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

No Offence Intended

I recently saw the exhibition child's play by collective no offence intended, part of the Manchester Free For Arts Festival 2011. It was brilliantly curated, large individual works coming together to a huge room from the perspective of a child. I don't currently have the time to describe the whole show, but here's a few points:

- the entire floor was covered in (polystyrene?) balls, which made you slide around the floor, relatively safely

- there was a plastic traffic bollard with a light inside it, which took on the air of a child's night light

- there were large sweet jars, which when you approached them, set off a 'burglar alarm'

- there were alcoholic slush puppies

I'm gutted I didn't make this earlier show by the same group, on the topic of religion:
http://www.blankmediacollective.org/events/details/recommends_no_offence_intended_blankspace_external_exhibition

Factory Factory

Factory Factory is a solo exhibition by artist Daniel Curtis, comprising of site-specific sculpture made in response to the Utrophia project space.

I saw Daniel Curtis' show Factory Factory this summer in London. It featured his usual raw material constructions, assembled with a level of care that redirects the possible conclusion that they're just junk. Some of the work has an industrial edge (see the piece made from huge sheets of sandpaper, centre) which I assume references the venue's previous existence as a factory. Other pieces (see top) seem ordered like a city or organism. The piece which seems to have involved the most process, in terms of actually fixing different materials together, is a large plastic sheet on a timber frame (bottom). This hint of potential function (it could be a shelter, a wall or a wing) has an element of excitement to it.

http://www.utrophia.net/events/FactoryFactory

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/

Design The Future

Design the future was the title of an exhibition showcasing the work of Micah Purnell. His work includes stickers and flyposters, which are found on walls and in freely distributed packets of club advertising material (e.g Don't panic) among other places.

Some of his work is popular, designed to sell at affordable prices in limited edition poster format, which indicates his profession as a graphic designer. The flyposters are designed in a similar style to night club advertising. It seems like clubbers are the target audience for this avenue of Purnell's work; certainly the nature of the art you make will heavily influence who looks at it. There are therefore two elements to his work; the actual design and then the 'political' act of placing his work in public places.

The most obvious design feature in the work is the use of maxims and sayings. The phrases are often spiritually concerned ('look after your soul') and sometimes biblical in origin ('you are more valuable than all the birds of the air'). As far as I understand it, the latter statement speaks in its original context about deprioritising the pursuit of possessions. This context seems readily applicable in the realm of advertising, although it is more likely to be interpreted as a statement of human worth.

Are his flyposters successful at 'redeeming advertising space'? Certainly they fit in and successfully take a fraction of advertising's audience - his guerrilla work has attracted much media attention. On one level many of the messages in his work are subtly thought provoking, and advertising that provokes 'non-commercial' thought is a kind of success. A critic may write the work off because of clear Christian references. However all artwork has a motive behind it and I respect his; as his website says - 'work as if you are working for someone you love'.

Also included in the exhibition were some not for sale pieces. I suspect they were not for sale due to potential copyright issues; two were photographs of high street shop window displays. Both displays featured near naked models. Purnell placed text over the images - some quotes from John Berger on the construction of  glamour, and some personal reflections on the effect of these images on young children. I think these direct responses were some of the strongest work, perhaps more suited to a strictly 'fine art' audience than his other, more design based works.

MicahPurnell.com

http://www.manchestersalon.org.uk/design-the-future-micah-purnell.html

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/

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

Freee at Eastside Projects

"The Freee art collective have been commissioned to spend a year working with Eastside projects to devise a range of innovative ways in which to generate and maintain a dissensual presence within the public sphere."


The Event:


I went to the opening evening of this year long commission, which consisted of a reading of Freee's manifesto-type document 'The Whistleblower's Pocket Guide to Dissent in the Public Sphere'. Basically the artists and visitors to the gallery (including me) stood in a circle and read the document out loud. I had printed the document beforehand and underlined parts that I agreed with; these were the only parts I spoke out loud. This was according to instructions. At 20 pages, it took 40 minutes to read. It was only a small group, less than ten, but it was still noisy. It took concentration to follow the words with people in and out of time with each other. I found it interesting, having first read it on my own, to now hear the authors (and others) read it aloud. It made it more believable.

