a t o u r i s t f o r t h e d a y

Some friends came to visit us in London for Christmas so we did some fun tourist-y art galleries with them. Starting off at Tate Modern we managed to catch what must be the final few days of Olafur Eliasson’s giant (although not so giant anymore) blocks of glacier. Overall, it’s fairly underwhelming; if the point is to confront the general public with the dangers of climate change then this is a pretty luke-warm attempt. This isn’t shocking imagery, it’s big bits of ice. Much more enjoyable are the photos of them dragging them out of the sea and all the disclaimers about how it’s not actually that bad for the planet to fly 80 tonnes of frozen water half way around the world… 

Eliasson also has a new work in the tanks, this one much subtler. Titled ‘Your Double-Lighthouse Projection’ it involves two circular rooms, one is filled with coloured light and the other with white light. The coloured room is quite nice (nice being the key word); the changing light washes over you and it’s all very pleasant but that’s where it all ends really. Niceness. 

Susan Philipsz was in another one of the tanks with a sound installation. The room is very dark with only a few dull spotlights. The ideas around the work are quite poetic; it centres on two figures that share the name ‘Lucia’ – the Italian patron saint of the blind, Santa Lucia and the dancer, Lucia Joyce. The name Lucia originates from the Latin word for light – ‘lux’ and in Sweden, the festival of Santa Lucia celebrates the coming of light on one of the darkest days of the year. While shrouded in darkness, you hear Philipsz’s voice singing three songs. The first is Will Oldham’s duet, I See a Darkness, which gives the installation its name. This is followed by Maurice Ravel’s piano piece, Pavane for a Dead Princess, which Lucia Joyce danced to with the group Les Six de rythme et couleur. The work finishes with the four-part Neapolitan folk song, Santa Lucia. This all feels very intentional and in turn gives the work some depth. 

Next up we went over to Tate Britian (the other Tate) and saw Monster Chetwynd’s new commission. It’s two giant, illuminated leopard slug sculptures each over 10 metres long. They are accompanied by swathes of blue and white LED slug trails across the building’s façade, so we would recommend going when it’s dark to get the full effect. It’s quite fun and is accompanied by a film of the mating ritual in the foyer. 

Once inside we saw the Jesse Darling show ‘The Ballad of Saint Jerome’. The basis for the exhibition is the story of Saint Jerome who was confronted by a ferocious lion and instead of reacting in fear, he recognised that the animal was injured and removed a thorn from its paw. Now tamed, the lion became his lifelong companion. A lovely catalyst for art-making and one which appears to have worked well. Our favourite works were the cowering cabinets with their bent legs, unable or unwilling to support their own weight now that the pages in the binders they’re carrying have been replaced by concrete blocks. All the works have this sense of being pained; some with plasters some with crutches, they’ve all got their own trauma. 

Finally, we went to Saatchi to see the Black Mirror exhibition since the new film is coming out soon. It was pretty disappointing due to an excess of boring paintings but was saved by two artworks, one by James Howard which was an entire wall of spam that you might be familiar with if you frequent any film streaming websites. They’re the ones that frame a video link bragging about their latest fix or warning of early symptoms. We weren’t sure about the whole wall aspect and thought that perhaps that would work better if they were positioned as one would find them on a web page but without that context. We’re being picky now but that’s only because we enjoyed the concept. 

The other piece was called ‘Cash Cow’ and was by Jade Townsend. The work depicts a sort-of convincing set of male legs holding a red painting with faded/semi-comprehensible statements about sex and smutty acts; a slow-burning critique of gender imbalance and contemporary worth, if one is to put in the time looking. With a title like ‘Cash Cow’, it’s hard to deny that some rather large bones are being picked. Townsend’s sculpture sets its sights on an ‘exclusive’ target – the art market, institution, and the ‘sub-world’ each of them operates within. A fun looking work with a message.

