Alfred Hickling 

Ten Years After

Open Eye
  
  


The joint authors of Ten Years After, Jamie Macdonald from Teesside, and Hector (no surname) from New England, both arrived in London at the end of the 1980s. They spent the next decade as 24-hour party people, observing the capital from heaving dance floors and sleazy toilets. They lived on the edge among clubbers, transsexuals, drug addicts and dropouts. Now they want to show you their slides.

The "I Love (insert your decade here)" phenomenon was bound to infiltrate the art world sooner or later, and here we have Hector and Jamie's eulogy to the 1990s. The remarkable thing is that they make it all seem such a long time ago. They give their multi-screen DVD montage an appropriately period feel by projecting it alongside a tinnitus-inducing soundtrack of the Stone Roses' I Am the Resurrection, while the deliberately artless framing of their shots suggests that they may not entirely recall having taken them. There is an initial difficulty in warming to a project that comes prefaced with a passage of self-regarding guff from Will Self, who writes that "every one should experience the same sense of interiority, of being in London, as I have". The darkened installation space offers whatever kind of interiority you are looking for. "Nice room to snog sexy Donna in" notes one satisfied customer in the visitors' book.

Whether or not you find Jamie and Hector (and their milieu) particularly fascinating, you have to admit that they have at least one good eye between them. The documentary-diary format of their work compares well with similar, obsessive self-analysts, such as Nan Goldin's ongoing project to record her life among the drag queens and drug dens of Manhattan. That said, the endless loop of I Am the Resurrection seems a pretty cruel trick to play on the gallery staff. "Oh it's not so bad - you learn to blank it out after a while," says one of the attendants on duty.

Until April 20. Details: 0151-709 9460.

 

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