I got a lot more from it since going away and reading the vorticist manifesto, 'blast', of which it is basically a re-writing. Freee update the swearing and use a lot of words I'd never heard before like 'biopolitics' and 'aesthete', apparently borrowed from thinkers like Hardt & Negri, Rancierre and Badiou, to underline their political theme. It sounds intelligent, and angry.

It seems to call for better art, and better artists. Better art seems to be defined as that which is radical, which doesn't allow market forces to commodify it. I'm not exactly sure where I stand with it.

Excerpts from 'The Whistleblower's Pocket Guide...':

"The self organized alterglobal anti-capitalist resistance to the professionalization, marketization and bureaucratization of art does not mean a new wave of amateurism, a politically inflected affection for kitsch or a naive defence of outsider art and the tastes of uneducated people, as some of you will say. Nor does it mean being aesthetically or intellectually shoddy. It means art courageous enough to be monstrous to its core. And this means, among other things, not accepting the official knee-jerk denigration of amateurism, kitsch, the outsider, the uneducated, the shoddy and the monstrous."


"We are against the ethical victimization of the multitude, as we are against their financial exploitation, violent repression, political deligitimation, cultural denigration, medical ghettoization, geopolitical reterritorialization, and educational instrumentalization.


It is not necessary to be an outcast, to be unkempt or poor, to be an artist, but it is necessary to be in league with the outcast, unkempt and poor to be a revolutionary artist of the monstrous multitude. It is possible to be rich and handsome and, at the same time, to be an artist, but to be an artist who takes their cues from wealth and glamour is to dissolve art into globalization. Art is nothing to do with commodities, spectacle and (celebrity)"

Response:

I find with Freee that I can't pin down their exact position on things, and I don't think they'd agree with much of my thinking, but there always seems to be space for me within their work. Maybe there's a simple explanation in something I saw written about the vorticist manifesto, explaining that it contradicts itself by adopting opposite sides to blur single perspectives. Which is postmodern pluralism isn't it?

At the time of the spoken choir, I came away with an odd feeling. As soon as the radical manifesto ended, everyone became really polite to each other; chatting, having a drink, thanking people for coming. It was a bit like being at church. Everyone speaks a creed together, something hard to believe, and then afterwards everyone is really nice to each other. I came away wondering if Freee really believe their manifesto, or if they don't have to because it's art. I wonder if what they say they think actually influences every bit of their life. Which might be unreasonable for me to ask. I came up against a similar idea soon afterwards at 'Object Lessons', an exhibition at Islington Mill, Salford. The show displays everyday objects (chairs, mugs, carpets) from the Working Class Movement Library. It's only when you look closely at the stuff that you realise it's all covered in Marxist sayings and images, or linked to Marxist organisations. The objects were originally a couple's personal collection, which totally engulfed their house and life.

Blast manifesto
Object Lessons
Eastside Projects

Tether: DAY ZERO at Castlefield Gallery

I went the Day Zero event today, and stayed for the evening talks. I thought it was an exciting, experimental event and I've never done so much networking before. It's the talks that I want to talk about. Artist collective Tether had invited four people, all artists I think, to give really informal talks about any topic that interests them. Apparently the original intended reference to American lifestyle seminars, where audience members stand up and shout out what's on their mind, was slightly lost. It ended up more like show and tell for Artists.

Joanne Masding discussed 'bugs' that she likes, with images projected. Her particular favourites included green shield bugs, which you might see in your garden (below, I think this is the same image she used).

 c.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

She said she liked to imagine what it might be like to be an insect, and referred to ants which work together like a 'super organism' and know their roles. I recognised this idea or desire from Christianity; in the Bible it says 'in Christ we who are many form one body', and I think it is meant more than metaphorically.

Tom Ireland spoke about his enthusiasm for the Apollo space program, which put men on the moon. He described it as being a massive thing which was beyond his comprehension. Despite the program's (1961-1975) 'relative historical proximity', he explained the inadequacies of his experience of it via the internet - 'reduced to images'. I found his genuine awe for an idea, something he had never seen, really interesting and perhaps related to utopia, religion or the sublime.

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/
http://tether.org.uk/
http://www.joannemasding.com/

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