l o o k i n g a t a r t i n e a s t l o n d o n g a l l e r i e s

Some exhibitions we would like to recommend/discuss include the new Ed Fornieles show at CARLOS/ISHIKAWA. This comes under the ‘recommend’ tab; it all looked very slick and the actual architecture of the space changed immensely, so that you were guided through it. It gets a little more creepy though because you know all those horrifying scenarios you see played out in dystopian sci-fi about social media? Well, Ed Fornieles is trying to make them a reality, and this ambitious little show is filled with complex and very worrying ideas. One work is a VR porn program where the body of your lover constantly shifts gender, race and shape. Enforced non-discriminatory sex, the politicisation of onanism: why have one partner when you can have all of them? In another piece, he allowed a team of ‘conversationalists’ to take over his Facebook account and conduct chats with friends. The data they compiled was used to build an artificial intelligence that could provide friendship services with no human input. He's also created a guide to building simulated worlds and a cute digital avatar whose moods are fed by global events.

Our favourite aspect of the work is its knowing nature; aware of its own cleverness and maybe even a bit smug, which makes it easy to dismiss. But he’s Patrick Bateman-esque in his sociopathic desire to push and push and push. He constantly nudges at the limits of our networked selves. And, importantly, he never neglects the aesthetics. The works accompanying the sim guide look like post-apocalyptic Jasper Johns paintings; the panels alongside the VR work look like kinky John Baldessaris. It’s interesting, and it looks good to boot. The whole show has the feel of a trade fair – as if it’s all stuff that could hit the market at any moment. It’s all a little too real.

The Ryder was another, slightly less exciting, exhibition we attended. It felt a little lazy in terms of curation since we had seen the same work at the degree show but it’s always fun to think about good artists getting good opportunities.

Cell Projects had a solo show by Mimosa Echard, which was OK but the frustrating thing was that central to the exhibition is this film called ‘The People’, which is compiled from the artist’s vast family archive of Mini DV footage all layered on top of each other. The layering meant that nothing was recognisable on the projection, leaving us with 120 minutes of abstraction in both sound and visuals.

Hannah Black’s exhibition at Chisenhale gallery titled ‘Some Context’ and is structured around 20,000 copies of ‘The Situation’, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about ‘the situation’. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation. The books provide the stuffing – in shredded form – for the ‘transitional objects’ also displayed in the space, and will be shredded at the end of the exhibition. It felt like a clever and thoughtful way to merge the personal and the political.

f a i l t o p l a n , p l a n t o f a i l

The open call for the exhibition we’re hosting at Light Eye Mind ended a few days ago and we’ve had so many great submissions! Looks like it’s going to be a really concise show with good range of work that explores the themes from a variety of different points. We’ve also decided to host a performance night the week proceeding the private view to accommodate a slightly more intimate gathering in order for the live work to be appreciated fully; occasionally opening nights can be a little too full on to enable more conversational/subtle material. 

We’ve now got a title for the exhibition which feels as if it solidifies it slightly. It’s similar to an episode of some TV show (potentially Friends?) when a couple (potentially Monica and Chandler?) decide on baby names before they’re born and consequently they catastrophise due to their existence being more ‘real’. On this occasion, it’s a little more essential to plan for those potential issues so any catastrophising is welcomed. The title we’ve chosen is ‘Pre-sliced Orange Segments’. It’s referencing the orange slices offered at halftime during kids’ football games whilst also referring to co-operative perceptions; an isolated orange segment is not an orange, but it does contribute to one, creating a whole new entity which is, as Kurt Koffka would say “other than the sum of its parts”. And it’s this collective activity of participating which we’re attempting to highlight in both sports teams and group art shows.

t h e 1 5 c m d m e n t s

After an incredibly busy week of back and forth communication with artists the pavilion for The Wrong is now completed! All the work looks amazing and we’re really looking forward to being able to release the site onto the world. We’ve included the press release below.

We all know what Ctrl-Alt-Delete does. It's a simple way, by pressing three keyboard keys, to escape a whole host of blue screen nightmares and crashed computer programs. But could this act of prioritising the immediate over the permanent have more societal repercussions than one might originally believe…

We have a shortcut culture. From our schools to public institutions we practice and encourage immediacy and shortcuts. Society has taught all our lives to make as little effort as possible yet to find and reach what we want when we want it in a way that suits us best. It’s a rather natural ‘shortcut reflex’. This has been encouraged and nurtured by our unlimited access to information, technology, money and kindred spirits, which has been largely facilitated by social media and sharing.