i ' m s o r r y : ' (

This week included an application to produce our own YouTube apology video. YouTube apologies are becoming their own genre of content, designed to emotionally manipulate viewers. At the beginning of this year the YouTube star, Logan Paul, posted a video unlike most of the other content published to his channel; lacking intro music, graphics and sound effects, it was just a dimly lit, talking head, webcam video. He appears red-eyed and starts with “I had a severe and continuous lapse in my judgement.” The video titled “So Sorry” is among YouTube’s most viral videos in 2018. It’s racked up more than 54 million views and four million comments. There are also hundreds of videos on YouTube reacting to the apology. And there are plenty more dismissing it, describing it as disingenuous and inauthentic and considering him as nothing more than a YouTuber who finally flew too close to the sun. Some have referred to it as the “first viral apology video,” a visual example of a modern celebrity fall from grace, played out in real time. The video was recorded after he received immense criticism for filming a dead body in the Aokigahara Forest, which is a notorious spot in Japan for people to commit suicide. The question then is was this authentic, or was this yet another performance, cloaked in PR-enforced sincerity? 

We proposed to produce an apology video using the myriad of techniques YouTubers use when delivering their own apologies. Ranging from the sigh at the beginning, deliberately not looking into the lens of the camera to express a false sense of vulnerability, filming themselves turning the camera off to reinforce the idea that the video was completely unedited and spontaneously crying midway through. The apology will be entirely generic and the incident will never be truly described, only spoken around. The film would be shown on a monitor on a stand, similar to one that might be found at a conference or in a school, suggesting that this is an education into YouTube apologies, a how to guide. Hopefully we get it but if not it’s a fairly simple, low budget thing to produce.

t h e a r t i s t s h a v e b e e n b u s y

Seen some good art this week! South Kiosk had Franek Wardyński’s solo show ‘Reunification of the Motherland’ which was dealing with something close to our hearts, stock images. The exhibition was all about the sad afterlife of a stock photo, it just ends up in some boring catalogue that no one ever looks at. The show was questioning what if there was a spiritual reunification with the images’ suggested origin, placing it back to the environment that it had the ambition to depict. The show itself is a short film and photographic series portraying a stock footage banner forest on its pilgrimage back to reality. The artworks deal with the issue of life as a journey, recognition and the struggle of self. It’s about liberating the forest montage, a bit like when you buy a goldfish in the market and let it go because you want it to be free. 

APT gallery had a short exhibition titled ‘Bodily Encounters’ with some exciting artists and it didn’t disappoint. All the works are beautifully made and there’s a consistency to them in that in all the works a body (individual or collective) is implied. There’s all these bodily traces, fleshy textures, stand-in bodily elements, architectural interventions and functional-looking objects that suggest human interaction. It’s very much show-don’t-tell which is always ideal. A favourite work was an amazing climbing frame by Emily Woolley that had all these small details such as hand prints in the poles as if the hulk had squeezed them a little too hard or suggesting that it was made of soft clay as opposed to metal. 

GOOD GRIEF, CHARLIE BROWN! Was mighty disappointing. The shows at Somerset House always feel museum-y and a little too educational and this one was no exception. The installation of the artwork is just so unimaginative too – everything has its own stand and its really boring. The art itself is high quality but the show as a whole is really poor. To top it all off, Andy Holden’s new film wasn’t working! It was pretty much the only reason we wanted to go and we didn’t even get to see it! Fun to see David Musgrave’s intricate snoopy anatomy artwork and Ryan Gander’s replica of Charlie Brown’s kite caught in the infamous SKATE sign atop Somerset House. Our advice would be not to bother, it’s the best work in the show you’ll save yourself 16 quid…

d i a m o n d i n t h e r o u g h

It’s come around to Bloomberg New Contemporaries again and since these people are our peers it’s fun to go. Unfortunately, it was all a bit of a mess… First of all was the nearly an hour-long queue to get in even though we arrived at the start of the private view. Secondly, once we did finally get inside it was a fiver for a tiny can of beer! The show itself felt like it was curated by numbers due to being oversubscribed; every inch of wall was covered all the way around the room with mediocre (at best) paintings with a few floor based works thrown in to even it out. Chris Alton’s work was our favourite and only work we liked. A massive banner saying ‘after the revolution they built an art school over the golf course’ – funny, insightful, and truly well made. 

