In the same months the Royal Academy is showing its ‘Impressionists by the Sea’, a collection of works from the likes of Monet, Courbet and Boudin, which explore the early tides of coastal tourism, Bexhill leads with a(nother) reflexive exhibition designed to re-interpret the building. Both exhibitions address the concept of place-setting, the new cultural geography jargon that focuses on psychological and physical elements that draw tourists to an area. For the Normandy impressionists the reasons are clear. They depict the coast as a site for the French bourgeoisie to work and play; re-energised by the light, life and landscape of La Manche.At the DLWP, the fruits de mer are a bit sour. To the disgust of the Bexhill blue-rinse brigade Alex Hartley has transformed the Pavilion into an American consumer paradise. Through montage, models and planning applications to Rother District Council, Hartley asks us to (re)consider the space variously as a fleamarket, a Costco, and a Tescos - with Hacienda-style adornments and plentiful parking. In equally dystopian mode, Nils Norman has utilised digital design to produce a series of work that incorporates elements from around the town with a political comment. His ‘Proposal for a mural’ stridently declares ‘Squandermania’ and features a road sign that incorporates as directions debates about investment in the Pavilion - ‘a wicked waste of money’, ‘rubbish’ and ‘another white elephant’.
Hartley and Norman are among twenty-one artists commissioned with a simple task; to re-imagine the Pavilion. They were given an assortment of materials relating to the Pavilion – its cultural history, geographic location, original plans and designs, and details of press coverage surrounding its regeneration and reopening. In execution and ambition the output was varied. But two artists hit the mark spot on. Robert Frith used the stylised and limited palette of the railway poster, in my favourite piece, to produce two aerial views of Bexhill. In the first, it was shown as it appears now, with the blues, greens and white of the front, juxtaposed next to the reddish built environment of the town. In the second, the Pavilion is camouflaged into absence, through a combination of green foliage and red-brick Victorian building design. This is a reference to the uses of the DLWP by German bombers during the Second World War, who used it as a marker to locate London from the South as they crossed the Channel. Ilana Halperin also focused on the history of the area. Through an exquisite line drawing she goes back to the ice age, picturing the DLWP in an ancient environment. The image shows the Pavilion as out of place, in a glacial and crystalline world absent of humans. It is located in context but is also a warning: a reminder that for all the talk of culture-led coastal regeneration initiatives, climate change is a real challenge that continually reshapes the relationship between Man and Nature. This dynamic, as Halperin suggests, requires us to build new relationships to the coast as our shoreline changes, but also to public buildings. As the floods in New Orleans and recently in the North of England showed, displaced populations seek havens from altered social and environmental existences. It’s a pity this message was not prominent in other work; the only people seeking a haven today were the windswept locals and visitors.
‘It starts from here’, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 7 July
