d o n ' t b e a f f r a i d t o a s k

Going to the CSM degree show is always a fun experience, especially now we’re getting dangerously close to being in it! The closer it gets, the more and more we realise how much ‘stuff’ we bypass without much consideration due to a large quantity ‘looking like art’. This could be anything form a painting to an assemblage to an ‘organic’ looking sculpture. Noticing the act of not noticing stuff is definitely different to merely not noticing without that thought. The point of this is, when considering the work we might generate for our own degree show, it should be as least ‘art-like’ as possible (or at least appear to be). Some favourites from this year included Kat Buchanan’s human cats (complete with scaled up scratching posts), which, aside from taking up the ambitious challenge of bringing durational performance into the walls of a gallery setting, was genuinely fun and good-natured. (this screen shot can only add to the work) 

Ivy Stearman was showing a similarly live piece but with quite a different intent; exhibited was an actor who appeared to be living in about a 3-meter square space (potentially for the entirety of the show. He had a bed, food and water and also what looked like bottles containing urine. He made occasional interactions with viewers but none of these were ever consistent – mirroring ‘real’ activities. Max Holland, who is known in the Fine Art department for his hilarious trailers for various open studios held and CSM, had made a film in an equally humorous vein. His film was several minutes of him asking various people (from the local MP to the CSM front desk) what he should make for his degree show. A large portion of the film is made up of the ‘ums and ahs’ of the people on the other end of the calls with the rest consisting of him encouraging them to say ‘anything at all’. Beyond the comedy, there are some truly perceptive ideas being portrayed around the notion of what art is, what art can be and that anyone can be an artist. A witty attention-to-detail was that the same texture of the wall behind him in the film had been employed to cover the wall on which the monitor was positioned. Other works can be found here on his youtube channel. 

We’re beginning to think more about the Manchester exhibition, The Great Unanswered II, where we are assigned a question to consider when making our piece. Since ours is, ‘what is reality?’, there’s a huge number of things we’ve been thinking about. We’re very interested in ideas around fact and fiction and where the line is drawn between the two, so this title is both applicable and exciting to us. The majority of our research has been a combination of these two phenomenon and theories around lying; when is a lie a story? Why are there negative connotations attached to the notion of a ‘lie’ but a ‘story’ is celebrated? Since artists are fabricators by design are they not also liars? Preliminary thoughts have been, mostly, on ‘fake’ things, such as us being in a fake band and displaying posters and merchandise for said band. The band would be called ‘Wet Paint’ or ‘The Wet Paints’ meaning that every ‘wet paint’ poster, intended as a warning, would be advertising for us. Slightly aside from this, but continuing down the ‘what is reality?’ road, the question caused us to revisit a work by Ed Atkins (which we’re still unable to find the title of but is pictured below). 

The first time we encountered the image we were intrigued by the mishmash visuals and computer-generated aesthetic but seeing it again under a new spotlight has made it appear far more romantic and consequently tragic. A story unfolds of two ‘people’ finding one another in this strange place and until this moment have not come into physical contact with another ‘thing’ and go to touch each other but instead of feeling the others hand on theirs, like they may have seen previously, they slip right through. This is the moment comparable to the scene in films Toy Story where Buzz falls to the bottom of Sid’s stairs and realises he in fact cannot fly and is only a toy. It encapsulates the thought that many of us have shared when thinking a little too hard about our position in the universe and at what point (if ever) does anything we’ve ever done become meaningful.

s u r v i v e d t o a r t a n o t h e r d a y

We survived our first solo show! The exhibition seemed to be very well received and all that attended enjoyed the works that we displayed. Paper Toss was hugely popular and we even implemented a scoring system due to the unforeseen difficulty of throwing balled up pieces of paper into a bin. ‘360 Life Support’ was, as always, enjoyed by a diverse crowd – all genders, ages and backgrounds. The set-up for ‘The Men’s 2000m Final’ ended up being two mattresses and a number of pillows, allowing a several people at a time the opportunity to gaze up at the video above, which felt suitably appropriate. The artists’ haircuts and Wikipedia Game were both things we were slightly unsure about; we didn’t know if anyone would interact with them but again people appeared to enjoy the interactive/inclusive nature of both the activities. In general, the show epitomised what we want when it comes to our audience and how they receive our work. Photos to come soon! 

