Go Robson Go!

Robson Cezar, who I worked with for the Eat, Use, Destroy ;) exhibition, has just appeared on the front page of the Internationl Herald Tribune.

The image shows Robson holding one of his bottle-top pieces, featuring the word 'strike'. He was at the time curating an outdoor exhibition in support of the Occupy London protests, despite previous insistence that his work itself is not politically concerned. The open air show was entitled 'everyone is an artist', in homage to Joseph Beuys. Participation meant that you had to hold or wear your artwork. During the event Robson also spent time creating bottle top pictures with participants.

In terms of Cezar's practice, this front page is a gift - an artwork engaging with the strikes has been absorbed into the main medium through which the strikes are perceived, the media. Is it opportunistic however, a jump onto the Occupy bandwagon? I'm under the impression that some see polite protest as an affront to 'real' protest - the angry protest that gets things changed in truly dire situations. I think Cezar's project was earnest, and characteristicly playful, touched as ever with his Brazilian identity. I'd like to think there's a place for polite, as well as more radical, protest.



http://www.gorobsongo.com/

http://londonist.com/2011/11/everyone-is-an-artist-at-finsbury-square.php

Art Gallery 'X'mas Cards

Several galleries sent me e-cards or messages this Christmas, via their mailing lists. There was a mad one from aas (an ephemeral performance art collective, see http://aasgroup.net/) see below. Charlie Smith (the London gallery) included an image of Christ by painter Gavin Nolan (see bottom). I believe the painting features in the book The Face of Jesus by Edward Lucie-Smith, which I might try to take a look at. The thing that strikes me is that it's ugly. The geometric lines are interesting, part of it almost suggests a star of David. I could also see the lines as drawing a visual bridge between the portrait and the viewer.

Edward Lucie-Smith - small art is polemical!

I didn't see this show (California's a bit of a way) but heard about it through Charlie Smith, the London gallery. An exhibition of small artworks, claiming reaction against 'huge art' - born as abstract expressionism in the USA during the 1940s. Images and text available at the link below.

Masien and Mehra, Museum Collection (Christian Laboutin), 2010

http://www.garboushian.com/exhibitions/polemically_small.php

Eat, Use, Destroy :) / American Bodies

This is an overview of the exhibitions Eat, Use, Destroy :) and American Bodies, both at Islington Mill, Salford in October 2011. Eat, Use, Destroy :) was a group show which I curated as part of Free For Arts Festival. It's focus was described as follows:

An exhibition looking at how we form consumer relationships with objects, images and people. But not always to negative effect. Featuring fine art as well as graphic design and documentary photography by artists from Manchester, London and Dundee.

Micah Purnell, Desire, 2011

Micah Purnell's work is independently motivated propaganda, which often attacks consumerist values. One of his posters both hung in the exhibition space and was pasted to the outside of the building (above), which is the natural habitat for his work.

Jenny Evans, In The Night I, 2011

Jenny Evans' beautiful, painstaking paintings are counterpoised to work such as Purnell's. Indistinct objects are endowed with human connotations, treading a line between respect for a fragile humanity and the objectivity of contempt. In the night 1 presents as a screwed up pair of knickers for example, which could denote any element of human physicality ranging from the fully fulfilled to the awkward or broken.

Clockwise from top left, work by Celina Teague, Robson Cezar and Josh Young.

American Bodies is an exhibition of the work of by David Wojtowycz. Ink drawings portray men posing, their apparently naked lower halves blacked out with gloss black paint. The show is very slickly curated. The usual glass doors of the gallery are replaced with wooden walling, the internal surface of which is painted gloss black. This creates a formal relationship between the whole gallery space and the paper works featuring blacked out squares.

David descibed the show to me as being about the 'death of desire'. This statement alone makes for an interesting relationship between the two shows. The subject matter draws on 70's gay pornography. The crux is that that imagery can no longer be presented in the way he fondly remembers it, due to the historical knowledge relating to the emergence of AIDS.

The show seems to be very personal, and honest about the ambivalencies felt for the imagery alluded to. The 'self-censorship' and context related issues surrounding some of the works seems to relate closely to some of my own work included in Eat, Use, Destroy :) (below). The paintings are actually photographs of genuine adverts, traced over in paint. The personal ambivalence in this case is that both the adverts' subjects are people very close to me.

