Growing up absurd

Growing up absurd brings together artists from the UK, Europe and USA. The exhibition takes its title from Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. Goodman’s landmark study of the conditions of adolescence and early adulthood railed against the 1960’s establishment that he saw as destroying the dreams and lives of youth. The book puts forth the idea that western society is a paradise of consumerism, a "confused, seduced, spoiled mass society”, staggering from one problem to the next.

The exhibition will seek to explore the current status of culture through the filter of adolescence opening up an often extreme and varied terrain. Here, adolescence is not merely a passing phase, a hazing into adulthood, but a parallel fluid universe in a state of becoming. It marks a territory that is closely connected to the present while symbolically containing the seeds of the future.

Contemporary art has treated adolescence as an indispensable point of reference through radical gestures, violations and impatience. From the revolt of the historical avant-gardes, through the counterculture of the 1960s art has explored and exploited the eternal adolescent. The artists in Growing up absurd recognise youth as a mental state, an existential condition with an overwhelming impact on lifestyles and trends.

Their reflexive and diverse approaches embody a state and love of extremes. Adolescence represents an Arcadian field of introspection that is both agitated and curiously elusive. Moments of reverie and observation collude with redefinitions of deviant behaviour and the forging of subcultures. Adolescence represents an Arcadian field of introspection that is both agitated and curiously elusive. Moments of reverie and observation collude with redefinitions of deviant behaviour and the forging of subcultures. Adolescents are omnivorous, tireless consumers of culture. The market saturates society with the precious commodity that is youth. Youth is a vaunted condition, a place to aspire to in perpetuity. It forms part of the dream, a decisive segment in the strategy of consumption.

The exhibition will take the viewer on a cruise filled with visual seduction and polymorphous adventure. The curatorial impetus will be to realise scenarios that will function like unstructured chapters in a never to be finished novel. The artists’ work will conspire to outline an alternative present prompting us to imagine ourselves somewhere else through a hybrid bricolage of confrontation and significance. The exhibition will portray a restless disaffected territory of creative energy through a sea of potential and possibilities. Its ambition will be to form new constellations of thinking and engagement with our complex contemporary culture.