Also managed to go and see the new Cory Archangel exhibition at Lisson Galley, which was fairly entertaining. The funniest part was the endless people in suits contemplating his Photoshop paintings, low-resolution images and tracksuits etc. For us, missing the entire point of these works; to debunk the idea of the ‘painting’ as this one off genius object. A benefit of seeing the rippling lake works in the flesh was realising that each of them are ‘physical’ things; there is a computer per ‘image’ that have each been individually hacked to generate this effect. Of course the whole idea that work of this nature is considered important is always to be praised – Lisson have, and continue to, enable a huge number of diverse artists the ability to make expansive and progressive work. 

There was a talk on at the Zabludowicz Collection regarding ideas around private lives and networked culture. It was an excellent talk one of the most interesting contributors was David Raymond Conroy, one of the artists in the current show, Emotional Supply Chain. There was a fair amount of meandering through well-trodden paths such as private space becoming public space and being more connected than ever before yet feeling more and more alone. A slightly new way of talking about it was this notion of the stage and how the entire stage is now important; offstage as well as onstage. This links back to the idea of process (how things come into being) and how processes are taking precedent over product – give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. Another subject that we’d previously thought about, but was phrased far more poetically, was that social media is a machine that runs on traffic but that traffic only exists because of the machine itself. It has become a chicken and egg situation where we no longer know whether social media or ourselves dictate the activities one is undertaking; what came first life or Facebook? These machines could encapsulate eBay, which was also touched on by David. He proposed the funny idea that they’ve changed ‘buying’ into ‘winning’; when you ‘buy’ something on eBay you’re saying that you’re prepared to pay more money for that item than anyone in the whole world; and you’re ecstatic about it because they call it winning. A totally new topic, that we’ve now gone onto research further, is an idea put forward by Pierre Bourdieu where he talks about ‘things’ and how went one wants a ‘thing’, what they really want is the image of that thing and that image is complete (hence the desire for it). However, as soon as you and said ‘thing’ become one (purchasing or acquiring it), something that was once complete has now been mutated; you are the very thing that destroys the perfection that you believe the ‘thing’ could give you. This idea brought a whole new meaning to the Martin Creed piece, ‘Work No. 232: the whole world + the work = the whole world’; for us it changed it from this fairly optimistic view that all things are equal and the addition of something to something else doesn’t necessarily mean that it alters the final product. But now, we see the work in the light of the all consuming, never satisfied collective body of the Internet.

b a c k i n t i m e f o r t h e w e e k e n d

We’re back and attempting to hit the ground running with our first solo show at The Wellness and Motivational Center in Leeds! When it comes to wellbeing, community plays a big role in maintaining it. Bringing people together to perform a group activity generates entertainment for all involved and has an unquantifiable impact on ones mental stability. We’ve taken influence from various team exercises to produce our own methods when raising morale. New works we’re showing include ‘Men’s 2000 meter final’ (is a scene-by-scene break down of the men’s 100-meter final from London 2012. The video is projected onto the ceiling and the audience is invited to lie beneath it, as if looking up to the stars. The projector is propped upwards using self-help and motivational books to hold it in place. 

‘The White Crayon’ will also be on display. The a children’s book written by us involving a white crayon who struggles to fit in because her drawings don’t appear. The book itself deals with exclusion due to indeterminable factors and eventual acceptance of these and subsequent integration into a community. Mirroring the space’s office aesthetic, it’s hard to escape the notion of boredom and the methods of entertainment that arise out of it. The App, ‘Paper Toss’, echoes a game, which creates fun from a seemly sparse environment. We plan to make a live version where participants are invited to ball up photos of people winning sports events to throw into a waste paper basket in the corner of the room. Regular office fans will position near the bin to increase the difficulty. To continue this line of question we hope to host live 1v1 ‘Wikipedia Game’ battles with member of the public. The Wikipedia game originates in educational or work based spaces where the institution limits ones web access (gaming websites). As a way to get round it people invented the Wikipedia game, which involves travelling from hyperlink to hyperlink between two specified pages (start and finish). 

