Review: Our Silver City 2094, Nottingham Contemporary

“If you critique art, you are an art critic,” said the careers advisor to the gorgeous fleece. The warm bloke inside that fleece was me, Philistine of the Year 2021.

“You’re spot on,” I agreed. “I’ll cut my teeth at Nottingham contemporary, and I’ll have a future in this business.”

The edifice itself is a crinkle-cut, concrete crumple sunk into in sandstone cliffs. A green and gold squat in a giant’s footwell. The outside appears compressed, but visitors will be impressed as the building breathes inwards to become cavernous inside. Its windows are wide. They invite me to regret arriving by tram when I notice indoor parking space for super cargo planes.

Georgian town houses across the cobbles remember when art lovers purred at portraits or lathered up to landscapes. But there’ll be none of that here. None of that now. This is a contemporary institution, a bastion of bewilderment. Its mission is to inspire almost unanswerable questions: Why did we have to come here? Can we go to KFC now? etc.

‘Our Silver City’ is the most recent vehicle to vex visitors. It arrives from a future world emerging from hellfire, crisis, and collapse. The year is 2094. Survivors with their plates full already oblige kindly to beam an exhibition back through time. It’s an open day for the future which I attend in the present.

It comes accompanied by a sci-fi novella — which is actually quite good, and there’s a free online version. But first sight of the first artwork puts paid to PDF promise, which dissipates into the ennui of always… It’s a torpedoed coffee table, mocked by a metallic sheet.

It’s conceptual art. Its value is not located in its beauty but in its meaning. Its meaning is hard to grasp, however, when further information explains nothing from beneath the title ‘Untitled’.

It doesn’t frustrate me. I’m an art critic now. I know that stating meaning is the job of science; art expresses it — and meaning will come from the exhibition as a whole atmosphere, a whole concept:

Here, an imagined future wheels out artefacts and makes use of our now. It curates its history selectively to construct how it sees itself. All societies do it. We do it presently. By setting it in the future, we might defamiliarise this familiar business and make it noticeable. It’s a good idea, executed in the most obscure fashion so that everyone except the public understands.

I shoot through to Gallery Two. It’s a senseless multi-sensory experience employing textiles and defunct electronics. A floating rock is the only piece of interest to children, suspended at the eyeline of adults. A peeved fish swims for the exit. And a fast-flowing current of apathy carries me in the same direction. Those lifeguards you get in galleries decline to intervene.

I wash up on Redcar beach. The space represents the dominance of weather over our lives, apparently. As weather changes, human practices must change with it.

Some claim this fleece is a sheen with nothing solid or worthwhile underneath, no refined sense of class or culture. It’s not true. I’m an art critic. Highbrow. I can engage with this sort of thing. Watch as I leave litter to add to the beach authenticity.

The next room is an encirclement of sideboards on a carpet floor. Future tramplers must choose to remove their shoes or supervise a swimming lesson with blue plastic slippers. If the exhibition promised that humankind will wobble but life will flourish once again, it now takes a dystopian turn. The carpet howls out for cushion and durability. There’s no underlay. And a carpet without underlay is like a duvet of pathetic tog.

An owl curls out a furry turd. A muddy stroke victim uses neither shampoo nor conditioner. She communicates that if you critique art, you are an art critic — but I’ve offered no criticism, no analysis, and nothing of substance. She reckons I’m a clown.

But how am I supposed to exercise critical reason, how am I supposed to concentrate when this carpet’s career is condemned to be calamitous?

A hairy pole occupies its own corner. It strikes a stern tone,

“Listen sunshine. Every detail is deliberate. As we age, time as we sense it accelerates. It seems to pass faster. In the year 2094, you will be ninety-nine years old. Carpet will flash through your experience from factory fresh to threadbare in five seconds flat.”

…If time is speeding up, it’s already time for me to leave — thank God.

I went to Nottingham contemporary with enough to worry about in the present. There was an exhibition about the future — I learned it too will be turbulent. But certain traditions will remain intact and offer continuity. Art shows will continue to divide visitors into two broad categories: those who admit openly the work on display is incomprehensible; and those who pretend it somehow makes sense.