Josh Young, Acrylic paint on photographs, 2011.

American Bodies is still on throughout October - see Islington Mill website below for visiting details.
Eat, Use, Destroy :) also featured work by Cully, Matthew Randle and David Shamiri.
All images - copyright of the artists.


http://islingtonmill.com/
http://www.freeforartsfestival.co.uk/

Chelsea College Degree Show

I went to the opening of this year's degree show at Chelsea College. Here are a few of my favourite artists/works:

Natalie Bays recreated a lettings agency - 'Hello Homes' - in the college. This existed both as an actual office space and as a performance in which she was the agent. The premise was that parts of the college site, in its prime central London location, could be let. This would raise money to deal with the cuts made to art funding. I like the piece as a proposition for alternative uses of educational spaces, although the use of a typical estate agency is probably not geared towards that conclusion. Similar in some ways to my recent project with Archipelago collective in which we created a 'consulate' for the Cornerhouse.

http://www.becomingasomeone.blogspot.com/




James White. Two cars chained together, remotely operated to pull against each other in a tug of war. I think there is theory behind it, but I just like the spectacle and simplicity of it.

http://www.jamespaulwhite.co.uk/

Kelly Jackson. Her text works are pretty bleak, to say the least. I don't think I share the kind of world view that would probably lie behind these (e.g 'life is meaningless'). But if you can't suggest any substantial truth or meaning to life, which I would attempt via Christianity, then I respect the intellectual integrity that accepts the implications of that.



http://www.kellyjacksonart.co.uk/

Izabel Engelbrecht presented some formally concerned pieces. A heavy looking cylinder of unknown material and a zig-zag piece of aluminium appear industrial in origin. They are actually painstaking constructed; the cylinder has been formed from waste fibres from a workshop in a process which involved the artist crushing the material with her feet. The aluminium has been poured into a hand built mould. There is therefore a strong personal connection between work and artist which I didn't immediately detect. This links this work to Engelbrechts other, unpresented, work which involves her own image (see below).



http://izabelengelbrecht.com/

Self taught artist / religious artist

Maria Walsh compares the position of the self taught artist to that of the religious artist (via joninbetween.blogspot.com) :


"In the great age of faith, religious themes provided a ready made and universal image-repertoire for artists to draw on. To be a religious artist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a time when the universal values of faith are being challenged, is to embark on a personal spiritual quest. Images produced as a result of this exploration will undoubtedly resonate with the religious beliefs of others, but, unlike the universalism of a classical artist like Raphael, the vision of the contemporary religious artist also runs the risk of being a lone cry in the desert. This conflicting position is a little like the one occupied by the self-taught artist in relation to the contemporary art world establishment. On the one hand, because of the seeming naivete of his formal skills, the self-taught artist is marginalized, but, on the other hand, he is valued for the very things which make him different from the mainstream, i.e. the simplicity and sponteneity with which he communicates his internal world."

Pact

Pact (2) Jenny Evans, 2010

This is a response to work by Jenny Evans, originally exhibited in Bones, Market Gallery London, June 2010.

Pact is a pair of paintings. Each depicts a valentine steak; meat sliced most of the way through and folded open, giving an almost heart shaped symmetry. The paintings reflect on human agreements: promises or pacts, and physical relationality. The combination of promises and flesh recalls, among other things, the Torah. It records that to seal a covenant participants would cut an animal into pieces, place them on the ground and then walk between the pieces with joined hands. The Hebrew term for covenant is Karath Berith - 'to cut a covenant'.

The paintings are roughly human-sized and stand on the floor. They are placed facing each other across the room; a further symmetry which the viewer disturbs by walking between them. They are figurative paintings yet they are attempting to make you aware of both how they relate to each other and your own spatial relationship with them; like a piece of minimalist sculpture might.

The pairings suggested in the work’s title, and the actual appearance of the flesh, are strongly sexual in nature. This is affirmed by the words of the co-exhibited neon sign You Made Us Male and Female. In this work a biblical quote ('male and female he created them') is subtly altered into second person narrative; appropriating or paraphrasing the text into a personal context. The direction of the statement is thereby altered, so that the viewer is given access to part of a conversation rather than necessarily being addressed. This idea could also be applied to the paintings. Sexuality is presented here as beautiful, risky - cutting yourself open, damaging the autonomy of your own body to facilitate something else. It's worth noting that in Christian theology, physical sexuality can be analogous to the way people relate to other people and things in a more general sense.

