The Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image

[En anglais]

While undergoing renovation, London’s Hayward Gallery goes off-site for The Infinite Mix — an enthusiastically received exhibition of video art that highlights the relation between sound and image. This display of ten works includes well-established artists such as Martin Creed, Stan Douglas, and Elizabeth Price alongside newer talents such as Rachel Rose, Kahlil Joseph, and Cyprien Gaillard. It also doubles as a launch of The Store: a complex of ten studios to be occupied by creative enterprises like The Vinyl Factory, Dazed Media, and FACT Magazine, alongside a shared broadcast studio and an organic café. The exhibition’s website devotes considerable space to promoting these businesses, and features a visionary quote from The Store’s founder, Alex Eagle: “The future of all space is both the physical experience of being in that space and broadcasting that experience to the world.”

It’s hard to imagine a more seamless cross-purposing of an exhibition: as both a captivating extension of the Hayward’s programming and as the perfect PR tool for the hip, hot-desking, coffee-fuelled creative entrepreneurialism that, at its worst, seems an all-too-perfect marriage between the concerns of contemporary art and those of speculative real estate. This is not to criticize the Hayward for finding alternative partnerships and, with them, funding streams. In an era of declining public support for the arts (particularly pronounced in the UK), these simply must be found. Rather, it is to question why it seems so difficult in this moment, in so many cultural sectors, to imagine anything else.