Supposedly important, but little more than pleasantly quirky
Folkstone Triennial
The Folkestone Triennial might sound a comic proposition: a British seaside riposte to the mighty Venice Biennale, offering not pavilions and palaces as a backdrop, but boat terminals and hard-to-let terraced housing. Yet the three-yearly festival has established itself as one of Britain’s premier art events – and contributed to this rather benighted former Channel port’s regeneration – by setting its specially commissioned works against an array of wonderfully atmospheric locations. Derelict Methodist chapels, secret clifftop gardens and a deserted end-of-pier railway station have all featured since the event’s debut in 2007.
For this fourth incarnation, curator Lewis Biggs has unearthed 20 more quirky settings (a hidden burial ground and a cuboid Seventies tower block, for instance), and portioned them out to 20 artists to make responses – Antony Gormley is among the better-known names – under the theme of “Frontier”.
With Britain currently renegotiating its relationship with its neighbours, and Folkestone having served for centuries as a border town, you’d have to be asleep not to sense the event’s liberal agenda. Yet that agenda isn’t pursued much beyond polite hints. The triennial’s heavy curatorial packaging – par for the course for events of this kind – doesn’t leave the artists with quite enough to do.
Argentinian sculptor Amalia Pica seems happy not to do very much. Her shell sculptures, placed on the window sills of local houses, reference the kitsch seashell ornaments that are a feature of seaside towns around the world. But her pieces are so unexciting – plain conjunctions of two or three shells – you wonder if the householders might not have created more interesting objects themselves.
Richard Woods’s Holiday Homes, six brightly coloured house-shaped boxes, dotted about in unlikely spots – on a traffic roundabout, in the harbour – make a mildly amusing comment on the housing crisis. But Jonathan Wright’s Fleet of Foot, a collection of gilded 3D-imaged replicas of fishing boats, sitting atop lamp posts and celebrating Folkestone’s fishing past, is one of a number of works that leave you thinking “There must be more to it than that”. As far as I can tell, there isn’t.
The most spectacular of this year’s locations is the loading bay under the pier. Yet the algae-carpeted space, with its view of the white cliffs on the far side of the bay, is used merely as a setting for one of Gormley’s metal casts of his own body – works that are already over-exposed in all senses. The triennial’s nadir, however, is David Shrigley’s Lamp Post (As Remembered), in which the generally astute and acerbic artist has asked a friend to remake one of the town’s Edwardian lamp posts after looking at it for 40 seconds – resulting in something looking like, well, an Edwardian lamp post. Like many of this triennial’s artworks, this tired non-event of a piece seems to embody a contempt for the intellectual level of the general viewer. It’s as though Shrigley assumes the people of Folkestone have never encountered conceptual art before.
The Folkestone Triennial 2017 makes a pleasantly quirky trail through this town’s nooks and crannies. But the viewer is entitled to a hell of a lot more than that from this supposedly important event.
Until Nov 5. Details: 01303 760740; folkestonetriennial.org.uk