i s i t s t e a l i n g i f n o o n e o w n s i t ?

We haven’t got any Internet at the moment so bare with us slightly! We’ve also now moved house and were taking a walk around our new area and found a pubic sculpture (photographed below) that has a blank stand where a plaque should be. Previously this would’ve held information about the artist or the piece itself but it’s empty. This feels like a perfect opportunity to claim it as ours. A slightly different idea to finding stuff and making it our art, instead we’re finding art and calling it our art. It’s a readymade that’s already a piece of work but is free from interpretation and we can just plug our own ideas straight in. We’ll go back and take proper measurements and get a plaque made for it. What will be written on it is still being decided but should in some way be referential to the notion of ownership and re-appropriation.

We’ve got the photographs back of ‘Bought Objects’ in Glasgow and we’re pretty pleased with them. The show looked great and our piece was displayed just how we wanted it. The ‘Bedroom Artists’ exhibition have got back to us and said that they require plastic cups for the opening and so we’re going to provide them – continuing the benefactor style position.

Some new stuff is the music collective 8MANA have very kindly said that we can curate a room of their next event in Leeds. The title is ‘Digital Wasteland’ and we’re going to be doing a call out to artists who would like to be shown on the night – we’re thinking films and other visually exciting content to go along side their crazy sounds. Click >>here<< to check out the event and if you want to get involved then contact us! The other new project is a show organised by Brooks and Groves, who interviewed us recently, and we’re going to be showing a new work ‘just ignore me’ which consists of us hiring a photographer for the private view and displaying a photo album for the remaining days of the exhibition. The install shot is is mocked up below; we wanted a nostalgic, reflective aesthetic to go with the idea of photography being this contemplative medium. We’re going away and bringing a sack of books so expect some mini reviews on our return.

y o u ' l l n e v e r o u t l i v e t h e m e m e

It’s getting closer to the bedroom artists exhibition and we’re thinking more about wanting to in-act some of our more invisible works – changing the light bulbs, making the furniture, hiring a photographer etc. We wanted to try and respond to the space itself and the requirements of the individuals using it. The organisers are going to get back to us about things that might be required we then were thinking about getting a plaque made, making us look like benefactors or something; ‘The white paint for the exhibition was kindly provided by Sid and Jim’. This particular example also transforms the gallery walls into a work themselves, which is something else we’re interested in due to the significance of them in the art world.

We also watched ‘Money Monster’ during the week which was thoroughly enjoyed. It could be coined a 'lite' version of ‘The Big Short’ explaining the financial crisis in a way we can all understand; it allows a beaten-down underdog to literally hold a gun to the head of a banker who wiped out his savings at a stroke. The film was only ever going to end in one place but the idea of everyone suddenly caring about an individual for a day then turning his final moments into a meme only days after definitely had a shade (or two) of reality in it. It captured the idea that we’re heading into a place where we have no attachment or bind to an interest or spectacle. One moment everyone’s encapsulated by Elaine Thompson running 200 meters in 21.78 seconds, the next everyone’s talking about someone on big brother has stubbing their toe. They all just become one unit of excitement – in fact if anything, the meme will long out live the memory of Kyle.

This week has also seen Ryan Gander’s book ‘Culturefield’ finally make its way into our possession. It really is massive but consequently surveys his diverse oeuvre very well. There are all the favourite conceptual gestures in there – an invented word, a chess set, a television script and a children's book.

p l a n t i n g a r t s e e d s

Seeing such a vast quantity of high quality art in Berlin gave us plenty to think about with regards to our own work. Adrian Piper’s transparent grave in the wall of the gallery gave us the idea to perhaps install windows in the fake walls of a space in which we are exhibiting. The white walls of the gallery have serious power when it comes to the value of art objects. When something is placed within them it tells people that someone thinks that thing is important and has made a conscious decision to place it there, which most probably doesn’t have anything to do with its direct functionality. Yet the walls are usually fake ones, which is an interesting metaphor about art establishments already; something that attributes worth is false, perhaps rendering its judgments false also? This work would allow visitors to see through the fake walls to the ‘actual’ walls of the building itself, revealing the grubby, muddled and generally unkempt behind-the-scenes version of the gallery. This piece also nods to ‘The Human Condition’ and other works by the famous surrealist painter, René Magritte, that involve windows or openings that reveal something unexpected beneath. Magritte was bringing reality into questioning with these works, using the semiotics of the window’s portal-like qualities but at the same time their boundaries. Windows are not for proactive people; they are for those who would rather watch than do and depending on which side of the window one is positioned, the view can be either that of a pinhole or one which is expansive.

