The exhibition The New Decor at Hayward Gallery includes work by  36 artists from 22 different countries and features works and installations that “take design as a point of departure. By transforming or subverting the appearance and display of everyday furniture, these artworks demolish the accepted etiquette of interior design and the idealized image of social behavior that it conveys.” Though I was not allowed to take pictures I snuck a couple in. My favorite work (which I could not photograph) was from 2008 called “Half-Life” by Jin Shi which was a portrait of a Chinese migrant worker. The artist created a home reproduced at half life-sized. The viewer looks down on the miniature world just as the population looks down on migrant workers. It was an innovative piece and very powerful. Doris Salcedo, the artist from Bogota, Columbia also had her furniture with negative spaces that were filled with cement in the show. As usual, her work suggests the civil conflict in Colombia and its impact on the domestic space and the human body. She states that the materials she uses are, “already charged with significance, with a meaning they have acquired in the practice of everyday life….Used materials are profoundly human; they all bespeak the presence of a human being.”

Camp

Elmgreen and Dragset’s 2008 work Boy Scout offers two bunk beds that face each other suggesting the homosexual urges that may occur in adolescence and the organization that so adamently tries to squelch these tendencies.