s o m e t i m e s i t s n o w s i n a p r i l

This week we managed to leave NYC for the first time since being here (well, sort of – Jim went to Philly a few weeks ago); we went to Dia: Beacon.  Leaving the city was a really nice experience, the “city” of Beacon is about 80 miles north of NYC, after departing from Grand Central the train follows the bank of the east river dipping in and out of small towns seemingly trapped in semi-rural obscurity until eventually dropping us off in Beacon; a very sweet place with bizarre trinket shops, many churches and one main street that we visited for a post-gallery snack and beer late in the afternoon.  Dia was brilliant; the building itself has to be one of the largest galleries we’ve ever been in; the space was superb and seemingly endless – in what building can you fit not one but five Richard Serra pieces?? Dia: Beacon occupies a former Nabisco box printing factory on the banks of the Hudson River and presents Dia’s collection of art from the 1960s to the present as well as special exhibitions, new commissions, and public and education programs.

It was really great to see so many important and interesting works in one building, the fact that there are institutions as large as Dia that are dedicated solely to art of the last 50 years really gives you the impression that the present matters, and current works will eventually have a place to exist. So many galleries dedicate vast halls and astronomical amounts of money to art of the distant past that it is often difficult to see a way forward through the fog of preservation. It was very cool to see some Robert Smithson works IRL; although one may have seen these works a thousand times in photographs the pilgrimage to the real object is a rewarding one, and one that will linger in memory longer than a poorly photocopied image on an essay hand out. We certainly felt that we were ticking works off the list of ‘art you should see’. Its always wonderful encountering large scale Serra work, we had a great surprise when we walked down a short flight of stairs, through an unassuming door and into a gigantic room with four of these last pieces in a row. The sculptures, from the Torqued Ellipse series, are magnificent; confronted with such large objects one traces the boundary of their perimeter sizing the object up against oneself. The rusted iron slab leers over you with a peculiar combination of sincerity and safety; entering the ellipse one is offered a private space where the leering slabs of iron become graceful arcs that gesture towards the space above the sculpture. After encountering the work in two different ways you start to develop an odd relationship with the sculpture; leaving the ellipse the scale still causes it to be oppressive, one is unable to encounter both of these experiences at once, you’re either in, or you’re out. They’re two faced.

One of our favourite pieces was a Louise Lawler piece called ‘Birdcalls’, situated in the Dia garden ‘Birdcalls’ is an audio piece in which Lawler, frustrated at the number of male artists getting recognition on a name-basis, stretches and squawks the names of these artists as bird calls. In doing so she mocks the herd like mentality of name/brand chasing. It got us thinking about producing an interactive piece in the form of a childish ‘can you spot the animal?’ activity sheet, where the participants would be asked to tick off any names that they hear in Lawler’s ‘Birdcalls’.  

In terms of new work there have been many developments very quickly, in fact we struggle to remember a time that we have been so productive in terms of ideas and even installing work. After going to see lots of shows we made loose plans to open up different avenues to work within; these could range from an alter ego who makes different art, to a fictional band, to a designer. These personas could just act as a motivational tool for us, or they can make their way into the work depending on how relevant it is to the ideas we’re presenting. The first (very much in development) plan of this is to be called the ‘Operation Series’; a year long performance where we designate different personas to ourselves and attempt to work with a mind-set that is specific to the persona. These personas could last a month, or just a few weeks, but there would be a distinct variation between each character. Some of our ideas so far have been to operate as: a company, an unsigned band, a sports fan, a promoter, an MP, and a designer. Works will then be developed within the environment of our characteristic, meaning that the stereotype of the persona will act as a brief to start the work.  Hopefully it is a project that can allow us to make work that is beyond our current practice while not feeling too constrained by the parameters of the project. Consider it a fancy dress of ideas – you can wear a different outfit but it is still you who is in control, you control what you say, you control what you do etc. The work came from our investigations into games, in the game Operation the participants use tweezers to remove objects from a patients body, if they touch the patient with the tweezers an alarm sounds and their go finishes. In this game even a real surgeon is an amateur surgeon; the game mimics real life but fails to mirror it perfectly, much like art. Even an ‘artist’ is an amateur ‘artist’.