I like to see Evans' use of flesh as semi political in a 'the personal is political' sense. It seems to say that even if materially similar, we are, at a vital level, violently divided. Her feelings about the ideas presented seem almost uncomfortably direct. The paintings are specific, purposeful, asking us to think about how we, as meat, relate to other meat. No political mediators, just the fact of human interrelationality. It seems to me to relate not only to personal relationships but much broader ideas including those human relationships contained and shaped by economic, official and other communal structures.

http://jenny-evans.com/

Hadas Tapouchi at BLANK SPACE

still from The Salute (= Hebrew = Moel-Yad). Hadas Tapouchi

I saw this video exhibited at Blankspace in Manchester recently. Unless I've totally misunderstood it, the artist is just plain wrong. It was exhibited with a similar description to the one which follows (emphasis added):

This presentation, an analysis of Israeli society, is a social experiment that provides an insight into Israeli past and present...


...The man stands in the center of Tel Aviv in 2009 and observes those passing by; men, women, and children of Sephardic and Ashkenazi backgrounds, arabs & jews...


...This presentation examines the ignorance of people towards an image that suggests a negative connotation, but does not in fact present so explicitly...


Although the observers are unsure of the true meaning of the presentation, they are inclined to follower their instinct in feeling that this presentation is an offence to them as Jews. The viewers show a type of satisfaction in being able to express their anger and hatred toward this symbol when given an external explanation by another observer. They express their frustration and feel it is validated.


It is interesting to discover to what extent people are loyal to symbols who's origin are ancient and stems from their faith, but have undergone a social interpretation.


This soldier is engaging in the act which we identify as the solute to Hitler, but in fact, it is a solute which originated in the Old Testament of the Bible in the Book of Nehemiah. It describes the audience reaction at the words of the Torah ready by Ezra "Ezra blessed the Great God and the people responded by saluting and saying Amen".


This salute, which was practiced by the Romans, was later adopted by Italy during the fascist regime and then by Nazi Germany. Due to its use in Nazi Germany, the salute is now identified with the Nazi regime and other fascist regimes. This form of salute is also popular with Arab terrorist organizations, and with large military militias such as Hezballah and Hamas. For these reasons salute is prohibited in most countries and in some places, its use is punishable by law.


The video shows a young man in a traditional European military uniform, standing in a public place, holding a salute. He looks straight ahead and says nothing. People around him can be heard asking him to leave, asking him what he's doing.


The artist seems to be trying to ignore the actual current cultural meaning of this particular salute by making a reference to one ambiguous hand gesture in the Torah. Her claim that it does not explicitly refer to Nazis is undermined by the fact that she put the man in a German - style military uniform, obviously anticipating a negative reaction. She also talks about people's satisfaction in being able to express their anger. I thought the public in the video were actually quite polite, a policeman asks the artist and man in costume to 'please leave' to avoid upsetting people. No one in that market square knew the artist's point, they thought she was just trying to upset them. And she was, wasn't she, to prove her point?

I'm willing to be proved wrong here...

Cornerhouse podcast

Myself and two other members of art collective Archipelago are interviewed in this podcast by Sarah Leech for Cornerhouse. We talk about our exhibition, 'Consulate of Cornerhouse'. Our section is roughly between the 16 and 22 minute-marks.

http://cornerhousemcr.posterous.com/this-weeks-podcast-the-best-of-berlinale

Contaminated Minds And Contagious Souls

I went to see Nway Htut's show 'Contaminated Minds And Contagious Souls' at Neoartists 'mini' Gallery in Bolton. I was interested by the title. It was advertised as taking inspiration from Buddhism and the culture of the artist's birthplace (Burma) using an illustrative, manga influenced style.

I got to speak to the artist. She said it was the last of her fine art work as she now plans to focus on a career in illustration. Her hair short as it was shaved recently while she was a temporary Buddhist nun. Before becoming Buddhist, she said she was first involved with Wicca and then Christianity while in Burma.

Contagious souls, 2010, acrylic on canvas.