Something else we’re thinking about is setting up a Twitter account for Millie Place; she was the subject of ‘what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts a recent work employing the use of voicemail recordings. The focus of the account would be that’s she’s the receptionist of a fictional gallery where she is constantly bored being a bored and so continually posts on Twitter. This would eventually paint a disparaged picture of a gallery that is perhaps never seen but described, with a variety of characters and situations becoming familiar to regular subscribers.

Inside the Jewish Museum there are a number of holes in the wall utilised to exhibit different artefacts. We noticed that on at the bottom of the wall directly underneath these were loads of tiny black marks from the shoes of (we assume children) who were unable to see so going right up to the edge of the wall on their tiptoes to see what’s inside the wall. This fell slightly into the same category of works that are invisible but also something else. Making a plinth which had similar shoe marks near the ground creates a story of what has happened before and the height of it would dictate what would go onto – maybe it’s 7ft tall rendering it too high for anyone to see what’s onto. There’s still plenty of stuff to think about.

This links in slightly to another idea that was triggered by seeing Joseph Beuys’ ‘Das Kapital Raum’, a works that uses multiple chalkboards on which have a variety of scrawled notes. If we were able to exhibit in a school or a site with a lecture theatre, a whiteboard for lecture we constructed would be fun to do. Giving snap shots of information and small facts that all link together in some way, again creating a narrative using a certain visual language.

Whilst in Berlin we also saw something we had never seen before…adverts on toilet paper. This wasn’t in an art context but just in a pub that we happened to go into. We could very easily print our own toilet paper and have it installed in the toilet of the gallery (it wouldn’t even need to be a gallery we were ‘technically’ exhibiting with ;) or require difficult installation shots because there are toilets everywhere!) What to put on the toilet paper is yet to be decided.

We also have a new ‘show’ in Istanbul in conjunction with The Institute of Fictional Exhibitions Art Foundation. Check out the press release below.

a r t f o r b r e a k f a s t l u n c h a n d d i n n e r

So we’ve returned from the Berlin Biennale wholly satisfied by what we experienced. There were a huge number of artists involved showing all number of works. We started off with Amelia Ulman and her Snapchat stories; unable to tell what imagery is genuine happenstance and what is fabricated coincidence the audience is taken on a bite sized journey of documentation-worthy happenings. We also see familiar content such as memes and fashion label ads’ restaged and re-filmed by Ulman.

Next was Cécile B. Evans’ monumental, hour long, film, commissioned for the exact purpose. Viewers were invited onto a platform surrounded by water with a giant projection of ‘What the heart Wants’ in front of them. Its beautiful CGI and bizarre non-linear, story line reduce the hour to what feels like a few moments and continues to stun the audience with lines such as, ‘most of the future hasn't happened yet’.

Heading down into what felt, very appropriately, like a bunker of sorts, we came across Josh Kline’s film, ‘Crying Games’. We’re faced with a number of individuals all weeping into their hands saying phrases such as ‘I can’t believe it’ or ‘so many people’. They look similar to people we recognise but with a slight twist; using open source software Kline has swapped the faces of the actors whom originally performed the role with alleged war criminals such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

‘Everything #5.1’ is a tombstone-shaped section of wall that has been removed. It’s a work by Adrian Piper. Covering the resultant cavity, a transparent sheet of plexiglass reads, ‘Everything Will Be Taken Away.’ A demonstration of a negative understanding of freedom, the equivalent of having ‘nothing left to lose.’ It is the liberty that results once the weight of signage, markers, and labels is removed.

