each new object of mystery and imagination, it had the rather prejudicial effect of turning the show into a cultural experience, as opposed to an exhibition of art objects within a sterile space – this is supposed to be a white cube after all – and while it was Miller's laudable intention to question the shallow preconception of Poe as humourlessly morbid, one must question the decision to annex the unrefurbished basement of Shoreditch Town Hall. There's surely no space more gloomy left in Hoxton.

It would be unrealistic to expect anything flawless from such a subjective experiment. Each artist was sent a story by Poe, and asked to create something in response. Some of the work, and I'm thinking here particularly of Tracey Emin's rather lovely canvas Black Cat, conform very closely to the idea of camp gothiness that Miller was so at pains to expunge. Others, such as Anself Kiefer's homage to The Fall Of The House Of Usher, looked exactly as I might have imagined a Kiefer illustration of this story to appear, and as such were reassuring and therefore largely uninteresting. And some were wonderful, particularly Barnaby Furnas' portrait, Poe, so magnetically well proportioned and colored.

Poe has always been an iconic figure for artists, even more so in America, and ultimately this show isn't about exploring or illustrating the writer's work, but about chronicling the lasting influence of his work on various artists.

This is what makes it both so fabulously unenlightening, and, on the whole, tremendously enjoyable.

Charles DD Smith