The Pictured Word

S. Mark Gubb and the Good Life: Beyond Mere Happiness

2012-01-28T16:06:00.000Z

In the 4^th century BC,Plato gave a starring role to his teacher, mentor and hero Socrates in a numberof dialogues dealing with existential and ethical questions. Through thesedialogues, Plato conveyed Socrates’ open-mindedness and capacity for lateralthinking with a clarity, directness and care that have kept Socratic philosophyrelevant for two millennia, enabling readers and thinkers armed with thedialogues to grapple with the fundamental issues of life. Socrates, via Plato, offersan unfailingly productive intellectual method, which involves posing questions,not to elicit specific individual answers, but rather to highlight intellectualprejudices and provide a deeper understanding of the issues at stake. TheSocratic method can reveal the futility or irrelevance of one’s starting point(Maybe that’s not the question), andexpose an untenable worldview. The ruse of Socratic irony, in which theinterrogator pretends to know less than their interlocutor in order to draw outlatent truths and underlying beliefs, is an essential part of this process. Itprovokes further questions, and ultimately shakes the foundations of ourcomforting suppositions, enabling us to re-evaluate what we hold to be true.

In over 30 dialogues, Plato returnsto the core themes of justice, truth and ethics. The question of how to liveone’s life turns up in several dialogues as a reminder of the wider contextwithin which specific topics are addressed. For Socrates, and indeed for manyother philosophers in antiquity, the answer to this most basic of existentialquestions is encapsulated in a single word: eudaimonia. From the Greek eu- (good) and daimon- (spirit or demon), the term is most frequentlytranslated as happiness, or flourishing, though it’s difficult to capture thefull range of connotations of this ancient term. Socrates considers eudaimoniato be the ultimate human desire, moreattractive than pleasure, power, strength or wealth. But how does one attain sucha state? Here Socrates differs from some of his contemporaries and successors,maintaining that eudaimonia isguaranteed by virtue, and virtue alone. It’s important to note that thisancient conception of virtue is divorced of any notion of morality, and in thisit differs fundamentally from our modern understanding of the term. InSocrates’ day, virtue encompassed morally neutral attributes such as physicalstrength and beauty, which today are relegated to the materialistic pole in thevirtue/vice binary.

For Socrates, a flourishing personpossesses the virtues of self-control, courage, piety, wisdom and justice.These are states of well-cared-for soul, perfected to a condition of trueharmony. It is through a sustained and attentive process of self-interrogation,combined with virtuous living – a kind of life hygiene – that this heraldedstate of eudaimonia can be reached. Theongoing practice of questioning for its own sake, rather than geared towards aspecific and definite answer, lends the platonic method a power to resistpersonal and political tyrannies.

Two and a half millennia later, theSocratic method has lost none of its creative potential. S Mark Gubb’sexhibition How should I live? (Maybe that’s not the question) invites us to ponder some of the beliefs we tend todefend against scrutiny. The show features works in a range of media includingbillboard posters, Bluetooth messaging, lightboxes and the more art historicalmedium of cast bronze. Each work is titled with a variation of thequestion/answer construction that brands the exhibition. In HowShould I Live? (Maybe That's Not the Question) - (Pura Vida) (2010), coloured lines on the floor sketch out thefootprints of a trinity of buildings. The lines are set down with lane tape, amaterial used for marking out games courts. The work evokes the layeringusually seen on a gymnasium floor, with its palimpsest of teams, allegiancesand practices. In Gubb’s composition, the architectural footprints of a church,bar and football pitch are overlaid with a more elusive drawing made from blackline tape, which describes a curving corridor meandering between two end linesthat suggest doorways. What looks like an aleatory pathway in fact representsan abattoir’s killing room floor, along which animals are guided and preparedfor slaughter.

The three buildings described inGubb’s floor drawing schematise the Costa Rican concept of Pura Vida, which advocates a basic lifestyle. PuraVida holds that a church, a bar and afootball pitch are all one needs to create a town. The expression PuraVida translates into something like ‘GoodLife’ and serves as a catchall phrase: it’s a greeting or exclamation thatworks in all kinds of social situations. As a philosophy of simplicity, PuraVida is seductive. Its combination of thespiritual, social and physical aspects of life echoes Plato’s doctrine of thesoul, which describes three elements that make up our basic impulses: desire,reason and ambition. For Plato, these three elements must be kept in harmony inorder to lead a virtuous life.

With How Should I Live? (MaybeThat's Not the Question) - (Pura Vida),Gubb offers a visual allegory of existence, in which stations dedicated toworship, entertainment and physical activity are circumscribed by theineluctable journey towards death. The work stages a powerful tension betweenits material and content, nagging at underlying anxieties related to systems ofcontrol and aspirational living. The familiarity and nostalgic appeal of gamestape can trigger disquieting memories, or highlight the problematic pedagogicalmanagement of individuals in schools. Add to this the supposed panacea of anidyllic existence, such as Pura Vida,and the result is a nagging confrontation between freedom and control, which isthen cowed by the ultimate authority of the killing room floor.

The ideal of the simple life hasseduced people in wildly divergent times, places and political systems, fromancient Greece to Costa Rica and even turn-of-the-millennium Britain. In 1993, as Britain was recovering from a severerecession, the Conservative party launched its ‘Back to Basics’ generalelection campaign for John Major. His victory ushered in a period ofconservative policy and economic hardship, during which the heralded basicsequated to swingeing cuts in many areas. But context is everything, and theapparent similarity between slogans such as between Pura Vida and ‘Back to Basics’ is not so surprising if weaccept that the meaning of an utterance is acquired through its use rather thanits structure alone. To highlight and exploit this undecidability, especiallyin relation to political propaganda is a classic postmodern device. What is newin our current day – and it’s a phenomenon that bears closer scrutiny – is thespeed at which a given phrase circulates, how quickly its sense can morph, andhow difficult it is to pin down its true intention. Slogans and buzzwords aredressed up in ever-changing cloaks of meaning by the worlds of public relationsand corporate communications, which use rapid-fire technologies to disseminatethem to insatiable audiences.

Gubb frequently uses propaganda asa medium, whether in the form of traditional promotional posters and placardsor more recent digital technologies. For a series of works that hover aroundthe exhibition How should I live? (Maybe that’s not the question), he uses Bluetooth, a technology that allows atransmitter to send messages wirelessly and indiscriminately to allBluetooth-enabled devices within a certain radius. This technology has a widerange of applications, from promoting sales to customers in a specific place,to its deployment as a tool for psychological warfare. In an especially piquantexample of instant communication, the Palestinian organisation Hamas usedBluetooth technology to message threats of extreme violence including ‘a showerof bombs on your city’ to Israelis within a given radius of their transmitterimmediately following Israel’s recent bombings of Palestine.

During the run of the exhibition,Gubb sends a range of messages, which will be received by anyone with aBluetooth-enabled device. People’s pockets buzz with images, statements orquotes chosen by the artist from a stock of phrases or typed up on the spot,inspired by his surroundings. Gubb calls these texts ‘little artworks thatpeople can take away in their pocket’. ‘Actively at Work, Everyday’; ‘MoreStock Means More Care’; ‘Happiness, Good Health and Success’: these messages seem to mean something, but it isn’t clear exactly whatthey are referring to. Their meaning is to be forged by the context in whichthey are received. Gubb communicates with his audience by circumventing anyspecific message, but rather by drawing their attention to the variety ofmeanings and connotations inherent in any linguistic construction, andhighlighting language’s power to influence. Well aware of the ambivalence ofthe Bluetooth technology he uses, Gubb recognises that some people may findvalue in these messages while others will regard them as a nuisance.

Contemporary thinkers still grapplewith the question of what makes a good life and its corollary, whetherhappiness is valuable as an end in its own right. For some, the intense stateinduced by the appreciation of art may play a part in producing a happy andflourishing state. In a recent article, the child psychoanalyst Adam Phillipsput forward the theory that what makes children truly happy is to becaptivated, to be fully in the moment, absorbed. And why should the same nothold true for adults? Phillips quotes a passage from William Golding’s Lordof the Flies, in which a young child playswith tiny sea creatures on the beach. The boy is so fascinated by his microcosmthat he becomes ‘absorbed beyond mere happiness.’ Admittedly, there is asinister subtext to the child’s omnipotence in relation to the animals hemanipulates, which Phillips doesn’t dwell on, but it is predominantly the factof being involved something to the exclusion of mundane considerations thatprovokes in the boy a state of rapture.

This model of what causes happinessdiffers from the one proposed by Socrates in that it results from a state of utter concentration, rather than an ongoing process of existential examination. For Phillips, theconstant self-questioning and auto-analysis that characterise contemporaryculture dissipate our attention, erode our capacity for absorption and,ironically, prevent us from actually being happy. It’s just one way ofanswering the question of how to live, but along Phillips’s schema, acaptivating work of art, film or piece of music may well be the most reliableroute to a good life punctuated by moments of sheer happiness.

Answering the question of how tolive might be a fool’s errand; trying toanswer it can be an absorbing, fascinating and wise process. The circusperformer in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, whose internal monologue provided Gubb with thetitle for this exhibition, may have been right in suggesting that askingoneself how one should live may not be the question. And perhaps it isn’t thequestion. But it’s a good place to start,and to launch a battalion of other questions whose assault on our entrenchedbeliefs might eventually yield surprising and fascinating results.

2012-01-27T23:55:00.003Z

Next Zabludowicz Collection Invites:
Anthony Green, Again, How Can We Carry On?
Opens Thursday 9 February, 7-9pm

Interview with Benedict Drew for Zabludowicz Collection Invites

2012-01-23T18:21:00.003Z

Download the interview pdf here

David Askevold

2011-10-02T21:59:00.004+01:00

Here's a review of the recent David Askevold exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in London, published on Artvehicle.com

http://www.artvehicle.com/events/314

PROPS

2011-05-25T09:39:00.028+01:00

On a rainy afternoon back in March 2010, I sat with six artists in a derelict building in Bloomsbury for a long and drawn-out conversation that coursed from ancient mythology to Thai rituals and Eric Gill's 'pervert font', and degenerated into something altogether less civilised once the family-sized Domino's pizzas arrived.

In one way or another, these artists all work at the intersection of sculpture, performance and the performative. The discussion was intended as a prelude to an exhibition about different approaches to the practice of performance, curated by Adam James and Tintin Cooper, which eventually took place last month in London.

In thinking about how to conduct the interview, I decided to turn it into a kind of random and playful stream of consciousness, punctuated by guiding words and images. I would talk through a series of terms or turns-of-phrase with the artists and address a specific question to each one in relation to her or his work. Some of these questions took the form of pictures; actually they were recent holiday snapshots of mine. The artist in question had a chance to answer and then others were invited pipe in with their insights before we all moved on to the next one. There were links between the different items but, like the works in the exhibition, they were not related to a single overarching theme.

Some of the ideas guiding the discussion:

Ersatz living
Ornament and crime
A dried up grotesque fountain (illustrated below)
The rituals of dress
Death mask (illustrated below)
Prosthetic nostalgia
Nonlinear systems
Primordial stew
Neptune and two palm trees (illustrated below)

The participants in the conversation were:

EMD: Ellen Mara De Wachter
AJ: Adam James
TC: Tintin Cooper
JSL: Jessica Sue Layton
AP: Andy Parker
LP: Lucy Pawlak
WK: Woodrow Kernohan

The project came to fruition in April this year, as an exhibition at Yinka Shonibare's Guest Projects space in Bethnal Green.

EMD: Adam and Tintin, you’re curating this show – could you talk about your reasoning behind the exhibition and why you invited these artists?

AJ: The idea came about through me and Tintin being in a show together, years ago at Tate. We noticed a similarity, a strange sense of humour that might work. I was dressed as a weird naked Greek guy, wandering around the gallery – I gave you a rubber liver. It was something to do with the Prometheus myth, which was the theme of the night. Tintin had made a video work. We started talking and decided to do a show together. This was a few years ago.

TC: It started as something simple with just the two of us but then turned into something much bigger. I started to think of Thai artists and Adam of artists here.

AJ: It’s the first time we’ve tried to curate a show, and most of the real reasonings came much later on. We both had lined up people whose work we liked but we weren’t 100% sure why, and it’s become more apparent over the last year. From my own perspective I’ve come from using my self in my work, from a performance background. A lot of the artists in the show seem to be coming from that, but I wasn’t entirely sure what exactly it was. I was also thinking about theatre, and how it seems to be a dirty word in relation to performance art.

TC: There’s a word in Thai that comes from Sanskrit, which is leela. It translates roughly as ‘the play of life’ or ‘the game of life’ and I think the Thai artists in the show were thinking of that word, which I think describes all the work in the show. It comes from a Hindu myth in which Krishna plays tricks on people during the course of their lives. So you might fall in love or people around you might die, but it’s for you to learn something. We were talking about life as the stage.

EMD: Jess, I’d like to ask you about Ersatz living versus authentic living. You work a lot with other people’s identities and you often engineer a sense of intimacy. What kind of responses have people given to your actions or ‘inhabitations’? Someone in your book commented that they felt violated by something you had done while flat-sitting for them.

JSL: I was interested in a range of ways of interacting with people, and also them not seeing what I was doing, so there would be a missed connection. In some cases, I felt like I didn’t have latitude to change things and that I didn’t want to violate or cross an invisible. With other people I felt more playful straightaway, and could be much more bold, doing things like painting inside a medicine cabinet. This mostly comes from being in a house, and observing the way a person lives. All the interactions I do are towards the end of my stay and I feel like I’ve gotten intimate with their home and seen the way they organise things, or don’t, and observing, based on their objects and belongings, the way they exist. In one of the projects, I replaced a Monet postcard with my own version and even though it was an obvious fake when you walked up to it, by just glancing at it, it passes for the real thing. I knew that the woman’s house was her livelihood and it was important to her that she feel in control of it, because she had a B&B. I didn’t feel like overly disrupting it. I knew that in doing what I did, she may never notice. In fact she didn’t notice until she came to a blanket sale I did of all the things I snitched during the project, and she recognised it. She was the one who felt violated, and I feel like I did gauge that one correctly.

EMD: Do you feel like you take on aspects of these people’s personalities by occupying their spaces? Is there some sort of sympathetic magic or spiritual transfer that happens?

JSL: I’m tentative about going into that because in a previous work, I would house-sit for one or more weeks, and then wear the people’s clothing for portraits taken by a photographer who I would pay using the earnings from my house-sitting. But because I don’t know these people at all it’s too much of a jump for me to say that I’m encapsulating anything of that person. I was interested in portraiture and photography with that project. How a photographer attempts to capture the spirit of someone they don’t know and have just met. A lot of people say my body language and even face are different in each of these portraits. I adapt to my surroundings but I’m not really attempting to take on their personalities. It’s also important for me to know that the homeowner and photographer don’t know what I am doing until after the shots are taken. I have to behave as though the house really is my own, which can become interesting when a fuse blows and I have no idea where the fuse box is, which happened once during a shoot.

EMD: Do you try to analyse tendencies in how people create barriers between private and public life, or is each one of these an individual project with its own narrative?

JSL: Now that I’ve stayed in a few homes, there is a difference between family homes and those of people who work a lot and stay out. There’s not a neglect as such, but more an absence of time accrued there. But that it just my reflection of what I notice, like someone not having dishes, or having only one bin in the entire house.

EMD: Lucy – yours was Ornament and Crime. Adolf Loos wrote an essay with that title in 1908, which argued that mankind’s tendency towards ornamentation was the most basic, backwards and degenerate drive and would eventually lead to crime and the ‘deceleration of society’. He advocated pared-down style. I thought of this in relation to your work because you use costume, masquerade and florid characters that could be seen as a kind of ornamentation of the psyche.

LP: I often think that kind of extreme statement and it’s opposite are two sides of the same coin, if you look at the most baroque ornamentation and modernist simplicity there may be some sort of obsessive compulsive parallels. I suppose that my use of the mask as a façade but also as a reference to icons, or even superhero masks.

EMD: For me it was this idea of a degenerate or marginal figure, and that you use ornamentation of costume, mask and elaborate sets to convey a figure of a misfit, whether it emphasises that.

LP: I hope not, in a way. One of the things that troubles me in my practice is that the masks, which potentially look grotesque, but I don’t want that to be a fundamental element of what they are, but I suppose they are trying to be outside, somehow, but also they are trying to be conforming to what they understand as the correct way to behave. They’ve kind of messed up what they think they are supposed to do. In Samsonov, the man in charge is earnestly taking notes on how a family should behave, but he’s kind of ruined it by his enforcement of his position as leader.

EMD: With your different films, are you following a thread through one world with the various characters?

LP: The link is that there seems to be a consistent theme of alienation, and the Thomas Schviefel film relates to doubt, whereas the Samsonov project he has a ‘blind or blinkered certainty’. Overall, the projects relate to engagement or disengagement with the world.

EMD: When you work on a film, is linear narrative important to you?

LP: I’m trying to go more and more into looking at the rules of storytelling. I’m doing a screenwriting class and make the next story I’m developing with Samsonov really follow the rules of the game, with a happy ending, etc. I’m really curious about these structures.

EMD: Could you say a little more about the workshops you are conducting and how they relate to your aims for the project?

LP: At the moment, I’m at the auditioning stage. The plan is to continue with a group of actors I’ve decided to work with, and to look at combinations of enforced structure and improvisation. There’s going to be a hardcore degree of control enforced by the bearded man, combined with a supposed setup that’s improvisational. I’ve been looking at forum theatre and Augusto Boal, and ideas of creating a place that doesn’t have the barrier between the audience and the stage and the possibilities or lack of possibilities this might generate in relation to a mindset of what theatre or performance might be, and how audiences behave, how people behave when they are in a group that might be an audience for something or onstage or in particular roles. And also asking whether you can escape these particular roles. Within the story, there will be an improvisational element in the final shoot, that has come out of workshops. The characters may have an opportunity to escape the script, or they may not.

WK: Is Eric Gill a figure who appears in your work often?

LP: I’ve looked at figures past and present, who adopt a position as leader, and how this manifests itself and how this might become quite nasty. Eric Gill is an example of someone like that. Everyone uses Gill Sans font, the ‘pervert font’. My father has a couple of Eric Gill prints, and I remember looking at him when I was a teenager.

AJ: He had diaries that were discovered after his death that revealed intricate systems. He had a daughter and a dog and a wife. After he passed away, someone deciphered his code and realised that on one day he was having sex with his wife, on other days with his dog, and on others with his daughter.

LP: And he would frolic around his country estate wearing a hessian sack with no pants and when visitors would arrive, he would just whip up his sack. It’s funny because the typeface is so classic, and so many people use it – like Stanley Kubrick uses it.

EMD: Andy – I have a picture of a grotesque fountain for you, because in some ways it’s a remaking of a grotto. I thought of you remaking objects that you find or remember from a long time ago, and all the failures that go into remaking something, that are also the charms of the sculptures.

AP: There’s something nice in that, which is the tension between what you can get from storytelling and what you can get from information, and how those two things can jar against each other. Replicating something and the idea that you could capture the essence of that thing because you’ve been so thorough, like making a cast or death mask. When you make something like this grotto, there’s more of a story, maybe from photographs or from your head. In those cases it’s infused with far more than a direct replica, which naturally has failings, because you get things wrong. My interest in that is coming from an art background that places a value on getting things right, so if you make a copy, you make an exact copy. That photoreal sense of correspondence with something else, more and more as I get experience of the world, I just shrug and think that it’s as much to make an object that corresponds to your relation with that thing as just to be subordinate to that thing in the world. And then you get wonderful things like this fountain, which looks like a slurry of concrete escaping from the wall.

EMD: With the anchor you are planning to rebuild, could you talk about where that comes from, and in particular in relation to sense memory; you talked about the smell of bitumen paint that you associated with the anchor.