Camille Henrot, responsible for the amazing film ‘Grosse Fatigue’, was exhibiting emails from a number of environmental charity organisations, printed onto rubber, along side her proposed responses and 11 large-scale paintings of animals. It felt slightly cruel to almost target these organisations with her ostentatious replies; they’re only trying to provide help to things are people that need it. If these had been from banks or network providers it would’ve been slightly clichés but it would have been more understandable. The paintings felt unnecessary also, obviously these animals are ones which show affection and the idea of paintings has this romanticism associated with it but the style was very particular and there didn’t seem to be any known reason for it.

Throughout the transitional spaces, stairwells and corridors, Puppies Puppies invited visitors to make use of the Purell hand sanitiser dispensers that he has placed around. A sneaky intervention that could easily have gone unnoticed and probably did by many. He also is creating a video everyday that the biennale is on.

‘Blockchain Visionaries’ is the work being shown by Simon Denny, which showcases three real companies – Ethereum, 21, Inc, and Digital Asset Holdings – at the forefront of digital monetary platforms and the application of the blockchain, a decentralised transaction database technology that is the backbone of the denationalised cryptocurrency BitCoin. Denny has created a trade-fair-like information booth and a postage stamp for each company, which individually embody a future direction in blockchain technology.

An idea, which we hope to eventually directly steal, is having a viewing of a film on a boat; no one can leave, there’s nothing else to do, you’re on a boat. All these points were clearly on the minds of Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic whose futuristic/dystopian film took on the form of an installation on board a boat. Another idea present in this work that was reinforced during the entirety of the biennale was that if you’re showing a film that’s more than 2 minutes, provide comfy seating.

It was very exciting to be able to encounter another of Jon Rafman’s VR pieces. It involved huge amounts of destruction, falling through and into things, whilst being visually stunning too. He also had some of the subject of his previous films, deferent animals of different sizes consuming each other, turned into sculptures. These weren’t to our liking at first; it looked as if he was merely capitalising on previous success in a different medium – O.K but not that interesting. Once we started the Oculus piece however, we learned they were props for what was happening within the world he had created.

Will Benedict’s music video for ‘Wolf Eyes’ had a pretty incredible an alien/sea creature main character and when combined with the lyric ‘I burn my dreams just to stay warm’ was enough to keep us amused for the duration.

Slightly disappointed with Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Finch but perhaps that’s because we’ve seen quite a few of their works now and they are very similar in their insanity and nonsensicalness. Obviously that is the entire point of them but staying for the whole hour is a rather herculean task. Saying that, there was a rather poetic line in one of them – "who's time are we wasting?" – suggesting that if it was one persons time and not someone else’s they could merely be refunded by another.

Simon Fujiwara had worked with his brother (who works in ‘happiness economics’) to create ‘The Happiness Museum’. Creating a portrait of Germany through products and collections that nod towards what we call ‘happiness’.

After seeing Hito Steyerl’s astonishing film, ‘Factory of the Sun’, in Venice last year we were initially slightly let down by the stripped back aesthetic of the setting for ‘The Tower’ and ‘ExtraSpaceCraft’. Nevertheless, both films did prove to be well told stories, with ‘ExtraSpaceCraft’ shot at the actual site of the former National Observatory of Iraq, now in the territory of the Kurdistan Regional Government, proving quite an exception.

That's it for the Berlin Biennale highlights but we gave ourselves an extra day to see what else Berlin had to offer. One of these things was a show containing 50 works, and 150 poems by Carl Andre. It’s always fun to be able to walk on excessively expensive art so the floor works were greatly enjoyed. We haven’t really seen much of his poems before so it was interesting to be able to see so many at once. Most of them involve singular words repeated. Was a lovely connection between the text pieces and those of a tangible nature; they’re both true to the 'material' in question. There is nothing else present but the things itself and in this case the word is all that is required, pure and unadulterated. There was also an interview with Andre himself were he spoke about how people think his scatter works are very different from his more systematic, precise ones. He was suggesting that, on the contrary, there is a ‘generalised irregularity’ of his scatter works making them just as uniform or irregular as the other pieces.

