Managed to get to see British Art Show 8 over the weekend at a variety of locations in Norwich, a hugely diverse show with a real range of mediums and scales. Even though we’ve just seen his show at Chisenhale Gallery we were delighted to be able to encounter another of Yuri Pattison’s works. The change of scene actually felt very important to how his works are read. At Chisenhale he was able to create an environment to embed his works into yet here, the singular piece is what takes centre stage. Many artists follow this model of working when dealing with bigger exhibitions, with others deciding to instead fill the space with works, perhaps with an overarching theme. On this occasion it appears to work very well; shown is a film of which the subject is the illusive bitcoin. It is shinning a light on something that artist Evan Roth has also been known to dabble in – the physicality of the Internet and its objects. The scenes of the film are grubby and dark, scrapyards for computer parts and circuit boards. One of sections depicts someone building a rig with which to mine bitcoins and nestled in behind the mammoth screen is a similar instrument, wiring away.
Laure Prouvost was another one of our favourites, although again not a new face. Her work in the show was very similar to an idea we had for 30/30 this year – to give mundane objects a voice and even a personality. It room is activated by the viewers movement, one is invited to enter and sit on a bench, a gravestone by another artist. Prouvost’s voice fills the space while electric fans spin and spotlights glare, almost the setting for a horror film.
Turner prize nominee James Richards is back and doing his thing. Presented is another beautiful film, showing real attention to detail, and some stunning visual experiments. A noteworthy fact we did learn when engaging with this work is that its title, ‘Raking Light’, is taken from an examination process used in art conservation. A bright light is shone directly across the surface of a painting to highlight details or irregularities. This makes perfect sense when paralleled with a film about the act of looking and a study of sight in general but was also great to learn with reference to our idea for a work which is to have the temperature in the gallery set to one that would be fatal to paintings. Both ideas are in relation to this movement towards the preservation of objects deemed important by the art community.
A slightly less tech-savvy work was by Simon Fujiwara who had purchased coats made with animal fur, stretched them as if making a canvas on which to paint and shaved them. What’s left is this mismatch of stitching and the occasional piece of metal. These, once luxury, items worn to signify wealth have been stripped of their beauty and hung up as an extension of the production process now made visible. A poetic piece about how history and class have developed the world of today.
Ryan Gander had an entire room filled with great works from his sculpture series, ‘the way things collide’, to a uncut film of his book ‘The Boy Who Always Looked Up’ being recorded for radio. His starting points for investigation are playful yet considered, as always. There are life size photographs taken of his studio, which is plastered with ideas, that look in progress but also very staged – letting us into his private head space but perhaps only giving an artificial scene on with which to gaze. His fascinating titles continue to puzzle and intrigue us, which is we assume entirely intentional, instilling a desire within the audience to connect the piece and its given label.
Eileen Simpson and Ben White had created a comment on musical copyright. Obtaining snippets from old pop classics which no copyright – these sounds last anywhere from 1 to 30 seconds depends on how much is censored. It was displayed in a Donald Judd-esk format with, what appear to be, random graphical lines on the record players. We were uncertain as to what this added to the work other than making it into a ‘thing’ – either more information or more consideration, one is lacking.
There were some seriously high-tech headphones employed in Melanie Gilligan’s, non-linear film. As you entered you’re faced with a jumble of black scaffolding on which are hanging wireless headphones and handful of TVs attached at varying angles. Each TV was showing a few scenes on a loop which remains silent until you stand in front of it with your headphones on; the headphones have a sensor in them which is activated at this point. The viewer, giving time to and skipping scenes wherever they would like, then constructs the film’s narrative. The subject of the film is how our relationship to technology has altered our bodies and attitudes (which we felt was acted fairly poorly but was an interesting and well portrayed idea none the less).
A simple but effective work was Cally Spooner’s LED screen composed of YouTube comments by people who were angered to learn that certain ‘live’ performances, such as Beyoncé lip-syncing at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration or Lance Armstrong apologising on Oprah for his use of performance-enhancing drugs, had been outsourced to technology. The comparison here is that the artist has also given her roll in delivering a work of art to technology also.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin presented two walls of portraits produced using sophisticated facial recognition technology. The series was influenced by Citizens of the 20th Century, photographer August Sanders’s attempt to create a comprehensive record of German society during the Weimar Republic. Using the same categories as Sanders for their sitters, Broomberg & Chanarin photographed 120 people in contemporary Russia, including Pussy Riot’s Yekaterina Samutsevich. This is a point where a camera is given a purpose, an agenda, it’s activated by being in the situation that it’s in and job that it has.
Last but definitely far from least is Rachael Maclean’s hour long film titled ‘Feed Me’ which is a completely bizarre piece about children, sex and TV. Something that did strike us about this piece was the amazing costumes and amount of high quality green screening. The entire film barely represents the world we know. It’s like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and 4 sheets of LSD all put in a pan and left to boil over.
