The mascot production has begun! We’ve started attempting to paper mashe the heads by using a yoga ball as a kind of template. There will be two halves with a connecting part which will elongate the head to make it look more like the original drawings. They’re going to take a fairly long time but hopefully it’ll all pay off!
We’ve also started creating the fictional people for the information stand; their respective bios and artworks are coming along. We’ve decided to have a pop-up exhibition on the forth floor for each day the degree show is open, a permanent exhibition in the sculpture garden which will have performances going in throughout the show and then events such as panel discussions and film screenings in the basement. The panel discussions and other talks will be given by art-world professionals and also some exhibiting artists. Each of the pop-up exhibitions will be based on one of the four themes we were looking into when creating our final works for the degree show, gallery archetypes, sponsorship, event and institutional bubble. For each exhibition, there will be a separate pamphlet within the information stand itself. There will be 3 leaflet sections, one for each space, basement, sculpture garden, and forth floor. The basement and sculpture garden will contain the same information throughout since the sculpture garden is permanent and then basement is only having a couple events per day. The names of the fictional artists and all from a variety of fictional sources; artists and other fictional characters from films or books e.g. Maude Lebowski from The Big Lebowski; invented characters within an invented world e.g. Homily Clock one of the main ‘Borrowers’; characters from myths e.g. Nessie Lock, the nickname for the lockness monster; and characters from our previous work involving a fictional gallery only seen through twitter. Inventing 37 characters is a pretty big task but it’s also a fun one!
We final managed to do our foley artist performance lecture! It went brilliantly; the actor we hired made it even better than we could have possibly imagined. It’s definitely such a liberating and exciting aspect of working with actors or people with proper skills; they take it to a whole ‘other’ place which as artists we didn’t even thing about. The microphones worked a treat and Jamie really played up to the roll. He even did a question and answer bit at the end, answering as if he was the artist! It felt an appropriate length as much longer would have been overly frustrating to experience.
We’ve also started our podcast artists and friends again which is going pretty well! Feels good to get back into it and talking to new people and finding connections – all positive.
A fairly light viewing of films this week, the first being the new Jumanji film. We’ve been entertained by both the original Jumanji and Zathura (both written by Chris Van Allsburg but the former about the jungle and the later about space) and it’s safe to say we were definitely worried about the idea of a second Jumanji as this tends to be where it all goes to shit. History has shown us it rarely works; Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, prequel to the Star Wars original trilogy; Hannibal, sequel to Silence of the Lambs; Speed 2: Cruise Control, sequel to Speed; Staying Alive, sequel to Saturday Night Fever; Son of the Mask, sequel to The Mask; Alien 3, sequel to Aliens and Alien; Jaws: The Revenge, sequel to Jaws; The Matrix Reloaded, sequel to The Matrix; Blues Brothers 2000, sequel to The Blues Brothers…need we go on? However, despite our reservations this was a genuinely funny and good take on the original. The problem we have with the sequel is that it rarely adds to the original storyline and characters in favour of merely reproducing the first film in a slightly different way (see the ‘Meet the Parents/Fockers/Little Fockers’ even the name tells us it’s the same film! Back to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, it has new things to say and a new story to tell and it deals with the change of tech (from board game to video game) without fetishising old computer games or (too much) explaining how a video game works. All in all a fun ride with some enjoyable characters, Jack Black is especially great as a teenage girl.
Next up we had The Florida Project, a truly stunning film where the theme of childhood is present in everything from the camera angels to the use of colour. Every adult in the film is shot from below, as the children in the film would see them. All the buildings are bright colours such as purple and yellow, almost as if drawn from the kids’ imagination. It also made us think of so many other films whilst watching; a scene in which the kids venture into derelict buildings (yellow, green and pink) reminded us of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, another Florida-set film that found kaleidoscopic poetry amid streets blighted by poverty. There’s a touch of Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher or Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant in the way Baker and co-writer/producer Chris Bergoch embrace Moonee’s defiant perspective, making us feel her joy and pain with all the raw urgency of youth. American Honey is there too; a kindred spirit in the portrayal of Halley, whom Baker discovered on Instagram. This authenticity is also present in The Florida Project through open auditions and street casting. It all adds up to a superbly sympathetic portrait of marginalised experience from a film-maker whose great triumph is that he never feels like a tourist. This is Moonee’s world, and for a couple of hours at least, we are privileged to live in it.
