Just when the world of contemporary art seems boringly full of magazine covers, modelling assignments, corporate hand-holding, goody bags and incessantly grim celebritisation, along comes an unsponsored show in a bleak warehouse that reminds you a bit of the atmosphere in some London galleries before the Turner Prize was televised.
As part of a year-long project called "Man in the Holocene", Tom Morton and Catharine Patha have hired 1,700 square feet of space above a gym in Hackney, east London, in which to hold a series of exhibitions. The overarching theme is the future, and the opening show, "Trailer", reveals the future of this particular year in this particular gallery. More than 20 artists have contributed a work that functions as a trailer for an exhibition they will have in the space over the next 12 months.
"This show is full of hints as to what will happen," says Morton. "But it also acts as an exhibition that doesn't exist yet - alluding to something that has already happened (ie, the work has been made, or at least thought about), but at the same time a precursor of something that will happen tomorrow." At the heart of this is the notion of the cinema trailer, at once a collection of highlights from a finished piece and a promise of future excitement. Indeed, a little cinema screens a loop of six two-minute trailers by some of the artists involved. These include a hilarious clip show by Martin Sastre imagining the arrival of Hollywood - Bolivian-style - and a rather startling advert by Douglas Fishbone in which he proclaims himself to be some sort of sex god: "Ladies . . . imagine a hand caressing you . . . no one knows how to touch a woman like an artist does . . ."
The non-cinematic exhibits include mildly diverting sculptures, paintings, graphic art and an e-mail, all of which relate not just to forthcoming shows, but to the future in general. One piece by Makoto Aida envisages life in the year 3000, when beautiful women are rolled up, dissected and made into sushi. Jens Hoffmann, the ICA's gallery director, has traded the convex mirror from his office for a photocopy of the same. Why? Who knows. Carey Young has supplied an e-mail called Forward-Looking Statement. Keith Wilson has built a wheeled trailer festooned with rather menacing butcher's implements.
The curators have a budget of £150,000 for their programme, which includes an 18th-century magic lantern show and the sexy Fishbone piling up 30,000 bananas in Trafalgar Square. Some of the events look like they will be fascinating; others will probably flop - but with such a range of artists, from the well-known (Young, Wilson and the late Leon Golub) to the unknown, that is understandable. And it probably doesn't matter. Morton says he has bigger issues than glamour and goody bags: the title of his project apparently refers to the current geological era, now 12,000 years old. "We are attempting to encompass the whole of human culture," he says.
It's ambitious, but I'm happier mulling on the future at an art show like this than attending a deeply fashionable, drearily solipsistic exhibition where the only temporal concept exciting everyone is the past, present or future arrival of Madonna.
"Man in the Holocene" is at 552 Kingsland Road, London E8 (020 7254 5053) from Thursdays to Sundays between midday and 7pm
