This morning I went with a friend to see the Grayson Perry exhibition at Colchester's Firstsite. The gallery was opened in 2011, late and over budget, and you can get a pretty good idea of how well it has done since when I tell you that, despite living only five miles away and liking art enough to be paid-up supporter of the Tate and the Art Fund, I have been there twice before today.
It was built, amidst much local derision, to showcase contemporary art. I like some contemporary art. I like Grayson Perry enough to have traveled all the way to Margate to visit one of his shows, but an awful lot of it passes me by. Still, if it is good enough for Hoxton who is to say that the good people of north Essex shouldn't have some as well? To make sure that Firstsite could not be used for anything more than a small exhibition of traditional art it was designed with practically no vertical interior walls that you could hang anything on. And the roof leaked. One of my previous visits to Firstsite was to hear a string quartet, and it turned out that it was not a good venue for chamber music either, because during the quiet passages you could hear the thumping bass line from one of the town centre's clubs.
The main reason I didn't take to visiting Firstsite is that they never seemed to have anything on that I liked the sound of. It required a certain amount of effort to find out what they were up to, as the pages on their website take an extraordinarily long time to load and they never managed to put me on a mailing list, but nothing I heard about seemed worth the extra hour's parking and a trip to that end of town. Never mind the star architect and statement building, if you don't have a good management team putting on interesting exhibitions you might as well not bother. I have looked enviously over the past six years at the good reviews of shows in the regional galleries along the south coast at Chichester, Eastbourne, and Bexhill-on-Sea, wishing that they could tour to Firstsite as well, but they never did. I don't know what the problem was, if Colchester was unlucky with its curators, or if the terms and conditions on offer weren't good enough to attract the best in a limited pool of talent. At one point the manager of Colchester Arts Centre stepped into the breach. He managed to increase footfall by dint of stunts like putting a van in the foyer (actually, most of Vinoly's design looks like part of the foyer) and holding food fairs, but that still left us short of any serious art.
A few months ago I read in the local paper that a new curator had been hired, so I live in hope that things will look up. Getting Grayson Perry was a step in the right direction. He designed a house at Wrabness a while back, a sort of extraordinary Mughal gingerbread house, intended to be let out (at great expense) so that people could holiday surrounded by a work of contemporary art, though you can see the outside from the public footpath. The current exhibition is about the ideas behind the house, which is envisaged as a shrine to an upwardly mobile Essex Everywoman. There are four big tapestries and five woodcuts (all displayed on the limited vertical hanging space), some preparatory sketches, photographs of the house, a stylised ceramic model of it, and a green ceramic Sheela Na Gig tile like those that decorate it, plus an essay about the imaginary Everywoman's life narrated by the artist and playing on a continuous loop. It is really good, if you like Grayson Perry. It is not very big, though. Janet Street-Porter came specially from London to see it, and tweeted about the fact that Firstsite was not signposted from the town centre, and I wonder if she felt the effort had been worthwhile.
Entry is free. We managed to arrive and leave without interacting with any member of staff, and Firstsite still don't have my details so that they could tell me about future exhibitions. The loos are very clean, and there is a cafe (or rather some tables and chairs and a counter) in the end of the endless foyer nearest the door, though we didn't stay. My friend looked at a mug in the shop as we left, but it was £25.
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