The piece which I thought was strongest, and most clearly carried the title themes, was contagious souls. I read it as a fairly literal illustration of people influencing the contents of their neighbours' heads. The interesting part is the row of blanked-out faces. Are they empty because they've reached nirvana? Or empty because they're pure, newborn babies, or because they've been brainwashed? Nway says that symbolism wasn't consciously included during it's making.

"before becoming a nun and going into a meditation centre, my mind seemed to be influenced by anything and it have been reckless for years, its feeling so weak.. and I can say that the meditation and Buddha's teachings have taught me quite a lot how I should handle my mind and life..learning those Dhamma  (Buddha's teachings are called Dhamma) .. make me think about the concept behind Contaminated minds and contagious souls.."
(Htut)

This statement makes the point that her mind used to be 'influenced by anything', but it is not anymore since hearing (being influenced by) the Dhamma. I found this confusing until I listened to a link Htut suggested to me ('Can you afford not to meditate?'). There seems to be a contradiction between being skeptical of different truth claims, but then accepting one. However the Buddhist teacher portrays a Buddhism which seems almost nihilistic:

"don't believe something just because it sounds reasonable"
"don't believe something because it agrees with what you already believe, what you think"

"what is easier - to believe or not believe?...to believe is easier!"

"I think my nature loves freedom...I don't want to take any orders...maybe that's why I became a monk"

"from that day I loved Buddha because he told me not to believe him. You don't even have to believe Buddha...you have to practice and find out for yourself that this is true"
(Sayadaw U Jotika)

He seems to say that rather than making a truth claim, like other religions, Buddhism is different. Maybe Buddhism's claim to truth is more nihilism-friendly because it doesn't relate to a god, or gods.

http://neoartists.co.uk/

Debate

This is an account of an art project entitled 'Debate' which I was involved in at Speakers' Corner, London, on Sunday 21st November.

The event was organised by London based artist group The Dogfood Idea. It involved a group of artists going to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and conducting an 'exhibition' by engaging in the etiquette/process/traditions of Speakers' Corner. My contribution was to conduct a questionnaire, which I filled in as a I asked members of the public questions. 

Questions included 'So what are you doing here today?', 'What is most important to you, or what do you love most?' and 'Would you like to ask me any questions?'. The questions essentially were aimed to open up conversation. At the end of the questionnaire I would offer it to the subject to keep. Most people were quite willing to talk to me, and most kept the questionnaire. The event was mainly focused over a one hour period, so I didn't speak to a huge number of people. 

The questionnaire also included some images of my photographic artworks, so I came away with some interesting comments on them. Some people were pretty indifferent to them, one guy criticised an image's ISO (I explained it was taken with a camera phone). Because of the atmosphere at Speakers' Corner, other people would gather round and sometimes join the discussion while I was talking to someone, which was good, and wouldn't have happened somewhere else.

I think my key interests were speaking to strangers, (more exoteric?) public responses to my (photographic) artwork, the questionnaire as an art form and exploring personal versus institutional validations of my artwork (i.e. what did I get out of the project, and what did anyone get out of my artistic contribution?). It was good to go outside, practice 'art', and to discuss with strangers. It was sometimes like an art college crit or tutorial. I think this owed to the Speakers' Corner tradition. The questionnaire format seemed like a good platform to exhibit my work. I often feel like the explanations I give when I'm discussing my work is actually part of the work, I like the idea of personal encounters as artworks.

The event curators/organisers commented that Speakers' Corner is currently dominated by (Male) Christian and Muslim orators and assumed that the artists' participation would make for some alternative contributions. I think that an interesting element of my involvement in the project then, is the fact that I am a Christian, although I didn't discuss this with the curators. I included the following references in my project proposal for Debate:

• I am currently working as part of a collective called Archipelago, which has received a commission from Cornerhouse, Manchester as part of their projects program. The project is due to go ahead in January/February 2011. Part of my contribution involves a questionnaire.
• Medical questionnaires (I am currently training to become a healthcare professional, and use questionnaires with patients).
• Evangelism. The artist who brought this project to my attention once told me that my approach to art was 'evangelical'.

The 'evangelism' inspiration really spanned two ideas. Firstly the idea of wanting to take art to everybody, and secondly the phenomenon of approaching strangers on the street, which also happens within Christian evangelism. 

http://www.thedogfoodidea.com/ (information, pictures etc under 'newsblog')

Luci Metcalfe interview - 'God is unfashionable'

Click me, I'm a link to an interesting 2007 Luci Metcalfe interview.