AP: It’s a big anchor I remember vaguely seeing somewhere when I was growing up. I recently went back to the place where I think I saw it and I realised there is one on the side of the Victory, which is a huge big black thing, similar to my memory. There’s something about the scale and feeling overwhelmed. I read something the other day about ships leaving harbour, which doesn’t happen so much these days because we all fly so much. But when ships pull away, they leave a huge gap, a jet-black void that opens up, where a massive solid object drifts away. And those are all things that correspond to feelings I’ve had and things I can vaguely remember, although I can’t pin them down, like my dad going away on a ship. Those are the things I’m trying to capture in making this object. It’s more vague than anything I’ve done before because it doesn’t correlate to anything in the world. For me, the work consists of actually making a thing, creating an object that exists for me and my experience, but the object itself is not more important than its making.

EMD: It’s interesting because both you and Jess are starting from absences. Jess you’re beginning with the absence of the person whose flat you’re in and Andy with the absence of the anchor you saw as a child.

AP: There is something about the gestalt familiarity of that kind of object that makes it immediately recognisable as an anchor. Though if you try to draw one, it doesn’t necessarily work, but that doesn’t matter, that it’s right or not because it’s a thing that exists. All my work is about some kind of absence, for example when you’re trying to make an exact copy from a photograph, or another object or index of something. The index is always the absence of something else because something has been there and left a mark, like the death mask that indicates that something is gone.

EMD: And with your cardboard rafts, you actually get rid of the work itself by pushing it out to sea, so you complete the absence.

AP: There’s something I find slightly troublesome when something lingers. The investment I make when creating what I see as the work is something I want to see through, but then to go away because I have no more interest in that thing. I feel happier getting rid of things. There are two journeys I do, one of which is making a work and letting it go, and the other is a gathering. For example with plant drawings I have been making, the idea was to endlessly serialise the works. It’s one piece but it consists of many versions of the same plant, it’s a gathering of different samples. It’s a way of accruing stuff, in the same way you can lose stuff, but without gaining value as such. In making the rafts, it didn’t seem that important to have them correlate with something in the world. I see and gather photos of stuff dumped in the streets because that’s something I enjoy looking at, but the rafts are not make strictly from these things. I find a box and think, if I add an inch onto that I’ll have something that’s roughly the size of a fridge, and I go from there to build something that feels right, and it’s that feeling that’s important. For me that feels like a very genuine process of making, it’s totally hands-on, and involved and thinking as I’m building, and finally the thing just appears and seems right, the way it should be. It feels intuitive. There’s a tinkering with the objects until it feels about right, creating a sense of these objects that feels right. There’s a relationship with storytelling, because in one sense I’m building it from a story I’ve told myself. There’s a vague sense of what something might be like. You end up with something that’s more than the thing in itself. The point of making these objects is to make them do something, like a prop, it has a use-value, which is to be pushed out in the water, given it’s last chance.

TC: It reminds me of a Thai ritual called loi kratong that happens every November. You chop up a banana tree and make a very pretty boat that you light with candles and push into the river. It’s the time you let go and forgive everyone and also pay respect to the mother, which is the spirit in the sea.

WK: Do you think the anchor will be in a scale in proportion to you as a child, so 2:1?

AP: In a sense that might come out as it’s done, but I’m not planning it in advance. I suppose I’m slightly hesitant about looking at it in relation to memory and childhood, because I don’t dwell on that. It’s just that this is an object that has caught my attention.

JSL: It’s another space, that you notice when you go to a thing and realise the thing is not there. It’s not meant to be nostalgic. It’s more of a bodily memory.

AP: There’s a nice connection with your work, Jessica, which is the idea of habit. When you are close connection with the same objects all the time, like a fridge or something, you’re just used to them. But when you go to the fridge in someone else’s house and you go to open it and they have the door the other way round, and it’s a shock.

EMD: When you described your work, Andy, I got the image of a blind person trying to sculpt something, and the idea that you’re doing this in the absence of all the data that you might have, sketches, the real thing to measure… You’re removing one of the most common bits of information, which is the physical presence of the thing you are replicating, and going more on your instincts.

Adam, your image was the death mask. I’d like to ask you about your compulsion to create different identities, and what this allows you to do? Also, what happens when you incarnate those characters yourself?

AJ: I think that without realising it, I can probably trace it back to being at school and feeling like I didn’t fit in with the cool kids, and being bullied and wanting to create a new and different identity for myself that would allow me to slip through the cracks. I guess I became a nerd and a keen hobbyist, which was another me. A lot of my work now comes from this nerdy fascination with characters, role playing and masquerading. Playing war games was what drew me to this process of creating characters. For a long time I would imagine characters and try to get other people to perform them for me by giving them wigs and prosthetics or costumes, but they never quite fit my imagination. Largely for pragmatic reasons, I started to dress myself and become the characters. More recently I started with mask-making and statues. For the last few years I’ve been observing characters of weirdos and people who don’t fit into society, and to become those characters. In some ways I don’t take it too seriously, and it’s an extension of what I’ve always done, having fun. I still feel like, with my performance work, I’m taking the piss, and I’m amazed that I can get away with it. Maybe I feel like I have to be silly, to become these characters in the public realm, because it is terrifying really to be these people. A mask allows me to be the other without it being embarrassing. I’m interested in seeing how small or slight that mask can be in order to become the other.

EMD: There’s a consistency within the enormous range of character that you incarnate and in the quality of the realisation, with a tremendous attention to detail. The characters are always complete and very convinced, even if they’re not convincing, which is slightly irrelevant. Another reason I chose the picture of the death mask was to ask about the life and death of these character, and whether you carry them with you forever or whether they are disposable, or replaceable.

AJ: I feel like the characters are all the same person in some way, though they look different. They allow me to be the same person, the kind of idiot. In a way, that idea of the idiot is what I am looking for in all the characters. Many of the people I take as a starting point are modern day witches or fools or loons, or people that otherwise we would ignore or step past. I find something strangely romantic and free and beautiful about the idea of just being an idiot and not caring. I really enjoy it and find dressing up fun, but I’m deadly serious about being silly.

EMD: Recently you’ve started making full body casts, premised on your body, but it’s not you. What does that shift mean?

AJ: It came about for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I felt like I didn’t have stuff and needed to return to a craft and to making something with my hands after spending a lot of time hunched over a computer editing or at the very last second throwing elements of costume together to become a character that ended up in a plastic bag all sweaty in my loft never to be seen again. The main reason was that I wanted to start internalising the characters I was becoming and stop being so much of a voyeur. I’d been pussyfooting around the choice of characters. My interest in these characters as outsiders comes from an interest in my father’s absence and growing up, knowing that my father was a schizophrenic, and that I had a ticking clock that meant that I would at some point go crazy. I guess I was flirting with this idea of the archetypal loony artist, and once I found out my dad had died last year, whether I wanted to or not now was the time to really tackle the thing that scared me most, which was looking at the crazy person perhaps within me. But it felt wrong to dress as my dad at the time, it was too raw and I only had some pictures of him to go on. I wanted to give some sort of permanence to this relationship I had with someone who I had never met, but for who I had a kind of romantic myth. So making a statue seemed like the logical step. I always liked the idea of him being a statue and the connotations of a Greek statue, a hero. Because he is heroic to me in some ways, though from stories I have from my mum, I know that he was a total arsehole and not heroic at all. There was a neat parallel between him and the other characters I’ve made, which is that in some people’s eyes they can be held up as heroes but on the whole they are decrepit and down-and-out. I’ve been doing a lot of research recently into bums and tramps and their deaths. It’s interesting to see how many of these people, once they’ve passed away, are written about really fondly as landmarks or weird heroes, even though they were cast aside during their lives. I’m interested in this flip between awful, tragic, rubbish and great, heroic at the same time.

WK: I was thinking of them in relation to the idea of ersatz living, as perhaps authentic living. Everyone else living in a fiction but these people living authentically, not caught up in the system or consumer life, but outside of it willingly.

EMD: And they seem to lack the shame that you behind the mask might be feeling, or that trepidation.

AJ: But I am also quite troubled by this because many of the people I am looking at do not feel in any way liberated or free. I am not interested in the plight of Joe Bloggs in the street, but rather that they are fascinating characters visually. They always give me a lot to go on in terms of creating a character. The works in this show, it’s the first time they won’t be based on anyone in particular, they will be from my imagination, which really troubles me because truth and reality is always so much weirder than fiction, so if I try and make up what’s weird, I don’t know what will happen.

EMD: Woodrow, I wanted to ask you about emergent properties in your work. It seems that you put together logical or mathematical systems with something non-mathematical like a photograph of a person. I’ve been looking for what it is that happens as a result of bringing these things together, and there seem to be emergent properties, but they are hard to identify exactly. How do you decide what to put together; is it intuitive or random, or guided by some particular principle?

WK: I was interested in the fountain, which looks like it’s spewing organic growth. It reminded me of the Robert Smithson poured glue piece, with a growth pattern. In my work, there’s setting up a structure and seeing what happens, setting parameters and endpoints that the system has to reach, so that it has a life cycle but you don’t know what it is. These are new things I’m exploring so I’m trying to be purely random and more arbitrary in my authorship. Things tend to have an endpoint when they are exhibited, and with the piece that involves images from a Korean health and safety website that explores all sorts of permutations within set constraints. In theory, anything could happen, though for it to be in the context of the exhibition, it has to have a set life, that my abilities with technology and the constraints of the gallery space limit. I was trying to use the same method for generating the images and the timeline as for generating how it’s exhibited, so the two structures carry each other.

EMD: The aesthetic of that particular work made me think of Dada, with the warning signs, exclamations, hazard graphics – did you pick them because they might have a comical or absurd sense of being out of context?

WK: They were picked through a process of chance, because they come from a Korean website called thisthis, so the title doesn’t make much sense. And ‘This this’ comes from a poem by Beckett I was looking at. They are two pointing words that normally point at something but in this case they point at each other, so they point at nothing. And the hazard equipment and mirrors point at things or show you something else, so there was that element to the content.

EMD: What interested you in this process of picking random methodologies or arbitrary rules to make work?

WK: The ship piece, which is called ‘Frame Refrain’ is of lots of porthole windows in ship cabins, and I found that image in a brochure very seductive, and saw it as a terrifying cell-like space on a ship with people who you were locked in with for weeks on end. I set up a rule to find sequences from films to put within the window frames and then arranged them in a linear pattern that was dictated by the soundtracks of the films they were taken from so that they are equally dictated by image and sound. So I began with chance and then set some parameters and saw what happened, because I knew there was only a certain length of time during which I could watch films. There are extracts from about 40 or 50 films in the piece.

EMD: Something I’m always curious about when artists use rule-based practices is whether you really kept to the rule or did you deviate if things weren’t quite right aesthetically?

WK: With the sequences for the hazard signs, I didn’t look at it until all the rules had been applied, so the first looking was when it was played, and then it didn’t change. With Frame Refrain, because there had to be continuity with the sound element, there was a lot of selection. For example there were notes in Jaws that could carry through to Titanic, or something like that; you could have a strange synchronicity between things. I try not to change things for aesthetic reasons, as long as they work within the rules.

EMD: Another thing with rule is the link with games. Do you see these works as games, and if so is there a winning or losing involved?

WK: I’ve been thinking recently that it’s a bit like patience, so there’s a futility to it. It’s setting up structures that are futile in a way, that explore parameters. The pleasure of the game is also in the repetition; the whole procedure becomes automated, and you become the editing desk, it’s a drawn-out process.

EMD: Do you feel that these works get a life of their own, do they become self-regulating systems and gain an autonomy?

WK: If I were any good at programming, they could.

EMD: Is that something you want to achieve?

WK: Potentially. I’m looking at it at the moment. Having a durational element would be very exciting. The thing about having a completely open structure is a concern in itself - it becomes a life form. I would be interested in exploring it and I think I’m setting up the potential for it, but I don’t have the skill.

EMD: There’s something interesting about doing these things in a low-fi way too, if the skill and technology exist, then it’s already been done, but to go back and look at where it might fall down, or where the chinks might be in the system is interesting.

WK: That comes back to the idea of replicating something that is already replicated and exists. There’s a futility in that. There’s a durational element to the objects, that have a trace of time.

EMD: And that mediation is different from an imprint, which you would get with a cast or something direct. It’s a mediation away from the material, through your mind or imagination.

I picked Neptune with palm trees for Tintin because of the ideas of mythology and deity and reverence and obsession, in relation the presence of male figures in your work, and film stars, which you’ve recut into sequences. In some ways there’s a perception of film stars as gods. But in some sense this picture relates to everyone’s work here, in terms of myth, story, fantasy.

TC: There’s a similar thing with Adam about male figures. In my video installation, I chose the most macho actors, and when I draw I always pick men, and the first thing people ask is if that’s my boyfriend, and it isn’t; it’s my dad. And it really disturbs me. These monumental charcoal drawings were at first just doodles, sketches inspired from pictures in the papers. So the first one is a picture of Imram Khan, who’s been active recently with protests in Bangladesh, and it captured my attention. It turned into a three-metre tall image of what really looks like my father when I was younger. My father was also very tall, nearly two metres. It kind of creeps me out as well because you do it and then notice afterwards. And behind this huge picture of my father was this crowd of refugees, and we grew up on the refugee camps in the Golden Triangle. So it’s weird that I noticed this after I drew it, and I guess that’s why I was attracted to this image. When I was a kid, I absolutely worshipped him, but now I think he’s very tragic.

I always use found images and I’ve notice I always use images of men who look the same. My father also played chess at grand master level and he won a lot of tournaments with Russian chess masters. People who are very good at things like that are usually strange in other ways. Bobby Fisher the chess player really reminds me of my dad or other men in his family, and when he was 60, Fisher started going crazy and saying things like the Holocaust hadn’t happened, really pissing everyone off. For me, I had an idol relationship with my father but now I see him as a tragic figure and I think a lot of my characters have that. I’m always struck by how frail he is now, and how pathetic in relation to the idol I worshipped as a child.

EMD: That realisation that you were doing something automatically is quite interesting.

TC: I did another one of a Bollywood actor called Amitab Bachan, who’s more famous than Brad Pitt. He’s in hundreds of films. There was a marriage picture that captured my attention, and I started to draw it and it turned into my uncle, who is half Indian. I used to make drawings of weird, nearly Arabic looking characters, who looked angry, and I never knew why I drew them and my mum would say ‘oh my gosh, that looks like your grandfather’. He was from the south of Thailand and he had very thick eyebrows and strong features. She would say that I was drawing the family karma. In Asia there’s a belief that your family as a whole has a karma, and it’s a haunting thing that keeps coming back.

When I draw, I sort of hang out for a week and drink coffee and then it’s like ‘oh my gosh!’ that looks like, whoever. The three-metre drawing, I paired off with a woman and it looked before getting married and then I got very freaked out because my dad had been married to and Indian woman before. I thought – why can’t I get away from my family, because I’m not really interested in family as such. I feel like that connection is very strong in my subconscious mind. I’m not sure how much others will get of this in looking at the work.

LP: I was thinking of Andy and Adam’s work in relation to the Thai ritual Tintin mentioned, and I wondered whether in opposition to a subjective mythologizing along the lines of Proust’s Madeleine, which is an object of ritual. If Andy puts something in the sea, then the sea will get rid of it for you.

AP: The first time I put one in the sea, there was no sense of getting rid of it, it was literally a raft that I put on the sea, because that’s where you put rafts. And it sank, sort of without me realising that was exactly what would happen. And as it did, I thought that ended the work in a way it was always going to, but without my consciously thinking it. I don’t really feel like it’s a ritual, even though there are probably connections you can make with Eastern rituals like the boats you cast off or the paper objects you burn at funerals.

LP: I guess I wondered whether it was an action you can set in motion but not be part of, which is what a ritual could be. For example lighting a candle in a church and then going away leaving the candle to do the work for you.

EMD: Maybe one of the differences is that the ritual is an action whose aim is not the doing of the action, but something else. It’s like a symbolic gesture to make something else happen, whereas Andy seems to have a very pragmatic use that he wants to put these objects to, and once that’s done, it’s over. It’s a concrete action that describes itself.

AP: A bit like Adam’s characters that seem crazy and useless, I see an old fridge that no longer works, but that is perfectly functional as a cupboard or a vessel, or something useful if you were castaway on an island. In that action of giving it some possibility of something to do, it naturally meets its own end. I can’t help it beyond what I can do, it’s like throwing a dead bird our of a window.

AP: There was something that struck me about this conversation – a weird sense of the Victorian, firstly from the list Ellen gave us, lots of things to do with automatism, and spiritualism and regressions, whilst at the same time, an objective sense of trying to do something, a systematic approach of using things to try and do something, make it happen.

EMD: I think I might know what you mean but for me, I would have called it a more Freudian thing; there were so many moments during this conversation when we were reading each other, versus that objective distance you mentioned.

AP: I’ve been reading a lot about the development of the texture of the Victorian city towards modern life and it feels like a lot of things we talked about; witches, loons and fools that are such old worlds, and suggest that we’re all reaching back.

LP: For me it’s without the spiritual element, the ritual without any of the sacred belief, so it becomes an action, without thinking. Sort of like the action can do it for you. Like the church gets very upset about what happens with Christmas, because it messes up their structure of control that they enforce through religion.

EMD: It goes back to what Jess said about simulations, and that the simulacrum is the thing remade and emptied out of its original purpose or meaning. But as something that still has a shape, it can still have a purpose, and people do other things with it. But it also accounts for how appealing the works can be, because people think they recognise something they know and they have a moment of ‘I get it!’ and that’s a type of satisfaction. But then the moment when the work turns out to be something other than they thought is when the art happens, when the rug gets pulled out from under them and that’s a very interesting moment.

WK: That takes us back to Ornament and Crime.

Which seems like a good ending.

The Shape We're In

2011-02-28T21:33:00.005Z

400 Women in The Art Newspaper, November 2010

2010-11-02T18:22:00.002Z

200 artists

2010-10-23T11:57:00.005+01:00

Veronica by Gee Vaucher

For the past month, I've stayed home on Saturday mornings. People connected with 400 Women have been delivering freshly painted, varnished and framed portraits to my flat. Artists, their friends and partners, have been dropping of 'their girl'. It has been a colourful stream of people of different nationalities, genders and ages, all concerned about the project, all of whom have gifted it their time and art. The works sit in my living room, staring at me, and I sit waiting for more deliveries. The faces of women, teenagers and children stare at me mutely. Whenever I receive a work, I unpack it to look at it, and set it up on one of the tables and chests around the room. Recently, I have had to wrap some of them back up. Their gaze is too powerful.

Until the exhibition opens on 11 November, my flatmates will be treated to new art works every week. They are part of the growing group of people connected with 400 Women, affected by their knowledge of the facts that prompted the project. The exhibition is gaining momentum. We found out yesterday that we have been awarded an Arts Council grant to produce the show; Amnesty International recently came on board as our official partners; the international media are sitting up and taking notice. The project is taking its toll on those involved but it is also getting people's attention and provoking a sense of outrage over an untenable and indefensible situation. The figure of 400 women is now old news. Since January 2010 there have been more than 300 women murdered or abducted in the area. That's more than one a day.

About 400 Women

2010-09-25T16:06:00.002+01:00

Laura Berenice by Laurie Lipton

400 Women confronts us with the faces of some of the women killed over the past two decades in Ciudad Juárez, a town situated near the border between Mexico and the United States of America. These murders, which continue today, are not to be confused or conflated with the plethora of killings associated with drug cartels in the region. The murders addressed by 400 Women were, quite simply, motivated by the fact that the victims were women. The brutal circumstances of these killings – rape, torture, captivity and bodily desecration – bear a direct relation to the victims’ gender. Since the year 2003, when 400 was quoted as the official count of sexual homicides in the region, the number has become symbolic, incapable of capturing the actual number of murders in this growing tragedy. In 2006, the Mexican government closed its investigations into what is known by some in Mexico as a ‘femicide’, concluding that no federal laws had been violated.

400 Women is the outcome of 5 years’ work by visual artist Tamsyn Challenger. The idea for the project was sparked by her visit to Mexico in 2006, to make a feature for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Challenger was marked by encounters with relatives of the victims, in particular the way mothers would press into her hands cheap postcards depicting their lost daughters. On the flight back to London, she began thinking of a way to tackle the trauma she had encountered in Mexico, and began developing a conceptual portrait project of massive scale and reach.

