For months London has been agog at a piece of conceptual art at the Barbican. A room in which you can look at rain and even get rained on.
Why??? etc...
Creator, Hannes Koch (yes, Koch) describes it as a "social experiment" while co-creator Florian Ortkrass (yes, krass) claims it is "very different to having an umbrella."
Let's consider this. It rains about 50% of the year in this country. Any given week, sometimes for weeks on end, it's shitting it down. Often we have to stay indoors in our houses, like tagged offenders, to avoid getting drenched. Why, pray, would one want to leave their house, travel to the concrete bunker of the Barbican, queue for half a day only to enter a room and get rained on. You could just stay home in your own room and not get rained on.
What next? An overcast gallery? A room of slate grey clouds. A windy room, where you can experience an artificially created bitterly cold gale?
With prosaic Englishness in mind, we set about thinking of other humdrum, run-of-the-mill, everyday, non-descript facts of modern urban life that we might turn into cuntish art exhibitions. Things that basically occur naturally that mugs might find excitingly artistic.
Here's our shortlist:
The Pavement Room
An exhibition of paving slabs with chewing gum on them. Visitors are invited to walk around the pavement looking at the different wadded and matted bits of discarded gum and think depressing thoughts.
The Crane Room
A room full of cranes towering over an urban construction site. When you go to one end of the room you see the cranes from a different angle.
The Roadworks Room
Just a room full of roadworks that you can't walk through and nothing's actually happening in.
The Pigeon Room
Flea infested pigeons pecking about a courtyard. You go near them and they startle and flutter about.
The Overflowing Bin Room
Visitors are given a small piece of paper to put into a bin thats almost full.
The Taxi Rank Room
Taxis lined up in a room pouring out petrol fumes polluting the entire room while cab drivers sit behind the wheel reading copies of The Sun and using the N word repeatedly. Visitors have to find the corner of the room least polluted and where the cabbies are least audible.
The Doctors Waiting Room Room
A room with only one free chair, surrounded by coughing old people and horrible old children's toys and sticky golfing magazines. You have to wait for your name to be called. But it never gets called.
The Dual Carriageway Room
Similar to the Taxi Rank Room but more visceral. Visitors stand in the central reservation of a four lane motorway while simulated cars zoom past. Occasionally cars break down and children are sick out of the window. Watch out for the sick, you might get sicked on!
The Sunday Afternoon Room
An ambitious installation in which hundreds of yorkshire puddings and slabs of roast beef have been set out on plates with gravy jugs close to them. The Antiques Roadshow is streamed continuously on a giant screen and performance artists fall asleep in armchairs.
The Massively Long Queue for an Installation Room Room
You stand in a simulated queue for an installation while performers piss into bottles, complain to friends on their mobile phones, eat McDonald's, discard the rubbish and slowly get hypothermia around you. You keep thinking you're
getting to the front of the queue but you're not. Because the queue is the actual event. You have to queue for up to 3 hours to get into the "queue". It's like Alton Towers used to be. But there's no rollercoasters at the end of the
queue. Ironically, when you leave the exhibit you get actually rained on. By the actual rain.
