Global action East End-style

Claire Bishop11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Anti-capitalist protesters have been kicking up a stink in Genoa, but artists in the East End are taking a quieter - but no less scathing - approach to globalisation.

Donwood and Tchock, best known as the designers (and performers) of Radiohead's albums, have made some screenprinted wallpaper called "I am a romantic at heart". Its black and white graphics comprise market research assessing the band's target audience, but the reductively bland language leaves you feeling as crushed as their music. More downers can be had watching Martha Rosler's 10-minute documentary on post-Pinochet Chile. As the police band parps its jolly music, we are fed statistics of economic disaster and watch peasants trotting past fields filled with Western advertising.

Elsewhere the stabs at corporate culture come with more wit but less abrasion. Liam Gillick daubs a selection of purpley brown paints on the wall in an attempt to find the elusive hue of Coca-Cola, while Gareth Jones makes a forlorn anti-form sculpture out of Calvin Klein underpant elastic.

The best work in the show involves Antony Wilkinson and his business partner Amanda Knight-Adams in a ballsy collaboration with artist Carey Young. She arranged for the two directors to have a so-called Visioning Workshop with the management consultancy Xerox. The video record of their meeting is complex, riveting stuff. The monotonously pragmatic advisor makes dreadful suggestions for boosting their turnover, such as getting their gallery artists to make more paintings per week. You're torn between acknowledging the fact that yes, galleries are basically glorified shops - but no, the arts still can't be reduced to abysmally homogeneous corporate principles. It's Young's best work so far.

Interspersed between these works is a more or less forgettable pile of conceptual art and a mountain of reading matter, but this is still an intelligent, self-conscious and succinct little show packed with pertinent issues and displayed with aplomb. Until 12 August. Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, E2 (020 8980 2662).

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