For 400 Women, Challenger has invited each artist to paint a portrait of one of the missing or murdered women, and to somehow become that woman, standing in for her in the context of the project. The works are based on photographs she has obtained from Amnesty International, the support group Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) and the Esther Chavez Collection, together with brief forensic accounts of the murders. In some cases, where photographs were unavailable, artists have been asked to work with nothing more than a name. The pieces have all been produced in a size reminiscent of a Mexican retablo, or altarpiece.

The collective nature of 400 Women is striking: it brings together 200 artists to create a critical mass of voices addressing a single issue. As a group of portraits, each created in its own unique style, the project raises important questions about the capacity of art to imagine the dead and to deal with the specifics of violence and trauma. With 400 Women, Challenger asks artists and viewers to question their conscience, and to consider the catastrophic situation in Mexico, both as a localised crisis and as an indication of gender violence the world over.

A network of conversations has developed between the participants in 400 Women, between the artists, curators, supporters and their friends and families. The murders of women in Ciudad Juárez are not easy to comprehend; to do so requires creating a mental picture of a killing, getting to the bottom of particular motives for extreme brutality. Young or old, established or emerging, male or female, the aim has been for the artists involved to identify with ‘their’ woman. They have absorbed the shocking details of her story, considered the effect their portrait may have on her family, and exercised their capacity, in some small way, to do her justice. A profoundly sobering and humanising process, the portraits come together to form a wall of resistance. These women’s voices may be muted, but their faces induce a shared sense grief, and act as a reminder of the urgent need for justice.

400women.tumblr.com

2010-08-23T15:09:00.003+01:00

Pink crosses for the women of Ciudad Juárez

400 Women
12-30 November 2010

Shoreditch Town Hall Basement, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT

Private View: 11 November

An exhibition of new work by 200 artists including Tracey Emin, Maggi Hambling, Swoon and Humphrey Ocean, responding to the widespread murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

This ambitious project was conceived by artist Tamsyn Challenger in response to the brutal murder and rape of more than 400 women over a decade in the US border town of Ciudad Juárez and the region of Chihuahua in Mexico. 200 artists have each painted one of the murdered women, confronting us with and safeguarding in our memory the dead and disappeared. The exhibition is curated by Ellen Mara De Wachter, a curator and writer based in London.

Challenger says:

“This project began in 2005 when I was commissioned to make a feature for BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour. I travelled to Mexico and met with some of the families and was struck by their need to hand me postcards that had been generated as another aid to finding their loved ones. These images were black, white and pink and poorly produced but they started the concept in my mind and on the long flight home I had a half formed idea for what has become the project 400 Women. The concept relies heavily on a large-scale collaboration and, for me, each participating artist represents one of the murdered women, in some way invoking her, so that she can challenge humanity. Each image produced will stand as a statement against gender violence.”

Explanations for the murders, which continue to this day, range from serial killers to organ fielding, the use of women as prizes for drug cartels and domestic violence. Most sinister of all is the possibility of so-called sexual violence tourism. The continued disappearance of women in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America evidences a culture’s disregard for the rights of women. Despite media coverage of the issue, the murder of 186 Women in 2009 and the disappearance of many more attest to the fact that little is changing. The killers continue to enjoy impunity in the region, which has had a knock-on effect throughout the country and the region. Amnesty International has reported that in Guatemala more than 2,200 women have been murdered since 2001.The Mexican authorities have seriously mishandled each investigation into these murders and in August 2006 the Mexican federal government dropped its investigations into the murders, concluding that no federal laws had been violated.

The majority of the murdered women were extremely poor. Challenger has obtained over 100 images through Amnesty International's Mexican team, the group Nuestra Hijas de regreso a casa, and the Casa Amiga Rape Crisis centre in Ciudad Juárez. For some women no image is extant. In these cases, the artist involved will use the woman’s name as they wish within the piece.

Notes:

· Each image will be on a uniformly sized canvas of 14” by 10” (portrait) echoing the “retablo” (which means ‘behind the altar’), the iconic imagery of the Catholic Church that remains such a strong force and power in Mexico.

· Challenger’s 2006 Woman’s Hour feature on the killings can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/03/2006_26_fri.shtml

· Information about the project’s development and images of works as they are painted can be previewed at http://400women.tumblr.com/

· Tamsyn Challenger trained at Winchester School of Art and KIAD. Her work has been exhibited in the Truman Brewery and Candid Arts in London. She has worked as a collaborative artist with the Magdalena Festival in Barcelona and with Triangle theatre. Tamsyn's first solo show 'The Tamsynettes' was at Transition Gallery in Bethnal Green in March 2010. She has also produced documentary work for the BBC, 'My Male Muse' receiving Radio 4's 'Pick of the Year' accolade.

· Ellen Mara De Wachter is a curator and writer based in London. Her main occupation is as the exhibitions curator at Zabludowicz Collection in Camden, where she has worked with artists on major commissions and exhibitions for the Zabludowicz Collection’s space at 176 Prince of Wales Road, including Matt Stokes, Graham Hudson, Mark Titchner and Toby Ziegler.

· Lise Bjorne Linnert is a multimedia artist based in Norway. Desconocida Unknown Ukjent uses embroidery to highlight the struggle to address the abuse, trafficking and murder of women. The project was initiated in 2006 in response to the situation in Ciudad Juárez and consists of workshops during which participants embroider the names of the murdered young women onto labels. So far over 2,200 people have participated in the project, embroidering more than 4,000 nametags. The project was awarded the Luleaa Summer Biennial Award in 2007.

· Shoreditch Town Hall Basement is a unique venue in the heart of artistic Shoreditch. Built in 1866 and now run by the Shoreditch Trust, the building has been used for exhibitions of work by internationally renowned artists and community projects alike. www.shoreditchtownhall.org.uk

For further information email 400women@googlemail.com

Confirmed artists:

Alastair Adams

Susan Aldworth

Carolina Ambida

Wendy Anderson

Jane Archer

Miranda Argyle

Bridgette Ashton

Joseph Avery

Dan Baldwin

Craig Barber

Mike Bartlett

Clare Barton-Harvey

John Beard

Rosemary Beaton

Julie Bennett

Paul Birdsall

Jason Bowyer

Lesley Burr

Ruth Calland

Ilinca Cantacuzino

Phil Cath

Rachel Cattle

Brian Catling

Gordon Cheung

Coral Churchill

Tom Coates

Emma Coleman

Tintin Cooper

Simon Davis

John Devane

Nelly Dimitranova

Alejandro Domingo

Annabel Dover

Sarah Doyle

Louise Durose

Joel Ely

Tracey Emin

Andrew Festing

Maryam Foroozanfor

Paul Fryer

Sue Golden

Oona Grimes

Gabor Gyory

Hazel Hammond

Maggi Hambling

Marcelle Hansellaar

Gwen Hardie

Alison Harper

Vicky Hawkins

Afsoon Hayley

Nadia Hebson

Wim Heldens

Rachel Howard

Georgina Hunt

Mary Jackson

Andrew James

Shani Rhys James

Jasper Joffe

Sanam Khatibi

Brendan Kelly

Anita Klein

Tanya Kohn

Shema Ladva

Elspeth Lamb

Sonia Lawson RA

Debbie Lee

Sadie Lee

Tom Levy

Laurie Lipton

Cathy Lomax

Andrea Marshal

Kate Marshall

Luciana Meazza

Johanna Melvin

Hugh Mendes

Fiona Michie

Alex Michon

Stephanie Moran

Colette Moray De Morand

Nicola Morrison

Charlotte Mortensson

Nan Mulder

Harriet Murray

Nancy Nimoy

Humphrey Ocean RA

Kim O'Neil

Paul Ord

Kate Palmer

Ian Parker

Celia Paul

Lei Lei Qu

Leslie Reid

Sue Ryder

Fred Schley

Tommy Seaward

Elie Shamir

Ali Sharma

Tai Shan Schierenberg

Jonathan Smith

Philippa Stjernsward

Matthew Stradling

Jeff Stultiens

Benjamin Sullivan

David Sullivan

Suzan Swale

Swoon

Emma Talbot

Neil Taylor

Paul Tecklenberg

Katherine Tulloh

Gee Vaucher

Be Van Der Heide

Gini Wade

Catharyne Ward

Jonathan Waller

Toby Wiggins

Simon Whittle

Anthony Whishaw RA

Nicholas Charles Williams

Susan Wilson

Eric Wright

Joanna Yates

John Yeadon

Katia Yezli

Mexican Artists

(Assisting in Mexico:

Maru Vasquez)

Andres Basurto

Patricia Cajiga

Jose Cano

Olga Chorro

Dina Eugenia

Maria Teresa Gaos

Arturo Hinojos

Abraham Jimenez

Jose Luis cuevas

Juan Toledo

Maru Vasquez

Ana Zoebisch

Systematic

2010-07-05T17:17:00.010+01:00

Exhibitions are always more than the sum of their parts; they are systems that develop in time and space, influenced by a number of factors, including the juxtaposition of different forms, ideas and people in an exhibition space. They produce results that can’t be fully anticipated and aren’t entirely clear until the exhibition has run its course. In this sense, they are nonlinear systems, which are partly constituted by the interactions between their parts. A nonlinear approach to systems looks at the emergent properties ‘of the combination as a whole – which are more than the sum of its individual parts’.
The artists in Systematic deal with systems in nonlinear ways by incorporating organic, linguistic, pictorial, digital, cultural or bodily processes into their works with various results. In many cases, they reveal that consumption and production can become one and the same moment, that in looking at an artwork or an exhibition, we are contributing to its production, its meaning and completion, while it too acts on us. These artists also tend to turn the idiosyncrasies of a system into the material or motivation for artworks. They embrace and sometimes even intentionally provoke the quirks, errors and failures of systems and exploit them as creative content. This results in intriguing artworks, while simultaneously providing a much-needed critique of systems that otherwise risk becoming naturalised, with their positive and detrimental effects unconsciously assimilated into our daily lives.

Contemporary artists have repeatedly toyed with the modernist exhortation for form to follow function. Justin Beal addresses this notion with an artistic practice that playfully uses the entropic tendencies of nature to critique the civilising drive of utopian design. In his sculptures, organic matter collides with man-made building materials, such as plasterboard, glass and concrete, to question the validity of modernist principles and reveal the blind spots of utopian architecture and design. Beal’s fruit tables, all called Untitled (Orange table) (2007), are rudimentary constructions of drywall, glass and oranges, which inhabit the gallery in visual, spatial, olfactory and sonic ways. The fruit, which decays over the course of the exhibition, generates ecosystems involving bacteria, fungi and insects. In performing the full cycle of living, reproducing and dying, the sculptures introduce insecurity into an almost naturalised lexicon of modernist materials and practices. For Beal, they ‘illustrate the inevitable awkwardness of containing a human organism within a structure made of glass and steel and sheetrock’. By allowing natural systems to run their course within the highly civilised context of the art gallery, Beal also celebrates the unpredictability and undecidability that befall all works of art once they leave the artist’s hands. The sculptures stage a duel between form and function: they have legs and tops and look like tables, and they might be used, were it not for the unstable surface caused by the rotting fruit. In so fooling us, they challenge the ethical codes of systems developed to the end of function alone. As the oranges rot and collapse, the glass tabletops eventually teeter at improbable angles, introducing chaos, humour and slapstick into the earnest domain of modernist practice. By fudging the distinction between furniture and sculpture, Beal creates objects that ‘float somewhere between use-value and art-value’. Neither wholly art, nor entirely without use, they confound expectations and operate a dynamic movement of to-and-fro between these two systems.

Life and death cycles are a recurring concern in Damien Hirst’s work. From an oversized ashtray filled with detritus collected at the Groucho Club in the 1990s – the metaphoric ‘corpses’ of the party – to his seminal work A Thousand Years (1990), in which a decaying cow’s head is the breeding ground for a colony of flies later zapped by an Insect-O-Cutor, Hirst’s work has repeatedly staged the production of life and encapsulated the moment of death. Internal Affairs is a series of vitrine sculptures created in the early 1990s, which seem destined to accommodate the human form. The vitrines contain the paraphernalia of workplace, hospital or laboratory, and are just the right size to accommodate Hirst’s body, making them sculptural self-portraits fraught with anxiety. With their heavy metal edges, these works resemble the triptychs by Francis Bacon, one of Hirst’s artistic idols. The glass structures also resemble cases from a museum of natural history, though their contents suggest they are intended for a living person, again highlighting the proximity of life and death.

Glass had perhaps its most famous – and infamous – outing in contemporary art with Marcel Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), or Large Glass (1915–23). The work has been the subject of a proliferation of hermeneutic literature that began before the work was even finished. It has been seen as a manifestation of Duchamp’s ‘passionate and bitter, and ultimately checkmated, love-hate relationship with art and with the people around him’. One psychoanalyst went even further, maintaining that the work was a symptom of the artist’s schizophrenic tendency to ‘act as though there were a pane of glass between [him] and others’. According to Duchamp’s biographer, the artist concurred with this criticism, claiming that ‘he had passed entirely through the Large Glass, behind which he had then spent a good part of his life, “entirely ignorant of the gravity of my condition.” In any event, the line of filiation that can be traced from Hirst’s vitrines back to the Large Glass makes particular sense in relation to Sometimes I Avoid People (1991), a work whose misanthropic title matches its potential for physical seclusion. The work consists of a pair of Hirst’s signature vitrines, which contain smaller cases built to the specifications of Hirst’s own body, with holes cut for his head, arms and legs, along with basic medical equipment required for breathing and excretion. On the wall beside the vitrines is a set of eight canisters containing the gases required for human survival. The work is a survival space, an escape microcosm in which a body’s basic systemic needs are seen to. It is a wry comment on the controlling tendencies of society; in a misanthropic and clinical way, it acknowledges the connection between the basic human desire for solitude and the precariousness of bodily systems.

Cory Arcangel’s work uses contemporary digital technology and impishly subverts it to realise its latent potential. To make the video Apple GarageBand Auto-tune Demonstration (2007), Arcangel passed a video sequence of Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner through an off-the-shelf computer program designed to correct the pitch of music. Pitch correction is partly to blame for the barrage of identikit pop tunes filling the airwaves, and as such it’s a tool whose usefulness is highly contentious. By applying this supposedly ‘optimising’ process to a performance already lauded for its excellence, Arcangel infects the contemporary logic of ‘perfection’ and uses the tool against itself to demonstrate its absurdly reductive reasoning. And indeed, the resulting tune is drab in comparison to Hendrix’s original.

Apple GarageBand Auto-tune Demonstration links the processes of consumption and production to create an aesthetic out of the workings of a particular system, in this case a computer program. Through a dual process of consumption and production ‘the aesthetic produced by those things becomes my work, which is basically exploiting the way the whole art system works’. For better and worse, this kind of exploitation is inherent in the system of the art world, in which stasis can lead to players becoming cogs in a machine. Such a system seems to naturally submit to an ethic of creation through an ongoing process of mutation and survival of the fittest. In relation to our use of digital and online systems, Arcangel sees that ‘production itself has become consumption’ or, to put it another way, using applications such as Twitter (or Facebook, or webmail systems) constitutes an act of production both online and in the ‘real’ world. Even supposedly passive Internet habits create browsing histories and cartographies of participation, and such micro-systems are intricately bound up with global macro systems.

The Palaeolithic paintings in the Lascaux cave in the southwest of France have beguiled generations of people since they were rediscovered in 1940 by a group of teenagers looking for their lost dog. In 1983, the French government opened a full-scale replica of the original caves, which had been closed for preservation. Lascaux II was no less fascinating for being a simulacrum, and it captured the exceptional grace, sensitivity and profound mystery of the originals. In relation to Seth Price’s use of images of the paintings, Jan Avgikos has written that Lascaux is ‘a site that resists interpretation,’ subject to ‘a radical incompleteness.’ The same can be said of the Internet, a system that generates untold amounts of data, and resolutely eludes our firm grasp, yet which powerfully influences our lives. In a Duchampian gesture of selection, Price collects much of the visual material he uses in his works from the Internet. By later posting these works and texts on his website and re-using them to make other works, he participates in an ongoing circulation of images and ideas. This kind of creation is also a way to produce subjectivity, a two-way mode of production that has primeval roots and resembles the ways in which prehistoric man, ‘manipulating matter, figured out how to adapt it to whatever end he assigned to it. But this operation changed not only the stone, which was given the desired form by the splinters he chipped from it, but man himself changed. It is obviously work that made of him a human being, the reasonable animal we are.’

The allure of systems – the fluidity and apparent magic of their processes – can often be attributed to their impenetrability. We may think we know how a system works, but a quick exercise in deconstructing it will reveal a wealth of unimagined and complex connections between its parts. There is often a wide gap between our superficial understanding of a system and its actual mechanisms, and this distance provokes curiosity and awe. Cave paintings, as a system of signs we can’t fully work out, are situated in the remote past, whereas the solar system stretches out into the far reaches of space.

The cosmos is a baffling reality that is perhaps more easily accessed by flights of fancy than those of a spacecraft. Occasionally, as in Katie Paterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007), poetry and technology are reconciled. Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) radio-communications technology allows people on Earth to make radio transmissions to the Moon, from where they are bounced back to Earth, weakened by losses to the shadows and craters of the Moon’s surface. Paterson chose Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, a romantic and wistful composition from 1801, as the cultural artefact to be translated from musical notation into Morse code and beamed to the Moon. The returning code went through a crucial stage of interpretation and was re-translated into notes to form a workable score. In one particular installation of the work, the data was used to make a perforated score, which was fed through a self-playing piano to produce what Paterson has called a ‘strange and ghostly effect’. The work is constituted by the limitations of and interstices between the systems it uses, the losses and slippages of meaning incurred in translations between the languages of musical notation, Morse code and radio waves.

Charles Sandison also works with technological systems, to explore the movement and flow of life, language and images. Working with light – and more importantly, with darkness – Sandison sets up complex moving projections of signs and symbols to create immersive environments. In Reading Glass (2005), points of light emerge from various architectural features in the gallery and rove the space, seeking partners with which to form recognisable signs. The points of light represent the full stops from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). They coalesce to form the words of the text in a hand-written script based on that of Sandison’s daughter from the time when she learned to write. The lights move according to a genetic algorithm that mimics the behaviour of bacteria; they consume and produce the text through processes of feeding, reproduction and decay, with lights brightening and fading, to eventually run through Darwin’s entire treatise.

Many of Sandison’s works, including Reading Glass, are influenced by a combination of control and chance. The binary code that regulates the movement of the lights seems decisive – it’s either ‘on’ or ‘off’ – but mistakes in that code play an important part for Sandison: ‘My work has grown up around them; they are like genetic mutations, they allow the work to develop in ways I can’t necessarily predict but can later comprehend’, by correcting them. Because it is based on computer code that evolves and develops over time, rather than on the looping techniques of video-based art, Reading Glass takes an indefinite amount of time – around 25 years – to run through Darwin’s text, reminding us of the slow and ongoing processes of evolution.

A willingness to embrace the errors and shortcomings of a system and turn them into art runs through several of the works in Systematic, from a pursuit of the inherent incompleteness of EME transmissions to an interest in evolving and regressing computer programs. Error is also the raison d’être of a group of unique photographic prints by Sean Dack. This Glitch series comprises kaleidoscopically distorted pictures that have a familiar, spectral quality, with an original source image appearing as a background murmur overlaid with striations and geometric patterns. These works feature the disruptions that occur in digital imaging systems, and in the conversion of images from digital to analogue formats. Dack’s source images range from portraits and landscapes to pictures of contemporary architecture; they are recognisable tropes of the visual arts. Through a variety of controlled and aleatory processes, the artist interferes with the transmission of data packets, the bundles of information that constitute digital versions of images. This interference happens during the download process, when bits of data are deliberately lost or displaced and rearranged, or is provoked by repeatedly scanning and printing the images. Scanning transfers an analogue image – a physical print of a photograph – to a digital file, whereas printing does the opposite, producing a print from a series of data packets held on a computer. These processes highlight the impossibility in analogue to digital transfers of exact translation, a problem that dogs all languages, and an existential issue that we ignore at our peril. There is also an element of chance in the visual form of these transmission and translation errors: it’s impossible to predict precisely which bits of information will be lost. However they emerge, Dack treats these glitches as his raw material, working and reworking them into the final image.

