Edward Allington
Carolyn Godsiff
Mauricio Guillen
Maria Ledinskaya
Nicola Maxwell
Holly Mitchell
Ben Sadler

"We live everywhere in an aesthetic hallucination of reality."
 Jean Baudrillard,'Simulations', 1983

Edward Allington's seminal sculptures of the early 1980s provide a starting point for viewing ' Pleasure Gardens '. Allington's recreations of the classical world and its iconography are characterised by playfulness, erudition, and a love of contradiction. 'Oblivion Penetrated', illustrated here, is at once a philosophical provocation; an experiment in extending the language of sculpture; and an alluring emblem of its time. Here, Allington complicates what qualities and characteristics might be defined and described as 'sculptural'. At first glance, we can say that 'Oblivion Penetrated' creates two illusions which confound our expectations of sculptural form. Firstly, we are seemingly asked to suspend disbelief in the work's defiance of gravity (rather than being invited to assess the 'sculptural' properties of weight and mass). Secondly, it evokes liquidity rather than solidity, appearing poured rather than constructed, carved, or modelled. At a formal level, it is not possible to readily decipher the edges of the work, as it has no clear contour or outline. Yet unlike those practices associated with 'anti-form' it is elegantly choreographed and 'neoclassical' at least in some sense. Of course, trying to discern in what ways Allington's work is 'genuinely' neoclassical leads us into further uncertain ground.

The artist's early works also address a constellation of wider intellectual problems which might be said to define the conditions of art production in our time. These works predate Baudrillard's quotation above, though echo its terms. One of these problems is why (and indeed how) the individual artist might create new artefacts when they are patently unable to compete with industry's capacity to generate new objects. A second is how the artist may create new and bespoke objects "in an age of mechanical reproduction", to use Walter Benjamin's term. A third is how it is possible to create novel and unique meanings by using objects which are manifestly neither novel nor unique. Allington's responses to these compound problems pushed British sculpture in a more philo-sophically inclined direction. His work is,

though, invariably leavened with wit and paradox. There might be said to be three immediately observable paradoxes that 'Oblivion Penetrated' embodies. Firstly, it is a unique 'luxury' commodity composed from thousands of disposable, inexpensive components. Secondly, whilst it is held in perpetuity by a national museum, it is constructed from nondurable materials. Third, whilst the function of the horn of plenty as a motif is to celebrate the fecundity of the natural world, the components here are blatantly manufactured. Accordingly, the work redirects our attention to the 'fecundity' - the productive capacity -of consumer society.