THE PARLOUR ROOM. PHOTO BY MARTIN BRUDINSKI
London is a town with an East-West problem, and for the last decade or so the East has won on most accounts, chief among them in thee important categories of art and boozing. But the west has never given up its claim to the city's prostitution. "The West is ripe for rejuvenation; I'm bored of East," says writer Francesca Gavin, who with artist Jonathan Yeo has installed artworks into a West Side bar with hopes of changing parts of the neighborhood's reputation—and maintaining others.
The venue is the Dean Street Townhouse, which the SoHo house recently acquired and have turned into a brasserie. Previously The Townhouse's 18th Century building was a printing press for publisher Novello. In the 1920s, it was Gargoyle club, the haunt for Anglo and Anglophile bohemians like Noel Coward, Sigfried Sassoon, Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, John Minton and Graham Greene. Matisse did the interiors. In the 1970s, a goth bar moved in, called itself Batcave, and earned the space a cult following. Yet another following (with overlap) came in its next incarnation as a men's sauna and massage parlour. In the 1980s it hosted the nightclub Gossips.
WORK BY TRACY EMIN; SAM GRIFFIN, THE UNKNOWN SLACE OF PARITALA
All of which is to say that the building hosting Dean Street Townhouse makes for an interesting portrait. And of the 75 works on display here, the vast majority are original commissions with instructions that the artist take on the history of the architecture. In a drawing, Tracy Emin recounts her time working in the coat room at Gossips. No one needs to tell Emin to make art about sex, but many of the other artists in the installation also went directly to SoHo's enduring history of sex traffic. Yeo himself filled an entire room with sexually-charged works.
Some of the younger artists, who perhaps know the building less intimately, have done portraits. Sam Griffin contributed a drawing of a diamond that supposedly brought this street into being. Griffin discovered that the entire street's history stems from an Indian slave who smuggled a diamond out of his native country in a self-inflicted wound. The diamond made its way to the family of William Pitt the Elder (distant forbears of the esteemed Brad); they re-sold the diamond and put the profits toward building a street.
See, it's all about lineage in England—but that this edition of the Soho house isn't member's only, so anyone can see the works on view (for the price of an ale).
Dean Street Town house is located at 69–71 Dean Street, London. It opens to the public November 25, 2009.
LEFT:PAUL NOBLE, POSITIVE/NEGATIVE. 2007, COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY.
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