In the same institution was Marcel Brodhauser’s film ‘The Rain (Project for a Text)’. In the film Brodhauser is trying to write while the rain constantly washes away the ink. In the final scene, the artist gives up and drops his pen concluding the exercise in futility.

In the grounds there was another piece very similar to the ideas we’re hoping to put into production soon; ‘The Right To Be Lazy’ - John Knight is an intervention into the existing architectural, social and political fabric of the place. The formal agreement between the institution and the artist was that the rondel, the circular lawn in front of the entrance to the building, was never to be tended and left to grow naturally by the command of the seasons. 

Erwin Wurm also had an exhibition, which we couldn’t miss. ‘Narrow house’ is a to-scale model of his childhood home, a building typical of Austria’s post-war suburban architecture, only the sculpture has been shrunk to 1m width. This goes along with his whole ‘alter the everyday perspective’ thing which he uses in a all number of mediums. There was great attention to detail inside the house, even photos and fridge magnets had been stretched/squashed. It also succeeded in making us feel overly oppressed.

His famous ‘One Minute Sculptures’ were also present in a way…the viewers were given objects that had been used previously to perform these sculptures and were invited to reenact them themselves. This was great fun to interact with whilst also watching others.

His beautiful instructional diagrams were on display too. His new sculptures had a similar theme; large scale domestic items such as a soap dispenser or a phone appeared to have been destroyed by use, buttons pushed in too far etc., but this was due to the fact the weren’t made of their original materials but a far softer one.

A funny/bizarre painting we saw, that we just couldn't not share, depicted 2 cigarette butts sitting in an ashtray smoking a matchstick. It will be our background to all our electronic devices for quite some time. 

The final thing we saw whilst in Berlin was a fairly gloomy albeit remarkable film, made using exquisite architectural models, of what the Nazis wanted to build over Germany. The scale of it was incredible – fountains and statues 30 meters into the air. When it cut to the map and it was revealed that what was being bulldozed to erect these new structures was hundreds of domestic properties. This film is also not available anywhere online but feel free to give it a search if you want – it’s called ‘Word of Stone’ and was made by a guy called Kurt Rüpil.

i f n e g a t i v e n a n c y a n d d e b b i e d o w n e r h a d a k i d

Tomorrow we head to Berlin to visit the 9th Biennale, which we’re hugely excited about! Unfortunately, on doing some research it appears that not everyone is as excited as us about the content displayed. We came across a Guardian article titled ‘Welcome to the LOLhouse: how Berlin's Biennale became a slick, sarcastic joke’ with the tag line ‘In the hands of New York fashion collective DIS, one of Europe’s biggest exhibitions is now a feeble blancmange of ads and avatars – where is the art?’. It was a shame to see such an old age, ignorant argument used by someone who is in a position of power and is supposedly an expert. Surprisingly it wasn’t Jonathan Jones who we firstly assumed would be behind it (his pieces include ‘The artist who lays eggs with her vagina – or why performance art is so silly’) but Jason Farago, another cheap-shot-art-critic. He isn’t a fan of Laura Poitras, ‘Astro Noise review – Citizenfour director loses the plot’ but loves Mary Heilmann, a painter in her 70s who is mainly focused with waves but we digress.

His issue with the work in the Biennale appears to be its alleged lack of sincerity suggesting that with the all the humanitarian and political catastrophes in the world how can anyone make art that is fun. On the contrary, why wouldn’t you?! Also this is similar to saying ‘how can you enjoy that triple chocolate hot fudge sundae, complete with flake, when that guy over there just stood in dog shit?’ Perhaps a slightly detached comparison but you get the idea. He also comes out with some pretty brutally elitist stuff too, our favourite being ‘at the very least, no one seems to have read an art history textbook’.

This is an unnecessary dig and even though we consider it interesting to know about what’s come before and learn about art and artists that have done things similar or dis-similar to us it’s not essential. One of the beauties of art is that you can create a thorough and concise work without knowing a thing about the great masters and you can make dull and un-insightful work with a PhD in Art History. It’s an incredibly difficult position to be in; reviewing art is challenging and we constantly struggle to be objective when viewing work, trying to steer clean of adjectives like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and more towards ‘well-considered’ or ‘inattentive’. However, we continue to work with the main principal that if something is being presented to us as art then it is to be considered as such. His questioning on whether this stuff is art is put to rest beautifully by roodvim’s reply to peter1234.

