Wednesday 31 January 2018

l i f e m o v e s p r e t t y f a s t i f y o u d o n ' t s t o p a n d l o o k a r o u n d o n c e i n a w h i l e y o u c o u l d m i s s i t


We’re trying to get out and see more art since that’s one of the major reasons we’re in this city. We tend to visit a couple a week but we’re going to aim to dedicate at least one full day a week to going around looking at shows because we’ve been slipping recently. Today we began with Pilar Corrias which had a two person show by Gerasimos Floratos and Christina Quarles. Some dull/generic colourful paintings, and blobby sculptures of similar aesthetics. 


Downstairs was more successful; a film by Trisha Baga played on a projector, with a disco ball situated on the floor, catching the light from the corner of the projection. This was a lovely addition to the film’s content, which was all about global celebrities such as Madonna and the pop culture landscapes.


Next door is Pi artworks where there was a series of paintings by Selma Parlour which were all made up of a variety of coloured lines and shapes. Dull and samey – the press release uses words like ‘diagrammatic’ and ‘otherworldly’ which are used with a serious pint of salt, and we assume are merely used to elevate the work’s importance…so nothing really new there.


After that was Frith Street gallery and a new set of works by Polly Apfelbaum. The room looks very considered; porcelain gloves hang on the walls, giant rugs with the outlines of feet on the floor. But it doesn’t seem to really DO anything but perhaps that’s because we feel as if we’re presented with so much content and then not a lot of context?


On to Sadie Coles HQ where Darren Bader has a solo show which we really enjoyed. On entering the space it’s similar to a yard sale but after a moment it’s obviously more considered than that. Initially you assume that it’s all art because it’s within the white walls etc. etc. but it’s actually just an arrangement of works by Bader, another artist Anca Munteanu Rimnic and a general assortment of stuff, including works by other artists. It made us think a lot about the role of the viewer/audience when determining value. Another great part was that a number of the ‘works’ in the exhibition comprise proposals for unrealised – perhaps unrealisable – artworks. We’ve now looked further into Darren Bader and now recognise some of these as models or blueprints for ‘trash sculptures’, which is an ongoing series in which he creates or selects a sculptural form as a rubbish container.


Southard Reid isn’t a gallery we had been to before due to it being quite tucked away even though it’s in central London. The most interesting aspect for us was a film by Edward Thomasson (who we noticed vie the credits was assisted by his regular collaborator Lucy Beech) title ‘Inside’. It was this bizarre, uncanny narrative of what appeared to be convicted women partaking in some sort of art therapy session where they draw “what they feel on the inside”. These drawings then go on to illustrate a song being sung by a man and a woman in a different space entirely. It’s all very strange and intriguing at the same time. We concluded that it was about how the act of storytelling is used as a way to understand environments and exchange experience.


We hadn’t been to Rodeo since Condo last year so it was fun to head there again because the space itself is a fun one. Robert Overby’s self-referential canvas maps were fine but didn’t blow us away. Ian Law’s black and white photographs, framed by Barbie Dream House floors, seemed muddled and forced in attempting to be highly philosophical without any reasoning. 


Finally, we had Chisenhale which has a show by Lydia Ourahmane. She’s drawn on pre-existing aspects of the gallery such as the doors and floor and made them her own – something we’re very jealous of since this is clearly an expensive endeavour that can only be swallowed by a big gallery. Our favourite work however has to be ‘In the Absence of our Mothers’ which consists of a single gold tooth, which resides in the gallery space, and a duplicate gold tooth that is implanted within Ourahmane’s mouth. Commitment and mystery all wrapped into one; excellent.


Monday 29 January 2018

t e l l i n g t a l e s w i t h i n t a l e s


Moving forward we’re looking into more storytelling styles and their respective origins. Since the notion of the metanarrative and stories within stories is something we’ve been looking into, we found ourselves reading Don Quixote. It’s a bizarre 400 year old novel by Miguel de Cervantes where a middle-aged man from the region of La Mancha in central Spain becomes obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, and decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the evil. But basically it’s a fictional author who discovers fictional account of Don Quixote, so a story within a story, and Don Quixote understands that he’s being written about. It made us think about the film Deadpool; both seem to make fun of the heroes of their time, employed metanarratives, and some call them a proto-postmodern works. 


