Saturday 25 February 2017

b a c k g r o u n d v s f o r e g r o u n d



We visited Tate Britain, while on a trip down to Chelsea College of Art, and saw the new David Hockney show. It’s always pretty phenomenal to see the work of, not only ‘one of the greats’, but one that’s been alive and making art for so long! Seeing the journey that his artistic practice took was hugely interesting and made us think a little about people who ‘have a thing’ and how it’s very different to ‘have a thing’ at 21 than it is at 80. The room that struck us the most had to be ‘The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods’; it’s this breath-taking, immersive video work showcasing the changing landscape of Hockney’s native Yorkshire, each season comprised of nine high-definition screens. Each wall is dedicated to a different season of the same environment and we found ourselves wishing he had installed a merry-go-round so you could just watch them all almost simultaneously.



Something that’s actually been there for a fair few months but is slightly tucked away is Racheal Maclean’s ‘Art Now’ room titled ‘Wot u :-) about?’. The main focus is her film ‘It’s What’s Inside That Counts’ with a variety of meticulously constructed tableaus that recall the compositional strategies of Renaissance painting on the surrounding walls. The film is fantastic (as is everything she produces) and parodies all number of things ranging from social media to advertising to children’s television programmes and fairy tales. Something that’s used very well in the film is the techniques global corporations use to sell well-being, youth and happiness by bombarding us with imagery and preying on our anxieties. At the base level it’s about consumption in all its forms, focusing particularly on our dependence on technology. The technological collapse she’s depicting causes a complete breakdown in the gruesome society, and to make it more depressing, there’s little sense that anything better will replace it. Always a pleasure to see her work, every detail is brilliant, even down to the pink glittery carpet, very excited to see what she does for Venice this year.



Some good news from us is that we’re going to be a part of the Digital Artists Residency in March. Our project is focusing on art galleries and how they’re these huge interconnected, interdependent webs, made up by all number of individuals, some which are, inevitably, valued higher than others. The lowest rank within the gallery system would probably be the invigilators or if these are not present then the receptionist. So we’re going to embed a twitter account owned by Millicent Place (you may remember her from >>here<< into the Digital Artists Residency website. The focus of the account is that she is the receptionist of a fictional gallery where she is constantly bored and consequently is continually posting on Twitter. Hopefully this is going to paint a disparaged picture of a gallery that is rarely seen but regularly described, with a variety of characters and situations becoming familiar to regular subscribers. We’ve chosen to title it 'Hold a penny between your finger and thumb', which refers to a test that one does to test depth perception, the ability of the human eye to see in three dimensions, or to see a (white) cube. This felt like an appropriate parallel to draw in terms of the Twitter feed’s role in generating a new world and how deep it could potentially go. But basically, during the residency, she’s going to be posting onto the Twitter page (mostly during ‘standard gallery opening hours’ but also occasionally at other times) and creating this fictional world that Millicent Place lives in. It will be similar to creating characters for a film apart from if the film was only shown in 140 characters a time. Each personality will have their own backstory complete a relationship map connecting all the dots.


Another film work we’re trying to get off the ground at the moment comes in the form of an audition tape. This has ties to the proposal we worked on this people from CSM about the preparatory period of a production but also we’ve been watching quite a few of them on YouTube and they’re highly engaging. It’s 2-4 minutes of pure acting, there’s no set, no costumes, no other actors, nothing. It’s just the character that they’re trying to portray, the bare bones of what makes a film or play engaging. Arron Paul’s from Breaking Bad is one of our top ones because he forgets a line half way through and it breaks the spell which you’ve been under and you’re jolted back into ‘oh yeah this isn’t actually the film yet’. So yeah, just attempting to get a script written for that and find someone to play the big role.




