Wednesday 27th July 2005
The Times (T2, page 16)
Many conceptual artists have an unholy delight in statistics, obsessively recording the precise number of metres walked or cataloguing the black and white birds of Britain. It is not clear whether the six artists featured in the show Day-to-Day Data share this delight or are subtly sending it up. A bit of both, I suspect.
Obviously there is no reason why visitors to the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham should not, for example, respond to survey questions by picking coloured badges from Lucy Kimbell’s six large Perspex cylinders, but it does teeter on the brink of quaintness. And it may be that Hannah Brown’s Daily Efficiency and Behavioural Analysis Self-Evaluation Checklists tell us more than we wish to know about ourselves and the artist.
Mind you, some of the elements of the web-based exhibition that accompanies the physical show (which lasts until Sept 7) could be useful. I bet that supermarkets will be fascinated by the results of Adele Prince’s research into shopping trolley migration in Nottingham, while the rest of us just wonder at its complexity.