An example being the bit in Deadpool where he’s handed a card by TJ Miller’s character and told that it “might further the plot”. After looking a little more into it, it turned out that someone else had already made this parallel since Deadpool actually kills Don Quixote in the comics. Sometimes we wonder about the value of this self-referential nature of the film, is it somehow comparable it to hipsters that attempt to subvert the mainstream with ironic moustaches and drinking obscure craft ales…Anyway, we’re also thinking more about methods of viewing and things which are essential to the viewing process. This would include things like a wall, the screen, plugs, seating etc. This is because we’re always trying to find a way for the work (if it’s a film) to leave the screen and almost leak out into its surroundings to give clues or hints about other aspects of it. This then links back to our thoughts about narrative construction, certain aspects are essential to building a world that’s believable – extras, a set, genuine dialogue etc. We’ll continue with this in the next week or so. 


We’ve completely forgot to discuss galleries we’ve been to in the last few posts so here goes. Union Pacific had a range of uninteresting paintings and ambiguous welded metal structures. A slight saving grace was a book by the title ‘The daughter of the Easter egg’ by Zora Mann. In the middle of the book there is a short text, while the rest of the pages are blank. This book is deliberately left almost empty as it was the installation in Art Basel Statements that offered the full imaginary scenario of the artist’s being. It’s very understated; just left on a table, easily missed. Something that would have been a shame to miss it since we find it to be the most effective and thoughtful work.


Next up was Carlos/Ishikawa who did a great job or manipulating the space; the ceiling was brought down and your entrance was highly controlled through floating cardboard walls. Other than that the actual show wasn’t too exciting.

The downstairs of Maureen Paley was well thought out – showing some ceramic vases and wall paintings by Eduardo Sarabia. They came out of conversations the artist had with residents on the Mexico/US border. They were displayed amongst boxes hand-painted to look like food crates for their namesakes, perfect for (theoretically) smuggling the artworks between countries. 


The Approach had quite a dull show on, the kind of thing that would look nice in your house, drawing of birds and stuff. The positioning of some of them seemed very intentional, looking at each other within a corner but it feels like we’re very much clutching at straws here.


We really enjoyed the look of the show at Modern Art. A few well used notice boards with adverts on them. This is something we’ve been thinking about for a while but wasn’t sure how to approach it. However, this was by Fiona Connor and her thoughts were that this was about how the internet causes such notices boards to no longer be used. We were thinking more along the lines of, the old staples are a reference to what is no longer visible but was once present; absence = presence kind of thing.


Wednesday 24 January 2018

r e f e r e n c e s n e w a n d o l d



The last couple of days have been dedicated to group crits. We’ve been both the presenters to 2D and the audience for 4D. Unfortunately, the 2D group weren’t hugely talkative but the tutor did engage in discussion and provided a new response which was helpful. The general discussion seemed to be in relation to whether or not the content they were watching was in fact a genuine YouTube video or a fabricated one. This was fairly unexpected but only because we made the film and therefore didn’t see it from that perspective. Amalia Ulman was brought up, someone we’re quite familiar with already but not someone we directly associated with the work even though now it seems like an obvious link. Perhaps it’s due to us not really thinking about this work as ‘internet art’ per say (something that we think about Amalia Ulman but something we now believe to be slightly reductionist) but more that YouTube was the appropriate medium for the message. 


We were also recommended Carey Young – not someone we believed we hadn’t heard of before but after looking into her work we realised we had! Also, her website has an excellent amount of information on her work which is excellent since her ideas are subtle yet highly considered. A good example being her work ‘Before the Law’ which is a series of photographs featuring courthouse doorways. Named after Franz Kafka’s 1915 parable in which the protagonist is continuously denied access to ‘the law,’ the series depicts these doorways as metaphors for the legal system itself. Courtrooms are glimpsed in various ways – a red glow emanating from one entices us with its surprising warmth and seductiveness; a red velvet curtain in another calls to mind law’s reliance on aspects of theatre; in a third, a courtroom visible through a frosted glass window glows like an abstract painting, as if law’s abstractions may connect with artistic thinking in ways which have not yet been fully considered. 