Finally finished reading the first volume of ‘Symbolic Misery’ by Bernard Stiegler titled ‘The Hyperindustrial Epoch’. A great book but not life affirming by any means, in fact almost the exact opposite. He argues that our epoch is characterised by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. And then the whole book is about how this has resulted in a ‘symbolic misery’ where conditioning substitutes for experience. He refers to adverts and societal conditioning as ‘aesthetic weapons’ which is excellent! But also he’s not wrong; audio-visual and digital technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious (and maybe even unconscious) activities we indulge in, modulating life. The majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing and therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic inquiry. So like we said, thought-provoking but depressing. He also makes some links similar to Paul Virlio’s ‘War and Cinema’; he pays particular attention to cinema which occupies a unique position in the temporal war that is the cause of symbolic misery: at once industrial technology and art, cinema is the aesthetic experience that can combat conditioning on its own territory.


Monday 20 February 2017

b u i l d t o l i v e


Frieze are doing a series of events and we were able to attend one titled ‘Can Self-Build Save Us All?’. As you can imagine it centred around the concept of self-build and its long and varied history. Self-building has recently been brought to centre stage: it featured as a theme in the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale and is proposed as an answer to housing crises all over the globe, including those related to emergency accommodation, long-term homes and the grey area in between. There were some superb speakers with plenty to say on the matter. Thomas Lommee (creator of OpenStructures) said something beautiful about the idea of how one keeps oneself invested; his answer was to exchange novelty to nuance, learning new things can be just as interesting as learning more about the things you already know. Another favourite moment was Daniel Charny’s presentation regarding the question of whether fixing is the future of design. He used the term ‘fixperts’ which we not only thoroughly enjoyed but caused us to think back to a Freakonomics Podcast on the subject maintenance and discusses why it isn’t the enemy of innovation, but rather the saving grace of American infrastructure. All-in-all, a thought-provoking day which made us want to build a table, or something more useful.


Went out for a little art-viewing venture today, over to Lisson Gallery which had two exciting shows on. The first is Bouchra Khalili’s ‘Mapping Journey Project’ in which she employs geographical maps as a means to reveal what generally remains hidden from our eyes: the clandestine and illegal journeys made by migrants. There are eight videos in the first space, all showing a hand drawing his/her course onto the map’s surface, whilst being narrated. The people in the films are described in the press release as ‘displaced individuals in transnational hubs’, but this merely scrapes the horrifying surface of their crucifying situations. Many had been jailed for huge periods of time and had been attempting to get to their destinations for even longer. Khalili gives these undocumented individuals a voice. By making them the main protagonists of her videos she challenges the stereotypical representation of migrants in the mainstream media. Important and distressing.


Heading upstairs one finds 'Lisson Presents...', a group show of artists who engage with how narratives can be formed and shared. A fairly poor, undescriptive title for a pretty interesting collection of works and Ryan Gander’s ‘Associative Ghost Template # 10’ is one of them. Its one of a series of 28 framed works from 2012 based on a collage of research articles and images on the subject of invisibility, illusion and artifice. It comprises two layers of Perspex, each punctured by apertures of various shapes and sizes. Each layer of Perspex relates to the original collage, and the laser-cut openings show the size and location of the objects. This is a classic example of Gander encouraging the imaginative possibilities created as the human brain struggles to find a connection between incongruent objects. 

John Latham’s piece ‘Story of the RIO’ was another great work from the show. The 'Reflective Intuitive Organism' and the works describe the evolution of human knowledge and culture, beginning with a blank, white panel and ending with a complex book relief. Visible is a sequence of 18 panels depicting the development of a complex universe containing RIOs from a proto universe. He’s used transparent glass, his third important medium/material, to signify an atemporal score or informing component of events. A transparent glass panel followed by a plain white panel represents the proto universe consisting of a state 0 followed by a state 1, or Least Event. And the remaining panels in the sequence represent highlighted evenometric steps. The final panel is a book relief in which a reflective intuitive organism appears as one book cluster along with other clusters representing a merely reflective organism and a non-reflective organism. An incredibly complex and multifaceted work which becomes even more so the more one learns about it.