True Platitudes

This is the installation I did with a group, Archipelago, in October 2010. It was part of the Free For Arts Festival. The group includes five people - some are full time artists, others are involved in sociology research or healthcare. This was the first art outcome we had realised as a group and in a way it was practice for our larger upcoming project, a small commission for Cornerhouse.

It's basically printed cards displayed in an empty retail space window, lit from behind. We met before hand and came up with the actual words together. Some were invented, some borrowed from other texts and some of them were combinations/alterations. It was a bit of a homogenisation process - because we all have different views and ideas in the group, there's no discernible direction to the phrases. I contributed a couple of phrases which (earnestly?) articulated something I really think, but I was almost giving up authorship by putting them with other phrases which made it all look ironic.

Liverpool Biennial

I went to Liverpool for the first day of the Biennial and this is a slightly jazzed up version of what went in my notebook:

John Moore's painting prize

'Protest' - Nicholas Middleton

Looks like a history painting, with a crowd of people carefully arranged in chaos. Although it also bears the style of a painting made from photographs. This contrast is also seen in the detail of a 'crime scene' sticker shown next to an engraving on the 19th century monument. It makes the G9 protest scene look beautiful, which makes me think of freee - 'protest is beautiful'. There's all sorts of people - a grinning couple, business women, lots who look like passers by which have become involved, and lots with cameras.

'Somewhere Between Prayer and Agenda' - Cara Nahaul

Painting presents a mingled body of people, who look like largely undefined Muslims in prayer. The loose, ambiguous style playing with our idea of 'Muslim' as a visual category (cues in painting include hats and beards)?

'Spectrum Jesus' - Keith Coventry

Hard to see the portrait because the whole painting is dark blue. It's also glossy paint, and in a glazed frame. I thought this was the whole point of the work - a literal portrait of Jesus, yet you can't actually see who he is etc. Then I read the wikipedia entry on Coventry and realised that the painting is one of a set, that forms a rainbow. It also relates to fakes and forgeries - it is itself based on a forged painting. I suppose it suggests that religious stories and texts are unreliable on their own.

As a child I was a Roman Catholic. Every Sunday morning at seven o'clock I had to go to church where I had a few minutes to look at the texts that I had to read for the service. The image of Jesus is like a container for all sorts of ideas. Maybe subconsciously I thought of theTurin Shroud as well, how the image is just barely visible - which itself is meant to be a fake. It's not a natural thing, but yet, I'm neutralising it as an image by making monochromes.

(Coventry quote from Wikipedia)

I think the phrase  'Jesus is like a container' Coventry uses is very accurate in describing the multitude of theories, theological and otherwise, that have been applied to Christ. It suggests a blank sheet to which you bring your own ideas, which relates formally to his monochrome paintings, and also presents a popular postmodern(?) idea. You could also see a container as something which holds its various contents together.

Other than that I saw Freee's window installations - commercial style window-sized stickers with their own slogans. Most of them were old pieces, so I thought it looked like a 'greatest hits' selection. I actually bumped into one of freee (Beech) on the train on the way back and apparently he'd said something similar to the organiser - 'you're the first person to give us an album, we've only has singles before'.

Forum 2010

I've just come back from Forum, a national conference for Christian students. Its five days of camping and seminars, or brainwashing you could say. There are a couple of points about it I want to put down.

1 - Singing

There were probably about 1000 students there, and in the mornings and evenings we all sang together in The Arena, a giant tent. Sometimes at the end of a song the band would stop playing, but the singing would carry on for the last few lines. Listening to all those voices together was like listening to howling wolves. But different to the 60,000 Green Day concert I went to a few years ago. Singing the Christian songs, everyone was singing because they believed every word, not because they liked the music. So you actually felt like you were all together, like a pack or an organism. If I'd stop singing to listen it was like standing inside a giant set of lungs and listening to it breathe.

