Maloney explained: The Tanqueray people want to associate their brand with young artists

Maloney explained: “The Tanqueray people want to associate their brand with young artists because their lifestyle is perceived as hip. One of the 20 young artists in his show, Matthew Brown, takes out-of-focus colour photographs of books, cartons, cans and bottles, glues them back on the products or dummies and sells them as artworks at pounds 25 to pounds 750 Ten Tanqueray gin bottles have received his treatment. There, in the backyard of a terrace of shops was a barman, hired by Tanqueray gin as I later found out, laying out 100 glasses of Maiden’s Blush, a concoction of gin, cranberry juice and lemonade poured over ice.The boozy sponsorship had been negotiated by the curator of “Multiple Orgasm”, Martin Maloney, a 34-year-old graduate of St Martin’s and Goldsmiths’ It was easy, really. I was relieved when two boys on rollerblades directed me down an alley beside a car breakers’ yard. As I picked my way over broken concrete, a scruffy cat darted from behind creepers crawling up the breakers’ security mesh and scurried through a wooden fence bearing a notice, “Lost in Space”, the name of the gallery.
A glance through the gate made me regret bringing two bottles of German wine.

But then, in pursuit of affordable art by tomorrow’s generation of artists – which is what I had been promised – one must expect a few rough edges. Neighbours in Lorn Road, in this less than desirable patch of inner-city south London, could not help me towards “Multiple Orgasm”, the name of the show. THE INVITATION cards, handwritten in felt-tipped pen, gave a Stockwell telephone number and said: “Bring a bottle” It did not sound like the most lavish of private views. Unfortunately, in a packed house there is considerable aural overspill, making the “time statements” difficult to hear.The team has yet to work out how best to tell visitors “when” they are, and what they’re seeing. Nonetheless, Lonsdale is committed to “landscape immersion”, and hopes to recreate the Australian outback in a corner of Kew I wonder what the blackbird will make of that !. After toying with the idea of videoscreens in rocks, the team hit on using “pools of sound” – recorded messages triggered by passing visitors and focused so as to be audible only in the right spot.

But they really informed?Lonsdale acknowledges that the exhibition has teething troubles. “We are trying to discover how best to put information over without destroying the believability of the landscape,” he says. Vigilant weeding keeps rampant mosses from growing illicitly “backwards” in time – although I did notice one or two ants visiting the Cooksonia.Yet what, I wonder, do people really take away with them? Marketing surveys carried out to date suggest that visitors enjoy the bubbling mud, the smells, the insects, the giant models of extinct trees. The simulated rocks, animals and plants have been painstakingly planned for both scientific accuracy and visual appeal, and living specimens have been introduced only if they are bone fide relations of ancient plants. It’s a deliberate move away from the traditional idea of a botanical garden, bursting with as many specimens from as many parts of the world as possible.But Kew has worked hard to guarantee authenticity in the midst of artifice.