There’s a common misconception that you have to be unique to be successful. The idea of an ‘original genius’ is dated and inaccurate; we’re all products of our environment. ‘Remember that style?’ is a version of the memory game concentration involving images of iconic artist’s hairstyles throughout the years.

p o t e n t i a l i s w a s t e d e n e r g y

Last night was another one filled with openings including one by Tracey Emin. It’s strange to consider her as someone that has caused so much controversy and whilst viewing works which are in no way similar to the notorious ‘My Bed’ or ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995’. For us, it feels like a step backwards; there’s far less to engage with in her bronzes and paintings. Her previous works debunk the artist as this untouchable, perfect being and tell a very human story. There’s obviously the fact that the gallery showing the works are in the business of making money, and therefore works that look better on a mantelpiece, between aunt Bertha’s urn and a vase of Peruvian Lilies, are far more likely to make an appearance. This is a only a shame because of the potential she’s shown, if this was all she’d ever produced then we wouldn’t think twice about the mediocre paintings but as it stands, it’s just disappointing. Park Chan-kyong was showing a variety of works, all addressing the notion of ‘traditions’, due to them being repressing during the hyper-modernisation of South Korea. There was a photo sound installation titled ‘Three Cemeteries’ and it was composed of photographs accompanied by sounds reflecting or illustrating the places. The three sites were all burial grounds reserved for people ‘neglected by history’. Even though these are sites with huge historical importance, the sounds appear to be nothing more than field recordings, birds, the whistling of the wind etc. If anything this is replicating the expressionless nature of the sites; no body cared then, and nobody cares now. 

The next exhibition was by a guy called Desire Obtain Cherish. We’re unsure whether this is his real name, if it is, hard luck, if it’s not, it’s a fairly cheap promotional tool. This continues in the names of one of his paintings; if the press release is anything to go by, ‘The Feast Of 1,000 Likes’ has nothing to do with Facebook or the Internet at large. He’s merely exploiting the fact that these things exist in order make himself sound more thorough in his research. Juan Usle was showing a selection of big, abstract paintings that supposedly ‘evocative of the colours, light and space of his Northern Spanish homeland and the density, energy and unpredictability of New York City.’ Below is an image of one of the works on show and we don’t think we’re alone in thinking that his statement is entirely subjective and personal. This tends to be the case fairly regularly but we feel that acting in this (selfish) manner will only alienate ones audience, but he’s the one with a solo show in Chelsea so maybe we should be taking a leaf out of his book! 

However, it wasn’t all so disappointing, especially since we were inundated with drinks on this occasion. Duane Michals has an exhibition, which featured his portraits. They were simply framed prints and included these handwritten notes, a lot of which were pretty funny! Dustin Hoffman ‘before he graduated’, James Coburn ‘was a bullshitter. He talks too much, too much, too much’. However, it is not all light. There is a sense of sadness in the image of Maya Angelou behind Venetian blinds ‘The angel Angelou singing in her white cage’ and a sense of loss in images such as ‘Mother after Father Died’ and ‘Jack Died of AIDS’ and the sequence ‘Robin Williams and friend.’ A diverse range of ideas and feelings felt by both the viewer and the maker alike.

a l l d a y e v e r y d a y

We’ve been to see quite a few shows in the past couple of days. Andra Ursuta was on show at the New Museum with an ambitious installation of geometrically faceted rock-climbing walls assembled from bone-colored panels dotted with colorful, penis shaped handholds and footholds. At the Guggenheim was a new group show, ‘But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise’, which involves ideas about origin, ideologies of architecture, and the politics of migration. A work that stuck out was Hassan Khan’s ‘Bank Bannister’; a sculpture is a reproduction of the handrail outside the downtown Cairo headquarters of Egypt’s Banque Misr, the first bank in the country to have been Egyptian-owned. It’s an object of huge socioeconomic implications in its intimate association with a major financial institution.