By using images to highlight a specific problem in the relationship between digital and analogue systems, Dack unsettles a core part of our everyday communications: the digital and visual mass media cultures we rely on daily to access the ‘truth’ of the world, and within which we are ourselves deeply embedded. For Dack, working with images in this way ‘is a way of being in the system while turning it on its side, remixing the code by which we understand and read an image and therefore, the world.’ And he does so in a resolutely aesthetic way, sensitive to the beauty that can be achieved by harnessing the incidental, and operating with a self-avowed ‘painterly and deliberate attitude’. He questions the imperatives of image-making by creating beautiful images through a combination of mischief, chance and a highly refined visual sense.

Each artist turns the impetus to work with the products of contemporary cultural systems into highly individualistic techniques. Haroon Mirza draws on eclectic sources such as contemporary music, religious practices and the history of art, subtly modifying and combining his materials to create heterogeneous but ultimately harmonious assemblages. Paradise Loft (2009) is a multimedia installation in which sound, light, moving image and sculpture come together in an immersive environment inspired by the cultural history of dance clubs. On one level, the work pays homage to two seminal New York nightclubs, and specific producers and DJs associated with the 1970s dance scene. Its title is a portmanteau of The Loft and Paradise Garage, cornerstones of the scene and testbeds for musical innovation. The work features video footage of two key players of the time: record producer Arthur Russell and Francis Grasso, the inventor of beatmixing, the definitive technique used by contemporary DJs. Beatmixing involves matching the tempo of a cued record with the record being played out to create a seamless transition from one track to another. Mirza uses this technique on a video of Grasso, editing it into rhythmic sound bites so that the footage shudders in tempo with the other sounds coming from the work.

Paradise Loft also includes a salvaged air-conditioning vent from the Gatecrasher club in Sheffield, which was destroyed by fire in 2007, and a work of art by Giles Round, a sculpture made from electrical flex strung between the floor and ceiling of the gallery to spell MW, which is the frequency-range setting of a radio also used in the sculpture. These elements add to the fertile mix of references and sources that animate the work. By bringing together such a wide variety of cultural artefacts, Mirza performs a figurative beatmixing, which produces unexpected and rewarding sensory and conceptual frictions.

The idea of nonlinearity is useful for thinking about the different ways in which artists use and create systems. The most exciting aspect of this kind of approach is the wide range of unexpected occurrences, tendencies and outcomes that emerge over time, and that constitute the actual ‘art’ of the work. By surrendering a certain amount of control to the systems, these artists admit that the artworks they produce have a life of their own, and a life beyond the studio in which they were made. Incorporated into a collection of contemporary art, placed in relation to works by other artists, laid open to analysis by interested spectators, these works never stop growing or producing new meanings. As part of an exhibition, they become subsumed under a new banner, playing a role in a systemic composition that is influenced by the building in which it’s installed, the various publics that come to visit, and a wide network of art world and media relationships. The hope is that the encounters people have with these works will transcend their immediate space and time and continue to produce new ideas, emotions and relationships.

Systematic runs at Zabludowicz Collection until 15 August
www.projectspace176.com
[Photos: Stephen White]

The Only Way Is Up

2010-06-28T21:21:00.010+01:00

The mood is strong in We Are the Above, a video parable that addresses our relationships with online life and the very real threats of natural and man-made disasters. The work has a spectral quality that taps into our underlying anxieties and fears. Its content is culled from the Internet and our collective unconscious; its form suggests the confusion of an addled but resolute mind, imagining and imaging a future too fractional to believe in, but which nonetheless seems inevitable.

Water courses through the video’s narrative, a fluid menace that ‘will prevail us’. A series of predictions and practical recommendations come together in what feels like a handbook for constructing a modern-day Ark. Issues of global warming and overpopulation are dealt with obliquely, through statements in a future-speak subject to a new grammar and syntax, to the brutally truncated semantics of the post-digitised world. Incongruous nuances float along in an undialected, unaccented digitized voice. She’s female, or so it would seem, and ‘she’ is adept at conveying her message.

Like the best science fiction, We Are the Above somehow seems more real than reality. Tweed captured these clips by trawling the Internet. They are the readymades of travelogues, sports videos and amateur documentaries. After reaping the products of the online world, Tweed uses them to construct a critique of our schizoid relationship with our own online alter egos. The Internet is a tool with which we hone our fixation with omniscience, precognition and planning. Here, it seems impotent in the face of the man-made environmental disasters that dominate the daily news.

Uncertainty and dread permeate We Are the Above. They grip the viewer with a pulsating sequence of seemingly innocuous words and familiar images. The stark contrast between and utterly pragmatic narrative and a maudlin score infuses the work with a powerful subliminal anxiety.

The narrator seems to repeat herself, but her repetitions contains minor variations that bring to mind Beckettian repetition ad absurdum and anxious high modernists word games. Her phrases plod on, apparently meaningful but ultimately vacuous: ‘The time has come to immerge. The time has come to submerge. The time has come to bring things to a state of eventuality and utmost probability.’

Tweed uses a wealth of data, but resists the impulse to overlay it with a definitive interpretation. The script is structured like a modern manifesto – a call to arms – but it is also redolent of ancient mythology. Preparing for an uncertain future is not a new impulse; it’s as old as mankind and as wide as the world. We Are the Above ends with the thrice-spoken exhortation: ‘The only way is up.’ It’s an ambiguous proclamation, a quotation perhaps, whose tone and intention remain unclear: is it a light-hearted quotation from a 1980s pop song, or a cautionary biblical reference to betrayal and the ill-fated tower of Babel?

Watch We Are the Above here: http://art-exhibitions.gold.ac.uk/mfa2008/pages/ct/01.html

This text was originally published to coincide with the screening program Who Wants to Act Now, or Even See Acting at Depo, Istanbul. Curated by Nazli Gurlek
http://www.depoistanbul.net/en/activites_detail.asp?ac=33

Systematic, 1 July - 15 August

2010-06-06T22:27:00.001+01:00

A text for Anna Barham's show at International Project Space

2010-02-15T21:14:00.005Z

Let’s infantilise our Forms. Let’s get to the bottom of immaturity.
How many kinds of immaturity can you think of?

Allow me to set up a distinction, in an attempt to avoid misunderstandings. I owe it to the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, and any objections should be raised directly with him. Simply put, it’s a distinction between Form with a capital F, also known as Style or the ‘ought’ given by culture, and form with a lower case f, or the spontaneous shape of things, which we constantly and instinctively produce like bees secrete their honey.

Although it is an opposition of sorts, the relationship between these two is not really a Manichean one; nor is what sets them apart a question of values. This odd duo often occupy successive stages in a thing’s development, either as a result of some gleeful violence wrought by one on the other, or of a kind of willing submission. form loves ruining Form’s righteous showpieces into bite-sized chunks, leaving us to delight at the ensuing disarray and imagine new filler for the gaping holes left behind. And, as with most things, one man’s F is often another man’s f. On the whole, though, they’re locked in a tangled shuffle: once in a while form’s left foot finds just the spot vacated by Form’s right, but more often it stamps down on the foot itself. Well-known for its immature and anarchic spirit, form revels in its shapeshifting play. Tyrannical Form could never take such a liberty.

Should we then denounce Form, handed down to us by the powers that know best? Perhaps, in the view of W.G. Especially when Form makes us feel stupid and inadequate, which it tends to do with great Formal flourishes. If the structures of culture infantilise us while claiming to enlighten us, pulling the wool over our eyes and leaving us to crash into the next available hard surface, then what? We take matters into our own hands, and infantilise those infantilising structures right back. As a start, we melt down Form and Style, those iron garters of culture, into a monument to the knackered elastic of form.

It’s time to introduce some new characters: the Older and the Younger, types featured in W.G.’s Pornografia. These alter egos of Form and form can’t help themselves. They both scamper lustfully after immaturity, albeit with different cravings. Where form merrily demolishes the order carefully established by Form, the Younger forgets its manners and nudges the Older along a warped path to salvation, with spectacular results. “When the Older creates the Younger, everything works well from a social and cultural point of view. But if the Older is submitted to the Younger–what darkness! What perversity and shame!” What glee, Mr W.G.!

But I’m already ahead of myself, and should concede that W.G. was admirably lucid when penning his thoughts about immaturity. It is a subject on which he was torn, but which proved important to his art. W.G. crafted an elegant treatise on the subject through prefaces to his own writing, in which he played out his ideas. So what did he have to say? There are three kinds of immaturity, each with its own relationship to the great Form/form divide:

1. There’s the innate immaturity that results, quite simply, from finding ourselves at odds with the forms we constantly exude. Gangly adolescence; the body or soul’s autonomy in the face of the mind’s demands; carnal disobedience.

2. Then there is the immaturity generated from the outside, caused by other who impose ways of being that are at odds with our nature. The pupil’s immaturity in the face of the teacher’s edicts; appalling behaviour resulting from the friction between parent and child; petty but wholesome misdemeanours in the face of our peers.

3. Finally, there’s the immaturity imposed on us by culture through its “higher forms”, which we are destined never to attain. The private paralysis of readers in the face of “great” novels; the passerby’s dismay at an impenetrable work of “genius”; inner regression motivated by encounters with alienating artefacts.

Late in life, W.G. admitted that his hitherto equivocal feelings towards immaturity had blossomed and that he was “mortally in love with immaturity”. W.G. centres most of his writing on this secret attraction to immaturity, the need for the imperfect, the ruined and the unfinished, which is often played out as a tendency to return to a state of ‘work-in-progress’. The idea of the draft, the sketch and the scrappy game – rather than the sophistication and polish of high culture – end up most closely exciting our desires. It may well be that “undervalue, insufficiency, underdevelopment” are closer to man’s aspirations than any kind of value per se.

And it is true that only the incomplete allows us a say. Only gaps can be filled. Only omissions summon the imagination. The clumsy earthworm fills the page with erratic tracks, which could never match the great landscapes they conjure up in the imagination. The gaps they open up invite an entirely different kind of picturing. There’s a quarrel in the realm of figuration, with figurative language aiming at more than the thing intended, and figurative painting attempting to tell it exactly as it sees it. The written word is always incomplete, pre-ruined somehow. It’s a fate that images resist, more or less successfully.

In the early 1800s, columns, capitals and slabs of decorative entablature were brought to England from the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna in Libya. The stones were a gift from the Bashaw of Tripoli to George IV. After a brief sojourn at the British Museum, they were taken to the shore of Virginia Water Lake in Surrey and assembled into the ersatz ruins of a Roman temple. They weren’t even held together with real masonry, the architect preferring to use thin facing stones filled in with sand and rubble. In any case, by taking these elements of Leptis Magna down a notch or two, from the architectural sublime of imperial Rome to the quaintness of 19th century English garden follies, protean form once again had its wicked way with Form. And people delighted in the contrived prettiness of a good ruin. So exotic, so fashionable! Or was it, too, that Form had its way with form, editing the unashamed decay of an organic ruin into petite and picturesque Romantic “ruins”? Further twists and turns in the tail of these curious symbiotic beasts…

For W.G., the wreckage brought on by an infantilising excess of culture produces a “domain of trash”, a “subculture”. This is a place where – as in Virginia Water – the forlorn stones of a fallen empire are crudely assembled, “where a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty…”

W.G. found this idea of wreckage so compelling that he molded his protagonists into versions of the same ruined archetype, who goes around committing perverse and immoral acts or entering into ever more regressive and compromising situations. W.G.’s infatuation with the shambolic nature of things and people is linked to another distinction: that between preparation and completion. The trope that embodies this ubiquitous ambiguity between processes and products is the draft: a preliminary version that can also be a finished work.

Life is a series of drafts. It’s an ongoing game of sketching out and tearing up what we hold dear only for so long as it resonates. This drafting perpetually produces ruins: relationships, bodies, emotions, expressions. It is a game, and we look for the rule, the straight stick essential to amusement and oppression alike. Two apparently contradictory uses lurk within that one tool, which simultaneously authorises and forbids. The rules we choose are productive generative constraints for our drafting.

Drafts, outlines, sketches are useful popular devices. They are also signifiers of personal and formal immaturity, moments of insufficiency and incompletion. They are evidence of doubts that goad us towards more refined Forms, which, for better or worse, trigger another round in the Form/form tussle, inciting further immaturity, anarchy and amusement. W.G. fantasised a global and malign case of doubt. In the wake of such a crisis, we would build A Universal Retreat, a refuge in which people would recognise the forms they uttered and realise how dissonant they were with their true selves. W.G. yearned for doubt to creep in, for a more tentative species to develop, one that would deflate the pompous utterances and meaningless proclamations of Form. In this retreat, “The bard will scorn his own song. The leader will shudder at his own command. The high priest will stand in terror of the altar, and the mother will instil in her son not only principles but also ways of escaping them so that they do not smother him.”

Our ruins owe much to the act of looking. From a common fascination for wrecked buildings to great literary cosmologies of devastation, ruins are ubiquitous to the eye, the mind’s eye and the third eye. For architectural theorist Robert Harbison, “ruins are ideal: and the perceiver’s attitudes count so heavily that one is tempted to say ruins are a way of seeing.” If we direct this ruinate look at language, we notice words, sentences, and texts as ruins waiting to happen. Depending on our attitude, these ruins can be productive and reveal unanticipated truths. An ordered string of letters conceals an abundance of other meaningful shapes; shadows that are finally made flesh by a prophetic game of shifting letters. Played according to a particular set rules, this game involves pouncing on words during their noontime nap and exhorting from them a revelation of the past or future. And because words have an infinitely protean character, the game is never over. This sequence of wreck and revelation uncovers the paradox of ruins as a guiding principle for progress.

The seduction of the ruin means that wrecks everywhere lure us into completing them through imaginary drafting games. In the unremarkable area of Passaic in New Jersey, Robert Smithson, who always looked at the world through entropic lenses and who had an unshakable fascination for ruins, saw a “zero panorama [that] seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is - all the new constructions that would eventually be built…[that] rise into ruin before they are built.” The flawed charisma of the ruin embodies the conundrum that in language, literature, art and life, pleasure and success are produced by a combination of skill and incompetence. Squalor inhabits elegance; immaturity loves Style, form can’t do without Form. These double acts will never change. In the meantime, let’s denounce their sick smooching and build ramshackle temples to their brawls!

APPENDIX A

A draft history of the House of Esox
Don’t talk to me about art; talk to me about pike.

Setting: The Royal Landscape. Land and water over 1,000 acres in the southeastern corner of Windsor Great Park. The lake of Virginia Waters: a gigantic ‘W’ sprawling lazily across a map. A pretty spot, surrounded by mature oaks and home to gaggles of lopsided birds and clans of pucker-faced fish with rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Esox the pike is the only survivor of the ruined family of the Esocidae, who ruled the fresh waters of the northern hemisphere for 65 million years. It’s a little-known fact that in heraldry, the figure of a pike is known as a ‘lucy’. What intrigue must be embroidered into the history of this clan! These days, it has a rather low profile; a diluted bloodline and inherited quirks mean that it’s the dimmer sort of Esocidae that mopes around the vast aqueous palace of these royal waters.

In the mid 1700s, a small stream named for the Virgin Queen had been dammed and flooded into what was then the largest man-made body of water in the British Isles. The royal playground of Virginia Water became a site for spectacular displays of pageantry and architectural flourishes. The perimeter of the lake was dotted with exotic Roman ruins and fishing temples, while the water itself played host to a procession of Chinese junks or was groomed into ornamental cascades.

The lake is also the site of the British record pike capture of 58lb 5oz.

Investigative phone calls reveal that, annual staff absenteeism notwithstanding, this claim cannot be certified by The Crown Estate.

And, in his TOP 50 pike BRITISH ISLES INC IRELAND, a list that betrays a noticeable absence of anything weighing 58lb 5oz, Neville Fickling notes:

No record is kept of pike caught by means other than rod and line.

This is a wreck of an investigation. The history of the House of Esox can’t be pieced together from shards of non-fact. It’s unstructured, shambolic, anaemic, haemophilic. One scratch from a spiky tooth and it bleeds to death. The best that can be hoped for is some ramshackle ichthyology.

The chief, basic torment, as I see it, is simply the torment of bad form, of bad exterieur.

But was it really a four-stone member of the House of Esox they pulled out of the lake in that record-breaking catch? Or was it Proteus, the old man of the sea (here in sweeter surrounding), the all-knowing formless form and reluctant prophet of Pharos, who, anticipating the torment of an unbefitting form, slipped back into the water as a tadpole? The historical title vanishes and the reference yields naught. We can but imagine the glorious disclosures had the angler – like Menelaus – held tight to Proteus and forced a revelation of the lust, murder and sin at the heart of the introverted House of Esox.

APPENDIX B

Let’s move this thing forward a little…let’s make a rule for our domain of trash and how we use it.

We will build up using only elements of that which we knocked down. We’ll work with what is given, and ask no more. It won’t do to go grabbing left, right and centre for new elements, shiny bits from other cracked-up cultures. But we’ll parade our asinine complicity with a gap-toothed smile! We’ll flaunt the touching twinkle of our gross immaturity. We’ll make our anarchy constructive.

Let’s do it.

Yes, let’s do it!

Now?

---

Anna Barham's solo show at International Project Space runs from 13 February - 14 March 2010

http://www.internationalprojectspace.org/current.html

Three circles at Tate Modern

2009-12-23T16:25:00.019Z

I had avoided asking friends about the big container in the Turbine Hall. I had missed the opening in October, otherwise engaged with the Friezing-frenzy, and hadn’t wanted to spoil the effect of discovering it for myself. I’d heard of a dark and forbidding work, but knew very little else. So, when I climbed the steep rubberised ramp yesterday, to be swallowed up by the void, I was excited about the paradox of encountering the nothingness inside. The crowd was sparse, festive mobs having been lured to gaudier places. I ignored the wall text offering explanations and even though I picked up a leaflet, I knew that I wouldn't read it until I came out of the big black box.

At the top of the ramp I eased into the dark, pupils dilating. My eyes hooked on a yellow shape, a staged figure glowing in the distance. It was some time before I could make out the kind of garish cone usually relegated to damp and bleachy floors or cramped station toilets. An indistinct pool of light shone on the cone, drawing visitors in.

As the blackness squeezed my peripheral vision, and my confidence in official Tate prudence dispelled any fears of falling into dark holes, my curiosity drew me to the sight. The light shifted lazily from the cone to the floor and back again. I pushed further into the container, with the dim Turbine Hall at my back, and the scene was revealed. As my eyes gradually resolved shapes and textures, my nose was tickled by a scent tinged with unease. It was an insolent smell, whose recognition provoked immediate revulsion. What I saw confirmed the worst my nose had feared. Three circles lay on the floor. Raking light picked out each glossy centre and chunky circumference in ochre hues.

My questions were met by an attendant’s bored and obliging explanation. Something about a little boy, out of order lifts and cleaners on call.

It hadn’t been the profound experience promised by the sculpture’s forbidding grandeur. With their pathetic humanity, those three pools of vomit were an appallingly comic foil to any effect the artist could have intended.

Miroslaw Balka, How It Is (2009) [Photo (c) Tate Photography]

Norovirus

Inspired or mercenary? Pop Life at Tate Modern

2009-11-02T12:45:00.004Z

With his September 2008 auction at Sotheby’s, Damien Hirst cut out dealers and other art world middlemen, and went straight for his collectors’ cash. The auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, achieved record-breaking sales and arguably constituted an artwork in its own right. Twenty-five years earlier, Andy Warhol had hawked TDK videocassettes on Japanese TV, illustrating his gnomic pronouncement that “making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art”, while today, Tokyo schoolchildren can purchase miniature works by Takashi Murakami with their bubblegum. Pop Life: Art in a Material World brings together works like these to show that selling is an artistic medium in its own right, with a history and actuality that resound across the globalised world. Originally titled Sold Out, the show was renamed after one artist complained. Yet the question remains: are Warhol’s art and legacy cynical and corrupt or pragmatic and empowering?

