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.