The new Lisson Gallery was slightly disappointing with Carmen Herrera’s minimal, abstract paintings but we’ll allow it considering she’s over 100 years old and continuing to make new work! Amish Kapoor had a show of his droopy, fleshy painting style canvases, which aren’t our favorite works of his but we’re hoping that another show of his will appear soon enough! Felix Gonzalez-Torres has his infamous painted word portraits, proposing the idea of what it means to take on the responsibility of curating and how releasing certain controls creates infinite possibilities. ‘Songs and the Sky’ is a thoughtful way of presenting images and sounds, side by side. Artists and musicians were chosen who had taken inspiration from the medium that they did not consider their own. Yorgo Alexopoulos was showing a collection of digital renderings, photographs, and filmed footage. The most mesmerizing, being the works with translucent screen, meaning that the film behind could be seen whilst another film was being played, physically, over the top. Definitely was fun to think about the idea of physical Photoshop layers within these digitally focused compositions. Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili had produced some fairly ghostly photographs in which she wasn’t just staging the surfaces, but the conditions of photographic representation; images appeared to have been photographed, printed, physically edited, then photographed again.

Eric Pickersgill had a show that sounded fairly promising on paper, presenting research about the connectedness of the world due to phones, but in the end it manifested in very obvious photographs of people posing in positions, which are suggestive of using a mobile phone. Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller presented a show titled ‘Cut’, included is a film, which combines material from 95 films involving incisions, scars, and blood. They’ve played on the word ‘cut’ to talk about the idea of film; film operates by bringing separate parts together. A ‘cut’ is the means by which clips are joined together, and the video here is produced entirely through cuts between clips and cuts to black. Seeing the big deals of the art world is always entertaining so we couldn’t miss seeing Cecily Brown, Jeff Koons and Charles Ray all in one building. All the works in the show nod to youth or nostalgia, especially Koons’ legendary steel inflatables. The urge to reach out and touch them is always immense. Stephanie Syjuco was exhibiting a Google sketch up model painted with black and white stripes to mimic the camouflage of the WWI battle ships. It definitely brought up strange thoughts about hiding and how history has caught up with us somehow. Bill Adams, Michael Assiff, John Gordon Gauld, Ignacio Gonzalez-Lang, JODI, Barbara Kruger were all involved in an exhibition titled ‘Open Source Indicators’. This is referring to an American research program of which the goal is to analyse mass public data as a predictor of significant societal events. Michael Assiff’s work was printed on the vent covers for the gallery, this introduced interesting ideas about ‘things that already exist in the gallery’ and making those ‘things’ into the work itself. It relates back, slightly, to Hassan Khan’s ‘Bank Bannister’, the difference being that he was making the object into an artifact as opposed to attempting to integrate it into the workings of the gallery.

William Leavitt’s exhibition was a number of heavily domestic installations that combine furnishings, sculpture and paintings with the occasional addition of video and slide projection. The results resemble these mysterious old skeletons of Hollywood stage sets but simultaneously seem almost futuristic in their composition. And finally we saw Betty Tompkins’, ‘WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories’. The show began with an email she composed asking for synonyms for or words that might describe women. The resulting work is a thousand paintings, which involve the words she was provided with. She is not proposing an answer so it’s probably more of a simple catalyst for conversation about today’s gender oppression.

