Nearly 50 years ago, a young artist called John Smith took his camera to a street in Dalston, London, to film people going about their lives. Except that he pretended to construct and author this raw slice of reality. Over the black and white footage you hear Smith barking out commands like a director. “I want the man in the white boiler suit to come in from the left!” It’s funny and thought-provoking: what is is art, if not a moment in which we frame all the stuff going on in the world, and see it as if we were part of a vast fiction?
Smith’s work forms part of the first exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London under its new director, Gilane Tawadros. It’s a promisingly quirky, adventurous start by her, that challenges you to wonder what the difference between art and life is, if any. This is not exactly a new question. But it is asked here in a daring way that risks utter banality to unlock poetry.