Wednesday 15 February 2017

f a m i l y d a y o u t

We took a little wonder round some exhibitions recently that didn’t feature in the podcast so we’ll give our thoughts on them here instead. Sarah Pichlkostner’s solo exhibition at Josh Lilley was beautiful; very clean and fitted. There was a genuine truth to materials with respect to these suspended glass tubes; silicate heated to liquid, blown once, and allowed to harden in its preferred molecular form. There’s also Silver nitrate which reacts inside, enacting a seamless transformation from transparent to opaque. So how the material is displayed is referential to what they would perhaps ‘want to do’ given the choice. This might be a little subjective but the works produced don’t appear far from this. An interesting work was a strip of LEDs hidden in the wall and when they were lit up, they could be seen within. Unfortunately, this wasn’t done with huge amounts of skill and therefore the entire process was visible (which could be intentional but we would’ve enjoyed more mystery about the matter).


A trip to PACE was also on the cards (something we had tried previously but when entering the building had been told ‘it’s only private appointments after 4, jolting us back into the realisation that this is actually all about those big boy bucks). However, we did eventually get to see the show but never really got past the initial ‘Ooooo look at the pretty lights’; this is not necessarily a bad thing, if anything it was the source of much amazement/enjoyment, nothing more, nothing less.



Serpentine is somewhere else we felt we needed to go since they actually finished a couple of days ago. Lucy Raven was occupying the main gallery with Zaha Hadid taking on the Slacker Gallery. Lucy Raven’s show is about the idea of animation and optics. These animations are often composed of photographs in stop-start sequence – a stuttering, percussive performance; photographs of offices; stills from television programmes. As you enter there’s a stunning work which is this almost the ballet of light beams gliding and falling, parting and uniting as they sweep the walls and floor. These could be seen in several ways, one of them being as search lights in an infinite pursuit of something unknown. Another merely an appreciative gesture towards some unsung heroes of cinema/theatre – these lights are beautiful in their own right, they have become more than functional in this space – they are art in and of themselves. Unfortunately, after the initial peak the quality of the work somewhat diminishes. An example being that the main gallery has been turned into a cinema, in which visitors put on red and green anaglyph glasses to watch stereoscopic photographs appear momentarily 3D: a phenomenon shown to children in museums the world over.

Now Zaha Hadid is an interesting subject due to the fact that she did not claim that she was an artist and therefore her paintings are drawings aren’t attempting or pretending to be anything they’re not; they’ve about space, shapes and location. And they’re amazing to look at, gorgeous use of colour and line to create these incredible looking buildings-esque forms. The VR was fun as always and especially fun was watching all the people on using it like it was just watching TV with a headset on; unmoved and unresponsive.



We’ve got our first SketchUp Project lined up with Realf Greville-Heygate, be sure to check out his stuff at www.thesketchupresidency.com/projects.


Friday 10 February 2017

l e a r n i n g c a n b e f u n


Prem Sahib was this weeks guest lecturer which excited us a great deal having hugely enjoyed his show at the ICA in 2014. Even though we knew about his work and had previously watched interviews with him going over some of the ideas which lead to its inception, we were unaware of how much the work is about his gay experiences. These were fairly specific references but estranged ones none the less; connections and thoughts which very much hidden when viewing the work ‘blind’. This is not something that we have any issue with because we tend to deal with ideas over materials ourselves. When viewing a work we really enjoy that moment when you’re reading about a work and you form the same connection that the artist had between the work in front of you and words on the page. However, when producing a work we enjoy providing minimal information and inducing a level of uncertainty in the minds of the audience, allowing them to make up their own minds about what a work might be about. To return to Prem Sahib, he spoke about this in a similar fashion saying that he had no prescribed reaction from viewers of his work, they can take away whatever they want from it. But, he is very much accountable and responsible for the initial idea and therefore is happy to discuss it and provide the narrative which led him to producing the work. This is exactly how we think about our art making but haven’t been able to be so articulate about it. Another noteworthy comment he made was in reference to his poster works that were upstairs in the dark area of the exhibition at the ICA. He said that posters are about something that has happened or going to happen, which sounds obvious but it becomes a device to talk about ‘event’. So posters are an echo of what has happened or a premonition of what is to come, interesting when thinking about ideas to do with mythology.


