TRESPASS. Group Exhibition

The exhibition is entirely permitted and Trespass will not be banned — it will be liked, which is the modern form of containment: exposure is yet another product. Visitors looking for a position to agree with will find the exhibition unhelpful. Perhaps it is for those who want art to cost them something. Trespass is also a different relationship to time. While “contemporary” life runs on hyperactivity that pushes all slowness, reflection to the edge of attention, trespass can be viewed as a detour and an interval of inter-time. Such intervals do not merely slow things down; they also serve to order and shape. Without them, there is only a chaos of events. Energy of trespass lies in the ability to disrupt one state and give rise to another. For four days this December nine artists occupy a commercial space on a short let, at the market rate for the street. In the UK where what is deemed ‘out of place’ gets pushed underground or to the periphery, Trespass has taken a lease in Marylebone instead. The very presence of the selected body of works here constitutes the exhibition's first act: trespass is to rent the room. The brief doesn’t ask to illustrate ‘trespass’. It asks instead what it actually interrupts in the country where trespass remains a civil matter in principle but is criminal in a growing list of places and circumstances; the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have been extending that list. The artists trespass in different directions: upon genre conventions, against public taste, upon the official canon, the iconography of power, into the functioning of “the system”, on the city’s background. However it is expressed, through various media and methods, directly or metaphorically, through research or activism, the effect of the transgression is continuing incongruity. Who gets to be radical? Mike Ballard has painted the working tape of his own police interview recorded after he was caught trespassing on the railways; the state spent an hour trying to get something out of him and got a sequence of “no comment”. The painting of that state failure will be in W1.