Marjorie Prime is a slightly more subtle reflection on the progress into AI and how we can live forever. A much more interesting take than the new Netflix series Altered Carbon where minds are uploaded and transferred between bodies. Here we see people and their subsequent AI replacements, remembering and re-remembering experiences and events through each other’s memories, creating an almost Chinese whisper-like effect on their final forms. Their unintentionally creepy phrase of ‘I’ll remember that’ suggests a long life memory but this is not reflected in the outcome.
On a slightly light note, Everything, Everything is a film about a girl with a terribly weak immune system, so weak that she is unable to breath the toxin filled air. She is therefore confined to her home and has never left. That is until an attractive guy moves in next door…she then braves getting ill and begs her nurse to allow him inside and then even goes outside when she sees he’s in trouble. They eventually run away together and she finds out that her mother has actually been lying to her for her entire life; she is not and has never been allergic to the air and it was just a way of her mum controlling her as her husband and first child died in a freak accident. A lukewarm sentiment and a different take on a teenage love story but all in all pretty trashy and inconsequential.
That’s it for films but we’ve been doing some reading recently too. Robert Webb’s new book (and kind of autobiography) is called How Not to Be a Boy, and after watching multiple interviews with him and listening to him on the radio we were presented with the book as a Christmas present. As emotionally repressed young men it ring dangerously true; we see ourselves mirrored in this so badly that it made us want to call people (mostly women) we feel as if we’ve been unkind to and apologise. We never actually did that but we’ve definitely been attempting to make changes to our behaviour, in order to be responsible for our emotions so other people don’t have to pick up the pieces.
We’ve also picked up a copy of House of Leaves. It’s a pretty crazy book with an even crazier/unconventional format/structure. The page layout and style is pretty unusual and we’ve seen that it’s a prime example of ergodic literature. It contains copious footnotes, many of which contain footnotes themselves, including references to fictional books, films or articles. Some pages contain only a few words or lines of text, arranged in strange ways to mirror the events in the story, often creating both an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic effect. The novel is also distinctive for its multiple narrators, who interact with each other in elaborate and disorienting ways. We don’t tend to read fiction but recently it’s been highly influential in our art-making and general thought process.
For the opening of Ian Cheng’s exhibition at serpentine, there was a great in conversation with writer Nora N. Khan, and digital curator Ben Vickers. They discussed the history of human consciousness, emergent forms of intelligence, as well as non-human entities, our capacity as a species to relate to change, the nature of mutation and the capacity of humans to relate to change. The talk was much more exciting than the show, which is sometimes just the way it works when an exhibition is fairly minimal. This isn’t a criticism but merely something to consider. Ian Cheng was very erudite and had this American drawl which was hard not to associate with arrogance but he’s a successful artist so bragging seems to be ok. The exciting aspect of the show was that instead of it being an animation or video, Ian Cheng creates a simulation and therefore it’s almost like going to a digital zoo as opposed to a gallery.
The Sondra Perry show in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery is very special. As well as the expected, single person film experiences, the full interior walls of the gallery have been turned into this undulating purple waves. In order to view the films on show, you sit on a exercise bike and then a rowing machine. The show’s title is taken from Turner’s painting of the British slave ship Zong, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On. En route from Accra to Jamaica, 133 enslaved Africans were thrown from the vessel so the crew could claim insurance on the ‘goods’ they were transporting. Sharing the title of the exhibition, a digitally modified 2018 video of Turner’s oleaginous sea is projected onto the outer walls of the gallery interior. Up close the paint look less like water, more like roiling skin. The video switches periodically to the purple waves we mentioned before, rebooting the Zong massacre for the present day.
