Dant on Drink: Drawings about Drinking in Britain

Drinking is the main theme of Adam Dant’s second solo show at the Hales gallery in East London. Dant on Drink: Drawings about Drinking in Britain, as one can imagine, is neither a didactic show promoting healthy leaving nor a guide through new range of deliciously fruity J2O juices. Instead the artist focuses on the nation’s favourite sport, second after football of course (although these two have a lot in common), which is ‘getting hammered’!

The drawings are vast but filled with a great detail and all executed in sepia ink and tempera on paper. At first glance they seem like historical illustrations or some old documents, but closer inspection reveals contemporary subject. In four huge drawings Dant explores the relationship between politics, history, environment and ‘the bottle’. From drunken orgies among royal family members to the total mayhem caused by weekend binge drinkers in the streets of East London. These themes mirror William Hogarth’s British drunken landscapes in his Beer Street and Gin Lane engravings, as well as the carousals of the middle class men in A Midnight Modern Conversation.

My favourite is the Redchurch Street series containing of eight medium-seized drawings, in which artist depicts booze fuelled romps that take place on the streets outside his studio in Shoreditch. It is truly the circus of insane out there! People dancing, fighting, being pushed on shopping trolleys, sleeping in piles of rubbish, having sex in random places with random people, urinating, vomiting, defecating… and dinking even more! Dant’s documentary take on the subject is very objective; the artist doesn’t try to moralise and leaves the final judgment to the viewer.

Looking at these images most of us would say: “yea, yea… been there, done that!”(only those who are unlucky to remember the happenings of ‘the night before’), but still it is quite funny, or maybe sometimes rather scary to see oneself from a different perspective. If you happen to wonder around East London with lots of time on your hands than Dant on Drink is an exhibition definitely worth a visit.