Jimmy Cauty’s ADP1: a massive shipping container enclosing many dark secrets

Riot on The Stade

An exciting artwork that previously pulled in the crowds at Banksy’s ‘Dismaland‘ is currently sitting on The Stade. Next week it moves to a site outside Debenhams in the town centre. It’s eye-catching and contentious, but is it any good? Toby Sargent went to find out.

You couldn’t miss it on Saturday morning. A huge metal shipping container, covered from top to bottom with graffiti, stickers and strange little messages. And on closer inspection you could spot dozens of little spy-holes spaced out around all its four sides, and at different heights. These tiny portholes let visitors – spectators, or possibly even voyeurs might be a better word – see the strange world set out within.

People flocking to experience Jimmy Cauty’s ADP1 on the Stade

And what a strange world it is: this alternative Garden of Eden that Jimmy Cauty has produced. For one thing it’s very dark in there, with illumination coming from searchlights that pick out individual elements in the tableau one at a time, and the ever present blue flashing lights of the police and armed response units.

It’s called ADP1, which stands for Aftermath Dislocation Principle part 1 and we’re seeing a landscape that’s been devastated by what looks like government neglect, social alienation and the riots that have inevitably followed.

The ADP container is covered in graffiti and stickers

It’s all in miniature, of course. Wrecked buildings and blasted highways providing a stark backdrop for riot police and the media, all going about their business with no sign of the general public, and all quite oblivious to us peeping in at them on a south coast seafront.

So is it any good? Well, yes, it is. Fascinating and unsettling with a nightmare quality that the splintered view from each vantage point only enhances, it is technically very well realised and definitely worth a look. There are loud echoes of the Chapman brothers in the use of miniature figures (albeit with a different sense of the grotesque) and the viewing points into an enclosed box reminded me strongly of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei whose representation of his own incarceration was to seen at the Royal Academy’s show in 2015.

But the accessibility of Jimmy Cauty‘s work – placing it in the open air, with no admission fee and no art gallery etiquette to observe – is refreshing. Passers-by were clearly enjoying it, and so did I. The merchandising is good too, being well-priced and edgy – although if HOT’s resident old perisher finds a thing ‘edgy’, it’s probably some way short of that to anyone under 60.

ADP1 : at the Stade Open Space until 12 September, and then outside Debenhams until 19 September. Highly recommended.

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