Artists we’re very excited to come into contact with include Simon Fujiwara, who’s furless fur-coats we saw at British Art Show 8; Jon Rafman, who’s solo show at Zabludowicz Collection sent shivers down our spines; Hito Steyerl, author of one of our favourite books of last year, ‘In Defence of the Poor Image; and Simon Denny, the artist who did reverse espionage on the NSA. Hopefully we’ll have a better time than Mr. Farago but only time can tell…

n o t q u i t e s u c h a f a i l u r e

The last 2 weeks we’ve been working at Tempting Failure, a live art and noise art festival in London. The days were long but the performances were amazing. We saw someone water-board themselves, suspend themselves through piercings in their knees, consume paper with every mistake they’d ever written on it, pull their children’s baby teeth out of their vagina, perform the magic egg bag trick, dance with strangers, write Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’ in their own blood, move a tone of soil around a room, 24 hours of live vaginal lip syncing and a man playing snooker against himself. While there we also attended a talk on disability within the arts where Syliva Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ was brought up – suggesting that the disabled female body was a metaphor for language in the text. Another point of interest was during a magic-influenced performance involving an egg it was proposed that an egg was already a mysterious object, without the aid of any magic at all. One of our favourite performances was one involving the cooking of a soup, by Xavier de Sousa. While the soup was cooking, he began to elaborate on the cultural background of the soup and them himself and how the two things were intrinsically linked. Once the soup was finished cooking he invited members of the audience up to consume it with him – once sat at the table they had a fairly heavy conversation about belonging and the idea of home. Half way through this a curtain dropped down between the stage and the audience, creating a barrier between the two. It embodied the idea of isolation and exclusion felt by those who were involved in the discussion.

Even though we were fairly busy with Tempting Failure we did manage to take a look at the conceptual art show at Tate Britain. Even though the show had plenty of reading, it was short enough to allow for visitors to invest time in each work (if they chose to). Similarly to visiting Dia Beacon, it was very satisfying to see so many works by so many people we know and admire in the same space. Classics such as Michael Baldwin’s ‘mirror paintings’, Keith Arnett’s ‘Self-Burial’ and Michael Craig Martin’s ‘Oak Tree’. Margaret Harrison’s piece ‘Homeworkers’ featured handprints with palm reader-esque statements about equal rights, this brought about an idea to perhaps have a palm reader present in the gallery for one of our works. We thought that maybe we could write the prophecies and consequently are somewhat dictating the future.

Even though we’ve been living in Finsbury Park for nearly a year now we only just went to the gallery at the heart of it, Furtherfield. ‘Networking the Unseen’ was focused on the cross section of digital and indigenous cultures and how geography influences the two. The Phone Booth Project was something that stuck out to us; a multimedia installation that demonstrates the intricate relationship between community and technology and how this is uniquely affected by local circumstance and environmental factors. It positions itself in the idea that phone booths have all but died out in urban environments. Yet here, in the Western Desert region of rural Australia with the indigenous Martu communities, we see the vital role that they continue to play at the edges of the network - where cell phone reception is often non-existent, and landline phone connections in every house are an infrastructure expense that neither the locals nor the government is willing or able to carry.

We’ve also had a couple of exhibitions recently the first being ‘I Exist' held at The Old Red Bus Station in Leeds where we exhibited ‘The Key to Success’ (seen >here<). The other was titled 'So what is it that you do again?' which was at SLAM in Kings Cross, here we exhibited ‘Where Are They Now?’.

Finally watched Foxcatcher last night, which was of course brutal and intense. There’s a beautiful line where John du Pont is talking to Dave Schultz and he calls the lack of support for athletes ‘the canary in the coal mine,’ which causes him to jump to a discussion of his love of ornithology, then back to how he wants to help America ‘soar again.’ It was a lovely verbal daisy chain of metaphors.