Cardiff: Aint no Love in the Heart of the City at various locations

Aint no love in the heart of the City , a CBAT project curated by Gordon Dalton, utilised many of Cardiff's scraps of urban space that were otherwise empty. These plots of land revealed thirteen temporary artist interventions as part of the reinvigoration of the marginal spaces around the Cardiff Bay development. An exhibition at the CBAT Gallery provided a more permanent response to the curatorial brief to explore the social and environmental impact that massive regeneration can have on an area.

Many of the publicly - sited pieces - including Richard Higlett's £100 carpet of brand new shiny pennies - lasted only as long as it took the artist to install, and has now become the stuff of local legend. Addressing head on the real value of public art, Higlett's piece quickly found its way to the change-for-tokens converter at ASDA where the local public literally feasted on the art.

Other works, such as Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan's enormous, cartoon-like pyramid, was quickly re-appropriated by the local community; its gaping mouth used to swallow up anyone who attempted to find shelter in the makeshift interior. Sited within view of the new Wales Millennium Centre, it provided a humorous lo-fi alternative to the skyline development and raised serious questions about how we perceive and consume art in the public realm.

Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan: Thinkthingamajig, 2004; courtesy CBAT

Nearby, clusters of Peter Liversidge's meticulously crafted parcel-tape boulders hinted at other more natural landscapes, imagined by the artist and only dreamed about by the developer. These DIY landscapes were accompanied by appropriated travel advertisements peppered around the area's lampposts - as if advertising some lost idyll to which we might escape.

Peter Liversidge: Montana 2004; courtesy CBAT

Lindsay Mann's sculptural works placed familiar interior objects into the public realm in order to highlight, through decoration, the forgotten and ignored spaces of the city. These domestic objects were brought together in makeshift architectural forms that incorporated the detailing used by developers to create the now-familiar fictional heritages that are used to increase the 'value' of an area.

Lyndsay Mann: Untitled, , 2004; courtesy CBAT

Pat Flynn' s digital animation Untitled (moonstone)  took its name from the Lottery machine that it recreated. Situated in the marketing suite of one of the area's luxury living quarters, the piece was a stark reminder of the good fortune required to live there (and the difficulties experienced in funding the arts in a climate where diminishing Lottery ticket sales are significantly affecting funding). In the gallery, Flynn showed two large-scale prints that revealed computer-generated environments that had been painstakingly constructed to reveal the kind of haunted, lifeless retail parks that are stalked by zombies in the relentless action of computer games.

Pat Flynn: Moonstone, 2004; courtesy CBAT

Many of the artists continued with their current research, such as Nils Norman's exploration into adventure playgrounds. Alberto Duman's twinned urban wastelands in Cardiff and London were announced by the presentation of two photographic billboards that pictured the sites in development limbo; Simon Pope's wall-mounted digital print measured a precise square metre of sky - the artist preferring not to reveal the location of undeveloped land.

Richard Deacon created multiple laminated photographs - as part of his on going series of photographic images of found street ephemera - that were mounted on stakes and driven into the ground at various sites. K.O. Lab (Kendall Geers) infiltrated the city with black-and-white posters bearing the reversed word evil  on sites that were earmarked for demolition or development. The posters sat uncomfortably alongside the many club and pub promotions - like some kind of mystery moral message for passers by.

Aint no love in the heart of the City was part of the Urban Legacies conference organised by CBAT. Projects such as these, with their mixture of publicly sited monuments, field research and political intervention, provide a much-needed pause for breath as cities rush ahead with developments without making time for creative consultation between artists, architects and the communities that live there.

Hannah Firth is Visual Arts Programmer at Chapter, Cardiff; www.chapter.org.

Aint no love in the heart of the City , Cardiff.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 109, Autumn 2004, pp.70-71

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