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Just 12 miles from Mayfair’s sleek galleries, the Whitgift shopping centre in the heart of Croydon, south London, feels a world away. But for the pioneering New York and Rome gallerist Gavin Brown, the downtrodden retail complex — currently undergoing a protracted redevelopment — is the perfect spot for a summer show of two landmark video works that have never been shown together before. These are Arthur Jafa’s “Love is the Message, The Message is Death” (2016) and Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” (1999).
“Art has extended away from the gallery space, now it can be found in places such as TikTok. There are other ways to make works such as these chime,” Brown says.
The maverick gallerist was born and raised in Croydon before training as an artist and founding his own space, called Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in New York’s SoHo in 1994. “I made the money to go to the US by selling posters outside Moss Bros [a men’s suit hire store] in Croydon,” he recalls. His memories of the shopping centre go back further: “I remember when the McDonald’s opened there in the mid-1970s, I went with my mum. Then, as a teenager, I lurked around there at night, getting up to no good.”
Brown closed his influential US gallery in 2020 and now works as a partner at Gladstone Gallery in Manhattan while maintaining his own space in Rome. He has organised the south London “homecoming” to draw attention to a local, artist-run studio and workshop called Conditions.
He gets “misty-eyed”, he says, about the opportunities he had compared to the challenges today. “I had a grant and free education. After that, the [low] cost of living and the availability of other jobs made it possible to be an artist.” Now, he describes the arts education landscape as “a slow-motion cultural train wreck” and says, “We find ourselves around the world in a situation where it is impossible for young people to maintain life as an artist. Without places like Conditions, it would be out of the question.”
Matthew Noel-Tod and David Panos founded the 30-studio space in 2018 to address what Noel-Tod describes as “a lack of space, a lack of a platform, a lack of interesting conversation”. The artists who rent their green-bricked studios each pay £290 per month for a small (70 square feet) working space, at the reasonable end of London’s average. This includes utilities and gives access to an in-person programme that includes critical feedback as well as talks and workshops, in the style of an art school. “It’s our own model, we do a lot of work voluntarily and run on small margins,” Panos says. He acknowledges that “if we were business people, we wouldn’t do it this way.”
The Jafa and Leckey show, in a former electronics store, is not planned as an immediate fundraiser — entry is free and the works are not for sale. It is more “about profile-raising and introducing Conditions to people who might want to support us financially longer term,” Noel-Tod says.
Jafa’s seven-minute “Love is the Message, The Message is Death” is in collections including London’s Tate and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and is currently on view at François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The film splices clips of racism and Black resilience — brutish violence switches to sporting triumphs, the Ku Klux Klan juxtapose with Barack Obama — all set to the soundtrack of Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”.
Music is at the core of Leckey’s more mesmeric, though still jarring, “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”, originally conceived by Brown (among others) to show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1999. The Turner Prize artist’s breakthrough film compiles people walking, roller-skating and mostly dancing or coming down from a dance night, with footage ranging from a squeaky-clean Ovaltineys party to heaving clubs.
Each critically acclaimed work “blurs the lines between art and popular culture”, Noel-Tod says, while Brown notes that both include found footage, “so material that belongs to us”. Both artists, Brown says, “are making the art of the underdog”, which he compares to his south London football team Crystal Palace’s recent (and against-the-odds) FA Cup victory. “There is something in what Arthur and Mark do that is in the same spirit. In the purest sense, art and football have a pointlessness to them, which somehow connects to the centre of us as people.”
He has mixed feelings about today’s art world. “On the one hand, art seems to have left the building but also, since the deregulation [of financial markets] in the 1980s, there has been a flood of money that has moved into culture.” Brown acknowledges that times are tough in the commercial world but has a long memory. “In many ways the art market is unstoppable, despite the best attempts of the early 1990s [recession], the financial crisis in 2008, Covid. Every attempt to knock it off its pedestal has failed,” he says.
Whether or not any of the art market’s cognoscenti will make its way to Croydon remains to be seen — it is, as Brown notes, a very straightforward journey from Victoria station. As for locals, the gallerist isn’t expecting to transform a deluge of shoppers into contemporary art lovers. “But it is summer and the holidays, so maybe some young people will come in.”
A talk with the artists at the ICA on June 26 will help spread the word to the well-heeled crowd, while an accompanying club night on June 28 at Bermondsey’s Ormside Projects — which Panos describes as “a very DIY space” — should widen their reach beyond the fine art world. Brown says, “There is an opportunity to see these profound works together. Conditions has opened my eyes to some of the alternatives to the mainstream routes.”
June 28-August 10, conditions.studio
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