The London Review of Books podcast is one of our favourites and with the new Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern there was a review by the art critic Hal Foster. He quoted Rauschenberg as saying that he used found objects in his work because he wanted to make paintings that looks like things as opposed to paintings that don’t look like things. We always find a stronger connection with work which contains a bit of real life and perhaps this is where that comes from. The magazine Art Monthly also conducts podcasts, although fairly sporadically maybe once a month or so, and we listened to one this week which was all about abstract painting. Now, this is a subject matter that would usually not be to our taste but we decided to give it a go and we were rewarded for it! The more we learn about abstract art the more parallels we find between it and our own art making; it’s about producing something that isn’t represented in the world we live and very often this is something that we’re attempting to do, generate thinking about a fictional or unknown entity.



Monday 6 February 2017

o n l y t i m e w i l l t e l l

This week involved finishing off the proposal for the collaborative show in with other students from CSM. In the end we decided on it being about an Archie M. Walker who is attempting to “stir the stage this season with his new production, Plastic Geraniums.” So, basically it’s a fictional play by an invented character. We spoke a lot about how the theatre could be compared to a swan; it gracefully moves on a lake, is a picture of elegance in motion but what is hidden from the eye is the activity going on beneath the water’s surface. We don’t see the hard work conducted by the swan’s webbed feet which propels the graceful motion we see and admire. We admire this because they are able to make the sublime look easy. They do all the hard work in the shadows and display excellence and elegance in the open. The swans feet are the unsung heroes of the theatre world; the prop makers, the set decorators, the publicity managers, the costume designers etcetera. The exhibition then became about the preparatory period of putting on a play where the work of these individuals is prominent; the backdrops are incomplete, the design of the posters are yet to be finalised and the auditions for the actors are still being conducted. The reality of the world being created is in limbo; currently the set wouldn’t be transporting you anywhere but isn’t allowing your feet to be kept firmly on the ground either. This is the feeling we want to instil in the visitors to the exhibition.

As we said previously, for the duration of the show, the space will appear to function as a storage space for an upcoming play. There would be various detritus around all the space, including but not exclusive to props, posters, sets, costumes and scripts, all hinting at various, generic locations or characters. A central component will be auditions going on involving a monologue that we all wrote together via William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. This system was employed to replicate the notion of a standardised play. The people auditioning will be a mixture of ourselves, visitors and people we source via an open call. This is our own rendition of invisible theatre; instead of performing in a public space without informing anyone, we are in fact informing without performing. And that’s it! We submitted it to Intermedia which is an independent gallery space funded by Glasgow City Council and managed by the CCA in partnership with Glasgow Life. [fingers crossed]


In a little bought of self-promo we’ve got a freshly peeled episode of artists and Friends where we talking about Carroll/Fletcher's superb show 'United We Stand' which is part three of 'Looking at one thing and thinking of something else', would highly recommend it if you have time. Also took a moment to talk about a few of the works in 'Room' at Sadie Coles and audio work by Rory Tangney and Dillon Lemon. If you have any audio works that you’d like us to review or talk about then send them on over to artistsandfriendspodcast@gmail.com.

Image result for carroll fletcher united we stand

The SketchUp Residency is now onto its third resident which is exciting as it’s feeling like more of a ‘thing’ and more people are applying to be a part of it. We’ve also a new area for experimentation on the website called The SketchUp Projects and it’s come about due to us feeling that we’ll be able to do more stuff for the people who are interested as opposed to just having one person for 3 weeks and then another etc etc. This will be a space, which operates alongside the residency, where artists can submit proposals for anything SketchUp related and produce one off works or series for the site. Anything that can be featured on the website will be considered; anything from still images, to films, to 3D models.



Something else we’ve been working on recently is a new website since we haven’t updated ours for over 6 months. Hopefully by the end of this week it’ll be all up and ready but it also means that we’ll be moving from Squarespace to Wix and we’ve still got a few months left on our subscription. So instead of leaving it or just waiting until it runs out to change we’re going to go on another curatorial venture titled ‘Dollspace. It’s going to be group and solo shows by emerging to mid-career artists within a dolls-house. This is another method to get around the whole we-don’t-have-enough-money-to-actually-rent-a-space thing, similar to our thoughts on The SketchUp Residency. Hopefully people will be interested enough to apply with proposal for teeny tiny exhibitions – if you have any thoughts on it then send them over to dollspaceprojects@gmail.com.

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