Pop Life persistently tests our coolness quotient: from our brand-recognition capacities, to our nonchalance at pornography in public spaces. While some displays perform trade in a straightforward way – a facsimile of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop is fully rigged for sales – others more obliquely address the apparatus of the art market and its standard devices. For example, a restaging of Candidature à une Rétrospective (Candidacy for a Retrospective), Martin Kippenberger’s tongue-in-cheek 1993 installation, satirises the valorising role of landmark exhibitions.

Sex is another expression of the desire that drives commerce, one that in 1957 was claimed by Richard Hamilton as an essential component of pop art. Sex looms large over Pop Life, from Koons’ graphic 1991 Made in Heaven series, which depicts him in having intercourse with his ex-wife, the porn star and politician La Cicciolina, to elements from the 1976 Prostitution exhibition at London’s ICA, which included Cosey Fanni Tutti’s porn and evidence of the media’s outcry at its public display. The work that most overtly foregrounds the kinship between selling, selling out and pornography is Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), for which she arranged to have sex with an art collector for $20,000 on the condition that the event be filmed and turned into an artwork for public display. The film makes for uncomfortable viewing, not because of the sex, but because of its revealing performances of foreplay and flirtation, which remind us of so much sycophancy in the art world.

In Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled (2009) a dead horse lies on the floor, speared with a placard inscribed with ‘INRI’. Cattelan’s relationship with the market is unusual: his work sells for impressive sums at auctions, though he has not had a show in a commercial gallery since 2002. Yet, this is not borne out by Untitled (2009). A display more relevant to Pop Life might have reunited the ten editions of Cattelan’s Mini-Me (1999), a diminutive sculptural self-portrait, designed to sit on a shelf in a collector’s home. Such a chorus of tiny Cattelans could have revealed something of the selling mechanisms surrounding the artist – one edition of Mini-Me fetched a record £493,000 at auction last June. It could also have asked whether the strategies employed by the work in Pop Life are inspired or simply mercenary – a question that ultimately defies Pop Life’s best attempts at answering it.

Pop Life: Art in a Material World
1 October 2009 - 17 January 2010
Tate Modern, London

This text was first published in the November-December 2009 issue of Flash Art International.

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled (2009)

Maurizio Cattelan, Mini Me (1999)

Luke Fowler

2009-10-12T14:37:00.018+01:00

“You asked me if the abstract was obfuscating reality and I said no because the abstract is as valid as the mundane” – and both are extremely valid in the filmic world of Luke Fowler. The quote comes from musician Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones, the central but consistently absent subject of Luke Fowler’s 2003 film The Way Out, made in collaboration with Kosten Koper. Fowler's statement says a lot about the form and content of much of Fowler’s work, which combines archival and new material in ways that are visually evocative of avant-garde, structuralist and art films, to convey something of the personal, creative and political dynamics of a range of countercultural figures and movements. The young Scottish artist, who won the inaugural Jarman award for artist-filmmakers in 2008, creates films about people who exist on the margins and whose exile may be self-imposed just as it may be the result of a rejection by society. While the backbone of the traditional feature film or documentary genres may be the story, the heart of Fowler’s films is constituted by something altogether more ungraspable and sublime and on which his storytelling is predicated: people themselves with all their inherent complexities and contradictions. Fowler explores lives and beliefs, avoiding any instrumental use of his subjects and without succumbing to the shortcomings of representation and without doing violence to his subject.

Citing radical and avant-garde filmmakers such as Lindsay Anderson and Hollis Frampton as key influences, Fowler’s films clearly communicate political and humanist messages through visuals that incorporate layered sequences, rich textures and unexpected rhythms. The Way Out recombines material from a variety of sources: new and found footage, including Jones’s own 8mm films, interviews and theatrical scenes scripted by Fowler. The resulting bricolage tells the story of one of the founding members of the band The Homosexuals and a prolific recording artist releasing up to two albums a week under different pseudonyms, Jones emerges as a maverick escapologist of the avant-garde music and culture industry. He is a slippery and antagonistic trickster who eludes any fixed identification or capture by a given system, and who also refused to take part in Fowler’s project. Colluding with its hero’s agenda through a wry deployment of emotion, humour and high camp, The Way Out is a faultlessly performative embodiment of its elusive protagonist. The film baffles with its multiplicity of viewpoints and contradictory histories, which range from spoof documentary-style interviews to angry diatribes and arty performances, to the extent that one American critic went so far as to question the very reality of its central figure.

Sound plays a crucial role in Fowler’s films, on the level of both content – Jones’s output in The Way out or Cornelius Cardew’s experimental Scratch Orchestra, which is the focus of Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006) – and form. A frequent collaborator with composers and sound artists, the artist incorporates field recordings in his work, unearths archival tapes to form a key component of his storytelling, and occasionally exploits the affect of sound to striking sensory ends. Bogman Palmjaguar (2007) is a poignant and persuasive film about the injustices of contemporary psychiatric practice, as well as being a portrait of the Flow Country, a remote area of rare blanket bog and wetland in northern Scotland. A trained conservationist whose writings about the natural habitats in the Flow Country possess a touching poetic beauty, Bogman Palmjaguar is also a certified paranoid schizophrenic. Palmjaguar is currently fighting a legal battle against this diagnosis, and the film features discussions between him and psychiatrist Leon Redler, a colleague of the late RD Laing, as well as an intriguing audiovisual portrait of the boglands.

The work’s soundtrack juxtaposes Palmjaguar’s strained diction with field recordings of the razor-sharp song of the birds he is fighting to preserve, made by sound artist Lee Patterson. Its disjointed narrative alternates Palmjaguar’s personal story of parental abuse and his fear of inherited mental illness with his scientific and emotive descriptions of the Flow Country. The film captivates through a sustained conjunction of opposites: the clarity of Palmjaguar’s arguments for the preservation of the Flow Country versus his misguided wish to overcome the medical establishment; his dreary home against open landscapes; the drone of processed sound alongside crystalline wildlife recordings. Formally, it jumps from a visual cacophony of superimposed images, entoptic signs and disorienting effects to serene depictions of the terrain. The recurrence of a heavy pulsating bass line provokes anxiety and dread, deepened by the apparent hopelessness of Palmjaguar’s situation, but redeemed by the hypnotic refrain listing the indigenous birds he loves: “golden plover, curlew, greenshank...” His candour, utopian vision and self-deprecation build Palmjaguar into a sympathetic and charming figure. On why he wears masks for the interview: “I’m trying to meet the increasing challenge of ugliness [that comes] with age”; on his self-imposed exile: “In a psychiatrically controlled civilisation, my way of life was not approved of.”

The intimate details of Palmjaguar’s life presented in the film are publicly available on his website, Wild Outlaws of Paradise, itself a poignant indictment of the mental health system and its inability to deal simultaneously with brilliance and illness. Nevertheless, questions about the possible instrumentalisation of a story like Palmjaguar’s nag at those sensitive to the dangers of exploitation that hover around documentary filmmaking. Fowler often includes his own voice and figure in his work, a subtle presence that might mitigate against possible accusations of abuse, if it is taken as evidence that the work results from a sustained relationship that stands to benefit both the protagonist and filmmaker.

Fowler has stressed the importance for him of the social aspect of filmmaking and the relationships that form as a result of collaboration. He is a dynamic force in alternative modes of cultural production, in particular through the activities of Shadazz, the independent record label he founded in 2000 and which he describes as simply “an outlet for people being creative in electronic music”. As producer for the label he seems committed to nurturing a community of artists and musician and to the circulation of film and music, something that stems from his understanding that the paucity of outlets and poor means of production have long threatened the existence of experimental filmmaking groups and cooperatives.

In both its visual style and approach to storytelling, Fowler’s work demonstrates a persistent drive against heavy-handed and systematic ordering and classifying. A firm adherent to American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s belief that arranging images into a narrative sequence is only one of many possible solutions, he has also asserted that he is attracted to features of “ungraspable complexity” conveyed by Frampton’s work. The act of grappling with the ineffable truths and irresolvable contradictions of human existence is central to Fowler’s first full-length film, What you See is Where You’re At (2001). The work looks at the five years of the Philadelphia Association at Kingsley Hall in Bow, east London. Set up in 1965 by pioneering psychiatrist RD Laing, the Philadelphia Association was an experiment intended to develop new methods for treating mental illness. Life at Kingsley Hall involved an unprecedented degree of autonomy for people with mental problems to accept or decline treatment. Psychoses were allowed to manifest themselves without the imposition of restraining or drug therapies. Fowler’s film borrows heavily from Peter Robinson’s 1972 documentary about the community at Kingsley Hall and combines it with new material to produce a portrait of a time and place whose daring and innovative approach is still pertinent today.

The representation of the self, authenticity and identity are fundamental issues in Fowler’s films. Because of their multi-layered look and content, they enable an ongoing process of discovery for the viewer and, presumably, for the artist. The experience of watching one of Fowler’s films is akin to the process getting to know someone, with all its attendant paradoxes, hiatuses and leaps of faith. In terms of technique, a work’s formal register might swing from the meditative to the ecstatic, with varying temporalities evoking a slow curious eye or a manic epiphany. For all their complexity, there remains a paradox of clarity in Fowler’s works: despite – or perhaps thanks to – the multiplicity of styles and rhythms and the diversity of material sources and points of view, they give off an impression of transparency that hints at the possibility of getting to the core of their subject.

Fowler is not overly concerned with the apparatus of art gallery installations for his films, and has stated that, if given the choice, he would rather show them in cinemas. A notable exception is the recent Composition for flutter screen (2008), the result of a collaboration with Japanese artist Toshiya Tsunoda. The installation marks a departure from Fowler’s previous practice by developing and expanding moving image into a complex sculptural installation. His most elusive work to date, it is composed of a 16mm film showing fixed shots that include a moth trapped in someone’s fingers and the meniscus on a glass of water. These are projected onto a handmade screen that is submitted to a series of ‘interventions’ including the amplified sound of a wire running across the screen, the movement of fans agitating it and the interference of lights cutting into the projections space, which together ask viewers to reconsider their cinematic experience. These intrusions lend the work an affecting physicality and like his films, hint at an autonomous presence or ghost inhabiting Fowler’s work.

First published in the October issue of Flash Art International

Luke Fowler (in collaboration with Kosten Koper), The Way Out (2003)

Luke Fowler, Bogman Palmjaguar (2007)

All too human

2009-09-29T10:14:00.007+01:00

Vito Drago’s disquietingly seductive art

For the past decade, Vito Drago has created work that engages with some of life’s fundamental questions. Using with a variety of media, but always with the same sensitivity to the precariousness of existence, his practice has tackled systems of expression, knowledge and control such as literature, cartography, medicine, zoology and religion. His materials have included old books and maps, genuine medical documents and, more abstractly, the raw data and information generated by particular disciplines. Meticulous research is crucial to Drago’s practice: not content with simply creating symbols for the themes he addresses, Drago is also dedicated to expressing his ideas in the most scientifically accurate language, using facts to both reinforce and question the allegories he constructs. A work from 2007 exemplifies this approach: Mors Tua Vita Mea consists of a series of matryoshka nested dolls, each of which bears an anatomically exact painting of a predator rendered in actual size, displayed to the right of a doll painted with an image of its prey.

Drago’s persistent return to structures of knowledge forms a counterpoint to his interest in organic forces, and his faith – for this is where scientific belief perhaps most closely resembles religious faith – in the entropy that befalls even the most ordered of systems. Societal attempts to regulate and control seem bound to fail when confronted with the desires that motivate life itself. Natural drives, whether material or emotional, break apart carefully laid constructions and reveal the vulnerability of organising principles, a fallibility that reminds us that we are, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “human, all too human”.

A classically trained draughtsman, Drago has an eye for the exquisite, in both form and content. His aesthetic seduces with hints of renaissance grandeur and nostalgic subject matter, but a wholly modern critical sensibility prevents the work from ever languishing in sentimentality. For at the heart of Drago’s work lies a sharp analytical wit, which combines with his skill and craftsmanship to create an intoxicating cocktail of beauty and violence.

Drago’s most recent project consists of a trilogy that addresses the foibles of human nature, the conceits of science and the frailties of existence. The exhibition at the castle of Marineo comprises three inter-related series, each of which deals with a particular ontological struggle linked to knowledge, interpretation and acceptance. The first work one encounters in the show consists of light boxes displaying x-rays, which Drago has painstakingly punctured hundreds of times along the outlines of his ‘n hers outfits. The artist refers to these works as his Vanitas, alluding to the vagaries fashion and the ultimate futility of attempts to control appearance. A seemingly irrefutable piece of evidence such as the x-ray could, even more so than photography in its vérité era, claim to be scientifically incontrovertible. However, by contrasting it with the frivolity of fashion design, Drago also asks us to question the truth-value of scientific material.

Isterica (2009) consists of an electroencephalogram onto which the artist has sewn a row of human hair. In contrast to the facticity of x-rays, the electroencephalogram requires analysis and interpretation by an expert in order to be meaningful. This hermeneutic phase of Drago’s trilogy also involves the artist’s interference. Human hair conjures up multiple associations ranging from a wild-haired ‘madwoman in the attic’ to death camps or, on a formal level, to a visual flourish that accentuates the crisis recorded by the encephalogram and expresses a striking emotionality. A series of anatomical paintings reinforces the diagnostic tone of Isterica, offering visual reminders of civilisation’s attempts to grapple with the mysteries of the human body.

For the final phase of Drago’s investigation, a triptych of paintings ushers in poetry, beauty and fantasy. Depicting a heart out of which grows a lily – the symbol of death – these works remind us that it is frequently at the juncture of fact and fantasy that life acquires meaning. The fundamental violence of such an image, which suggests that new life can only arise out of death, also provides reassurance. We are all part of an eternal cycle; our future success depends on the demise of others. The works stand in for the unattainable dreams and fantasies that simultaneously drive and terrify us. The mechanisms of attraction and repulsion energise existence at its most basic level. Drago has spoken of this final triptych as an expedient: violence and death are essential to the genesis of new life, but, if we are honest, we will admit that this also implies something improper or even immoral in our everlasting desire for the new. And it is this honesty that lends Drago’s works their power. Seductive - yes; disquieting - sometimes; but ultimately and unabashedly honest.

Obvious Expectations (2009)

Isterica! (2009)

Lirio (2009)

Vito Drago's website

Pete and Repeat

2009-08-31T13:53:00.004+01:00

This is not an essay: a comparative essay on serious protest

2009-08-28T08:56:00.012+01:00

While some artists are content to examine, unpick and rework formal and conceptual aspects of their chosen subject, occupying the quietly confident domain of subtle and elegant historical references, updating them with poise and savvy, others make it their business to cry out, demanding attention for their latest hobbyhorse, and rupturing the serenity of the library with a marching band and a chorus of acolytes banging wooden spoons on old pots – making some noise.

Consider the following fact: in April 2005, the UK Parliament passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, one provision of which restricts the right to demonstrate within an exclusion zone of up to one kilometre from any point in Parliament Square.

The area includes Whitehall, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, the Middlesex Guildhall, New Scotland Yard, and the Home Office as well as County Hall, Jubilee Gardens, St Thomas' Hospital and the London Eye on the South side of the river Thames.

Consider the following scenarios:

1. In December 2005, a man walks backwards from Parliament Square down Whitehall wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan "this is not a protest”. No Protest is a performance by Mark McGowan.
2. In January 2007, Tate Britain opens State Britain, an installation that recreates, within the Duveen Galleries, the one-man peace-camp set up by Brian Haw on Parliament Square in 2001, to protest sanctions against Iraq. The work is by Mark Wallinger.

These two works respond to the same law, which seriously curtails the right to free speech within a designated zone, but they do so in dramatically different ways. In one work, the artist acts alone, constituting both the form and content of the work. Publicity for the work consists of a press release written by the artist and personally emailed to journalists. The other work is situated within and sanctioned by the institutional apparatus of the state-funded gallery of British art, eventually winning its author the 2007 Turner Prize, the most prestigious and well-publicised contemporary art prize in Britain.

Wallinger’s State Britain was a meticulously made replica of Haw’s peace camp, as it was on the day it was dismantled and seized by 78 members of the Metropolitan police in May 2006. Each detail - from banners to photographs and personal messages – was carefully reconstructed, to create an uncanny simulacrum of the protest site within the neoclassical setting of Tate Britain. The work diverged from the original in only one aspect: a black line taped on the floor and running through the middle of the work to demarcate the edge of the 1-mile exclusion zone stipulated by the act. Ironically, given the absolute realism of the reconstruction of the peace camp, the line was a fiction, pure artistic license, and symbolised the circular mile circumference of the exclusion zone, rather than the actual zone, as demonstrated by Charles Thomson, a co-founder of the Stuckists, who showed that the exclusion zone actually ended at Thorney Street, some 300 yards from Wallinger’s limit.

In any case, State Britain offered people who, for whatever reason, hadn’t engaged directly with Haw’s camp while it was still in Parliament Square the chance to get close to a version of one of the most spectacular and enduring protest sites in London. It is interesting to note that Haw still occupies the same spot on Parliament Square at the time of writing, some eight years after he first set up camp, though on a much reduced scale. The work transformed a performative, demonstrative and active site into a document, abstracting it from the uncomfortable and messy human realities in which it was originally created, removing it from the unsettling gang of police officers patrolling outside the Houses of Parliament, and inserting it into the spectacle of contemporary art. The dual nature of the work’s relationship to the sanctified domain of a state gallery of art added to the piquancy of its conflicted identity: it simultaneously challenged state policy in Iraq and owed its very existence to state sponsorship of the arts. Wallinger’s hands-off approach to making State Britain was evident in the hiring of an art fabricator to remake it. What was originally an accumulation of people’s personal additions to the camp, weathered and worn, was, for the work, artificially aged, scientifically calculated and clinically installed in a gallery context.

In replicating Haw’s peace camp in a realist style, Wallinger opted performed a 1:1 mapping of the original. Although Wallinger claimed that State Britain was a document of the peace camp and Haw’s work on one level, it functioned more as a memorial for the original, standing in for the original and commemorating its destruction, inducing a hushed reverence in the viewer. This was in part due to the shocking nature of the content of some of the placards and photographs included in the protest site. State Britain also sacralised the peace camp, fixing it in a particular form, and solidifying it by consecrating it to the art historical canon, even though Haw’s peace camp carried on in much reduced form on Parliament Square. State Britain invited members of the general public to engage with a particular moment and persona, frozen in time and place, within the marble hall of the Duveen Galleries. State Britain bestowed an aura on Haw’s camp, elevating it from the potent consciousness-raising exercise and performative protest that stood on Parliament Square to a formal and aesthetic representation of that reality. State Britain ended up being a symbol of the original peace camp, and while symbols have their function and power, they are usually static and lack direct implication with reality.

McGowan’s performance operated in a dual and inherently contradictory way: as both a straightforward protest and its exact opposite. The slogan on the t-shirt worn by the artist during the performance reads ‘This is not a protest’, a slogan that pays tribute to a formula from one of the most famous works by Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s. The iconic painting La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), 1928-29, depicts a pipe with a caption that reads ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ – ‘This is not a pipe’. Despite first impressions, the image and its legend are not contradictory for this is indeed not a pipe we see; it is a picture of a pipe. As Michel Foucault states in his essay titled after Magritte’s painting, ‘To paint is not to affirm’.

Turning the relationship between object and reference on its head and confounding the public, McGowan’s backwards walk down Whitehall did in fact constitute a protest, but a very slippery one for which the authorities would be unable to prosecute. The work is successful because of its ability to defuse the logic of the laws introduced to curtail free speech and movement. No Protest performs a heroic refusal to take the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act seriously, laughing in the face of the law but also laughing at itself. As McGowan freely confesses: “Anyway, I started protesting, but at the first sign of trouble I was out.” The work is a double refusal: McGowan challenges the law but also the committed and serious stance of the typical protester, telling the police officer who challenges him: “My mum would freak out if I got arrested. So, the first thing I want to do is make it totally clear that I’m not actually protesting.”

