I popped along to this exhibition a couple of days after it opened. It's on London's Grafton Street (a street name more famous in Dublin), very near Berkeley Square in Mayfair.

The Spruth Magers building is an old (expensive) London townhouse. It has a large window at the front, a bit like the shop fronts on the nearby designer boutiques. But instead of items for sale, you can see into the front room/gallery. Once you enter by the front door, you say hello to the receptionist (stunningly beautiful) and then go into that first room where there stand four glass-screen TV's, each playing video art installations, with headphones. The four videos are:

1) Damian Hirst/Angus Fairhurst A Couple of Cannibals Eating A Clown
(Ah the old joke: Why don't cannibals eat clowns? Because they taste funny)

2) Angus Fairhurst: A Cheap And Ill Fitting Gorilla Suit (last 15 secs here)

3) Gary Hume: Me As King Cnut

4) Sam Taylor-Johnson: Brontosaurus
(you may know her as Sam Taylor-Wood, she collab'd with PSB on I'm In Love With A German Film Star, and directed Nowhere Boy starring Aaron Johnson whom she married despite him being half her age. Aaron Johnson is aka "Kick Ass" in the film...Kick Ass. Oh she also directed 50 Shades of Grey (!).

There are various rooms on the ground floor, upstairs and in the basement. One of those rooms features a bunch of photos/prints from the punk era like this:


No direct link to Joy Division, but it reminded me that JD weren't the only people flirting with Nazi stuff as part of the Punk shock-tactic style.

In another room, images like this by Richard Hamilton. Something to do with combining functionality and aesthetics I think.


In a large and mostly empty room upstairs you stumble upon this bad boy, also by Richard Hamilton:



It's a floppy disc machine thingy and it's almost as big as an oven. Its title is "DIAB DS-101 computer, 1985-89".
Judging by the date, I guess it wasn't used for Blue Monday then. A bit of googling reveals that it's from the Tate Galery, and you can read about it on the Tate's website.

Appropriately in the same room is a a copy of the BM sleeve displayed in a square glass box/cube:



Admittedly both of my BM 12"s have the black inner sleeve, but I thought they might have a silver inner sleeve for this (I've never seen one "in the flesh"). It did look kinda cool in that glass case though.

Elesewhere, also behind glass was a copy of the book Designed By Peter Saville. Anyone got this? It appears to be rather expensive. This copy had blue bits where the normal(?) version appears to have red bits.

I'm pretty sure this was from it (open, behind glass)




There was another book with more punk images in it (I don't know what book). Swastikas again.


Oh, and down in the basement, another art film. This one projected on to a wall:
Gillian Wearing - Dancing In Peckham 1994. I have no idea what this was about!



I popped in around 5pm (the gallery closes at 6) and wondered if i would have enough time. In fact I was done after about 25 minutes. It's probably not worth making a bg trip for, but it's free so if you happen to be in the area and feel like looking at BM in a glass case, then hey, why not?

Also I've just found THIS SITE which has better pictures than mine, and attempts to explain what it's all about.

Nice little write-up. Thanks for that.

Yep - I have the Saville book but only with the pink stripe.