We are planning to open a merchandise section of the website very soon, this will be a place for small art projects to be realised; a place for works to exist online. We noticed that there are lots of small projects that we have made, or are planning to make that don’t quite fit the polished nature of a generic ‘works’ section. The merchandise section will essentially act as a place to experiment with ideas, some of these may springboard into larger projects but for the most part the merchandise section exists to have fun with, the ability to play around with ideas is a fantastic aid in keeping the ball rolling. This is something we have noticed while taking part in this years 30 days 30 works project ran by 12o Collective; we have been updating our YouTube channel nearly daily for a month or so and it has been lovely to have a space to have some fun. The merchandise section will be made when we return from New York and the first project-style works we will put up are going to continue some of our investigations into working as a duo; something that we have rarely touched on considering we have been working together for about a year and a half now. We plan to make ‘Sid and Jim’ products specifically using plain products, ie. Products one can purchase with no decoration, branding or colour. Good examples of these are white t-shirts and plain tote bags (very merchy). We will personalise these products with things that our specific to us, for instance the ‘Sid and Jim Flip Flops’ will be sold in two different sizes depending on our foot size (Sid – Size 8, Jim – size ). ‘Sid and Jim Favourite Band T-Shirts’ will be t shirts (in our sizes again, Sid L, Jim XL) upon which we have written our favourite band or musician. ‘Preference Mugs’ will be plain white mugs with Sid or Jims preference for how to make tea the way they like it. The Sid and Jim tote bags will be sealed and full of objects (probably sand) that weigh as much as the average weight of our individual rucksacks over the course of a working week. The merch section can also be a platform to experiment with some ideas about authenticity; one piece is a work where we design/get someone to design a series of book covers for us; these books will be about ‘Sid and Jim’ over their career. Ranging from exhibition catalogues to autobiographies the book covers will tell the fictional tale of two people going through life, making art along the way. These will be part of the ‘sold out’ section, where people will be unable to purchase the objects but can see the book covers and read excerpts, similar to how you can preview a book on amazon before buying it.

p r o p s m a k e t h e s t o r y

Something new stuff we’ve been cooking up involves creating our own football shirts. We’ve begun to incorporate the fact that there are two of us into our recent works like ‘Sid and Jim vs. The World’. Since it’s inescapable that what we do is governed by how we do it, harnessing and shining a light on that aspect feels only logical. The football shirts are another ‘team’ style system; they’re how people distinguish between someone they share something with and someone they don’t. It also draws a comparison with a uniform, it’s distinctive clothing worn by members of the same body. However, unlike a school uniform, which is forced upon the wearers, this uniform is worn with pride, not distain. It’s interesting that the first evidence of coloured shirts used to identify football teams comes from early English public school football games. Something that originates with the upper class is now far more synonymous with the working class. As the game gradually moved away from being a pursuit for wealthy amateurs to one dominated by working-class professionals, the kits changed accordingly. The clubs themselves, rather than individual players, were now responsible for purchasing kit and financial concerns, along with the need for the growing numbers of spectators to easily identify the players, led to the lurid colours of earlier years being abandoned in favour of simple combinations of primary colours. Basically, the shirts look the way they look because of the people who wear them. This means that, at some level, they’re personalised. They’re valuable to each person for the same but also totally different reasons. They make the universal, personal. That’s something that can be very often missed in art. A lot of artists make autobiographical work; ‘I’m from Germany and I make art about being German’, ‘I’m disabled and I make art about being disabled’, ‘I’m black and I make work about being black’. Something that’s very difficult with this field is how relatable is it; making work which is fairly self-involved can be problematic when other people are viewing it. Art is a pretty great tool and is only limited by the user so to confine oneself to only dealing with ones own issues seems slightly strange to us. A football shirt is an accurate metaphor when attempting to make something that appeals to many for a reason, also appeal to one for a different reason. It’s also fun to consider us as a team but it’s assumed if we were we’d be on the same team as opposed to rival ones. Like in ‘Sid and Jim vs. The World’ it will appear that we are competing with each other; shirts for team Sid and shirts for team Jim. The teams would be five-a-side to reflect our amateur status. The shirts also tell a story; was there an event? If so who won? Who played on whose team? We’re constructing a story using visual prompts to jog a memory or thought.

