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/

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