Time Out’s First Thursdays have launched in London’s vibrant East End, reviving the capital’s arts spaces with late-night opening hours on the first Thursday of the month.
It’s a night for maps. 6:35 pm on a Thursday in Bethnal Green and there’s a sense of expectation in the air. From Cambridge Heath Station, small clusters of art-seekers, armed with Time Out maps, pick out Vyner Street and head purposefully towards the East End’s most condensed thoroughfare of art-spaces and galleries.
We are not talking crowds en-masse but the discernable stream of people tell us we are getting warmer. Those who have entered the Whitechapel’s organised treasure-hunt are following clues from location to location. Hunting for art, it turns out, is a serious pursuit.
We are heading to Vyner Street for the launch of First Thursdays (co-organised by the Whitechapel and Parasol Unit) with over 70 galleries and art spaces across the notoriously vibrant East End opening their steel doors until 9pm. Limited office opening hours may sit well with the East End’s more elusive reputation, but late nights can only be a good thing for both established spaces and emerging galleries who will equally benefit from the increased audiences they deserve.
For those of us frustrated by limited access to some of the most experimental emerging galleries and exhibitions in the capital, First Thursdays will be welcome news. The atmosphere on Vyner Street tonight is refreshingly low-key. Galleries and arts spaces in this compact industrial stretch sit amongst derelict warehouses and factory buildings and tonight’s expectant young crowds are mingling casually in galleries half the size of your average living room.
If you’ve come for the commercial flair and audience pulling shows of the West End you are in the wrong part of town but tonight’s crowd seem to know what they are after. Tonight it’s launch night and we are welcome to sample as much as we like, but some doors remain fashionably shut. A small plaque by a door at Lime Wharf reads ‘Temporary bell. Ring a few times please’ At number 32a there’s no need to ring a bell and a clean smell of fresh cut grass hits us as we step through the narrow open doorway.
Artists’ Collective Artists Anonymous who work between London and Cologne, have transformed their patch into their installation 900 calories with a grass lawn lining the concrete floor. Large neon-coloured paintings of figures floating in semi-psychic abstract spaces glare from the walls. One of the collective members steps forward to emphasise that what’s on show is all about “the body of work” and all has been made collectively. Whereas it’s easy to imagine a collective installation, I try to imagine how that might work in terms of constructing a painting — it’s a thought worth dwelling on.
Changing the tempo over the road at One in the Other space we are getting up close to contemplate the work of Japanese artist, Satoru Aoyama whose first solo show Good Aliens consists of a series of small, densely sewn works. The subjects are ornaments and Aoyama who first photographs, then sews his simple every-day images, gets into the material presence of each thing he tackles, bringing a physical gravity into play with his idiosyncratic and carefully crafted objects.
Back out on the street we can’t forget that any emerging visions are part of a context; a backdrop of spaces and streets with a creative history that’s impossible to ignore, a touch of nostalgia is inevitable. After all, the rich history of artistic life in the East End dates as far back as the Blitz, when giant industrial spaces were filled by artists seeking affordable living and working space.
Jumping forward to the heady days of the YBA’s (Young British Artists) in the 1990’s the East End’s reputation as one of the main artistic centres within Europe was cemented, with artists finding lower-rent buildings as studio space and Hoxton Square gradually transforming itself into the cultural quarter it exist as today.
Over in Shoreditch tonight things are getting off to a lively start with a free for all pillow-fight performance taking place in Hoxton Square. Is this a conscious attempt to make social interaction top of the agenda or just playful for playful’s sake? Whatever the underlying objective, pillow-fighting seems an apt way to go about breaking any existing ice and drumming up some physical energy for late nights to come. The city is determined not to sleep and across the capital LATES (lates.org) have coincided with the First Thursdays experience. Late night evenings, exhibitions and cultural events throughout the rest of the week are now programmed at leading arts venues, including ICA, V&A, Tate and Southbank Centre, all playing host after hours.