This is similar to another idea we’ve been thinking about involving a coffin or tombstone. Something or someone has died and we know that because there’s a grave in the ground to mark it. It arises from a quote by David Eagleman’s book ‘A Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” So a gravestone used to be the way that you would never die because as long as your name is out in the world, you’re alive. The Internet, especially social media sites like Facebook, has increased this improbability of ‘death’. Prematurely creating our own gravestones is an attempt to create an alternate reality where we actually have died. Why would there be a gravestone with someone’s name on it if they haven’t died? There’s also a lot of ‘stuff’ that comes with death and this isn’t to do with the dead person because they’re dead, funerals are for the people who have to deal with the fact that they’re dead. This is the same; the item is being made for the people who are alive. However, the people who are alive are also the people who are supposed to be dead.

We’ve also been photographing empty storefronts of jewellery shops. There are all these elegant shapes and beautiful colours to hold and match what is on display but if there’s nothing on display, they become change. We are left wondering whether we’re looking at invisible jewellery or if it was been purchased or stolen. What is the story behind the missing objects?

a r t o v e r f l o w

These past couple of days have been pretty gallery heavy so we thought we would just go through them all to work out what was what. Walter De Maria’s notorious ‘Earth Room’ is amongst the things we’ve seen. The aspect that I think we were most stunned by (and is probably the same as most people) was the smell from it; you can actually feel the air get thicker as you approach the huge bed of soil. 

‘Chronology 20160424 / 41°-74°’ was an exhibition by Pippo Lionni & Qasim Naqvi. It’s a call-and-response style work with Lionni creating paintings to visualise the noise and Naqvi producing sounds the in some way reply to the paintings. Something we warmed to was this graphic score that some how represented the synthesizer’s pitch and durational settings – not something we could quite de-code but an noteworthy diagram none the less. We also saw a show by Nathlie Provosty, which was a selection of abstract paintings that were supposedly about how humans are unable to see certain colors. However, to us it felt like she was just using this idea in an attempt to fain some sort of philosophical perspective when in actual fact she just wanted to make some paintings. ‘The Horse Who Drank Beer’ was another show by Pedro Wirz. A funny title that we would have enjoyed to spill over onto works but unfortunately not. Displayed were sculptural objects that mimicked materials of some sort of ‘dream world’. Something that we were actually enjoyed despite only stumbling across it was Arash Hanaei’s exhibition ‘Capital Complex’. He show’s us a history of advertising in Tehran’s public space in two way, one featuring billboards and another one murals with war heroes and martyrs. After the Iranian Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war, propaganda images took the place of advertisements for foreign products. Ever since the latter began making their way back into the cityscape, they have coexisted with the other, political images and texts, often displaying slogans with similar language. A very well thought-out juxtaposition.

Jean Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s show was called ‘Films and Their Sites’ and is comprised of film still sequences, videos and annotated scripts. It attempts to shed light on the couple’s meticulous and formally innovative adaptations of works by important figures of Western art and literature. It’s a very dense show, which requires a fairly broad, pre-existing knowledge of their previous films. This isn’t a negative aspect, far from it; it’s just a very theory heavy exhibition. The Propeller Group were showing a film at James Cohan which featured a number of beautiful rituals which all seemed to revolve around death and how the living honour those who have passed. It’s a beautiful film, full to the brim with excitement and desirability, regardless of its inner sombreness. Seeing work by tutors is always fascinating to us; seeing teachers as ‘real people’ regardless of their position in your own life feel almost essential or at least in the world that we’re in. Ross Knight is a tutor of ours and was showing a series of sculptures in a show titled ‘Human Stuff’. The pieces all alluded to objects with practical application due to their anthropometric shapes when in fact they had no such properties. The viewer is caught between recognising the items and realising they’ve never seen them before; readymades without the ‘ready’. Another tutor of ours, Yael Yanarek, had an exhibition revolving around narrative construction and the various mediums, which can aid such a venture. Half of the show made complete sense to us; archiving using a range of tools from notes on a computer to objects collected over the course of a journey. However, there were a number of paintings, which didn’t seem to fit this model of storytelling and their presence was ever explained. 

