On first being led into Soho’s notorious Colony Room Club, the guest of a habituated member asked in dismay ‘What’s that smell?’ Without looking up, another member, stooped in a corner, muttered, ‘Failure’. The old salt stared into his wine – just a sailor fathoming his mermaid. ‘Failure,’ he mumbled again more faintly, this time not joking but sinking.
Darren Coffield, artist, author and former member of the Colony Room Club, has re-created in significant detail the seedy first-floor bar. The once much-loved (but now sadly shut down) members’ club in bohemian Soho opened its doors in 1948, when lesbian mondaine Muriel Belcher paid the then unknown Francis Bacon £10 a week to fetch ‘interesting’ drinkers into its embrace. It was a speakeasy frequented by homosexuals, artists, prostitutes, writers, politicians and petty criminals. Its latest incarnation is as a work of installation art, occupying a basement just off Regents Street. How best might we think about such work?
Excerpt from:
Art’s Dividing Line: The Colony Room Club and Kant on this one from the heart by Edward Winters
Photos by Peter Clark
peterclarkimages.co.uk
Ziggy Green opened at 4 Heddon Street on November 22, 2023. The Colony Room Club will be open on a walk-in basis only, from 3-11pm, seven days a week, and for a limited time only.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