2 - Dan Curtis

The event had an artist in residence, Dan Curtis. He had been given an open-walled section tent section to make work in, which I thought was a difficult situation to start in. He found discarded building materials, originally from the centre's Victorian manor house, and used these to make the sculpture over a 4 day period. They were returned afterwards. The materials were carefully arranged into small groupings, or miniature constructions, taking visual reference points and lines from the space. Despite its highly formal nature, I was keen to focus on it as a gestural, conceptual piece; Dan spoke of several conceptual themes within the making process. Materials were examined and contrasted; cheap instant materials like tape and the carpet (event carpeting is disposable) against much older architectural fragments. I was interested in the time and care that had been given to the objects. Despite looking at a lot of modern art, this is the first time that I have actually understood something as being genuinely affirmative of the material. Looking back at photographs of the work let me see it more in terms of the composition; I might have a more two dimensional mind.

Another post on Dan Curtis' residency:

http://garethleaney.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/dan-curtis-at-forum-2010/

BLOOD TEARS FAITH DOUBT

I went to see 'BLOOD TEARS FAITH DOUBT' at the Courtauld Institute. The artworks had been selected from two sources - the Courtauld collection (old) and the Arts Council collection (new). They are displayed dimly lit, on dark painted walls - grey, blue, turquoise. They must have been following the National Gallery's show 'The Sacred Made Real' earlier in the year, which used similar presentation. The resulting atmosphere feels more like a museum than a gallery, maybe an attempt to see the older devotional works in something of their original religious context.

The work that most interested me was Siobhan Hapaska's St Christopher. It's a waxwork man sitting on the floor against a wall. He has tanned skin, long black hair and a beard. He wears a purple robe and his legs appear amputated at the knee. I remember a friend seeing a semi-animatronic waxwork and thinking it was real. I was amazed, to me it was clearly not a real person. But St. Christopher is still, and looking down; to me it is very close to seeming real. He has hair everywhere; his chest, arms, even his fingers. It's the opposite of the idealised religious image. That for me is what was surprising. St. Christopher wasn't a biblical figure, but in my head I generalised him as a religious man along with those who wrote the Bible. So to see him as a real man brought that home, that all the people in those ancient stories, were hairy people like us. Obviously I knew that, but encountering St. Christopher made me think about it. I think the work's primary function in the exhibition was actually to represent doubt - apparently the Catholic Church doubt historical details of his existence. Doubt is also inherent to the wax medium - is the representation real?

St. Christopher is paired with Caravaggio's depiction of Thomas; putting his finger in Christ's wound to confirm his reality. The work is intended to convince the viewer too - Thomas' other hand reaches out of the canvas, inviting you to touch Christ's wound by proxy. The pairing of works does provide interesting links to think about or discuss, although the doubt of Christ and doubt of a historical christian are different.

The rest of the exhibition is simillar; thematic links are thoughtfully presented by the curators. It's jarring to look at the old works next to the new though. I found myself comparing them rather than looking at works in their own formal contexts. I thought that the show's themes could have been better explored by being more focused, and using fewer artists.

I spoke to Hannah L. Fuller, one of the curators. She said they had questioned their position in devising the show, given that none of them are 'religious', although one of the team reported a 'religious re-awakening' following the project. I asked the reason for their subject choice. She said that it had emerged partly from their surprise at the number of contemporary works in the Arts Council collection with religious content or overtones.

Thanks to the MA students for their work curating the show.

Links:
Blood Tears Faith Doubt info - Courtauld Institute
The Sacred Made Real review (p.5-7) - Jenny Evans

Incursions in the Knowledge Capital

This image is from the exhibition 'Incursions in the Knowledge Capital' by Ultimate Holding Company. The phrase 'they might have it more abundantly' was a faded inscription which was re-guilded by the UHC Collective. The show was billed as re vitalising a derelict space. It's interesting that they refurbished the lettering selectively. The original, as in the old King James translation:

The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

refers to Christ as the only way. The phrase now suggests the all-consuming way of consumerism. Or maybe a question: 'they might have it more abundantly but..'. Churches are used for exhibitions all the time, usually with a lot of badly thought out references within the shows. The use of the Chapel here seems to make sense. The other works refer to the workings of a city system driven by economics. The Chapel appears as a relic which doesn't fit into that system any more; the perfect site for a critical appraisal of it.

www.uhc.org.uk

King & Queen Sub-Creators

These are my notes from Jerram Barrs' talk on 'Christianity and the Arts'
(audio available via theologynetwork.org)

He says that the closer you look at God's creation (i.e through a microscope), you just see new layers of beauty and perfection, compared to imperfection in what we have created. He gives the example of polished steel (up close it would have flaws). He notes that we (Christians) are forbidden to be ascetics - to deny the value of creation. The value of creation is one reason that being an artist is valuable, and not less spiritual than another vocation. The mentality that art is an extra add on to serious work like evangelism is a heresy[?!].