The bathetic nature of the performance is further borne out by the conversation that ensues, in which the female officer, fulfilling the motherly stereotype, saying “you haven’t made any protest to me, and all I can say is that it’s very cold and if I were you I’d put your coat on, okay? But if you wish to walk backwards, as long as you’re safe doing it, I really don’t have a problem.” By proclaiming his own fallibility and impotence, the work celebrated the fact that failure is that which gives meaning, clumsiness that which lends elegance to an argument, and in the final analysis No Protest constituted one of the most direct and cunning challenges to the new law.

No Protest refused to operate within the logic of the structures it challenges, speaking an entirely different language and invoking the perverse power of the absurd. It effectively neutralised the anti-protest laws through laughter and ridicule. In performing the work, McGowan appeared not even to take himself seriously; a recursive gesture which constituted an essential part of the work, reducing the law - and himself - to a joke at which he can laugh rather than railing against. This attitude stands in stark contrast to Wallinger’s predominantly silent presence in the creation of State Britain; a difference that signals the distance between one artist’s adoption of performance and another artist’s strategies of re-presentation.

Despite its title, No Protest constituted a protest, in its most crystalline form. In contrast, State Britain functioned predominantly as a representation of protest, though it could be argued that, through its insidious position within a state institution and extrapolation of the funding relationship between the government and Tate, it might actually be an extension of the original protest. However, Wallinger’s hands-off approach to reconstructing the peace camp and the utter realism of the work might also suggest a certain complicity with the state apparatus. One might have imagined a more daring work being a reconstruction of the peace camp installed overnight in a guerrilla action on the site of the original – a true challenge to authority.

By replicating Brian Haw’s peace camp within the walls of Tate Britain, Wallinger made a solemn and straightforward indexical gesture towards the original and its intentions, but it operated in the domain of representation, and lacked the potency of the original camp. McGowan’s performance, in contrast, constituted a protest precisely by stating contradicting itself. State Britain and No Protest demonstrated the difference between a work that says something and a work that does what it says it does; the difference between a document or commentary and a performative statement or gesture.

Brian Haw's protest camp (Photo: Mark Wallinger)

State Britain (Photo: Sam Drake)

Link to a video of Mark McGowan's No Protest

O (un)Lucky Man!

2009-06-14T10:35:00.016+01:00

Who owns a look? An aesthetic? These are some of the questions raised by Paul B Davis's current exhibition at Seventeen gallery in London. The show is made up of a series of more or less self-aware failures, and as such it's an exhibition that is firmly planted in the realm of problems rather that of solutions. The five works in the show look very different from the bulk of Davis's previous output. This is because of Kanye West. The rapper's video for Welcome to Heartbreak came out in March 2009, right about the time when Davis would have been figuring out exactly what to include in his upcoming solo show at the gallery. West's video made use of an aesthetic device that Davis had developed through his own work. The look consisted of ramping up the glitches that characterise compressed and streamed video data: the squaring up of pixels and geometric flashes that interrupt the illusion of fluidity in online moving image. As with most effects, the success or failure of this one boiled down to a question of intensity. Occasional glitches just looked like a mistake, but the willful and precision deployment of the problem created a full-on look - a 'compression aesthetic' that acted as a visual trademark for Davis's work. Until, that is, the director who made West's music video (a self-avowed fan of Davis's work) used the effect for his own production. Unlucky for Davis, some might say, as the look will evermore be filtered back to him through West's pop-cultural might.

The question of the ownership of a visual aesthetic is a tricky one. While it may be straightforward to show that a slogan has been 'ripped off', a tune sampled or a photograph reproduced, exclusive ownership of a look is ultimately indefensible. In the event, Davis wasn't interested in attempting to prove his ownership of the aesthetic and seems to have gotten over it pretty quickly, turning his attention to the possible ramifications of the experience and using his current show to explore what it might mean for his own future artistic production. The resulting show raises stages possibilities for a reversal of appropriation of mass media culture in a fine art context, perversion of intra-art world appropriation, and a bastardising of the rules of appropriation against the horizon of the anything-goes approach of online experimentation.

The West 'appropriation' incident is just one of many relating to the problem of recursion and the feedback loops that occur as part of the evolution of digital technology. Hackers and other digital tricksters have created a wild west in which apparently anything goes, and where it is perhaps most productive to deal with any such problems in a sanguine manner. So instead of getting litigious - the absence of any copyright of compression aesthetics would have made this impossible - Davis got theoretical. That the resulting works, made over two months in the run-up to his exhibition, seem rushed and unresolved is understandable and ultimately apt. They deal mostly with failure - the artist attempts to paint canvases, and fails. The artist films himself eating a bacon sandwich and shitting in a perspex cube; the artist makes a headset that lets the viewer see the world as though it were a YouTube screen, but with 'critical' subtitles- and fails to hold the viewer's attention. Where the exhibition is successful is in its dealing with the particular problem of the Kanye West video. With Codec, Davis conducts an online tutorial explaining pbd, an eponymous algorithm that allows him to process any video and extract data to produce a new video that looks strikingly similar to one of his own works from 2007 - effectively allowing him to seemingly magically compress any video file into his own work. It's an impressive sleight of hand and a cool form of revenge for West's flagrant hijacking of Davis's work.

Paul B. Davis [BEIGE], Codec, 2009

Huh? Wow!

2009-06-11T09:47:00.013+01:00

One of my favourite effects in art - and, if you are to believe Ed Ruscha and Dave Hickey after him, a criterion of all good art - is the "Huh? Wow!" effect. This phenomenon is opposed to the "Wow! Huh?" effect and its power holds true for life as well as for art. It requires little explanation and is best invoked through illustration. A case in point is Roman Ondák's Loop, the work he has created for the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. As a Slovak, representing his nation in a pavilion named after a country that no longer exists, Ondák faced the challenges and absurdities of national representation through art - as well as the architecture and history of the Biennale's original site in the Giardini Pubblici. National representation is a vestige of a colonial attitude some would have us believe is long gone, but which is still taken seriously by the curators and artists representing some nations - USA, Israel, Russia - as an opportunity to promote their own culture and heritage. For others - Germany, Denmark, the Nordic countries - it is a chance to challenge notions of nationhood, belonging and jingoism.

But back to Ondák's Loop, and why it was so effective. For a moment, walking into the Czechoslovakian pavilion, I questioned my memories of the past six years and periodic visits to the Gardini. Had there always been gravel on the ground inside the pavilion? No, surely not as I recall an installation some years back in which visitors could push perfect glass spheres around a smooth floor with their feet. Since when had this lush vegetation, semi-mature trees, and gently landscaped path taken over an otherwise minimal structure? Doubt gave way to a priceless revelation - Ondák had invited the Giardini into the pavilion - eliminating doors, burying steps and enabling the ecosystem of the cultured gardens to take over the cultural ecosystem of the Biennale. Of all the works in the Giardini - and some, like Renata Lucas's subtle sections of highway sneaking into the gardens and Arsenale were very slight indeed - Loop was the most quietly striking. Flouting the binary of interiority/exteriority, rendering the architecture of the pavilion dumb and useless, and letting many visitors pass by unaware, it dealt a gentle but fatal blow to nationalist bombast, and, by staging an invasion by its surrounding reality - the trees and bushes of the Giardini - it mutely denounced the shouting simulacra and initial wow-ness of some of the other national pavilions.

This Is Just To Say

2009-06-08T17:12:00.001+01:00

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

-- William Carlos Williams

De Novo - Things repeat themselves

2009-06-07T15:15:00.017+01:00

One of the most powerful works made for Daniel Birnbaum's Venice Biennale exhibition, Making Worlds, is a film by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. It works because it addresses one of the fundamental questions of artistic creation - repetition - with candid, self-critical humanity. It is clear and modest; qualities that Gonzalez-Foerster's slightly overwrought Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern lacked, with its anxious theatricality. This is the fifth time Gonzalez-Foerster has been invited to be part of the Venice Biennale, and in De novo, she films herself talking about her successive returns to the oldest and grandest periodic exhibition. As though fulfilling an irresistible Nietzschean prophecy, her eternal return to the Venice Biennale led her to a state of deep resentment and stagnation. In her low-key croaky voice, she reveals her frustration and paralysis in the face of a compulsion to make new works, always different but always authentic, as well as the resulting cynicism and perversity that engendered a series of works amounting to nothing more than black holes: a chaotic scribble in which any word might be made out one, including the title of Utopia Station (the show it was commissioned for) or an installation so dark that it repulsed all but the most resilient of viewers, who, once their eyes had adjusted to the absence of light, were treated to the manifestation of an even darker shade of black. The confessional tone of the video - echoing so many diary rooms and lengths of informal footage - and the lucidity of Gonzalez-Foerster's admissions of cynicism offer proof by counter-example that recursive artistic processes don't always lead to black holes.

More seriality and compulsive repetition in the Biennale:

Ivan Navarro's Death Row

Ming Wong's In the Love for Mood

More of Michelangelo Pistoletto's mirrors

More of Bruce Nauman's hand casts

Contested Ground

2009-05-31T09:21:00.001+01:00

Installing Sam Porritt's work in Contested Ground

Contested Ground took place at 176 over two days in January 2009 as part of Testing Ground: Curating. This month-long experiment sought to engage with the practice of curating in three specific artistic registers: the performing arts, curatorial training programmes and the secondary school teaching of photography, textiles and graphics. These projects resulted in the intensive production and presentation of three public events at 176 over the course of three weeks. The Magic, an evening of music, dance and live film curated by singer-songwriter Lail Arad, tested the boundaries between the performing arts and performance art. Deconstruct/Reconstruct was the culmination of a process that involved the curators at 176 mentoring a group of year 12 secondary school students through the production and exhibition of new works, and introduced a generation of young art students to the practice of curating.

In the narrative arc of Contested Ground, what began as a modest proposal to students on the two most established curatorial training programmes in London – the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art and the MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College – rapidly took on a life of its own as the forces of ambition and competition came into play. The resulting two days of exhibitions, performances and events were attended by more than 800 people. The initial brief to the students of the two courses was to programme a public event – for example an artist’s talk or screening – during the weekend of January 17/18. We extended that initial invitation in late October 2008, and in the 12 weeks between that time and the public presentation of Contested Ground, the project grew, well beyond our initial expectations, to involve 30 curating students and more than 35 artists and collectives in some 17 discrete events and over 10 different curated displays. In terms of resources, the students were offered the building at 176, a former Methodist chapel with 1,000 square metres of exhibition space; curatorial support from the team at the gallery; and a promotional campaign for the event, conducted through the press and marketing channels used by 176. One caveat in the brief was that the event would in no way be funded by 176, hence the modesty of our initial proposal. The curators of Testing Ground were invited to figure out the event’s economics and budget for themselves.

Contested Ground was not simply an exercise in fulfilling lavish ambitions with frugal means; its underlying pedagogical motivation was to introduce the students to the practice of curating in an active and independent institution; one which operates within its own unique set of circumstances and provides an unusual institutional framework. As a privately funded public space, linked to the Zabludowicz Collection of contemporary art, 176 enjoys a relative freedom in terms of its programming. In other words, its independence from public sources of funding allows it to take on projects at short notice, sidestepping time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, and to take risks in producing large-scale artworks and exhibitions. This freedom lends the process of exhibition-making at 176 an intuitive air and allows for an open-ended approach to projects. However, it also demands a sustained critical and analytical stance from the curatorial team at 176 with regard to its own programming and status in relation to other types of public and private art institutions.

During the debrief for Contested Ground, the most common comment from the students involved in the project was a retroactive wish to have received a more stringent brief for the project. But delivering an overall vision for the event from the outset would have risked hindering the open-ended and experimental nature of the project, which in many ways enabled its ambitious scope to emerge and contributed to its eventual success. Paradoxically, the fact that Contested Ground teetered on the edge of being overprogrammed, or of repelling audiences with an excess of options, is one of the things that made it so successful. Post hoc publications such as this zine, which has come out of the printed material generated during and after the weekend, allow an engagement with the tangled legacy of such an intensive moment of production. They allow us to eke out the strands that made it such a success, and to reel in those that threatened to lead it astray.

A Secular Form of Belief

2009-05-31T09:13:00.000+01:00

Matt Stokes, Club Ponderosa, 2009. Photo: Thierry Bal

Each year, 176 invites an artist to create new works and an exhibition that take into account a particular set of givens. These include the former Methodist Chapel in which the gallery is housed, the Zabludowicz Collection of contemporary art, and the specific social and geographic conditions of the surrounding areas of Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Kentish Town. The Gainsborough Packet, the film from which Matt Stokes’s residency exhibition takes its title, draws together the historical and contemporary worlds of folk music in the Northeast of England, where Stokes lives and Camden Town, home to 176. The second work to come out of the residency, Club Ponderosa, might be loosely termed a ‘space for social interaction’. It developed from Stokes’s desire to explore and collaborate with the communities, groups and people who live, work and meet in the neighbourhood of 176. The project takes its name and mission from two precedents. Firstly, from Ponderosa, an ad hoc shelter built on communal ground in a street near Stokes’s home in the West End of Newcastle, andused for gatherings or simply for being outside of one’s home and pondering. Secondly, from the Ponderosa ranch, which was the setting for the 1960s and 1970s American TV series Bonanza. The programme offered an unusual portrayal of life in the Wild West, with the ranch as the site of nurturing family and community relationships, rather than a stage on which major dramas were played out. These sources for the club share a utopian aspect and a strong sense of independence, conducting their activities or fulfilling their desires outside the mainstream and extracting themselves from the confines of so-called ‘normal’ society.

At the time of writing, Club Ponderosa exists as a space of potential. The club will be open between February and June 2009, during which time it will host a number of events, performances and meetings. Until then, it exists as a virtual space waiting to be actualised, characterised by unpredictability. Afterwards, the residue that survives its dismantling will exist in the things created during the club’s existence, in the new relationships and collaborations that grow out of its activities and in the flesh, blood and souls of the participants. The impetus of the club, rather than being one of redemptive social action, is an experimental one. The space will exist not just for action but also for interaction; people with different interests, practices and above all passions will react with and against one another to form new compounds and precipitations. The club will also allow those involved—both the participants and the artist—to react against themselves, testing their own flexibility and elasticity, their resistance to change. Escaping well-trodden paths and ingrained behaviours, and taking their selves out of themselves, the participants in Club Ponderosa will make something, rather than just be something.

Club Ponderosa reflects a belief that the design of social spaces is a crucial factor in determining the ways they function and that the design process should actively involve the users for whom such spaces are ultimately created. This also means that, as a social space, Club Ponderosa will ultimately be more than the sum of its parts: more than the events, performances, objects and people involved. It will have a supplementary value that exists in direct relation to the use that is made of the space. Club Ponderosa also depends on a lengthy process of developing relationships and cultivating the trust and willingness of its participants, who have been invited to join the project based on a loose set of criteria: that they are self-organised informal groups or individuals, operating independently of any official structures, with a DIY approach to their activities. These are amateurs in the original sense of the term, which comes from the Latin word for ‘lover’: they are people whose initial motivation is their love for what they do, rather than any financial gain that might accrue from their activities.

In early stages of the club's development Stokes met the Kentish Town Living History Group, the New Factory of the Eccentric Actor and a Kurdish architect who spends his summers building villages in Kurdistan and his winters running a health food shop on Chalk Farm Road, among others. The club brings together individuals whose beliefs and activities may be slightly at odds with one another, takes them out of their comfort zones and asks them to envisage ways of working with people from different ages, cultural and class backgrounds and with sometimes radically different world views and passions. Its activities cannot be rehearsed, nor its outcomes guaranteed. More than just a venue, the club’s heterogeneous membership, its flexible attitude and unique architectural and historical situation offer a context for groups to do things in a new way. In this sense it mirrors the artistic residency at 176, which encourages artists to respond to the particulars of its structure and origins, its building, collection and its independence from politicised art-funding structures, a freedom which allows an open-ended approach and important risks to be taken. Club Ponderosa is therefore not a performance, planned in advance and rolled out on the allotted day for a passive audience. Instead, it is a performative space with no foregone conclusions. It allows doing and making to take precedence over performing and showing.

Club Ponderosa will also be home to MASS, a free collective sound system made up in part of donated equipment. The group of donors includes individuals who build and run sound systems or who agreed to contribute components they held in storage. They have also offered advice on designing and building sound systems, and their participation in the project stands to be part of a wider legacy should the system continue to amass components and be used elsewhere after its stretch in Club Ponderosa. MASS offers a key to Club Ponderosa and indeed to Stokes’s practice in general. The clue is in the name’s dual connotations of worship and community. Stokes’s work reveals a long-term fascination for groups that form and exist outside mainstream culture, especially subcultures motivated by a love of a certain type of music. Works such as Club Ponderosa and MASS mine the rich seams of belief, commitment and passion that characterise these groups, as well as their susceptibility to dogma, by creating contexts in which people can perform their passions and enact their rituals. In such contexts, the answer to the question, Why make such an artwork? lies in the very doing of it, and in the subjectivities that are produced as a result of the encounters it provokes. In such cases, the art ‘work’ becomes a verb rather than a noun.

Though formally very distinct from Club Ponderosa, The Gainsborough Packet does bring together different groups and participants, giving life to cultural histories and currencies of English folk music. A particular aspect of the residency that guided the production of the work is the chapel that houses 176, which was built between 1867 and 1871. For nearly a century, it was an active place of worship and the head of the Methodist circuit of five churches in Kentish Town, holding over 1,050 worshippers. It was also famous for its Men’s Meetings, which, according to the Methodist Recorder of 1908, hosted musical performances of “a high standard of excellence”. In the 1960s, the Methodist community moved to newly-built premises and the building was taken over by the London Drama School, a breakaway group from the Central School of Speech and Drama, which pioneered the teaching of Constantin Stanislavski’s technique of method acting, and which occupied the building until 2004, after which plans for 176 were put in place.

One of Stokes’s central concerns in approaching the residency at 176 was to investigate the histories of Camden and Newcastle, particularly the crucial moment of industrial expansion the two cities experienced during the early to mid-1800s, and its accompanying cultural developments. During this time, the population of Camden developed into a thriving urban community, an expansion that was catalysed in large part by growing canal and rail networks. Evidence of this growth is still visible today, in the forms of King’s Cross station, built in 1852, and the Roundhouse, which now houses an arts centre but was originally a steam engine repair shed built in 1847, within view of 176.

Stokes’s research focussed on personal histories from the period and turned up a letter written in 1828 by Newcastle resident John Burdikin, to his "Dere friend Pybus". The letter paints Burdikin as a self-appointed hero who saves a mine from collapse, averts disaster when a ship containing gunpowder kegs catches alight, rescues a young girl from drowning and plays trumpet for the Sheriff of Northumberland —just a few of “the things that happened in Newcastle; (and its vicinity) I mean within a mile of the town.”

Burdikin’s letter was at the root of The Gainsborough Packet, inspiring lyrics for a song that was recorded and turned into a music video set in northern England during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The project involved a group of respected musicians including songwriter Jon Boden, whose groups Spiers and Boden and Bellowhead are at the forefront of the contemporary folk music scene; composer Alistair Anderson, one of the UK’s leading exponents of traditional music; and American producer Tim Kerr. As a folk musician, artist and pioneer of punk music in Austin, Texas, Kerr was ideally placed to offer the project a different perspective, linking it with a work Stokes made in parallel with his residency at 176. these are the days (2008) is a two-channel film installation exploring the punk scene that has been a counterpoint to mainstream culture in Austin over the last three decades.

The musical team working on The Gainsborough Packet transformed Burdikin’s letter from archival material into a fully-fledged pop-folk song, which was recorded with singer Sam Lee, who also incarnates Burdikin in the video for the song. In a twist that exemplifies the interconnectedness of Stokes’s residency at 176, Lee is the outreach officer at the Camden-based English Folk Dance and Song Society where Stokes conducted initial research for his residency. He is an active figure on the contemporary folk scene, organising regular club nights and teaching on the Traditional Music degree at the SAGE Gateshead music centre. By involving experts in the field of popular and academic folk music, Stokes’s process unravels an entire cultural world, pulling out its historical and contemporary elements like so many threads in order to weave them back together again in the timeless shape of The Gainsborough Packet.