Cory Archangel had an excellent show on featuring a drum machine in the centre of the gallery space alongside a pair of raised speakers facing in opposite directions. For 24 hours a day until the close of the exhibition, the speakers will blast out the rhythm pattern to ‘Sucker MCs’ on loop. Allowing it to just exist by itself is the same sort of minimalist gesture as some of his other works involving just the clouds from the game Mario. The audience is invited to fill the gaps of these endless, repetitive works. 

The Kitchen is showing ‘Performance Capture’ by Ed Atkins. Using performance capture technology he asked 100 people to read a section of a script he’s produced. He then puts all their facial expressions, voice intonations and hand gestures into one virtual figure. As we watched the rendered body narrating this story we caught glimpses of Google searches, a poem and just a general mash-up of hoarded language. The figure feels a bit like a creative bin; not only are the phrase he’s saying fairly nonsensical but as the film progresses he looks more unwell, skin changing colour and eyes becoming bloodshot. 

Martin Klimas was showing his sonic sculpture series; a number of photographs that come in pairs. One of them being an explosion of colour created by a speaker, the other people the set-up of the synthesiser that produced the sound. The clever aspect of these works is that the sound is never heard, only suggested or hinted at by employing a different sense. Steven Baldi is a photographer but the works we were mostly intrigued by at his exhibition were these panels that have been wrapped in green cloth and framed in aluminium. Each of them is a scaled down version of each gallery wall. The green is suggestive of the potential of this space; it awaits input. They form this void that allows the physical attributes of the works to take a back seat to what the audience might bring. Thomas Ruff’s new show features large-scale photographs of archival media clippings from American newspapers that relate to the theme of space exploration. There’s this idea about the press and how a story is more important than the reality, which draws a nice parallel to going into space; to most of us it’s just a dream but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying the story. There was a bizarrely formal nature to ‘Edited Monument Avenue of the Americas’ by Andres Durán that almost made us feel strange about finding it highly amusing. These important historical figures completely obscured by skyscraper inspired blocks. But there is specificity to this; he focuses on monuments of Latin-American heroes on 6th Avenue called Avenue of the Americas. This Avenue was renamed as Avenue of the Americas and many statues of Latin American liberators were installed on it but it’s likely that few people in the city know the identities of those statues. This raises questions about the construction and understanding of Latin American Identity and about the validity of commemorative monuments in the contemporary city. 

Peter Freeman had a show devoted to Dimitrije Bašičević. It focuses on a number of exhibitions he was involved with over the years. Our favourites were when he converted the whole space into a strange showroom/office room, improvising pedestals out of fridges and filing cabinets. We were disappointed by a show by Mike Kelley and our feelings can be summed up in an early line of the press release, which reads ‘this body of work demonstrates his return to the medium following a 15-year span of performance, multimedia and installation art.’ Basically, ‘remember that whole time when Mike Kelley was doing all that interesting stuff? Well he’s stopped now and gone back to making “proper art”.’ Charles Gaines’ music based works that unite a score by composer Manuel de Falla from his opera about a tragic story of a love affair doomed by social mores and class differences and a speech by Stokely Carmichael (a Black Panther Party member and civil rights activist), in which Carmichael advocates that African Americans refuse to serve in the Vietnam War as an act of self-determination in the face of oppression. It creates this strange kind of ballad for the enduring history of race-class inequalities. Cardiff and Miller’s exhibition ‘The Marionette Maker’ manifests itself as a crazy mini environment within a caravan that houses numerous characters. The interior of the trailer reveals an imaginary world of a puppet maker. You’re able to walk around and peer in from various angles each giving equally fantastical in their appearance. Last, but certainly not least, is Stan Douglas’ film installation ‘The Secret Agent’. It is shown on multiple screens, each scene shot from different viewpoints or played out alongside other incidents happening somewhere else at the same time. This is beautiful and poetic way to tell a story; highlighting how a story is constructed beyond the events that might be ‘interesting’ to watch. Despite the severity of the content of the film (war and terrorism) it’s feels fairly odd that the overall atmosphere hovers between melodrama and melancholia. It’s a film, which has been meticulously woven together and employs a brilliant strategy of introducing the two halves with ‘two weeks before’ and ‘two weeks later’. This creates a cyclical structure where there’s no ‘real’ beginning; a perfect loop.

