East Meets West - London, England's East and West End

DILAPIDATED WAREHOUSES, abandoned industrial buildings, disused retail spaces--these would seem to be staples of the international postwar avant-garde milieu. In New York in the '50s and '60s such premises hosted Happenings, Warhol's Factory, and the Castelli Warehouse. Usually, only minor renovations were carried out, and the primitive appearance of the structures jibed nicely with the rawness of the art that was made and displayed in them. On a more practical level, derelict industrial spaces also tend to be cheap, light, and spacious.

In Britain, the intersection of this nostalgia for the industrial and the pressure to find affordable space in an overheated real-estate (not to mention art) market has led to boom times in the East End of London, which has established itself as something of a mecca for edgy art and artists, akin to Chelsea in New York and SoHo before it. With the arrival of Jay Jopling this month and Victoria Miro (unofficially) next month (both of whom are leaving the same West End neighborhood for far larger digs)--not to mention the opening of Tate Modern just across the Thames in May--the movement to the East End is reaching critical mass. Other galleries are sure to follow.

Until the '60s, London's prosperous West End had always been the center of the British art world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Royal Academy, based in Piccadilly (geographic postal code W1), and the nearby auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's were ground zero. Artists tended to live in surrounding districts like Chelsea (SW3), South Kensington (SW7), and Holland Park (W8). Francis Bacon was one of the last major exemplars of this tradition: His first studio was in South Kensington, in a house that had been built for Sir John Everett Millais (1829-96), a former president of the Royal Academy. Bacon subsequently relocated to Soho (W1).

Gilbert & George have lived and worked in the East End, on Fournier Street (E1), since 1968. Admittedly, their Georgian house hardly counts as a workshop-style space, but when they moved into the Spitalfields area it was a very down-at-the-heels location, filled with sweatshops and light industry mostly staffed by recent immigrants. The people and places on the artists' doorstep were to furnish the subject matter for many of their early photo pieces.

The East End is now home to one of, if not the largest community of artists in Europe, and the galleries--and gentrification--have followed, slowly but surely. The most important catalysts were Matt's Gallery and Interim Art (both E8), which primarily functioned as project spaces. Matt's was founded by the artist Robin Klassnik in an old warehouse in 1979; Interim Art was founded by the American artist Maureen Paley in a Victorian artisan's house in 1984. Paley has put on shows by the video artist Gillian Wearing, the multimedia cartoonist Paul Noble, and the late Helen Chadwick.

Such was the fledgling East End's success that in 1990, when the Japanese art magazine Picabia ran a feature on the London art scene, they printed a street map with a large black rectangle obliterating the West End and deemed only five galleries in London worthy of mention: three of them--Matt's, Interim, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery (E1)--in the East End. In 1992 Matt's and Interim relocated to larger premises in the vicinity, and in May they will be showing (respectively) a sound-and-video sculpture by British artist Carl von Weiler and photographs of young girls in interiors by Irish artist Hannah Starkey. Despite the gallery's growth, Klassnik says that his approach has not changed from the days of his first show, an audio sculpture by David Troostwyk. "I cleaned up the space, invited the artist to make a piece for it, made an invitation, and have stuck to that format ever since." One East London gallery guide now lists twenty-one galleries.

More recent arrivals in the area include The Approach (E2), an artist-run space located above a pub of the same name. The gallery artists include Emma Kay (text drawings), Daniel Coombs (mixed media), Enrico David (needlework), and Gary Webb (assemblages), and special projects by Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, and Jane Simpson have also been mounted. In May, British artist Michael Raedecker will show landscapes and interiors made from fabrics sewn onto canvas. Anthony Wilkinsor Gallery (E2) is organizing a theme show of paintings in which architecture features. The large, publicly funded Chisenhale Gallery (E3) will be showing a space-shifting installation by the Dutch artist Jot Koelewign that features a false floor and ceiling and several trampolines. Flowers East (E8) is mounting a retrospective of the late German emigre landscape painter Josef Herman.

The opening of Tate Modern in the former Bankside Power Station (SE1) perhaps marks the apogee of the art world's infatuation with industrial struc- tures and has prompted many of the recent gallery openings in the eastern half of the city. Because it stands south of the river, in the extremely poor and working-class borough of Southwark, Tate Modern is not strictly in the East End; but it's the first national art museum in London to be located outside the West End.