Like much of Stokes’s work, The Gainsborough Packet was launched by a combination of factors: finding Burdikin’s letter; a residency in a 19th-century former house of worship; and the important presence of folk music in the Northeast of England and Camden. A plan for the work developed over several months, during which time Stokes attended numerous folk music performances, clubs and group meetings in North London, constructing a picture of the scene, exploring its possibilities and developing relationships with its main protagonists. Acutely aware of the dangers of simply ‘dropping in’ to such sacred spaces as music clubs and being perceived as a ‘tourist’, Stokes’s intention is not to become assimilated into these groups, but rather to remain on the sidelines as an observer. Being a borderline figure in these groups enables him to suspend personal judgement and to be swayed by the opinions of the people he meets. While they incorporate historical sources, facts and archives, Stokes’s works make no claims to documentary transparency or scientific objectivity. They leave intact the integrity of their factual origins while departing from them in unexpected formal and aesthetic ways, and interpellating audiences. As an exhibition, The Gainsborough Packet, &c. asks us to reassess our assumptions and prejudices about particular historical moments and cultural groups, and indeed about our own identities. It compels us to consider and explore the minor histories that have such powerful impacts on our own and other people’s lives.

The practices of traditional and contemporary folk music could be seen as defining themselves in opposition to one another. The Gainsborough Packet uses elements from both in order to generate something new. This strategy of productive confrontation also guides Club Ponderosa, which asks various groups to decamp from their usual territories and comfort zones, and to question ingrained tendencies towards self-mythologizing. The test is whether these groups can withstand such a questioning, and where they will go from there. It could be said of Stokes’s works that they make a stand against the natural settling of systems, the well-rehearsed versions of individual and group identity, catalysing relationships and reactions, producing new cultural forms and encouraging new ways of being and acting.

Picnoleptic Seamless

2009-05-31T09:06:00.000+01:00

A text published for 'Stage Fright', an installation by Laura Buckley, Haroon Mirza and Dave MacLean, at Rokeby Gallery, London, January 2009

Picnoleptic seamless

Our reassuring belief in a unified reality betrays a rather more fragmented truth, in which what appears to be constituted by its own essence is in fact rendered by the cuts, breaks and interruptions between discrete parts, each one too small to fully grasp.

Swapping skills and materials, the artists behind Stage Fright have, over the past few months, formed a web of exchange and quotation, with each artist applying his or her preferred techniques and methodologies to the products of the others. In the first stage of the process, videos shot by Laura Buckley were selected and cut by Haroon Mirza according to their visual and audio shapes. The resulting samples were then given to Dave MacLean, who juxtaposed them based on their sound values alone, composing four audio tracks whose corresponding visual sequences were ther esult of chance, albeit within carefully set-out parameters. Temporarily segregating the sensory registers of audiovisual material — i.e. image and sound, this process allowed each, in turn, a guiding role before they were joined together again in the finished videos. The resulting montages consist of extremely brief clips that operate independently of their original sources and are infused with the preferences, styles and speeds of the three collaborators. The web of exchange then developed a feedback loop, in which the new video mixes were returned to Buckley to be staged in an installation that is typical of her aesthetic of geometric constructions and plain industrial materials.

The recording, editing and sequencing technologies used in the making of Stage Fright have produced richly patterned films that rely on the rapid sequencing and repetition of very short clips — too short, in fact, to be clearly or distinctly comprehended. Their rapid-fire pace compels the viewer to keep up, charmed and baffled by the intensity of the rhythm. Such a feat seems almost within reach, until the spell is broken by the comedy of a sample taken so entirely out of context as to be ridiculous, its outlandishness snapping one’s attention back to the physical surroundings and prosaic edges of the here and now.

While it is methodologically driven by an ethos of collaboration and synthesis, Stage Fright, with its staccato videos and exact sculptural lines, enjoys an aesthetic of striking fragmentation. This paradox of togetherness and separation — flow and interruption — is emblematic of the conflicted nature of consciousness, whose sense of a integrated temporality, impressions of smoothness and illusions of identity mask an altogether different reality in which multiplicity and fragmentation rule, and meaning is generated by endings; by the little deaths of image, sound and text.

In Pure War (1988), Paul Virilio refers to the notion of ‘picnolepsy’ in relation to the splintering of both the external world and inner mental life that characterises our era. Due in part to technologies of speed and warfare, the relentless and rhythmic shattering to which picnolepsy alludes is in fact essential to existence. For Virilio, it is interruption, not continuation, which constitutes the whole. From the physical (sleeping) to the existential (death), momentary stoppages produce knowledge and duration; they constitute a life, an idea, a thing. Picnolepsy opens the gates for individual consciousness, vision and works of art to be admitted to the regime of interruption:

“Epilepsy is little death and picnolepsy, tiny death. What is living, present, conscious, here, is only so because there’s an infinity of little deaths, little accidents, little breaks, little cuts in the soundtrack, as William Burroughs would say, in the sound track and the visual track of what’s lived. […] Our vision is a montage, a montage of temporalities which are the product not only of the powers that be, but of the technologies that organise time.”1

The apparent seamlessness of individual consciousness and the seeming unity of a work of art betray the shattered reality of their constitutive processes and components. In the case of Stage Fright, this reality is mirrored in the work’s aesthetic. There is a fundamentally unresolved identity at play in the making of Stage Fright, with Mirza extracting fragments of Buckley’s artistic voice, offering them to MacLean to integrate the two blind, before handing them back to Buckley for a final synthetic chorus. Such behind-the-scenes exchanges and shared authorship, while revealing a strong sense of trust, also hint at the fundamental — or rather, metaphysical — disconnections implicit in any group, process or product.

1 Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer. Pure War. Semiotext(e). Second edition:1998. P. 40

(Im)material Presence: Effects and Affects in the work of Mark Titchner, Graham Hudson and Laura Buckley

2009-05-31T08:53:00.000+01:00

Graham Hudson, On Off, 2008

What happens if we agree to abandon our cherished habits of logic, our conceptions of space and geometry; if we stop believing our eyes and start believing our ears instead; if we decide to believe in the magic beyond the illusion, the ghosts haunting spaces; if we agree to invert the laws of rationality, just to see? What would such excursions achieve beyond an initial confusion and disorientation? Could the worlds we access by way of these excursions have a feedback effect on our own, supposedly reliable world? If one’s cosmology is the way in which one explains the world to oneself, could art installations become machines, devices for generating new and different cosmologies?

Irrational Spaces

In moving away from two- and three-dimensional art into multidimensional spaces, installation art makes a radical break with the practice of representation. These works do not seek to reproduce something from the world in pictorial or artistic form; nor is it about the visualisation of concepts or abstraction of existing forms. Something else is going on. The binary relationship between original and copy that has historically grounded practices such as photography, painting and sculpture is rendered irrelevant, or at least subsumed under the larger body of the works; relegated to a secondary position as a part of the whole, rather than constituting the work itself. This break with representation also entails a move away from tendencies of anthropomorphism and illusionism. By severing the umbilical cord between the work of art and the “real world”, installation art makes way for hyperspaces, other worlds: the impossible, kaleidoscopic spaces created by moving and folding mirrors in Laura Buckley’s Mechanical Poem; the auratic world of Mark Titchner’s When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever, in which symbolism and oppression are the dominant languages; or a monumental stepped helix that could have been the set for a reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier N2 (1912) in the Escherised space of Graham Hudson’s installation On Off (2008).

Cubism and Futurism ushered in the 20th century using radical new viewpoints. With Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Pablo Picasso suggested a three-dimensional world of sliding and
interpenetrating planes on the two-dimensional surface of the painted canvas. Projecting their multiple perspectives into the space of the viewer, Cubist paintings broke with the Renaissance tradition of illusionistic representation and a single vanishing point, creating a sense that their world was “becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring”.¹ This unease was taken to extremes by the belligerent Futurists, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose first manifesto in 1909 tapped into the anxieties of the first decade of the 20th century and glorified war in all its forms, lauding it as “the only true hygiene of the world − militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill and the scorn of woman”.²

Futurism incorporated the Cubists’ revolutionary style into a radical political agenda. With a style that involved a fragmentation of perspective and the scattering of vision and matter, the Futurists adopted a new viewpoint, situated within the work rather than simply in front of it. This spatial rearrangement and its attendant new perspective extended to the viewer, who was now able, by way of the artwork, to access the world of the future and experience the urban energy that characterised the era, catching a glimpse of the new logic of technology, warfare and power − a foreign language exceeding any previous system and seemingly arrived from a different planet. The Futurist concept of “lines of force”− according to which objects reveal their states, emotions and characteristics to the artist or viewer − also hints at a sensibility to presence beyond mere material. The Futurists were prescient in their understanding of the possibilities of art in creating new worlds, reaching beyond received wisdom and reason to see through to the future potential of art, technology and perception, as well as to the darker undertones of these potentials. Was installation art, a genre that came to prominence in the 1970s, the inevitable culmination of the Futurists’ enmeshing of shattered vision and dark geo-political fantasy?

A round 300bc, Euclid of Alexandria developed the principles of his geometry to explain and account for physical space according to the coordinates of length, depth and breadth. His laws still govern lay understanding of the workings of space; they constitute our framework for apprehending the places we inhabit and the events that occur in them. However, Euclid’s axioms fail to account for what lies beyond common understanding; his system is ill-equipped to speak of other worlds, the strange, the mystical or the ineffable. Leaving the Euclidean framework behind when approaching a work of art might allow for the emergence of any number of additional dimensions in the space of painting, drawing or photography. Adding a third dimension to the picture plane yields sculpture, while a fourth dimension, time, begets film; but a potential infinity of other dimensions exists in installations, enabling them to operate as other worlds with their own logic and rules. By exploding our conventional notions of space and adding other elements to point, line, plane and time, installations create versions of space that cannot be represented according to Euclidean rules, which is not to say that they cannot exist. The surreal mathematics in the spaces created by a visionary like M.C. Escher may prove to be more useful than Euclid’s axiomatics when approaching the artwork as installation.

Eyes, Ears, Mouth & Nose: Senses, Synaesthesia & Effects

Artworks then, especially installations, can create their own worlds, exceeding our naturalised means for explaining or experiencing physical space. These territories operate according to their own laws and are governed by their own forces, which in turn construct the viewer in new ways. The physical boundaries the artist has chosen to put into place, positioning sculptural components, outlining moving image projections or extending soundtracks and live performance, limit the space of the installation. But within these borders, a fullness is constituted by a range of effects including a kind of transubstantiation that can also yield the smell of materials and the sensation of textures. The viewer is immersed in this fullness as in a pool of water and acted upon by the different components of the work; sensory effects that create feelings and intuitions that exceed the pure materiality of the installations, creating a surplus and pointing to extra dimensions of physical space and experience.

Mark Titchner’s installation When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever (2005) is cloaked in a murky soundtrack: the first few notes of the opening fanfare of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, stretched to the duration of the entire movement. Beethoven’s dramatic symphony, so revered by the young protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) is here desecrated by special effects, transformed from a glorious composition into a creeping presence. Stretched beyond recognition, ghostly voices and sounds begin to emerge from the vibrations of the track; the pure force of the symphony is isolated, distilled from its melodies and harmonies and thus from its ostensible meaning. Sonic apparitions materialise and populate the space in which it is played. We begin to imagine the symphony, to “see” it, much as Beethoven, who was already suffering serious loss of hearing when he composed it, might have. Along with the other sinister or occult references in the installation, including pictorial signs taken from anarchist torture chambers used during the Spanish Civil War, biblical references and cabbalistic symbols, the soundtrack fills the room with a rich mixture of tyrannical vibrations. This oppressively textured sonic environment contrasts starkly with Laura Buckley’s use of sound in her installation Mechanical Poem (2007), in which a series of clear, sharp sounds is produced by the meeting of clean slick surfaces: squares of pristine materials such as perspex and mirror collapsing together with a slap. The clarity of these punctuating sounds stands out against a murmur of conversation and ambient sounds from the lakeside forest in which Buckley filmed one of the moving image components of the installation. In homing in on the sounds of materials colliding, synaesthesia creeps in: they are such distinctive sounds − nothing else produces that part-sucking out of air between the surfaces /part-fraction of a clatter − that the eye seems to hear the lucid and slick sounds while the ear sees the manipulation of flawless materials. Buckley has noted the importance that sound holds in certain sequences and the influence the soundtracks of her footage have on their editing; the staccato interjections of the hard materials coming together govern the way moving images are cut and intercut.

Graham Hudson’s sculptures and installations often incorporate record players and a motley selection of records that demand a new and illogical way of listening. A recurring crossbreed in his work is the outcome of pairing a turntable with a suspended light bulb dangling over it in such a way that the bulb rests on the surface of the spinning record. This dislocation of the usual logic of machines evokes Comte de LautréLamont’s statement, adopted by the Surrealists, about the beauty of “the fortuitous meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!”³ Not only does the combination of light bulb and turntable create a visual conundrum by bringing together light, sound, motion and time in a single though multifaceted point, but it also makes for a unique and slippery sonic performance. The turntable struggles to play in spite of the bulb, which repeatedly slides off the surface of the record, dragging it back and causing the music to stutter in a new and baffling language, before crashing into the record player’s arm. In this odd coupling, the records occasionally burst into a proud concert, but more frequently stutter and stammer their way through to the bitter end when their grooves disintegrate, the machine collapses and the record stops playing − only to be replaced by a fresh specimen from the wide collection of records available for the installation. With On Off, which in addition uses a sequencer to switch a series of turntables on and off for a few seconds at a time, Hudson produces a confounding sonic undulation housed in a helical tower whose design might have featured in one of Giovanni Piranesi’s prison drawings.

Machines Under Duress

In Laura Buckley’s Cubic 2 (Green Cube Rotate) − one of the moving image components of Mechanical Poem, filmed with a digital video camera set to auto-focus − the action consists of a series of scenes in which a perspex cube is gradually assembled on a revolving plinth, beginning with a base and single side in the first sequence, and culminating in a five-sided open-topped cube in the final scene. During the course of the film, a single light bulb, “a light-based drawing tool”, is variously dangled over and around the cube or positioned in relation to one of its sides.⁴ The rotating planes of colour and transparency, along with changes in the position of the light source, create a motion and a false sense of depth and distance that the camera is at pains to keep up with.

Putting such a sophisticated piece of technology in a stressful situation results in something unexpected, hinting at a potential that exceeds the original intentions of the machine’s makers; an exquisite by-product of abuse. This excess produces the art; in the case of Buckley’s films a combination of uncannily precise geometric shots that resemble computer-generated graphics, and blurred sequences during which the camera visibly works through its options, finally settling on a focussed image for a brief moment before the revolving structure returns to disrupt its equilibrium once again. The slick perspex surfaces of the cube occasionally reflect their surroundings, allowing for a fleeting glimpse of the artist, her studio and her camera, while creating another tripartite viewing relationship between artist, sculpture and recording device, and enabling the viewer a momentary access to this charmed world. Such artful misuse of machines or materials − the distressed symphony, the camera put under acute strain in order to capture surfaces and the play of light, the turntable diverted away from its intended use − marks the difference between approaching an instrument as a tool and as a material.

When Graham Hudson uses as his materials standard units such as scaffolding poles, transportation pallets, cardboard boxes and hazard tape, it is with a twofold view to their utility and to their potential to do something other than that for which they were designed. The relationship between artist and material is one of engagement and reconfiguration rather than simple use; it has a different intentionality than the relationship with tools. This difference extends to the distinction between sculpture and architecture, in which the usevalue of buildings is separated off by the sculptural approach and chance comes into play. Distorting the language and logic of machines, parts and materials diverts them away from the pragmatic and guides them towards the poetic. It is this inherent contradiction in the works, which can be mild or acute and which arises from the disjunction between the intention of materials and the uses they are ultimately put to, that enables them to actually work − to have an effect on the viewer that goes beyond a mere contemplation of shape and materiality.

Hauntology

Julia Kristeva has written that in an installation “it is the body in its entirety which is asked to participate through its sensations, through vision obviously, but also hearing, touch on occasions smell. As if these artists, in the place of an “object” sought to place us in a space at the limits of the sacred, and asked us not to contemplate images but to communicate with beings”.⁵ It is this capacity of installations to incarnate something entirely new, almost alive, rather than to represent something outside themselves, which constitutes their presence, their surplus value. There is a palpable but uncontainable energy to these works, an alchemy whose elements include scale, materials, ideas and effects.

When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever contains a number of visual components that act as a sort of pictorial refrain running through the installation. Images are taken from a variety of sources including the Bible and a book about torture cells designed and used in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War.⁶ The cells bear an uncanny resemblance to sculptural shapes, visual patterns and signs from modernist aesthetic trends and abstraction, making their designer something of a former-day sampler of visual culture, excising elements from their original context and lending them new political and aesthetic significance. The patterns and signs used in the torture cells, avantgarde when first made, are now visual tropes firmly ensconced in the canon of modern art. They are reminiscent of modernist artworks such as Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, of Luis Bunuel’s anxious cinematic spaces, and László Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with kinetics, but they also signal a future potential, pointing towards sculptural-perceptual works by contemporary artists such as Carsten Höller, Gregor Schneider and Anish Kapoor. In these torture cells, geometric shapes and patterns were combined with curved surfaces, intense colours, textures and temperatures to create spaces, non-Euclidean worlds, intended to make their victims suffer perceptual trouble and ultimately madness. Their nefariousness is a question of intensity: a lesser intensity in the deployment of these tactics resulted in high art. Pushed to the limit, they became instruments of torture.

To know of the origins of these symbols, which now exist in Titchner’s installation in a second-degree abstraction from their original détournement from modernist artworks, is also to be aware of the victims who suffered from being subjected to their forces. These visual elements carry an undecidable presence in the installation: do they laud avant-garde developments in the visual arts or are they indicators of a much darker legacy? Such undecidability recalls the fate of zombies: neither alive nor dead, they roam without hope for closure, unable to be revived or put to rest. The zombies of modern art haunt Titchner’s installation, as do the ghosts of the torture victims who suffered from malicious intensification of avant-garde aesthetic signs. The legacies and tendencies of modern art live on in the work of countless contemporary artists and it is up to the viewer to decide the connotations of progress in the arts and technology; to determine whether the ghosts are friendly or terrorising.

Technology = Magic

In Laura Buckley’s film Cubic 2 (Green Cube Rotate) a two-sided perspex construction sits on a rotating cloth-covered platform, “but then a hand appears to push and expose the driver of the movement and the technical tone is lowered. Including the hand removes the magic and shows you how to do the trick”.⁷ To demonstrate how things work in this way, to reveal the science of movement is also, paradoxically, to reveal their magic, a magic that lies beyond trickery. Revealing the science, the mechanics of the work, paradoxically serves to underscore the surplus that can never be revealed, the part of the work that is untouchable by reason and that operates in accordance with the rules of another logic altogether.

The act of revealing the technology behind the work is one way of hinting at the magic. Another is to use technology to reveal something that usually lies beyond our grasp; what would otherwise be inaccessible or unbearable. Buckley’s sculpture Another Place (2007) consists of a naked light bulb hanging behind a sheet of black perspex. This shield protects the viewer from the glaring light waves and allows the red element, alive with electricity, to be seen. Plastic and bulb together allow us to see a thing whose detail would otherwise be ungraspable by the human eye. By framing a light bulb, or filming the reflection of the sun in a puddle as in the film Cubic 1 (2007), Buckley actualises a vision that otherwise would exist only in the realm of the virtual.

Sigils are signs, words or devices of supposed occult power in astrology or magic. Titchner’s installation When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever includes four lamps with shades whose cut-out patterns are made up of a specific sigil known only to the artist. The lore surrounding sigils tells that when creating a sigil, a particular phrase, wish or spell is reduced to a visual symbol and in so doing, the wish is captured in the symbol, infusing it with a power related to the wish.