s p o t t h e d i f f e r e n c e

We’ve had a new idea for a work that revolves around identity (and consequently the fact that there are two of us). We haven’t fully figured out the logistics/final manifestation but the basic premise is that we get random people/people who don’t know our names to guess which one of us is Sid and which one is Jim. The point of this is that it really doesn’t matter who is who and that attempting to label things by the ‘creator’ of them isn’t where it should end. There’s also a fun ambiguity to it all because to them, they are right, even if they chose differently to the next person or the person before them. If you’re told your whole life that left is right and right is left then you will be correct in thinking that until someone corrects you. Being ‘correct’ is a purely subjective thing; it has to be because we created the concept of right and wrong. Now we’re unsure of how we would prefer to manifest this, it’s either a single channel, continuous film of us standing side by side and there’s people guessing our names which can be heard but not seen or it’s the other way around; people come into shot and point at us who are behind the camera. The latter feels slightly more appealing to due to the increased uncertainty, even though we’re supposedly the ‘subject’ of the film, we never appear in it. Also, if people who aren’t aware of either of our appearances watch the film, we could look like anything or anyone. By not showing our faces in the film we create infinite combinations of Sids and Jims. 

The idea of a group show of everyone who was in ‘From Archway With Love’ last year has been put into motion, which is very exciting. It’s always fun putting on an event with mates, especially since we haven’t seen each other’s work for a while! We’ve also began a discussing some sort of collaborative experience with another artist duo Tim and Tom who make work that remind us of Harrison and Wood, the Laurel and Hardy of the art world. 

Today we also saw the show at Bridget Donnahue Gallery by Jessie Reeves. We first saw her work unknowingly by viewing ‘Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau: A 21st Century Show Home’ at the Swiss Institute. Her furniture were merely props in this digitally native take on décor. But now in the gallery space they occupy the entire space. She seems to be getting in on the age-old question of art’s relationship to design and vice versa. There’s also something very strange about the objects; usually a comfy armchair is welcoming and reassuring but the works in this show are raw and have an ‘unfinished’ appearance. There’s definitely an interesting idea about the nostalgia with things of this nature; you associate them with home and belonging but within the context that they’re in now, that relationship is lost. 

30WORKS30DAYS is still going strong! Another work we’ve produced recently was where we gave the inanimate objects, within a setting gallery, a voice. There was the ladder, the lights, the wall, the screws, a plinth and the floor. At the moment they’re simply presented as small excerpts of a post-exhibition interview but they could perhaps turn into some sort of film or at least given voices of some sort. It could, eventually, turn into a mockumentary titled ‘Inside the White Cube’ (referencing the art school classic by Brian O'Doherty) which shows the gritty reality of ‘working’ in an art gallery.

a r t t h a t l o o k s l i k e a r t

The MFA sculpture students at Pratt were having an open crit in one of the gallery buildings so we thought we should check it out. Our first observation was that the some tutors seemed relatively childish in the way they were conducting themselves; all constantly shouting over each other, and this aggression portrayed an attitude that felt more geared to attack than to mold. Obviously dealing with people of this nature is somewhat necessary since not everyone will always like the work that is being displayed. However, there were some tutors in the room who seemed to be able to behave in a professional manner (being critical of the work but in a constructive manner) so why couldn’t the rest? The work was nicely varied in how it manifested itself, not that we were expecting it to all be the same but it’s fun to go to an exhibition here and not see abstract paintings. Even so there was a continuation of something we’ve witnessed before; it’s all stuff that kind of looks like art. Our theory with this is that they have an idea and then they try and convert that idea into art as opposed to just finding something to house the idea. There was a film we quite enjoyed which explored the history of the candle.

The history began with candles appearing in paintings, and obviously the paintings are of important/wealthy people meaning that the candle becomes this desirable object, that is associated with wealth and significance. The story of the candle then develops and from time to time the narrator confers with the artist about the wording of the text he’s reading. This tiny detail turns it into this ‘uncut’ thing and in a world with beautifully made objects and crisp footage, something that once upon a time might’ve have been accidental or circumstantial, is clearly a choice. It reflects that the imagery has been sourced online and so is a fairly amateur experience; he hasn’t gone leafing through physical archives to find the perfect piece of information, he’s Googled it. The consultation between actor and director also suggests it’s a work in progress, a first draft of sorts. This is a technique which is similar to the breaking of the forth wall in what it is trying to achieve. Breaking the forth wall appears to be about changing what was once a story into something potentially ‘real’. Being addressed by an actor in a film gives an audience the feeling that what is happening on the screen is/might/will happen in ‘reality’. It removes the actors from their pedestals for a moment and allows them to be stood in front of the people watching, they’re now equal. This has some cross over with what people are trying to achieve by leaving in parts where the actor consults the director. They too are being removed from the spotless position they were once in and are now just as clumsy and clueless as the rest of us. They’re both promoting equality between actor and audience. Breaking the forth wall is perhaps more about acknowledgement of being fictional but a byproduct is definitely feeling more in tune with the individual on the screen.

