A chilly Saturday night in Southend-on-Sea might not seem to be a major art world draw. However a substantial crowd was attracted to Focal Point Gallery in the town’s shiny new library to celebrate the opening of The Peculiar People. This rich, archival exhibition is devoted to the history of alternative communities in Essex from the late 19th century to the present day. The show marks the start of Focal Point’s Radical Essex project, which will run throughout the rest of the year and demonstrates that there is much more to this oft-mocked county than orange spray tans, vajazzles and white stilettoes. (As a Colchester-bred Essex girl, your correspondent is especially happy about this long-overdue reassessment of her home patch.)
The show includes plans for an inflatable canopy for Southend’s High Street by the radical architect Cedric Price; early Modernist designs for the Silver End garden village and a wealth of works by illustrious former Essex-inhabitants including Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and the concrete poet and Lettrist Henri Chopin. Among the throng admiring such treats were the Camden Arts Centre director Jenni Lomax and artists Anne Hardy, Simon Periton and Alan Kane. The latter duo had an entire vitrine devoted to Constable, can’t you see my predicament? (1994), a charabanc day-trip they organised on the August Bank Holiday that year to the nearby resort of Clacton-on-Sea with fellow artists Jeremy Deller and Dan Mitchell, which involved a treasure hunt and much sampling of the tawdry local attractions.
An hour or so into the Focal Point opening, the evening took an unexpected and rather surreal turn with a striking performance by four smartly turned-out ladies who were bathed in strobe lights whilst rhythmically strumming mysterious, interlocked instruments balanced on their knees. With their severely coiffed hair, abundant makeup and slightly sinister, knowing smiles, the enigmatic quartet looked as if they had just stepped off a pot by Grayson Perry (also an Essex boy) and seemed most appropriate to The Peculiar People theme. However, it emerged that they were not locals but part of the Lietuva folk music ensemble from Lithuania, who had been brought to the shores of Southend by artist-musician Lina Lapelyte, and that their boxy instruments were not Essex-made but Lithuanian harps. All most peculiar…
