The overwrought title of this show–In The Poem About Love You Don't Write the Word Love–sounded like a manifesto for metaphor. In fact what curator Tanya Leighton’s selection of works shared was the desire to explore slyer forms of political engagement via the sin of omission. The exhibition was almost essayistic in making the case that political art should not be a finger-pointing, heart-on-sleeve affair. The works’ strategies were crablike; the enemy was the literal because, the show suggested, there is no such thing.
The folds were best exemplified by François Bucher’s Readymades with a Fold (2004), which consist of little else: photographs of magazines folded to juxtapose ads and earnest features, cover and contents. Images bleed when this ‘pornography of proximity’ is laid bare: a Paris Hilton porn video facing off with an Abu Ghraib image, a shot of the Israeli "security wall" and a publicity photograph of a celebrity trapped in a bubble. They doodle enjoyably with the crass conventions of segregation, while perhaps sacrificing a little of their bite by taking the form of high-gloss digital photographs rather than being exhibited, lepidoptera fashion, as splayed objects.