We also went to the opening of the Mmuseum and it was great to see so many people interested in the project. Something else, which was great to see, was Casey Neistat who we spotted whilst we were there and we even got in the vlog (for a aggregate time of 1 second). The second famous person we’ve seen this week, so we’re hoping to complete the hat-trick with Tom Cruise tomorrow.

g e t t i n g u p g e t t i n g o u t

Today we re-photographed the vacuum cleaner piece. The language we’ve used feels much more appropriate but we’re still thinking about a title. We’re thinking about maybe something you might say to a maid/cleaner like ‘you missed a spot’ or something that from a review, ‘It has surprising power but is light and easy to move around’. We’ve also got an exhibition lined up when we return from New York coming up in July with Scaffold Gallery in Manchester, which is titled ‘The Great Unanswered’ and revolves around, allegedly, unanswerable questions. Each artist in the project is assigned a question and then creates a body of work around it. Ours is ‘What is reality?’ so there’s plenty of rom for manoeuvre.

Finally we’ve bought the flag with our visas on it so that should be here in the next week or so. We want to submit it for this project Temporary Alliance, which is held at the knockdown centre, and involves a 40ft flagpole that artists are invited to fly their own flags on. Home Depot was a place we found ourselves today, to purchase the final parts we need to make the wrapped up piece. We’re still sorting out what the invoice/delivery note would say; whether to have a section for putting in where the work has been sent from/delivered too, to have a name on it, or just a description.

We visited the Met for the first time since coming to New York. We saw the Sol LeWitt drawing which is installed there at the moment. ‘Wall Drawing #370: Ten Geometric Figures (including right triangle, cross, X, diamond) with three-inch parallel bands of lines in two directions.’ Something about these drawings that we’ve always enjoyed is that he celebrated the fact that they’re instructional meaning anyone can do them. He spoke of himself being similar to a composer, he creates a score that can be played by generations to come and while the concept remains constant, every time it’s realised it’s slightly different. There was also a Richard Tuttle exhibition on the lower levels. He uses these ‘humble’ materials, which are supposed to reflect the fragility of the world. He is very poetic in the way he talks about his works so we’re almost let down by how they materialise. What is apparent is the investigation of line, volume, colour, texture, shape, and form. But when you read into it he’s investigating language and the viewer’s spatial relationship to the aesthetic experience he’s creating. Some of our favourite works him were the wire drawings, which included in his show at the Whitechapel in 2012. They’re the sum of pencil lines drawn directly on the wall, combined with tethered wires and the shadows cast by them from the heavy spots. This low-fi choreography of 3 forms of line ignites a flash point between the conceptual and the material. They feel like the epitome of what he wants to portray; delicate arrangements that are mirroring the multifaceted nature of language.

There was also a photography exhibition there too which was about photography being used for criminal investigation and evidence gathering, to record crime scenes, to identify suspects and abet their capture, and to report events to the public. There is a particular thread running through the show that might have provided more substance and a sharper focus: that is the use of photography for identifying lawbreakers, which began soon after the invention of photography. This makes us think about ’Minority Report’, the story by Philip K. Dick and the movie based on the novel, where beings called precogs can foresee people committing murders, enabling police to arrest killers before they kill. As far as we know, such a system doesn’t yet exist, but computerised biometric identification technologies like facial and gait recognition software have significantly advanced the Bertillon approach (the duodecimal system for criminals; mug shots and finger prints). This is an exhibition tracking the uses of technical images by crime stoppers from the early days of photography to now and into imaginary futures could be eminently illuminating. The cherry on the cake of this day was going to the opening of the Cornelia Parker’s ‘Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)’. ‘California Gothic’ was supposedly how Alfred Hitchcock described the haunted house in ‘Psycho’. A late Victorian building with a mansard roof, only ever seen from below, looms on a hill. A replica of the house is what is displayed on the fifth floor garden rooftop of the Met. What appears to be a house on first view is revealed, when you walk around it, to be a propped-up facade, created in equal measure from reclaimed wood, memory, and imagination. Whether it’s a giant dollhouse or madhouse became secondary when we managed to pluck up the courage to approach her say how much we enjoyed the piece and her work in general.

