One gusty afternoon in 1971, the artist Rose Finn-Kelcey hoisted a flag above Alexandra Palace in London. Silver lamé letters on a black background, spelling Here Is a Gale Warning, sounded the alarm for an unspecified emergency. A half century later, Finn-Kelcey’s act, a video of which flickers above one of the two main galleries at Kettle’s Yard and gives this exhibition its title, no longer seems so enigmatic. From climate change to economic precarity to rising fascism, we are living in an age of concurrent catastrophes. The future is here, the storm already blowing.
Artists have always responded to the exigencies of their times, but these days it’s museums that are uniquely under pressure. Public campaigns to make institutions more diverse and accessible have mounted just as governments around the world move to strip them of budgets and their audiences of rights. Museums have a responsibility to grapple with the cultural fallout, though the trend for mounting group exhibitions around critical issues can feel like an anxious plea for survival. Art, meanwhile, isn’t well served by sloganeering. Assembling works ranging from documentary to totally abstract around the assertion that they “warn us of political, social and ecological upheaval”, Here Is a Gale Warning seems painfully aware of this conundrum, but succumbs to it anyway.
