a s m a l l v i c t o r y

Our exhibition at Bones and Pearl was a definite success! Everyone we spoke to at the opening and then at the performance night seemed to really enjoy themselves and thought the work we showed had uniting themes without being repetitive. The staggered performances throughout the night meant that people who attended stayed and so at the end of the first night there was a huge number of people. We also ended up showing two works, the first being ‘is here alright?’, and then also ‘where are they now?’. We were really happy that we finally got to show it as a physical installation/sculpture as opposed to just the sound aspect. Another additional aspect of the show was the destruction of our piece ‘is here alright?’; we had previously made a film of us destroying the original but had never done anything with it and since everyone else in the show was doing a variety of performative works, it felt appropriate to re-enact this here. We invited others from the crowd to participate in the deconstruction, which we hoped would spur on others from the crowd into joining in. However, due to the nature of the evening we think that because everything was seen as a performance that people didn’t’ want to mess up the art that was happening in front of them. Just something to think about for next time.

Will and Billy’s performance was particularly funny; they staged a barbecue wearing aprons emblazoned with the phrases ‘real men don’t use recipes’ and ‘license to grill’. They continued these faux-macho personas onto the actually cooking itself; they proceeded to cook the burgers until they were burnt to a crisp and then went about putting them into buns anyway! An insightful yet funny critique of British masculinity.

We’re now preparing for the isthisitisthisit exhibition titled ‘AFK’. The central theme of the exhibition, made clear though the exhibition’s title (an acronym for ‘away from keyboard’), is the internet but in a physical sense. How the digital world interacts with the physical world and vice versa. Our piece is every recorded work by Cézanne made more ‘digestible’ through mutating them from beautiful masterpieces into data. People strive for the ease to assess a concept instantly, sourcing tools such a charts and graphs. Art, on the other hand, tends to go against the grain with reference to this idea, as something that is stereotypically pondered over and deeply considered during production and consumption. Using Photoshop we have reduced every painting by Cézanne down to a single pixel/colour. The colours are then put into an online and interactive Pantone Matching System (PMS) colour chart which, when given a colour, will suggest similar Pantone colours. By using Pantone colours we’re referencing the mass production and ‘fast-food’ culture. The PMS also provides a corresponding number to the colour. This number is then put into a graph containing all the other numbers generated, in turn producing a line graph consisting of the entire works of a particular artist – available at a glance, at ease. We’re still toying with a name for the work but have a potential in ‘line of best fit’; it’s exactly what you were instructed to find in school when creating such structures and goes along with the idea that you’re saving time and attempting to box something up into one category as opposed to allowing people think for themselves.

The newest episode of artists and friends is out on soundcloud so give it a listen >>>here<<< if your ears have got some time to spare! We’ve been pretty busy at the moment but hopefully we’ll have another episode up by the end of next week.