It made us think of James bridle digital renderings of ‘invisible’ spaces. These are spaces which are illegal to photograph such as the detention centres, closed courts, luxury lounges and private jets Britain uses to deport people. 


She also employs the notion of the footnote quite frequently in her work, this is something we’ve been thinking about for a while due to our thoughts on authorship and how nothing is original and everything is somehow referential to what came before it. 


Having a chance to see the work from other pathways was a valuable experience. However, it did get slightly annoying when we were continually told that what was on show had only been made the night before (and you could tell). Not that we have any objection to working up to the last minute, but leaving it up to the last minute is very different. It merely demonstrates a lack of care which is frustrating at this level. This is only due to the fact that we really get excited when we’re blown away when we see thorough, well considered, skilfully executed art made by our peers.

Sunday 21 January 2018

c h o o s i n g t i t l e s


Tate Exchange wasn’t quite as successful as we hoped it would be but that may be because we didn’t push is as hard, knowing that it was now a part of something bigger. We’ve now repurchased the suitcase and foam to fit the items for the film. That should be finished in a couple of days. 


The new work is ready for tomorrow’s cross pathway crits. The actor we hired did everything perfectly! The visual language is exactly what one would expect from a vlogging style YouTube video. 

We had a few different ideas for the title around themes of storytelling, the platforms through which those stories are told and stories within stories. We landed on ‘Storytime with Mr. Orange’ which came about through recently re-watching Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Storytelling's a continuing motif in the film. Films are stories. Directors are storytellers. Actors are storytellers. Reservoir Dogs is, of course, itself a story and we the viewers are the audience. All of this pretty much goes without saying. We know that Tim Roth is a British actor who doesn't actually have an American accent and definitely not whatever kind of '90s LA dialect that Orange has, but that doesn't matter. We believe it because it's what we see as part of a coherent story. The same is true of our story within the story, by which we mean Orange's commode story. 


Maybe a lot of what you think you know about Orange comes from the story he's telling, fooling both the audience and Joe into thinking he's cool in the face of pressure. In the story, he walks into a bathroom carrying weed and runs into a bunch of sheriffs and a police dog. He stays cool, does his business, and walks right out again. Think about it, though. We know Orange works as an undercover cop. He practices the story like crazy. He spends a whole lot of time looking in the mirror and reassuring himself that the undercover operation is going to a success and he'll be okay. All the stuff about him in the commode story being cool under pressure is just a story, but it's a story with purpose. It parallels the very situation he's in while telling it. Joe and Eddie and White are the Sheriffs and the German shepherd. Orange has to act convincing by doing what Joe refers to as "shit your pants and dive in and swim." The elaborate commode story is an "in your face" move by Orange. Just as in the commode story, he takes his time to appear extra nonchalant and make sure his hands are nice and dry, he has to work hard to make a convincing impression on Joe. In fact, we even have a story within the story within the story – the imaginary sheriff is telling his fellow officers about a man who almost got shot by a cop who pulled him over because he went for his car registration rather than keeping his hands on the dash.


Holdaway gives Orange a speech about storytelling. He says that if Orange isn't a good actor, he's a bad actor and that bad acting is no good (wow - really going out on a limb there, Holdaway). Basically, Orange doesn't want to memorize four pages of monologue but Holdaway tells him it's not about memorization, it's about getting into character. It's about knowing all of the little details and letting the mind of the listener fill in the blanks. This again makes us think about the movie as a whole. How much do we know about these guys? We don't really get much of a background, and the flashbacks only take us so far. White worked with a girl named 'Bama, Blonde did some time for Joe, Pink… is cheap? Then of course there's the glaring hole of the heist. We don't know a whole lot about it, but just like Holdaway tells Orange to do, Tarantino gives us some details and some context and our minds fill in the rest. By structuring the movie in a nonlinear way, we're always left wondering what's going on until another scene or chapter fills us in. That draws us into the narrative, just like Orange had to draw in Joe and the rest.

