Lady with Spike by Clare E Rojas. Photograph: © Clare E Rojas
Does art have to be good to be memorable? Does it, in the end, have anything at all to do with what used to be called "taste"? These questions are provoked by two exhibitions currently within walking distance of each other in Hackney. I saw them both last Friday but only one has stayed in my mind - the other is already a fading memory.
I suppose I should therefore be raving about the memorable show, Sympathetic Magic by Clare E Rojas at Modern Art, 10 Vyner Street E2 until April 22, but I didn't enjoy it at all at the time. Nor did I find it interestingly provocative. It just seemed stupid and clumsy, and yet the images keep clanging about in my head.
Rojas, a Californian artist, performer and mystic (so the press release says - I wouldn't be at all surprised if she was a persona adopted by the next Grayson Perry) has created an installation of large, segmented coloured panels illustrating her own feminist mythology. They have a folksy, jarring brightness that really, really irritated me.
In fact, the style has something to do with north-western native American art - complete with shamanistic beavers - but is also very reminiscent of Russian primitivist art in the early 20th century, Nicholas Roerich or early Kandinsky. So, it's sophisticated as well as crude.
My god - is this a rave after all?. The mythic conceit of these truly weird pictures does have something going for it. The annoyance was the annoyance of being surprised.
And the forgettable exhibition? Danish artist Jacob Dahl Jurgensen's show at Wilkinson Gallery, 242 Cambridge Heath Road until April 1, got on my nerves at lot less than the Rojas. It was certainly more "tasteful" and manifestly intelligent, not to say mentally balanced. Constructivist objects and modern fetishes are juxtaposed in an atmospherically lit meditation on affinities between the legacy of high modernism and the spiritual beliefs of "primitive" cultures.
See the shared concerns with Rojas? Both are interested in mysticism - but where Rojas claims to believe in magic, Jurgensen is safely sceptical. Consequently his ideas about modern art could equally well be expressed in a press release (and the press release is a meaty read).
Imagination is better than irony, art that gets on your nerves is better than art that is decorous - and Clare E Rojas vindicates the biggest cliche of all: she's so bad she's ... good?
