Mick Hartley: Blue Crystal Flat

Seizure, Roger Hiorns' copper sulphate interior, is in a small ground floor council flat near Elephant and Castle. It earned him a nomination for this year's Turner Prize. The flat's due for demolition, but the recession means the wrecker's ball's been suspended for the moment, so those of us who didn't see it first time round now get another chance. I headed down there this morning.

There are a few people milling about, waiting to get in:

No, it's not a smart address. You can see why the bulldozer's next on the schedule. Inside, well....it's blue:

And that's it.

I was underwhelmed, I'll admit. There's just this one small room, plus a tiny bathroom. Everything except the bath's been stripped out, so it's just four walls, floor, ceiling. And it's gloomy: just a few bare bulbs. The place was crying out for some natural daylight.

It must've seemed like a great idea. The brochure you're handed as you join the back of the queue, as well as being very keen on the health and safety stuff - "Take great care when entering and leaving. There is a step" - has an interview with the artist:

I am completely objective about my own artwork, I can stand outside of it and work out whether it should exist or not. That's why I use materials which enable me to be detached, materials which are their own thing, have their own genetic structure. Rather like copper sulphate is described as auto-genetic, my work is also auto-genetic, it tries to make some sense of my psychological position and then basically it makes itself.

Well, hardly makes itself: the rooms had to be sealed off, and 75,000 gallons of hot saturated copper sulphate solution pumped in, left to cool for a couple of weeks, and then drained.

Now, if he'd left the furniture in there, and the TV, and the bloke sitting there with a can of lager, and the dog.... And as I say, opened it up to let some daylight in. As it was it struck me as the kind of decor you might see in a cutting-edge night-club as you came in off the street, and you'd think, hey, wow, cool - if you were the kind of person, that is, who'd say things like hey, wow, cool.

The critics, it has to be said, disagree:

We are in the presence of something both beautiful and incredibly powerful, a chemical and physical force. It doesn’t need us. It doesn’t know it’s there, or that we are in it, and what drives its formation is a power that will outlast us...(The Times)
Seizure is so ineffably rich and strange that you cannot help stumbling out into the daylight bowled over by the work's immense imagination...(Daily Telegraph)
This is destined to be remembered as one of the truly worthwhile and significant moments of modern British art...(The Guardian)

I think they should maybe get out more.

It's not that I thought it was rubbish, or that such projects are a waste of money. I'm glad I went. I just thought it was little better than a fancy bit of interior decor, or like something you'd see underground in some Derbyshire cave system.

If it's blue you're after, I prefer the men on the building round the corner on Borough High Street: