a r t i s t s m a k i n g a r t

We got to go to Istanbul last week and managed to catch some great art during our time. ‘Not All That Falls Has Wings’ was a group show presenter by Arter containing Bas Jan Ader, Phyllida Barlow, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow, VOID and Anne Wenzel. Since opportunities to see works by Ryan Gander can never be turned down we definitely weren’t missing this one. The exhibition presented the idea of falling as more than a mere curse or a sign of impotence. Provided that ‘all falls and keeps falling’ (as it says in the press release), the movement here points to a shared condition that ties all things, be they tangible or intangible. Beginning from this common ground, the works in the show are highlighting the notion of some sort of disorientating movement that bridges the unexpected and the mundane. Falling makes it possible to trace a movement from beginning to end, which creates the conditions for dealing with the surface, and coming to terms with the bottom. The works in the exhibition manifest the invisible forces of gravity working on small and large scales, and contextualise an all-time dynamic by each of them offering up their own definitions at the point of their production. Some favorites included three 16mm films by Bas Jan Ader from his legendary ‘Fall’ series. Our enjoyment of these works come from Ader taking this idea of ‘fate’ into his own hands; usually is one were to fall it would be by accident (or ‘chance’ as some call it) but he is removing this by inflicting it upon himself.

Ryan Gander’s installation was one we had seen many a time via the Internet but never IRL. It’s one, which references the disagreement had by Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg about the significance of the diagonal line (Mondrian being opposed to them and only using horizontal and vertical lines and Van Doesburg embracing them). Hundreds of black arrows, all of which seem to have been shot at varying angles, transform the existing gallery space into a battleground. This work in praise of a diversity of lines and paths provides a scene for fact and fiction to collide; a site where nothing actually falls other than the viewer’s certainty. 

While we were there we also visited Istanbul Modern that had a group show titled ‘Artists in Their Time’. As the title suggests, the main theme of the exhibition was how artists position themselves and their work within the concept of time. One of our favourites was ‘Stairway to Hell’ by Monica Bonvicini. Previous knowledge of her interest in architecture, sex and politics highlight the dark humour of this work. It manifests as a steel staircase, suspended from the ceiling by long strands of steel chains, which culminate in panels of safety glass punctured by the occasional hammer crack. To climb a staircase suggests the possibility of redemption but the prospect of finally emerging from the staircase only to be trapped within this nightmarish combination of brightly lit metal and broken glass definitely overrides this. 

Another was ‘Taxidermist’ by Ali Kazma. This was a film where a taxidermist went through the process of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals. It was mesmerising to see watch and the process of the animals starting out at limp, lifeless bodies to mimicking their once animated selves. It reminded us of a film by Daniel Eisenberg called ‘The Unstable Object II’, which is about the conditions of factory production in the early part of the twenty-first century. This particular film is one based in a prosthetics factory where thousands of hands, feet, arms, and legs are produced daily for the world market. When watching it, you get this strange feeling of people building people; when there are close-ups on hands making hands it’s hard to tell which ones are ‘real’. The connection between the two works was the hidden nature of them, both are rarely in the public eye, and the uneasy feeling they both in still with regards to the viewings confidence in reality. 

Şener Özmen’s film, ‘What Actually Does an Artist Want?’, was another piece that stuck in our memory. The artist shouts into an empty field, while his voice drowned out by passing planes. This is similar to an idea we’ve seen enacted by Joshua Tabti (see his website here) where he gives a lecture but is standing outside while the audience is inside, watching him through a window. 

The photos from ‘Level Playing Field’ are finally here, along with documentation of ‘God’s Own County’ (we appear at around 53:54 on the YouTube video here) and ‘swimmers/secretkeepers’. 

There are some other new things, which are in process, one of which is a platform that someone is building for artists where they have a profile and a selection of interview style questions that they’ve answered about their practice. Another is an exhibition called ‘Bedroom Artists’ (although this is potentially a working title), which is a show consisting of predominantly live (performance or live art) works or works that are less ‘live’ but more unfold in front of you (moving image). It’s in the very early stages at the moment but it’s going to be held in London some time in September. The third and final of these is a project titled ‘withfc’. It’s basically a new curatorial collaboration between Hamish Chapman and Freya Fullarton (click on their names to check out their individual practices or here to find out about their previous project, ‘The Plinth’). The backstory is that they’ve been asked by Very Friendly to stage a ‘take over’ of Voidoid Archive for the month of August, and have selected 50 artists to be involved in one of their programmed exhibitions. The exhibition’s working title is ‘Bought Objects,’ the premise of which is to explore the role of found objects in a contemporary artistic practice. And to develop a new sub-category within this of ‘bought objects,’ essentially that a bought object is one an artist seeks out consciously for some artistic purpose. This exhibition will take place at Voidoid Archive in Glasgow and will open on the 12th August. Find out more on the withfc website here. Something that continues to be in progress is ‘The Great Unanswered II’ and is going to take more of our focus as we’re nearing the exhibition date.

w h a t i f d o t c o m

Started today with some good news that we are showing our film ‘The Best 4 x 4 x Far’ is going to be shown as a part of 'God's Own Country' at the Western Park Museum in Sheffield. The works are going to be projected onto the outside of the museum (as shown below) so it’s exciting to be able to see our work on such a huge scale. 

We were also discussing The Wet Paints and perhaps their first release could be Brian Eno’s ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports’, but instead it would be called ‘Ambient 1: Music for Stealing’. Originally, the music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. To achieve this, Eno sought to create music that is as ignorable as it is interesting. This reflects our thinking around ideas based on the stigma around the notions of ‘theft’ and also the fact that Eno is one of popular music’s most influential, innovative figures, means that his content has been stolen a multitude of different ways. 

Eva and Franco Mattes’ show at Carroll Fletcher Gallery titled ‘Abuse Standards Violations’ was this evening and it was a great opportunity to see their work in situ, since mostly the only way we can see them is through documentation. The ‘Dark Content’ series confronts us as we walk in – the first showing of the next episodes. They were displayed using topsy-turvy office desks and a cubicle wall – reflecting the corporate nature of the companies, which employ the content moderators and the facelessness of both parties. Heading into the backroom is ‘By Everyone For No One Every Day’ (BEFNOED) which also calls attention to a new form of labor in the digital age. For this series, the artists used a range of crowdsourcing websites to give instructions to anonymous workers to realise a variety of absurd performances for webcam. The artists laid out instructions for them to follow and interpret. Once received, the videos are dispersed on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world. Seeing both works in the same space made us think about how in ‘Dark Content’ the artists act as a sort of confidante, but in ‘BEFNOED’ their position is more complex, as their unusual demands appear to both entertain and exploit their performers. The placement of the monitors is something we’re very fond of; in the space is such that, in order to watch the work, viewers are forced into a series of physically awkward and bizarre positions, in a sense taking on the role of performers themselves. 

Remai Modern has awarded Ryan Gander with its first web commission, ‘My validation through my association’. A publicly available Twitter feed from the perspective of Picasso’s chair, donated to Remai Modern in 2014, written by a ghostwriter employed to give the inanimate object a life. A continuation of Gander’s ‘What if?’ style practice which we always attempt to strive towards. It started with just its own tweets but now it has began to act more like ‘real’ twitter account such as retweeting others etc. building up a persona.

t h e i n t e r n e t l i v e s o n

We were able to visit the Whitechapel, to especially check out the films by Harun Farocki and Eva and Franco Mattes. Farocki didn’t fail to impress us with ‘Parallel I-IV’. ‘Parallel I’ opens up a history of styles (be those choices or merely all that was possible at the time) in computer graphics. The first games consisted of only horizontal and vertical lines. This abstraction was seen as a failing, and today representations are oriented towards photo-realism – yet there are many that enjoy the ‘retro’ aesthetic of those earlier games and attempt to revive it. ‘Parallel II’ explores the borders and boundaries of the game worlds. This could be our favourite of the four due to how it expands upon a thought that almost al people who have ever played a video game have had. The film follows characters attempts to escape the edges of their animated world by any means, and seeks to reveal what lies outside of the defined spaces and digital borders. The narrator speaks of this in a very romantic way – the characters attempting to break free of the games, very obvious, attempts to keep them in check. ‘Parallel III’ seeks out the backdrops of the game worlds and the nature of their digital objects. It reveals digital worlds which take the form of discs floating in the universe – reminiscent of pre-Hellenistic conceptions of the universe. The animated worlds appear as one-sided theatre stages, flat backdrops revealed only by the movements of an all-knowing, all-seeing camera. Parallel IV explores the actions of the heroes and protagonists of the video game world. A feature we hadn’t previously considered was that these heroes have no parents or teachers; they must test their relationships with others and determine of their, own accord, the rules to follow. Humans create them, which gives users the feeling they can relate to them, meaning that whoever plays with them almost has a share in the creator's pride. Our interest in video games/computer animation is related to the fact that for so long photography and film were the leading media. From the start, they served not only to inform and entertain, but were also media of research and documentation. That’s also why these reproduction techniques were associated with notions of objectivity and contemporaneity, as opposed to images created by drawing and painting indicated subjectivity. These images fall somewhere in between due to the fact we see far more objectivity and the hand of the artist is far more hidden. 