Another event this week was Martin Creed’s solo show at Hauser and Wirth titled Toast. There are a couple of thoughtful ideas such as an excessively complex machine which only purpose is to wiggle a sock around on a plinth and an old classic of the intrusion/protrusion on the wall (a gold one for this show although we prefer the one which matches the wall colour). But these are minor features in a show which is dominated by awful paintings, truly uninteresting and unconsidered. 

Next was the Elephant x Griffin Art Prize which was surprisingly good. We say surprisingly because it’s a prize exhibition of younger artists and they can be fairly hit and miss but everything seemed very well done; the curatorial decisions were visible and the artworks were varied but consistently high quality. Realf Heygate was our favourite to win, due to him being a friend but also because we’re really fond of his work. he presented a number of his small, highly detailed paintings alongside one of his videos of the same content. He’s really managed to crack the art code of making things which are beautiful and desirable/sellable and also have a great idea at the centre.

b u i l d i n g a s t o r y f r o n t s c r a t c h

Whitechapel have an absolutely incredible show on by Elmgreen & Dragset. It begins with an installation of a disused public swimming pool. The attention to detail is amazing – from the peeling wallpaper and the subtle smell of chlorine to the invigilators wearing guard uniforms, we found everything like music to our ears; becoming almost giddy with joy every time we spotted something else. There were also individual artworks dotted around this construction; a toppled bronze beefcake on the poolside and a lumpy aluminium rock, too bulked-up to use the trampoline, a slug, the changing room doors with a handle on both sides, and the urinals at the back, with their exposed plumbing entwined in a lover’s knot. 

The fictional tale that goes alongside this part of the show is that this is the old Whitechapel swimming pool and after it was shut down in the 1980s, there were the club nights, the squatters and the illegal raves. It was an institution, proper old East End. The Whitechapel pool has been sold to some art hotel and resort corporation. It will soon be a spa, with reduced-price membership for locals on Wednesday afternoons and slack time for wellness junkies and gym bunnies. 

The Whitechapel pool is a comment on the privatisation of public amenities and spaces, the corporate taking over from the communal. Sadness and humour overlay one another in this arresting double-take. We almost feel bad by revealing what the artists have done so whoever is reading this can also falter on the threshold, momentarily speechless and gawping, confused and amazed. 

Heading towards the rest of the show you see the gallery’s Perspex donations box on the landing is full of rubbish. A single trainer, an old Oyster card, a bronze OBE decoration (bought on eBay), a remain flyer, a starfish and a bottle of poppers nestle among dollar bills and fivers. Easy to miss, unlike the lifelike sculpture of a sleeping baby in a carry-cot, left beside the ATM at the top of the stairs. It’s very destressing. The sleeping child is a modern infant Moses, adrift in the stream of money. Or no money. It is almost a Victorian parable. The rest of the older works, white sculptures of figures, aren’t really to our fancy but we were still riding the high of what came before and so didn’t’ care at all. 

The approach gallery was next; titled ‘Eight Universes and The Machine’, the artist Hun Kyu Kim has painstakingly created eight parallel universes across eight paintings, comprising four seasons, night and day. Numerous hybrid animals within each painting symbolise a social status such as scholar, artist and labourer. The worlds created by Kim are imagined to be controlled by one huge machine – neoliberal capitalism – which has been the dominant and increasingly pervasive economic system of the contemporary world since the late 1970s. Despite the insanity of depicted in the paintings, they come across as very beautiful. 

The works are the first eight paintings from a much larger ongoing project that the artist is embarking upon, which he refers to as The Big Picture. A huge endeavour, meticulously illustrating – in obsessive detail – a story combining Korean fairy tales, political history and folklore, as an original science fiction epic. Defining himself as a storyteller, Kim’s images of fragmented and scattered narratives tangle together to make a more complete and cohesive picture. Each story works as an independent entity, but shares a common world full of imagination, informing a single overarching narrative.

h o w a s c e n e i m p a c t s a f i l m

Took a trip to the cinema to make sure we got to see Steve McQueen’s new film Widows in all its cinematic glory. Unsurprisingly it was amazing. 