''For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer''

'' And God saw that it was good''

So we must appreciate creation [although obviously this may not require art or artists]. We are called to be 'sub creators'. Psalm 8 - to be human is more glorious than anything else in creation. Revelation 21:24 - Kings will take glory (and cultures?) into heaven?

As we cannot create, all we can do is play with what god has given us [everything is play?]. 'Art needs no more justification than food or sex' - Rookmaaker. [Does this apply to institutional contemporary art?].

We are kings and Queens of earth, under God. We know we live in a broken world, and our calling as artists is to work against the fall, and to resist it. The (Christian) farmer makes food to feed people (rather than just to make money); this is their way of dealing with the fall.

Plastique Fantastique at 1-2-3-4

Plastique fantastique is a variable art collective, described by the artists (David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan) as 'a mythopoetic fiction - an investigation of aesthetics, the sacred and politics - produced through comics, performances, text, installations and shrines and assemblages'. I see them as part hyper-fashionable, part appealing to teenage subculture and part mock religion. 'Inversion Ritual (against the Plague that is Capital)' was a performance at 1-2-3-4, Brighton in 2009. Other artists included Martin Creed and Bob and Roberta Smith.

The performance's script notes that it occurs in a deconsecrated church. During the 'ritual' a 'demon' is summoned, via projection screen (see below). The demon rants angrily about the viewers 'stupid habits and ROO-TEENS, your vegan-campers and organic-converses (I DESPISE your socalled life-styles)'. It chews up pop music/ culture references and spits them back out - 'So, all you Beyonces and baby dolls, and lucy loos, you independent ladies, wave your hands in the air like YOU JUST DON’T CARE'. 

Its a clever way of relating to culture, appropriating a religious format allows them to transform viewers into members (religious angle) or participants (art angle). It also allows, through use of ritual or worship, the speech to not have any particular point. Although political, it has no propositions like a manifesto would ('I HAVE NO MESSAGE'), its just focused opposition, anti-worship of capitalism. The speech is full of repetition, which suits it's content ('Again and again and again you will do the same thing'). I didn't see the performance but just looking at the script, its pretty dark.

The least hopeless part of the script is not spoken by the Demon, but one of the summoners:

'Goods will become SHADOWS!'

Plastique Fantastique

Inversion Ritual script

1-2-3-4

Freee at Zoo

[italics re-posted from freee.org.uk]














Following an elaborate series of scripted ceremonies, Freee and a small group of invited ‘witnesses’ took to the streets of Cambridge to rename a selection of the city’s streets along a route from the Court to Kings College.

Existing place names such as King Street, Jesus Street and New Street are renamed by the group through secular ‘christening’ speech acts temporarily occupying the streets of Cambridge with the names, anecdotes and legacy of those 18th century activists who were inspired by the French Revolution to engage in radical political movements in the UK.

The script divided the participants into ‘chalk-holders’ and ‘witnesses’, the former responsible for writing the new names of the places on a blackboard held near to the existing place name; the latter responsible for acknowledging the renaming and proclaiming their assent to the new name in a spoken exchange amounting to a secular christening.

Having studied with Dave Beech from FREEE for a little while, I hardly dare to say anything about this, because I know I'd get rinsed! I suppose its quite neat that they can't actually rename the streets, they have to just make the gesture, because obviously once a street is named after something the meaning of the name is forgotten. Naming a street 'Jesus Street' could probably undermine christianity as much as promoting it.

The weird red hats give it some sort of currency(?) as a performance, I don't know if they have significance but they must have had balls of steel to wander round wearing them!

Its appropriating Christianity in the loose western (rather than religious) sense in that it uses 'christening' as a cultural reference point to explain what they're doing. You wonder why they couldn't have just said 'naming' though? I suppose christening suggests a link to something greater (union with God?) which maybe in this case is something else.

The post goes on to say that through the presence of 'witnesses' to the event, a 'temporary counterpublic' was created, which seems to be the most important thing. I get the feeling that its a really clever link between participatory art and radical politics..