During this week we were challenged on the work ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’. We displayed the work via a projector; the film was then projected onto a canvas that had been purchased across the street at the notorious BLICK. It was brought up that perhaps we should consider the implications of purchasing everything apart from the videos used in the film. The piece is all about buying, yet there is an aspect that is stolen rather than bought. Questions of how one would go about buying a YouTube video were raised and this is definitely something that we will be looking into; do we purchase a copy? Do we purchase the original? If we do purchase the original, must the creator delete all trace of it from both the Internet and their own files? This thinking then acts as a catalyst for ideas regarding other things, which are thought of as free and what would happen if one were to attempt to purchase them. But this can very quickly become condescending which would need to be heavily considered if it were to go down that route. The idea of what comes ‘next’ with the last super name cards was also an interesting discussion; it feels as if they’re a beginning of something or a suggestion or what’s to come.
A performance or re-enactment was considered; just like a film of an awkward office ice breaker session or general ‘work-do’ but everyone is wearing the nametags. Perhaps the tags are just at the gallery show and can be worn for whatever period of time they audience wants and then can replace them. Either way it seems like we’re moving towards some sort of embodiment of these characters and the stories that it might tell. We also worked with Clerk 37, a music producer in Leeds, to create a music video for his new track Flow Sowii, which can be found here. There’s a link to his Soundcloud in the description.
Riding bikes, sculptures made out of mirrored road signs, flashing neons, broken walls, a live broadcast of a T.V show, kaleidoscopic videos, customized carpets, a continual birthday party, a cardboard Louis Vuitton shop, silicone skeletons, Oculus Rift worlds, exploded basket balls, and what could have been a set for a theatre production about ancient Rome. Spring/Break Art Show was like no other art fair we had ever attended. Mostly, note the word mostly, art fairs are places where wealthy people go to make investments in a commodity that happens to be art. It’s not even where good art goes to die. If the way you make your living is by selling portraits of peoples cats or attempting to revive history by making huge abstract paintings, these are the places for you! However, Spring/Break is different, there is far less emphasis on the work’s ability to be sold and more on just being a place where people show thought provoking pieces. Some favorites were LV DIY created by Alfred Steiner, a parody Louis Vuitton boutique filled with ludicrously fake merchandise. All the walls are covered in cardboard and duct tape to mirror the wood finish and metallic trim of the actual store. A funny and well-executed critique of luxury consumerism.
Chris Bors had ‘24 Second Psycho’ playing on a continuous loop, a reference to the Douglas Gordon’s ’24 Hour Psycho’ – both a the film Psycho slowed down or sped up to last 24 seconds or 24 hours. ‘No Gains on Sacrfice’ contained a machine capable of turning speech into a slogan written across a virtual t-shirt (available for purchase). There were also a variety of lights that had the part with the bulb set in a block of concrete – they also had a devices supposedly proving that the light was on inside the concrete. ‘Surface Feat’ appeared to be a number of abstract paintings balanced on bits of fruit. However, they were all in fact casts of such things, all painted meticulously in order to act in a fraudulent manner.
‘L Dopa’ had turned one of the bathrooms into an institution for the mentally unstable. It involved a doctor and some seemingly crazy people. The funniest thing about this was when someone from the press tried to talk to the doctor about this live experience and then the people who were controlling the atmosphere via the creepy music that was being played made the phone ring and he answered. This meant he was no longer talking to the reporter but was giving her all the answers to her questions simultaneously; this is what the piece is about, subversion.
The reason we were able to get involved in the fair was by running some work to it for Eva and Franco Mattes. Their piece consisted of a shower curtain, a calendar, a key chain, a dress, and a bottle. All the items had the same image of a woman on it, who was clearly in distress, which matched the titled ‘Panic Attack’. The image was sourced from a search engine when typing in those same words. The origins of the piece go back to an artist called Kevin Bewersdorf; Eva and Franco bought the idea of putting the same image onto various Internet bought items. They then used this idea in a variety of different ways, this being on of them. The items they have chosen are all related to this notion of anxiety and potential techniques which one can utilize to avoid it. For example, a calendar is for planning, a keychain helps you locate your keys; a bottle gives you convenient access to water wherever you are and a shower curtain gives you the privacy required to shower without disturbance. A thorough and contemplative piece, as always.