An idea we recently had whilst perusing a museum shop was art being on postcards. Postcards are typically sent without an envelope and have illustrations or photos on that reflect the place they were sent from. Once a postcard has a piece of art on it, that piece of art becomes a symbol for the place. This idea is only very early in its development but we’re thinking about having one of those spinning postcard racks and the images on them will be works by us. This process will, in a way, make our works into a sort of icon but as the same time very throw away. Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction definitely plays a big part in what this work is suggesting.  

p o k i n g t h e b e a r

We attended a total of 11 private views (or ‘openings’ as they’re far more appropriately called here) the other night, which was quite a stretch. Included in those was an exhibition at PACE gallery of David Hockney’s iPad drawings.

Fairly obvious to say but, the nearly 80 year old, Hockney isn't the likeliest candidate for making iPad art, but saying that doesn't mean he approaches the medium with any less enthusiasm. Like his previous works with the ‘Brushes’ app, his new digital drawings are nothing if not approachable, and so handmade they feel strangely familiar. "The Yosemite Suite" collects the works he made on site at the national park in 2010 and 2011, some designed with printing in mind, and all definitely marking a new horizon for American landscapes. This body of work only reinforces his title as the ‘mark-making king’.

We also attended several ‘openings’ yesterday evening too! Something we did notice was a definite difference between the shows we’d seen in Chelsea to the ones in the Lower East Side. Chelsea galleries seemed to have far less drinks (something we consider nothing less than essential when attending an opening. They also seem to have, in our opinion, far weaker works; this would be due to the overwhelming pressure to exhibit works that are ‘sellable’. The works we saw tonight were far more thorough in their ideas and processes than anything we’d seen in Chelsea the previous evening (plus there was always beers and no looks of horror that there were young people in the building). An example of the work we saw was an exhibition titled ‘Ephemerol’. Dora Budor titled it after the experimental drug central to the plot of David Cronenberg’s movie Scanners. In the film, a telepathic artist named Benjamin Pierce works in isolation to construct this giant head sheltering a seating area. What Budor has produced is a sculpture that acts like a fiberglass mould for the reproduction of Pierce’s head. However, the interior seating of Budor’s cranium has exchanged Pierce’s original for a corporate doppelgänger based on a work by the Danish designer Verner Panton, an immersive fantasy lounge titled VISIONA II, itself a monstrous variation of an iconic ‘60s furniture piece known as the ‘Living Tower’, which is still in production today. She’s thought about her position in, not only, the contemporary art sphere but also the world and society as a whole; referencing a variety of pop culture ideas from film to home ware.  

Even though the 30WORKS30DAYS project has finished, we think that we’re going to attempt to keep it up, but relatively causally. If we’ve got plans or haven’t necessarily made it by midnight it won’t be the end of the world. Keeping up with making stuff is obviously a good idea; keeps the ball rolling in the work produce and in the ideas within them, just takes a bit of focus. Here's a couple from the last two days:

The flag arrived today too! It looks great and we are looking forward to presenting it tomorrow.

What we experienced during one of the final 3 crits today was the epitome of Pratt as an organisation. This came in the form of plenty of focus on materials as opposed to ideas within the works, which were barely touched upon. One guy just presented a few plaster casts of his feet with no knowledge of why he had produced them, other than wanted to learn how to cast – however, his honestly on this was actually creditable considering the bullshit that comes out of most people’s mouths. But the point we’re making is that being in this room with these people has made us want to present a work, which is everything that people find ‘challenging’ about what we do. We want to attempt to make an almost completely dematerialised work, as a kind of experiment, just to see what conversation arises from it. Since the idea has arisen from experiencing a crit, the subject, we feel, should be the crit itself. We plan to position a camera in the corner of the room and when everyone comes in and sits down, we set the camera to record. The piece then becomes a conversation about the conversation about the work (which again is the conversation being had). This is a work completely devised for a critique and works, almost exclusively, in the realm of art school. It brings up ideas about mirrors without being able to see one’s reflection; the focus appears to be on this object but when the objects attention is being put onto the viewer, the viewer becomes the subject of the work, by default. This is not intended to ‘poke the bear’ but we’ve realised that in order to get the most out of a crit, we need to steer the conversation away from the work’s material attributes and into the ideas within them. Our solution, make a work which is in fact the very same people who are talking about it.