Been to see a couple of fun things recently, the first being La Ribot’s ‘Distinguished Room No. 45’ at The Place in/near Euston. A pretty amazing performance work involving 3 people and a giant, mysterious structure, covered in a tarpaulin, in the centre of the room. The audience had to maneuver around it in order to find whatever action what taking place in the room. It began with an incredibly energetic display, involving all 3 performers wearing multiple layers of tight-like material and that same material being cut off them by each other. During these scrappy interactions the circle of audience members would come in very close and actually causing the performers to crash into them on multiple occasions. This created a very tense atmosphere, almost as if we were observing a fight on the street.
We also attended the opening of ‘Even Dust Can Burst Into Flames’, a group show including Anna Barham, John Latham, Jeremiah Day and Kit Craig. All the works seem to sit between the events they materialise and the interpretations they point toward, for example in John Latham and Kit Craig’s works, the event is simple and private: a one second spray of ink on paper or a finger pulling through wet clay. The very first human methods of producing a mark; direct results of the process of their production, embodying the history of their own making. But in Latham’s ‘One Second Drawings’ dots of ink on the surface of the paper give the impression of deep spatial recession as scale telescopes in a viewer’s imagination and cosmoses appear. This approach of linking material and ideas is almost reversed in Kit Craig’s bronze casts of simple gestures – drawings trying to become sculptures. The dumb marks are similar to thought processes, touch screens and cartoon outlines, referring away from themselves, as intermediaries to explain something else. But cast into bronze, each one has a tangibly solid, haptic quality which shifts attention away from it as a signifier of something else towards being a thing in its own right...not sure if it quite lines up but we’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Jeremiah Day’s framed drawings and Anna Barham’s text pasted to the wall are, in different ways, records of public events. We were more interested in Barham’s ‘scores’ and her ideas about charts of the material generated in live production reading groups, traces of the mutations of a specific text event, particular renderings of the surface affects of language as the texts are given breath by the participants. A lovely aspect of these was their openness to be reinterpreted by the movement of a viewer in front of them, to be read vertically or horizontally, forwards or backwards.
As well as taking part in Morguefest we also managed to see really great art including a game show with a fake ghost, cakes adorned with edible faces of questionable politicians, multiple can of soup being emptied onto someone’s head and a poem dedicated to a deceased grandma. Something we did notice as that there was a certain chatty edge which felt very inherited from standup comedy. It’s interesting when there are disciplines that collide; some think of the arts industry and the entertainment industry to be different but that would have been hard to argue after seeing the works during the festival. Our work seemed to be fairly well received even though we had a couple of hiccups such as one of our scalextric cars not working when we arrived and our actor getting stuck in central London. However, it was a good exercise in problem solving but as always we learnt that need to have everything going perfectly before the day if you want to be sure that nothing will go wrong.
We have also been selected for a residency in Wigan at the start of next month which is exciting! First IRL residency! Not sure as to what we’ll exactly get up to but it’ll be a great experience to have an intense art-making time. Since the whole point of a residency is a different locale we’re thinking about notions of place, space, and location in relation to our own practice; in particular, how refocusing one’s thinking can bring such ideas from background to foreground. This background-becoming-foreground is an aspect of the residency that attracted us, being potentially isolated in a new place can bring with it a heightened sense of awareness which can only be beneficial to the production of art. Storytelling and narrative construction are also subjects we’re considering with regards to the residency. These could be fictitious or factual but they are not our own, we prefer to develop them through conversation and general interaction. Being in a new city means numerous new stories just waiting to be fabricated, whether it is through the people, the architecture, the politics or any other material. The process of working with local communities would not only be highly advantageous to our own art-making but, hopefully, would also be of interest to participating individuals. Manchester itself has so many groundbreaking historical stories, from being the place where the first modern computer was conceived to being the setting for Charles Dickens' Hard Times, it would be fascinating to be able to construct our own.
In other news we’ve got Adeeb Ashfaq coming on to talk about what he’s up to so that should be up in a week or so and our film work ‘something wicked this way comes’ is going to feature in the Philosoc end of year exhibition at The Hive in Dalston! Just got to figure out how we want it to be installed...