We think our final few weeks will be spent soaking up as much art as possible - W A T C H T H I S S P A C E

m a k i n g p r o g r e s s

Good news this morning as we heard our new sound piece ‘Where Are They Now?’ is going to be featured on The Listening Booth on the 27th of May. The Listening Booth is basically an online listening gallery of contemporary sound based art and experimental music. It’s an interesting project so check it out if you have a minute.

A book we’ve been invested in for about a month now has finally come to a close. ‘Why Grow Up’ by Susain Neiman proposes the question of how are we supposed to become free, happy and decent people? Rousseau’s “Emile” supplies Neiman with some plausible answers, and also with some cautionary lessons. A wonderfully problematic book – among other things a work of Utopian political thought, a manual for child-rearing, a foundational text of Romanticism and a sentimental novel – it serves here as a repository of ideas about the moral progress from infancy to adulthood. Rousseau and Kant are Neiman’s main characters, and she conveys a vivid sense of their contrasting personalities in addition to providing an accessible survey of their relevant ideas. Between them, they mapped out what she takes to be the essential predicament of maturity, namely the endless navigation of the gulf between the world as we encounter it and the way we believe it should be. In infancy, we have no choice but to accept the world as it is. In adolescence, we rebel against the discrepancy between the “is” and the “ought.” Adulthood, for Kant and for Neiman, requires facing squarely the fact that you will never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it. It is a state of neither easy cynicism nor naïve idealism, but of engaged reasonableness. She seems to believe in the virtues of travel, in limiting time on the Internet, in good government and progressive education. She doesn’t like mass tourism, advertising or authoritarian politics. Essentially she wants you to think for yourself. And who could argue? Thinking for oneself is a true skill. But if there’s one ‘message’ of this book it’s born out of its insistence that thinking for oneself is a difficult and lifelong undertaking.

An idea we, very literally, stumbled across a while back was art that had been thrown away or discarded somehow. We were walking along the street and came across a whole load of paintings that had just been thrown away. The act of throwing something away instantly decreases its value, regardless of the previous value it may have held. This all revolves around ownership and who owns what things. A rejected object might no longer portray the current ideas of the owner or represent them in a way they find flattering. Art comes into this because there’s a lot of ‘taste’ associated with art; everyone has art they like and everyone has art they dislike. This can be hijacked in a number of ways; art made by ones child will be loved regardless of how it appears because of the connection between the two parties (parent and child). This relates to art being thrown away because the question arises of whom has thrown it away? Is it the artist? Is it a collector of art? Is it someone who owns a gallery? Is it someone who is clearing out an old house and finds some paintings? This question means that different levels of value have been removed from the work. An art dealer is supposed to know what’s good and what’s bad so if they’ve thrown it away then it must be bad, right? The value of something can be reduced far more significantly if you’re high up within the field with which the object is associated. So this piece is essentially about value and the value of art and who has the power to value (or devalue) art. All the works were found by us and were clearly unwanted (either in a bin, a skip or by the side of the road for removal). It references when Michael Landy transformed the South London Gallery into ‘Art Bin’, a container for the disposal of works of art. Other artists would discard their works into the ‘bin’ and in doing so create this monument to creative failure.

b a c k a t i t a g a i n w i t h t h e i d e a s

Today involved a crit in which we displayed the work involving the vacuum cleaner. We positioned it in a way that suggested the task (vacuuming the room) had been completed and the object that completed it (the hoover) had consequently been abandoned. There was certain information we felt needed to be conveyed so we decided to write it on the wall. This decision was down to the fact that it felt similarly ephemeral; it would continue to be there within the room until it either faded or was painted over (mirroring the detritus that had been collected). The piece was actually received very well and the feedback was more than generic-y good feedback – it was genuinely aspects of the piece we could change as opposed to thinking about the ideas for something else. The language we had used in the writing wasn’t quite as specific as it should have been; ‘cleaned’ should in fact be ‘collected’ and instead of calling it ‘dust’ we should have written something like ‘material’. It was also pointed out that it wasn’t necessary to say that the vacuum had been used. The ideas about making art from other art (in particular the art from the room) was conveyed and it was great to unpack what we were actually trying to talk about in terms of how ‘people’ view art and how we’re trying to put that on its head slightly.