Thursday 18 January 2018

t h e m a n d e l a e f f e c t


Even though it seemed fairly daunting after only handing in our dissertations the previous day we had a very productive group tutorial where we showed images from the Manchester show and then the scenes from famous film with the dialogue removed. People seemed to genuinely warm to them, which was strange because for us they were only intended as an exercise but now it could be an actual work in its own right. However, it doesn’t feel as if it’s ‘enough’ to stand by itself and after a discussion we agreed it be more effective to exist within another frame. We started thinking about it as a part of a whole. Initially the several parts were the steps of a how a film gets produced and consumed; the audition, then the actual film, then the review. This didn’t quite fit because it puts a little too much emphasis on the matrix (the most recent and best quality scene with removed dialogue) as opposed to the notion of creating a story within a story and how a narrative is put forward and displayed to an audience. After considering this we went on to think about where this sort of video exists in the world and we landed on YouTube and the idea of fan made content. 


The idea of how a story is told is now becoming more complex and layered. Made us think about Chinese whispers or how conspiracy videos/theories come to fruition. Therefore our final product is actually going to be in the style of a YouTube video/blog where someone is discussing watching The Matrix and seeing a scene without any dialogue which the previously thought of as being highly expository. They then go on to discuss the ‘Mandela Effect’; coined first by Fiona Broome, in reference to a false memory she reports, of the death of South African leader Nelson Mandela in the 1980s (when in fact Mandela died in 2013), which she claims is shared by "perhaps thousands" of other people. This is then consistent with the themes of The Matrix; notions of conspiracy and a general lack of trust of ‘the system’. It also plays well with the original ideas of narrative construction and how their receival is a big part of that. 


Today we’ve just finished producing a script for the video and a ‘setting’ for it to exist. By setting we’re referring to the YouTube frame work; the video will be playing surrounded by the recommended videos and view count we all know and love. We’ve slotted in some additional nods to our source material too. There are 101K likes on the video because Neo lives in room 101. There are also 303K subscribers on the channel because of the opening scene where Trinity is in room 303. It’s also funny because of the fairly popular internet meme of Morpheus saying “what if I told you” which supposedly comes from the same scene and is never actually said in the film and therefore is the title of the YouTube channel. The name of the YouTuber is Fiona Johnson who is the woman in the red dress, intended to distract Neo, the profile picture is of Fiona Broome who first thought of the phrase Mandela Effect, and all the recommended videos are references to either some other Mandela Effect, the Matrix or conspiracy theories in general. All we need now is to find an actress…



Finally, we’re going more into the word for Tate Exchange in terms of documentation. This isn’t necessary for tomorrow but we’re considering devising a film where we deconstruct the items in the bag/studio in a sort of things organised neatly/Wes Anderson style thing. Either with foam that’s all cut perfectly to shape in a suitcase, or a piece of wood that’s had the lines of everything drawn onto it. We’re also considering selling the items on ebay and having the listing printed out next to the moving image work. 



Friday 12 January 2018

w i f i - l e s s s t u d i o



Word in Transit turned out really well! We also felt as if we were the teachers on a school trip giving out everyone’s pass as they got onto the train. The feedback we got from people who read the book thought it was a effective way of interacting without actually doing a performance. Plus, since the story has a fairly tragic ending it was strange seeing people expect a kids story to be an off-into-the-sun-set sort of story and not receiving it. A classic ‘don’t trust a book by it’s cover’ situation. 


We’ve been thinking more about the how to display audition tape work. Obviously it’s a film and therefore it must exist on some kind of screen – projector, laptop, monitor. But it seems as if this should be more of a conscious decision; if someone asks ‘why is this on a monitor?’ and we can’t answer it then that feels like a problem… Maybe something appropriate will reveal its head once it’s actually made. Deciding on how to display something before it exists is fairly nonsensical. 


We attended a lecture by Hilary Lloyd which we were fairly excited about since we feel her video works are small celebrations of what is perhaps beautiful in the everyday. It started off well, introducing that it wasn’t going to be a talk about her work but a more ‘in conventional’ style talk. There was also an hour long slide show that was playing behind Alex Shady and Hilary Lloyd while they were talking which was sometimes images of her work and then sometimes more inspirational images. There was a funny joke that came up half way through ‘Why doesn’t artist look out the window in the morning? Because what would they do in the afternoon’. This came in the bigger discussion of the notion of ‘the studio’ – something which perhaps came up due to the Tate Exchange theme that Alex Shady also set. They both spoke about a fairly romanticised idea of studio; things like no Wi-Fi? Seemed like an old idea of “paradise”. We more view the studio as a work place but perhaps that’s because these people have other jobs as well as being artists. 