There was a particularly remarkable extended shot which we wanted to mention as it could almost be an artwork in itself. Colin Farrell drives in real time from desolate slums to grassy mansions, the camera focusing not on the conversation inside the car (although it can still be heard through the entire shot), but on the changing world outside, where wealth and poverty are only blocks apart. The expansive widescreen frame frequently emphasises the distance between characters, with faces seen in mirrors and through glass, amid crystals of reflected city lights. It was a metaphor for the entire film but was just neatly slotted in; simple but so very intentional.

b a c k o n t h e a r t m a k i n g t r a i n

Finished production of the Brazil artwork! It’s a little rough around the edges - if we were to remake it/re-show it we might make the maquette out of thin ply as opposed to card. However, there is something very disposable about the material which works very well with regards to how the objects are supposed to be discarded. When we finally added the tiny trees it really helped with making it seem real - we thought about maybe including a car or a bench but decided against it. It does feel nice to have made something new but the production was a little last minute and felt like a bit of an afterthought, almost as if we regretted applying...Perhaps it’ll feel better once we have the studio because we won’t just feel cramped up in the living room trying to live around the work and vice versa. Either way, we’re looking forward to seeing how the rest of the show turns out (we’ll upload the work to the site once the pics are in) and getting onto our next project.

t i m e i s i t s o w n c u r r e n c y

This week has been focused on a few tests for how the final production of the Brazil work is going to go. Initially we had struggled with trying to find something which would be right for the concave shape of the cooling towers but two plastic shot glasses end to end has really done the trick!

Thinking more about the extra pieces - bookmark is going to be practicing making the clouds that go on the sides of the cooling towers. It will be different techniques of painting them and making them seem more ‘cloud-like’. The folded architectural drawing makes us think of a story someone told us about an architect at a party; after asking a stranger at a party what they do for a living and being told they’re an architect, they go on to tell them they’re looking to redo their house and if they could take a look and see what they think. The architect says sure and picks up a napkin and does a sketch which takes about 30 seconds, hands it to the other person and says, that’ll be (insert inappropriately large sum of money). The other person is very surprised and says ‘but that only took you 30 seconds’ and the architect replies ‘oh no, that took me 30 years of practicing architecture’. A very long winded way of saying that actions add up; becoming an architect takes about 7 years of training and learning, becoming a doctor takes even longer etc. Things that at first might appear not to have immediate value because they share the aesthetics of something that is unconsidered (sketchy or incomplete) may in fact hold much greater value due to the previous thought that’s gone into it. This can then be linked back to conceptual art; things which don’t necessarily appear to have lots of production behind them but are heavily considered.

e x h i b i t i o n c o m i n g u p

We have some good news! We got “The New Age of Babylon” exhibition and so we’re in process of making/planning the work. We’ve never made an architectural model before so it should be fun. We’ve began by making the bases for the towers out of card which seems to be going well. It’s now coated in PVA and is going to be sprayed white. The model is going to be based on the left three towers for ease and isn’t going to have the water and then the drawings are going to be based on this image too. We’ll have some time next week to continue developing it so will send updates then.

r a c h e l m a c l e a n k i l l i n g i t a s u s u a l

Finally managed to see the Rachel Maclean exhibition at The Zabludowicz Collection! As with her other works, Maclean has used green-screen technology to perform against a backdrop she’s designed, in this case a Barbie-Dreamhouse makeover of a Brutalist seminary outside Glasgow. For the first time, she’s used a cast of actors alongside herself; the intensity doesn’t drop for a second. She often uses found audio material and lip-syncs to it: her authoritarian villain here speaks with Kenneth Clark’s voice from the 1969 BBC series Civilisation. And because her film is an exploration of feminism, she subverts his patriarchal, patrician voice, wittily collaging snippets from his series, such as his references to the pagan Venus as an “amorous strumpet” and the Virgin as a “sweet, compassionate, approachable being”. 