It was also fun seeing the first three Dark Content’ episodes by Eva and Franco Mattes on a big screen. The films contain interviews with several anonymous content moderators previously employed by companies with clients such as Vimeo (you never work directly for the platform needing your services) over chat and email correspondence. Since it’s such an elusive occupation, the Mattes had to pose as a company interested in hiring content moderators in order to get in contact with any. A frustrating curatorial decision was to put their videos on a loop with Tor Jørgen van Eijk’s ‘Purgatory’ which consists of a series of videos where the camera records its own image, exploring how the apparatus of analogue video generates visual feedback. This is a fairly aggressive and repetitive selection of moving images, meaning that anyone who wondered into that room wouldn’t stay for more than thirty seconds. This is obviously fine if that’s the only film, just a matter of taste, but if people firstly come into contact this ‘Purgatory’ there’s no way they would make it to ‘Dark Content’ which felt like a shame to us. 

Eva and Franco Mattes were giving a talk at Photographers gallery with Zach Blas. When attending a talk by people who you’ve previously researched fairly heavily, it’s less likely to be mind blowing in terms of the art they produce and more so joining the works to bigger ideas. The Mattes and Blas both fall into this category; we’ve been aware of and interested in their work for quite some time. An interesting point that was brought up was Umberto Eco notion of ‘The Open Work’. It was brought up with reference to a painting of a woman crying holding a dead baby. If the baby is removed, the work is far more open to interpretation; a narrative is built, a question I posed which is completed by a viewer; ‘what is the woman crying about?’ Speaking more generally, it’s an attempt to understand artworks, which can be rendered ‘open’ by their author, and further completed by the performer, viewer, reader or audience. It legitimates the variety of interpretations one work may give us. But despite how we may never know which interpretation is the ‘correct one’, we cannot have unlimited interpretations of a work either. Eco’s concept of openness relates to interpretation and to modern aesthetics. In his book ‘The Open Work,’ Eco uses Stockhausen as an example of a musical piece rendered open by its own author. The work created rejects the definitive, concluded message and rather multiplies the formal possibilities of distribution and performances. A single music sheet with a series of groupings is presented, and the performer is given the freedom choose the order or the sequence. So Stockhausen’s piece can have a variety of forms given by different composers. 

To Eco, this idea of ‘openness’ is essential to contemporary art. In ‘The Open Work’ he explains that this idea of ‘openness’ is far removed from meaning ‘infinite possibilities’ and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is available is a rage of rigidly pre-established and ordained interpretative solutions, and these never allow the reader, the performer or the viewer to move outside the strict control of the author. With the example of Stockhausen’s musical piece, it is evident that the performer can re-invent the work in collaboration with the author itself. This can be compared to the work of Sol LeWitt in the sense that he plays the part of an administrator or director than an artist. To return to the talk, Blas spoke of killing the Internet and the series of political demands and technical operations that went with it. This is in reference to when the Internet was shut off in Egypt in 2011 due to a clash between anti-government protesters and police. A funny question that was posed after was that if the Internet was ‘killed’, since it is now ‘alive’ again, is it a zombie of its previous self? He also spoke about biometrics and how non-normative, othered, and minoritarian groups are most acutely and consistently made vulnerable to policing and discrimination by biometric authentication, often because such machines render them ‘illegible’.