Going to the CSM degree show is always a fun experience, especially now we’re getting dangerously close to being in it! The closer it gets, the more and more we realise how much ‘stuff’ we bypass without much consideration due to a large quantity ‘looking like art’. This could be anything form a painting to an assemblage to an ‘organic’ looking sculpture. Noticing the act of not noticing stuff is definitely different to merely not noticing without that thought. The point of this is, when considering the work we might generate for our own degree show, it should be as least ‘art-like’ as possible (or at least appear to be). Some favourites from this year included Kat Buchanan’s human cats (complete with scaled up scratching posts), which, aside from taking up the ambitious challenge of bringing durational performance into the walls of a gallery setting, was genuinely fun and good-natured. (this screen shot can only add to the work)
Ivy Stearman was showing a similarly live piece but with quite a different intent; exhibited was an actor who appeared to be living in about a 3-meter square space (potentially for the entirety of the show. He had a bed, food and water and also what looked like bottles containing urine. He made occasional interactions with viewers but none of these were ever consistent – mirroring ‘real’ activities. Max Holland, who is known in the Fine Art department for his hilarious trailers for various open studios held and CSM, had made a film in an equally humorous vein. His film was several minutes of him asking various people (from the local MP to the CSM front desk) what he should make for his degree show. A large portion of the film is made up of the ‘ums and ahs’ of the people on the other end of the calls with the rest consisting of him encouraging them to say ‘anything at all’. Beyond the comedy, there are some truly perceptive ideas being portrayed around the notion of what art is, what art can be and that anyone can be an artist. A witty attention-to-detail was that the same texture of the wall behind him in the film had been employed to cover the wall on which the monitor was positioned. Other works can be found here on his youtube channel.
We’re beginning to think more about the Manchester exhibition, The Great Unanswered II, where we are assigned a question to consider when making our piece. Since ours is, ‘what is reality?’, there’s a huge number of things we’ve been thinking about. We’re very interested in ideas around fact and fiction and where the line is drawn between the two, so this title is both applicable and exciting to us. The majority of our research has been a combination of these two phenomenon and theories around lying; when is a lie a story? Why are there negative connotations attached to the notion of a ‘lie’ but a ‘story’ is celebrated? Since artists are fabricators by design are they not also liars? Preliminary thoughts have been, mostly, on ‘fake’ things, such as us being in a fake band and displaying posters and merchandise for said band. The band would be called ‘Wet Paint’ or ‘The Wet Paints’ meaning that every ‘wet paint’ poster, intended as a warning, would be advertising for us. Slightly aside from this, but continuing down the ‘what is reality?’ road, the question caused us to revisit a work by Ed Atkins (which we’re still unable to find the title of but is pictured below).
The first time we encountered the image we were intrigued by the mishmash visuals and computer-generated aesthetic but seeing it again under a new spotlight has made it appear far more romantic and consequently tragic. A story unfolds of two ‘people’ finding one another in this strange place and until this moment have not come into physical contact with another ‘thing’ and go to touch each other but instead of feeling the others hand on theirs, like they may have seen previously, they slip right through. This is the moment comparable to the scene in films Toy Story where Buzz falls to the bottom of Sid’s stairs and realises he in fact cannot fly and is only a toy. It encapsulates the thought that many of us have shared when thinking a little too hard about our position in the universe and at what point (if ever) does anything we’ve ever done become meaningful.