It was the opening of Alfie Strong’s solo show at Virtrine Gallery titled ‘Beyond the Pylon of the Pit’ which is taken from the fifth chapter of the abstract work ‘Nightside of Eden’. What’s on show is a series of large silk tapestries in muted greens, purples and greys. These hang alongside Aran knit fisherman jumpers and papier machache structures. It produces this over-theatrical, paranoid, unhinged display; Observed as a non-authoritative and sensory, sequentially dispersed narrative. He extracts areas of mythology, magic and folklore, combining them with things that are current cultural problems – such as government failures, raising water levels, capitalist acceleration, marginalisation of minority groups, nuclear unrest, oppression of the disadvantaged. Fairly repetitive at a glance but once learning more about the collection of imagery it felt successfully consistent.

Friday 5 January 2018

n e w y e a r n e w u s


‘appy new year y’all.

Got some bits coming up in January that we’ve been thinking about recently. The first being the first iteration of Word in Transit, curated by Anais Comer. Since Word in Transit happens on the underground we’ve decided to make it about another form of public transport. 

Earlier this year we attended the beta run of the Citymapper bus; for a weekend the company offered free lifts around central London to trial their new green shuttle bus. The bus is being introduced by the company to ‘plug the gaps’ in the city that TFL neglects. The compact size of the bus combined with the company’s ability to monitor and track the traveling habits of the city means the Citymapper bus could be the first private mode of public transport in the city other than TFL (or the second, Uber Pool could technically be considered as public transport). The App, which has been used widely for quite a few years and now has a global reach, is characterized by small, stylized cartoons, constructed using white lines on a green background, one of which (a bus) is called Bussy. As the company begins to roll out actual busses the shift from application to Bus Company is in motion, and as a business whose aim is to improve efficiency of cities (and in turn collect data) one has to consider where it may eventually lead to; town planners? Public property developers? Self-driving vehicles?


In response to this thinking we’ve written a short kids story about Bussy; how Bussy deals with the changing landscape of the city, from the ‘rejuvenation’ of areas as well rising sky scrapers that confuse Bussy’s GPS as a result of multi-path interference. Multi-path interference is caused when the location-based device does not have a clear shot or line of sight at the sky. In areas where there are many tall buildings, the source signal of the GPS device can split into more than one signal, causing erroneous readings. Bussy is torn between his/her dependence on 4G (and the infrastructure surrounding it; demand, funding etc) and a desire to escape the city, as well as the pressures of being needed by the citizens. Like a young adult leaving home the Bussy deals with feelings of guilt, liberation, and a general curiosity of the mysteries of the world outside the Internet and the city. The small publications are then fitted inside a the plastic oyster card holders we all know and love, and then distributed to the crowd in the carriage. 


Another year means another Tate exchange, and this year’s title is ‘How to survive as an artist in the metropolis’. We’ve decided to go down the route of the rucksack being a kind of mobile studio. Artists’ rucksacks embody a behind-the-scenes view into their studio; they are the vehicles that transport the tools used to create the concepts that make up their practice. Notebooks, pens, laptops, chargers, cigarettes, old bits of paper, receipts. All of these items have the potential to tell a story of both, where the artist has been, and where they might be going next. The process of artistic production is something that isn’t bound to a singular place such as the conventional idea of a studio; themes and concepts follow the artist around the entire time, as if they are within the rucksack on their back.


Therefore, what we decided was that our studio will take the form of a ‘guess the weight’ game that one might find at a school or town fete. Participants will be asked to guess the weight of an artist’s rucksack that contains all the materials required to make a portable artists studio. Items ranging from notebooks to PAYG oyster card to phone chargers and paints will make up the materials of the bag. Each participant will get to take a lucky dip into one of the rucksacks, receiving an object from the artists’ rucksack studio. The winner will receive one of the empty rucksacks; a space to carry around the constituent materials of their own practice, whatever that may be.

Our conversation with Jeff Ko from Ko projects is going really well! He’s put such a great page together for us. Doing these sorts of things is such a great opportunity to see how other people organise and reflect on our work. Letting other people do what they do and see how we’re depicted is such a rewarding experience for us.