She repurposes them for a world where social media defines femininity and womanhood – her characters are called Siri and Alexa, among others. In a riotous denouement, Maclean unleashes a volley of voices questioning feminism today and in the recent past. Filled with humour and no little anger, it’s consciously excruciating at times, yet always captivating. 

The other works are similarly engaging yet discomforting: Spite Your Face, that we first saw at the Venice Biennale last year, is Maclean’s post-truth retelling of the Pinocchio story and the VR work I’m Terribly Sorry places the viewer in a post-Brexit toytown dystopia, its closing twist tapping into modern Britain’s seething tensions. Maclean’s films are so engulfing that when you emerge, reeling, into the outside world, you feel almost like they’ve spat you out.

s t r e t c h i n g o u t t h e a r t m u s c l e

We’re working on a proposal for a new artwork for an exhibition titled The New Age of Babylon. Our piece is going to focus on how science fiction films often present viewers with visions and hypothesis for the future, Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985) gives us a glimpse of a bureaucratic future in which people live in ‘Utopian People Housing’. This housing, situated in The Shangri La Towers, is directly connected to a power station churning out smoke. 

The work itself comprises of fragments of the design process that would have gone in to making The Shangri La Towers in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985). No longer needed, these items have been discarded and utilised for other, more menial, tasks: a book mark, folded paper stabling a chair, and maquette of The Shangri La Towers acting as a door stop for one of the entrances to the gallery. 

An architectural sketch of the Towers will be folded and placed under the leg of an unstable chair in the corner of the gallery (near the main entrance), which the invigilator of the space is invited to use. The invigilator will also be given a bookmark they can use in their book if they are reading one (if they’re not reading, we will provide a book that can be placed near the invigilators chair). The bookmark will feature a design plan for the cloud pattern painted on the cooling towers of the utopian housing development. A small detailed maquette (30 x 20cm) of the Shangri La Towers will be placed by the entrance via CSM reception to act as a doorstop. 

New Babylon is a design from the past for the future. Our proposal is begging the question of what happens to those plans, now that the future has become the present and those plans haven’t quite come to fruition. We see a parallel between this and films and literature set in the future. This is the beauty of Science Fiction; it has the ability to tell a story that relates to the current world, but which can be set in a future of limitless possibilities. Until you reach 2015 and realise self-drying clothes, flying cars and hover boards aren’t yet available (Back to the Future 2 predictions), there’s no one to tell you, you’re wrong. 

In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), we see a portrayal of how someone can at once be a victim of the society they inhabit and also complicit in helping that society function. The now dysfunctional metropolis depicted in the film was built with the intention of it being a paradise; the infamous tower block Shangri-La Towers is named after the utopia described in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. This, like Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, is another idea where time has caught up and reduced its function to viral that of a brick or small piece of wood. Holding only value to those who desire to prop open a door.

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

Managed to see Christian Marclay’s Clock at Tate Modern 3 times in the past week. The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. It’s literally called “The Clock” and lasts 24 hours, and potentially the world’s most popular piece of conceptual art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It’s been really fun to be able to pop on for 20 minutes or so and see something different.

While there we also got to check out Tanya Bruguera’s new turbine hall commission. It’s probably the least visually spectacular work in the Turbine Hall so far we’ve ever seen; no giant slides, no vast yellow sun. Yet it might be the most radical. Through “stealth interventions”, Bruguera asks us to wake up to the migration crisis.

Thunderous rumbles intermittently shake our bones. In a “crying room”, tears flow from our eyes, induced by chemicals; a sardonic response to superficial or even absent empathy. The work’s title — the number who migrated from one country to another in 2017, plus those who died trying — is literally stamped on our skin and will rise as more perish. Bruguera has involved Tate’s neighbours too. The Tate’s north building has been renamed in honour of local activist Natalie Bell. Bell has also suggested the subject of a photographic portrait concealed in the Turbine Hall floor itself — Yousef, a Syrian migrant who found support through Bell’s SE1 United charity. The portrait is hidden under a heat-sensitive floor. If enough people pack onto it and then rise up as one, the portrait will be revealed.