We’re currently involved in the 30WORKS30DAYS project organised by the weird and wonderful 12ø Collective. We participated in it last year and it was hugely beneficial for our practice and general thinking about art and art making. A favourite idea that’s appeared from it has been a screen shot of a text conversation between a gallery and an artist about a missing artwork. The work is never seen and is only vaguely described allowing the reader of the text to create their own story/work and the features it may or may not hold. By doing so we’ve generated infinite works based on that description and also constructed a story or a myth about the work. There are some obvious links to our No. 1 guy (Ryan Gander) and his piece C++ where he produces paintings, which are never displayed and are only shown through the pallet on which the paints have been mixed.

To develop this we want to have it as more of a sound work, similar to a scene in a film where the protagonist walks in through their front door, throws their keys down onto the table and in the table motion presses the ‘messages’ button on their answering machine. What would follow is a series of answer phone messages getting more and more animated depending on what situation was being described. This scene features in everything from a cheesy rom-com where the guy has made a mistake and is confessing his love slightly more with every message until he’s screaming for ‘her’ to take him back to a sci-fi movie where the aliens are landing and the messages begin with ‘can you see that weird light in the sky from your place?’ to franticly asking if you have a spare baseball bat to crush some alien skull. The one we’re proposing is somewhere in between; the artist is inquiring about a work that should have been dropped off that afternoon for a show the following week. There are a variety of messages all describing different bits of the piece and slowly becoming more and more concerned with the lack of response from the gallery. The final message would be an angry/upset one where the artist has gone to where the exhibition was supposed to be held and cant find the gallery and perhaps realises that none of it was ever real. The installation of this work would be something like this.

Another sound work we’ve been attempting to materialise is the speech. We toyed with the idea of just having microphone and it being played through hidden speakers or just the idea of it happening in a room and not having any physical hints at all. However, we landed on the clothing that one might wear at such an occasion, a suit. The suits would be on a rail in their dry cleaning bags – ready to be worn. The sizes of the suits is very important since we are both different sizes and they are supposedly for Sid and Jim.

Visiting the Fischli and Weiss exhibition at the Guggenheim acted as a catalyst for another idea, something that might not get ‘done’ while we’re here but definitely is something to think about. The water fountains at the gallery a all gold which is hugely comical already and then it becomes almost like a religious thing – the holy water of the art world. This in reinforced by the (what feel like) insane admission fees which can be compared to similar activities of a church or religious organization; one doesn’t necessarily ‘pay’ to enter but there is certainly an exchange somewhere. Our idea was something along the line of either making a copy of a Guggenheim water fountain, which is continually running with ‘holy water’ from a church (the church itself is yet to be decided) or somehow get our hands on a font and fill it with water from the Guggenheim fountains. Both ideas are still in progress and perhaps they can exist as a pair. They’re both talking about the same thing but the visual language being used would draw very different conclusions.

A show we’ve seen that was of particular interest was ‘New and Handmade by Me’ by Brad Troemel. He’s interested/invested in exploring how the Internet spurs production. He’s used Pinterest to find techniques that interested him and learned how to make works using glycerin soap, bath bombs, handmade gingerbread houses, and other things. The press release was different to many we’ve previously encountered – it was quite endearing. ‘The idealistic hope for making a healthier world together and the nihilistic paranoia that the world will end at any second once again arrive at the same practical conclusion: doing it yourself. And for this exhibition, ‘New and Handmade by Me,’ that’s just what I’ve done!’ One of his previous works that we are fond of involves a Tumblr called the Jogging, in which Troemel and others quickly made works, destroyed the objects, and left the images online to get re-blogged by others. (The rapper Gucci Mane used one the Jogging’s images as an album cover.)