This sigil technology shares the space of When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever with a number of other technologies, all modes of communication: moving image, electronic sound and typography. These technologies aim to affect the viewer with their power, be it merely artificial or decidedly supernatural. By containing and conveying meaning in more or less obscure ways, they demonstrate that no mode of communication is transparent or untainted. In each case − the use of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, a piece of music associated with the psychological re-programming of a juvenile delinquent in A Clockwork Orange, or the sampling of visual patterns from a mixed legacy of fine art and torture or sigils − the ultimate aim of a particular technology is to exert a specific type of control over the viewer. As writer Kodwo Eshun points out in his analysis of Gothic Futurist Rammellzee, “writing, alphabets, typographies are all ubiquitous elite technologies that have lowered themselves into your consciousness where they adapt you to their habit, their reflex, their perception. The alphabet is not just a transparent communication but a ubiquitous technology, a system adapted and encrypted by successive religious regimes for warfare: the Roma, the Christian, the Medieval, the Gothic. Words, letters, signs, symbols are all weapons, stolen, ornamented and wrongly titled to hide and manipulate their meaning. The prize? Control of the means of perception.”⁸ The magic is that we have assimilated these technologies of communication to such an extent that they seem the natural − the best and only way to communicate. By incorporating them into his installation, Titchner mirrors the constructed artificiality of their role in our daily lives and reveals the underlying strangeness of the way we have wholeheartedly adopted them as organising principles.

Such guiding principles control much of our understanding of and interaction with the world. Their ubiquity masks a fear that things might fall apart if we were to risk living according to a different logic. Artworks and installations, by virtue of their capacity to act as containers for the viewer, destabilise and disrupt this compulsion to control. Rather than predetermining meaning or a particular outcome, they allow for unpredictable relationships to emerge, for strange forces to come into play, and altogether different logics to govern our experience in a process that affects and re-creates the viewer as it does the artwork.

¹ Pablo Picasso quoted in Amy Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements, London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. 86
² http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html (accessed August 2008)
³ Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror, NY: New Directions Press, 1965. 263
⁴ Laura Buckley, Revealing the System: A self-reflexive exploration of practice and methods, artist statement, October 2007.
⁵ Quoted in Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: thought beyond representation, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 51
⁶ Jose Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1998.
⁷ Laura Buckley, Revealing the System: A self-reflexive exploration of practice and methods, artist statement, October 2007.
⁸ Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet Books, 1998. 32

Charlie's Vision for a New World

2009-05-31T08:49:00.000+01:00

An Interview with allsopp&weir about the work I commissioned them to make for artreview .com

allsopp&weir have worked collaboratively since 2003, producing video, animation, sculpture and performance works. Their practice addresses different shades of physical struggles or challenges often creating a mise-en-scene of an action that appears to consist of failure, yielding a complex relatibut their relationship with failure is anything bu: “The unrealisable doesn’t have to be seen negatively. If something fails then there is a possibility that something else will start to happen. The unrealisable struggle is more an openness to this potential.”

Their artreview commission can be seen here: http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A475385

Ellen Mara De Wachter: Could you briefly describe the online project you've made and how it relates to the series of Charlie works?

allsopp&weir: We have made a series of animated drawings and a soundtrack in collaboration with an old man named Charlie Fuss. We have been working with Charlie for a while now, and he appears in our last four films. The work shown here is a development of some drawings we’ve made with him. According to Charlie, the drawings are a way of "making a new world".

Ellen Mara De Wachter: Fiction and fact seem to come together in the Charlie series in an interesting way. Could you talk a little about your experience of this?

allsopp&weir: We wouldn’t make that distinction. Sometimes the work operates on the lines where fictions become fact, and facts melt back into fiction. People often asked us of Amplification Device (2007) for example whether the action was all directed (fictional) or whether we had documented an action that was happening already (factual). Really it was neither of these things. We had gone to City Airport in East London to film something else, and we bumped into Charlie there. We created a system based on actual events; Charlie builds a machine to make sound but every time a plane passes, he stops and makes sound. Charlie put himself into this system and negotiated its boundaries, ending up by turning away from the planes and banging a stick on a watering can. As Charlie discusses in our most recent video Drawing the Front Line, he has set himself a program of ‘jumping out his body’ and this jumping has to be both factual and fictional in order to have any effect, “It’s jumping out your body. It’s jumping out your body into another life. Well…the buzz..woahh. It’ll get you jumping about all over the shop, mate. You know what I mean?”

Ellen Mara De Wachter: There seems to be an unrealisable struggle in each of the Charlie films - what is it about portraying futility that attracts you? Or do you not see this as a portrayal of futility?

allsopp&weir: Futility suggests starting a process while knowing it will fail, or come to nothing. The unrealisable doesn’t have to be seen negatively though. If something fails then there is a possibility that something else will start to happen. The unrealisable struggle is more an openness to this potential. Charlie talks a lot about struggle in the video. Jumping out of his body is a struggle. "You have to quick and you have to be ready, so built up in your mind, and determined. Then, bump, and away. I don’t think this is really a portrayal of futility. Its exciting." The futility from Charlie’s perspective comes from its transience, “You know. It’s beautiful, but…how can you put it? It don't last long.” But then the films, and the drawings too, become a way of opening up and expanding these moments.

Ellen Mara De Wachter: An interest in the structures and fault lines of technologies of communication is present in other, earlier works such as Language Machine. What interests you in particular about the failings and treacheries of language?

allsopp&weir: Charlie talks a lot about sound rather than language in particular, and he often embodies it rather than talking at a distance from it. The rooster in his story becomes a raucous crowing, and the trumpet player becomes a series of toots. So many sounds. Sound becomes a way for him to collapse time, the subjective and objective, memory and history. It becomes a point of focus, hypnotic. As he says, "For as long as it continues to beat I will focus on the sound of its beat." Charlie is always throwing down these little motifs, like his dancing to the music song. And sound also becomes his means of communication, playing back the radio and responding to elements. Some of it gets lost on our transcript in Drawing the Front Line. There are quite a few moments of unintelligibility. This is one of the points where language collapses back into sound.

“Whenever I hear them vibrations, I’m glued to the spot/ I can’t move my body, and my bones won’t stop / I love that music, I’m jumping about / All I’m doing is gonna scream and shout / I’m doing my thing / Enjoying that music all day long”

Gasworks/Colourbox

2009-05-31T08:43:00.000+01:00

An Interview with Laura Buckley about her artreview commission

Laura Buckley’s installations combine narrative and abstract video with sculpture and kinetics to produce immersive environments that have powerful sensory affects. Through a distinctive use of light movement and colour, and stylistic devices such as refraction, mirroring and repetition, her works engage with the legacy of formalist cinema and minimal art.

Her commission can be viewed here: http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A451387

Ellen Mara De Wachter: Could you briefly describe the project you have created for artreview.com

Laura Buckley: This project is a record of an installation. Four of the films are documentation of a work, and one (Colourbox with coloured light flashing out of a wooden structure) is part of the original work. The installation was a kinetic video work, where a film projection was refracted onto the walls, ceiling and floor using a Perspex triangular prism. So it’s a sculptural projection of film, and this project is documentation of this movement.

The layout of the project came about because I was watching some quicktime files that I minimized on my computer, so they were on the bottom menu and quite tiny, but still playing. I enjoyed them playing in that tiny capacity. So they are icons really, which refer to the computer as a method of exhibiting work. So it’s a play with scale and function. Its an interesting duality as I use the computer to make the work, and it has become a virtual space in which to show the work.

Ellen Mara De Wachter: You use light in quite an idiosyncratic way, making it visible as a medium and causing its dispersal in space. Is this transformation of something intangible into a medium a conscious decision or a happy accident? What is it about light that attracts you?

Laura Buckley: Light is everything really, its vision. And its magical. It’s the opposite of nothingness, it is focus, reality. As a child I was scared of the dark, it made me feel like I was disappearing. Dark is good, but when we are active (and visually aware) we have light. I’ve used reflective surfaces to bounce things around for a few years, so when I started making films it was a natural progression. Mirrors function like art, they reflect and represent things. When I project many films in a darkened but white walled space it creates this kind of twilight, and I hope that by encompassing the whole interior space with the movement of the image this creates a feeling of inclusion for the viewer. And the viewer becomes part of the work.

I ended up doing what I do in the overall installation as I was making a film. I used a ceramics revolving turntable as I was filming a Perspex structure, and placing a projector on the turntable led me to project onto and through an actual Perspex structure within the installation. So the structures exist within the films and also physically

Ellen Mara De Wachter: Your sculptures and installations also use movement and kinetics - some of your sculptures are revolving and they affect the route of a projection by casting reflections and prismatic distortions. Is the work influenced by the legacy of kinetic art?

Laura Buckley: There were 2 shows this past year at the Serpentine that I related to, Paul Chan and Anthony McCall. I identify strongly with this work as it is sculpting light. Entering such unreal and otherworldly spaces is a very moving experience. The McCall show was the closest I’ve come to a religious experience, and I enjoyed watching the viewers as much as the work, and how they interacted with the situation. It’s the same with Olafur Eliasson, the piece he did for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Phenomenological. Magic. Escapism.

Ellen Mara De Wachter: You have a very distinct vocabulary of materials: plywood, perspex, digital video. You gravitate towards industrial materials in a way similar to someone like Donald Judd, who chose to work with materials which had no art historical connotations. Is there a similar desire to distance yourself from materials which may be imbued with a sense of art historical or technical tradition?

I think that due to the legacy of Judd, John Cage and others, basic materials have become part of our current visual vocabulary. In art, architecture, furniture…
Plywood is interesting because it is wood that has been remodeled, but it retains its character in the grain. It is natural and has comforting qualities. I used to paint on wood, so in a way the structures have become the supports, and I’m applying the image through the projection. Its painterly, light painting. I had issues with film as a medium because of its transience. I was missing the physicality of the object, so by projecting onto a structure I’m grounding/anchoring the digital. You can still touch the work. At Chelsea Brian Chalkley always encouraged us to break things down and see the potential in everything, somehow the supports became the subjects of my films. That’s how I got started filming.

I hover between abstraction and representation, the structures are quite minimal, but the films are figurative. There’s a richness of imagery that I’m constantly trying to strip back, stripping back reality by representing it.

Ellen Mara De Wachter: Sound is an interesting feature of your films and installations - especially ambient sounds, which some people may have been tempted to eliminate. What role do you think sound plays in the works and is it a guiding part of editing and composing the work?

Laura Buckley: I think that sound is more immediate than the visual image.
When I started making films they were silent, it was strange to work with audio. Its about control, and letting everyday life feed into the work, which can be emotional. I grew to appreciate what I could do with sound gesturally. The impact of an action. Much of my film work involves the movement of materials, repetition and percussion.

Spectral Iconic Appearances

2009-05-31T08:39:00.000+01:00

An interview with Tony Chakar on de-sanctified icons, the space of catastrophe and the aftermath of the Lebanese civil wars.

Ellen Mara De Wachter: You tend to privilege writing as an artistic medium. Why is this? Deleuze mentioned in an interview that »Only writing is pure, speech is pure charm.« What do you think of that?

Tony Chakar: The relationship between text and image has been problematic for a long time, and at certain points it seemed that we were dealing with two absolutely separate entities, one related to concepts and ideas while the other was constantly relegated to the realm of the representational, with all that the idea of »representation« carries: the non-authentic, the false, the reflection, etc. It hasn’t always been such. Take the icon in the Orthodox tradition, for instance; in Arabic you’d never say »to draw an icon« (R/S/M, Arabic verb stem, editor), but rather icons are »written« (K/T/B). Icons are texts, albeit pictorial ones. Furthermore, the icon is not a representation of, it doesn’t represent, but rather it operates as the First Image of (hence their sanctity). Icons are embodiments, the same as in the Divine Nature of Christ being embodied in Christ the Man. This helps to blur the rigid distinction that I spoke of earlier, and it might help us (re)think this problematic issue differently. If we understand this theological example allegorically, and from the point of view of our (post)modern period, we might assert that everything which is truly modern is inscribed on the surface, on the surface of the things that surround us. Modernity’s authenticity lies on its surface, and it manifests itself as text-figures, as de-sanctified icons. In that sense this is what constitutes our world, the world in which we move, where we constantly shift positions, where we are surrounded by spectral iconic appearances; and in that sense there would be nothing particular about using text, it’s just the way the world is.
As for the distinction that Deleuze made, I wouldn’t be able to comment because I’m not really familiar with his work or his terminology.

De Wachter: Can you talk a little about the development of your ideas of the space of catastrophe. You have been working on this for some time now; what has been the trajectory of this thinking?

Chakar: The work on the time and space of catastrophe is an ongoing project on which I started working after the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2006. It is not really related to the attacks as such (and it certainly isn’t a »militant« work), but rather to the Lebanese civil wars of 1975-1990, and then only allegorically. I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s an attempt to reconstruct a certain world (and a certain time span) that has been lost to me. The reconstruction is never perfect; it may be melancholic but it is never nostalgic. Maybe it is an act of redemption – not of myself but of the world (another theological comparison would be with the 2nd-century Gnostics, who believed that it was not God’s task to redeem the faithful, but rather it was the faithful who were to redeem God).
During these past three years I’ve accumulated a lot of material, a lot of spectral iconic appearances. These are not descriptive of what the catastrophic was, of the way life was lived during that period. Rather, they act as »interruptions«, as disturbances in a certain continuum, like lightning is an interruption of the stormy night sky (une déchirure de la nuit). They are all held together by a certain force field, a gravitational field, a black hole if you will, which is the catastrophic.
What is paradoxical, at least for me, is that after almost three years, I’ve nothing really to show; this work never took a definitive form; if someone is interested I haven’t got any »object« (art object, video, publication, etc.) to show them. I only have the slideshows that I use to aid me in the talks that I give about the subject, but without what I say these are absolutely hermetic, and even meaningless. Maybe it’s better like this – not to have this work »solidify« in one way or the other, and maybe it’ll happen in the future when I’m ready, when the work itself is ready. We’ll see.

De Wachter: Your relationship with your city, Beirut, is fundamental to your artistic practice. You also teach architectural history (is this correct?). How do you enmesh theory, history and practice? Also you use literary sources – as in this project you will be using Shakespeare – in what ways do literature and the city cross over for you?

Chakar: It’s funny that you should use the term »artistic practice.« I always consider the work that I do as belonging first to the sphere of architecture. The architectural world doesn’t take this sort of work very seriously, so I always end up with artists, who are kind enough to provide me with the closest thing to acceptance I know. But it is still architecture.
I came across a citation from a French poem recently: »Je suis l’espace où je suis« by Noël Arnaud (»I am the space where I am«), which I think will fit quite nicely here. Beirut imposes its program on you – and I certainly wouldn’t be the only person who would say that. It’s a city built on extreme contradictions, which tend to explode in your face from time to time. Contradictions: which means that at times it can be very tender and graceful; but it’s the other face that I dread, the one which is spiteful, ugly and filled with hate. Maybe one of the dimensions of my work is to try and save Beirut’s kinder face, the one that makes me want to stay here. It’s not that easy, because it seems to me that this face shines best after moments of intense destruction, after the city attempts so vehemently to destroy itself.
The last part of your question takes me back to what I said about texts and images. To take the Shakespeare reference that I mentioned to you before, it’s funny how – for lack of a better term – you come across something which was written in 17th-century England in 21st-century Beirut; or perhaps you happen upon a situation that you’re living in a foreign text (spatially and temporally). The reference I intend to use is from Richard II, where Bushy, the queen’s servant, advises her to »look awry« in order to see the shadows of grief. Looking, looking obliquely, seeing, shadows and grief are all themes that I worked on previously; it’s uncanny how Shakespeare managed to put all these categories in one sentence! In any case, what concerns me in the immediate is how to remind a building of its forgotten future(s)... would that be possible, visually, by changing the conditions of looking and seeing? It’s a very delicate operation and I hope it’ll work.

De Wachter: You visit and revisit places and ideas in your work; how do you view this practice of the return, as a kind of haunting? What place do notions of ghosts and hauntings play in your work?

Chakar: Yes, I do revisit certain themes and ideas, sometimes obsessively; but I don’t think you can call that haunting. Maybe I have an obsessive personality, what do I know? What I know for sure is that I tend to linger, to look behind while moving forward... to paraphrase Baudelaire, I’d say that there is an eternity between the lived moment and the present moment. But that doesn’t have much to do with ghosts or haunting. I’d rather use the term specters, which is not easily interchangeable with the term ghosts. Specters do not haunt; I don’t think they even »will« or take over something. They’re just there, in this spectral universe we live in, hovering, lingering, distractedly waiting to be redeemed.

De Wachter: Can any space be catastrophic (virtually)? Or is it a question of history?

Chakar: There’s a distinction to be made: When I talk about the space and time of catastrophe, I mean the shifts, displacements and disruptions caused by catastrophic events on the space-time continuum that we usually qualify as »normality.« Normality can be considered a set of conventions and habitudes of course, and ultimately it doesn’t mean anything physical, or palpable (in the sense that you cannot qualify a space as being »normal,« it doesn’t make sense). Viewed from this angle, a space cannot be termed »catastrophic« either. But we can slightly shift our angle of vision, and ask: what are the elements that determine how people, in a certain place, experience space and time in a certain way, a specific way? The answer would certainly encompass the notion of normality I spoke of above, but it wouldn’t be enough. There are other elements which are not necessarily conscious and that play a large role. If you take the Lebanese wars for instance, and think about not what caused them or their physical results, but rather: how come the country is still in one piece? The amount of violence that was exerted in the direction of fragmenting Lebanon was enormous, and sustained over many years; but still, the country is there, in one piece; still, there is a certain notion of »Lebaneseness« (for lack of a better term) that manifests itself sporadically, and that has nothing to do with a conventional »national feeling« or »national heritage.« It bases itself, precisely, not on an ancient history, but rather on a shared lived experience (the experience of the catastrophic is only part of it) that is to be found in what we might call a latent space, a veiled space, an obscure space, I’m not quite sure. For better or worse, this experience hasn’t been formulated in political terms, in the sense that it has not yet been recuperated by the prevailing political discourses.

De Wachter: You seem to be suggesting a Bergsonian approach to buildings, positing that the building contains a flux of past and future events that constitute them today. Would you agree, or is there something else there?

Chakar: You can say that, but where do we go from here? As far as I’m concerned, this is a correct theoretical observation (which is not at all self-evident, by the way); but it only constitutes a basis for a non-banal architectural practice, a starting point. Another starting point – or let’s call it a shining point in this constellation of ideas – would be to insist that the experience of architecture is not only visual, it is tactile as well, an idea which disturbs the foundations of architecture as we know it, foundations which have been mainly developed in the Renaissance period. Not unrelated to that is the amazing analogy between Panofsky’s description of the space of the Renaissance perspective, how it is constituted by points linked together only by a Cartesian system, and how objects »float« in the space of Capitalism (the only force of gravity being »how much?«) as described by Georg Simmel. I can give other points as well; the fact remains that these ideas are not what constitutes a »practice« (even if understood in the broadest of ways). The practice lies in the space defined within these ideas.

De Wachter: Could you describe the project a little?

Chakar: I’m not sure how... I’ve never attempted to do something so absolutely digital before. But in view of what I said, I’d like to consider the space allocated to me as a surface, which I will try to disturb and interrupt in certain places, so that it acquires some topography, and so that people who would see it would get a glimpse of a shining figure-text in evanescence. We only see things just as they are disappearing, and the closer we look the farther they move back. I cannot promise that the result will coincide perfectly with my description, because my technological knowledge is really behind; but it doesn’t matter really. The discrepancy between what you aim for and the result you get (the discrepancy between the content and the form) creates a certain space between the two that is always interesting to investigate.
For this project I’ll be using some pictures I took in the streets of Beirut, along with others that come from the repertoire of digital images produced by Hizbollah for the reconstruction of the southern suburbs of Beirut (Hizbollah’s fief and the object of massive Israeli air raids in 2006). There’s one that I digitally manipulated in order to create an anamorphic image, something which in »real« space would require a sophisticated apparatus of mirrors and a lot of mathematical calculations.

This interview first appeared on artreview.com in September 2008, as a companion to the online project »Breathe« by Tony Chakar, curated by Ellen Mara De Wachter. It can be viewed here: http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A518908

This text is also available in German at: www.folioverlag.com/docs/springerin_08_04_editorial_inhalt.pdf