This year’s summer exhibition at the ICA goes by the playful title of “Surprise, Surprise” – the surprise in question being that curator Rob Bowman has persuaded all manner of well known contemporary artists to create, or exhume from the archive of their previously undisplayed work, something so odd or uncharacteristic as to be quite unexpected. Each participant was given an invitation to think outside the box, to depart from tried and trusted formula – to take a kind of summer holiday, so to speak, from being the artist everyone expects them to be. So Damien Hirst has contributed a work that conspicuously does not [in italics] consist of a dead animal suspended in formaldehyde; while Jake and Dinos Chapman have successfully refrained from exhibiting sculptures formed from mannequins enacting acts of unspeakable barbarism and cruelty on one another. The results are frequently entertaining, sporadically remarkable and varyingly unpredictable.
The exhibition broadcasts its presence to the world with a sound piece by Santiago Sierra, which plays out into the Mall from the concourse gallery of the ICA. Sierra customarily makes works of art which, in the modish jargon of modern artspeak, might be said to problematise the relationship between art and capitalism (for the occasion of his recent one-man show at the Ikon Gallery, he paid an Irish vagrant whom he had encountered on the street of Birmingham to intone the statement “My participation in this piece could generate $72,000 – I am being paid five pounds”.) For “Surprise, Surprise”, Sierra has departed from his normal practice by creating a work of self-consciously perverse futility, devoid of economic implication. He hired a French orchestra and instructed them to play the first verse, and only the first verse, of La Marseillaise, for an hour, while he recorded it....