Some other shows we’ve managed to see were ‘Above and under L-train’ by Isidro Blasco manifested as a hugely complex and seemingly haphazard sculpture. However jumbled the wood appeared, it was obvious that there must’ve been some highly systematic design supporting the façade. Even though the subject of the work is the subway system, it definitely has some noteworthy contributions when thinking about general systems (economic, political, ecological, etc.) that have slightly more nuances than they originally appear.
‘We Need To Wake Up Cause That’s What Time It Is’ by Glen Ligon was a silent; seven channel installation, which features Richard Pryor. Pryor is famous for his dark humor but here; his voice has been removed, forcing the viewer to focus on his body language. The silence is referencing a moment in the orginal film where he says “the madder I get, the quieter I get”. An interesting idea about Brian Willmont’s ‘Chaos and Willd Again’ was the production of painting but then not showing the painting itself but turning it into a wall paper on which to show other works (also copies as opposed to originals). Walter Benjamin’s notorious essay ‘A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ comes to mind; the copy of the work becomes less important and therefore utilitarian (wallpaper) as opposed to being considered as a work in and of itself. Michelle Vaughan’s ‘Generations’ took a while to figure out, and it was only due to the multi-disciplinary nature that we didn’t just walk right by. The subject was history and how new information can effectively rewrite it. Contradictions are the key to growth; if you’re never wrong how can you be expected to learn. The subject matter for this was digitally manipulated portraits of the family of King Philip IV. The work is a series of copies; Vaughan selected web images where the original course if often unknown, the removed the digital information and copied multiple times, in different media. This reflects the reproduction of portraiture of the times; the artists apprentice would copy the original and then all the works would be attributed to ‘The Studio of…’ ‘Codes for Conduct’ staged some controlled and unrehearsed interactions between the body and digital tools. Madeline Hollander and Alexandra Lerman’s video sculpture scrolls through a brainstorm of collected references that transfer rather than discard and end where we begin. It poses questions about the interface and if it helps us realize the body’s limit and its augmented potential, it also mediates a fluid recalibration of gendered, raced, aged, placed, and abled bodies. Caroline Santa and Jen Schwarting put on ‘Conversation Space’. Schwarting had made some bizarre/hilarious pieces made by insetting digital images of “drunk girls” found on the Internet within paintings and columns that borrow from Bauhaus textile and furniture design. Ben Coonley had a show titled ‘Moonley’, the most captivating aspect being the centerpiece; a virtual classroom installation titled, ‘Trading Futures’. A 9-foot handmade cardboard geodesic dome housing a 360° 3D video featuring a spandex-clad professor leading a discussion on financial derivatives trading and other subjects before his virtual children – a cat, a human daughter, a 3D model of a dancing baby – and the off-screen viewers of the work. Lucid fantasies and nightmares periodically interrupt the talk.
‘Break Ground’ featured an artist called Joe Amrhein who had produced a pile of what could have been old signposts or markers of some kind. Each piece of wood had writing of some kind on it; much of it was only marks to us. This kind of ‘used up’ feeling to them was strange, it felt similar to a prop for a film or a crime scene style work that had been removed from its appropriate setting. ‘Scriptive Formalities’ by Paul D’Agostino was a series of fairly uninteresting abstract paintings varying in size. The selling point of Signal gallery’s show ‘Watermark’ was the unconventional sauna installation (below), however there was also an interesting video of people unwrapping packages; the things they were using to unwrap each package, came from the package they had previously opened. The objects then almost owed their freedom to each other and therefore were connected in some way or another.
(no idea why this is dated as March 7th when today is the 8th #timetravel)