The keyboard shortcut could be said to be a symptom, and perhaps even an enabler, of this culture. In computing, a shortcut is a series of one or several keys that cause an event when triggered by the user. In a landscape, if your friend reveals they’ve found a new shortcut to your local pub you’re delighted by the time you will save now and in all subsequent trips. Yet in society, a shortcut could mean jumping a red light, cheating on an exam or taking performance enhancing drugs…all these examples are built within the frame of disrespect for the consequences. But when it comes to something like sport there are some discrepancies in how people feel about certain shortcuts; the phrase “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough” was made famous by former Chicago Cubs first basemen, Mark Grace and perfectly captures this divide. If you’re cutting the course in order to make it shorter for yourself, you’re showing that you’re actually trying a little bit harder than everyone else, right? How is it different from those with natural abilities or simply longer legs? What is one supposed to do if they’ve committed their life to this and the results never come? And how are they supposed to feel about all of the sacrifices they’ve made if their highest aspirations have yet to be realised? Should they quit? Or should they try just a little harder? What’s one more sacrifice?

There are multiple ways to interpret this notion, whether positive or negative, in reference to politics or sport, we hope to present a broad variety of works navigating this language of ‘the shortcut’.

b o o k b o o k b o o k s

We’ve had another little break...but we did manage to read a couple of great books we would highly recommend! The first is a book by Oliver Ressler, Gregory Sholette called ‘It’s the Political Economy, Stupid’ and is based around an exhibition of the same title, curated by the same two artists. The show was predominantly comprised of video-based political works from many international artists. Its title has an interesting lineage, it appears in an essay by cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, who adapted the phrase from a 1992 Bill Clinton campaign slogan. Unfortunately, the entire time we were reading it there was a feeling of “this would probably would be better had we seen the show”, this being because it is very much a catalogue – but it is not necessary to have done so; examples of quite a few of the artists’ work can be found on-line, and the several of the essays required revisiting. The idea of exploring the crisis in art and theory is a great one, given the mystique attached to knowledge economies and cultural work in the newly precarious economic order. Well worth a look for those interested in cultural economies, analyses of the crises and the political economy of everyday responses.

Next, the compliment the themes of the first book we had, ‘Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism’. This short book wastes no time in cutting to the chase: contemplating why we enjoy what we enjoy helps us recognise and better understand environmental and market forces that influence our dispositions to certain types of entertainment. The author does not suggest that readers should adopt more "high-brow" forms of enjoyment, like reading complex critical theory, and forsake certain other types of mindless enjoyment (e.g. playing Candy Crush). Rather, he places all enjoyment on a level playing field to be analysed as more or less equal enjoyments. This approach encourages introspection from the reader into what our enjoyments are without the red herrings of analysing how worthless some of our enjoyments are. For example, we all know that playing games on our phones is usually an unproductive waste of time. But had this book made that its central focus, we'd likely miss the larger themes of enjoyment in general. All enjoyment. We'd agree that Instagram is a waste of time, vow to spend less time on our phones, and then let the new goal slowly deteriorate and disappear within a week of finishing the book. However, by not ranking or disparaging certain enjoyments, this book helps the reader recognise that even the book we're reading provides a certain enjoyment that needs to be analysed. Why did we buy this book? What environmental and market forces drove us to purchase this book, and what is it about us that enjoys reading it?

Finally it was Ryan Gander’s ‘Fieldwork, an Incomplete Reader’, the first of his two books that accompany his large installation titled ‘Fieldwork’. The work is a quite something; it feels like the perfect analogy for it is the swan that gracefully moves on a lake is a picture of elegance in motion but what is hidden from the eye is the activity going on beneath the water’s surface. We don’t see the hard work conducted by the swan’s webbed feet which propels the graceful motion we see and admire. Behind this one window is everything but the viewer is only permitted to see a one beautifully displayed item at a time. It reveals playfulness and morbidity in equal degrees and includes the urn that had contained his Auntie Deva’s ashes and a group of Playmobil “Mix ‘em Ups”. The book is a collection of notes by Gander on the individual objects, including a description of Ryan and his daughter’s experiments to make the Playmobil shed its identity, assembling the pieces by chance. The value here is not in the physicality of the objects themselves, but in their heritage.