r a c h e l m a c l e a n k i l l i n g i t a s u s u a l

Finally managed to see the Rachel Maclean exhibition at The Zabludowicz Collection! As with her other works, Maclean has used green-screen technology to perform against a backdrop she’s designed, in this case a Barbie-Dreamhouse makeover of a Brutalist seminary outside Glasgow. For the first time, she’s used a cast of actors alongside herself; the intensity doesn’t drop for a second. She often uses found audio material and lip-syncs to it: her authoritarian villain here speaks with Kenneth Clark’s voice from the 1969 BBC series Civilisation. And because her film is an exploration of feminism, she subverts his patriarchal, patrician voice, wittily collaging snippets from his series, such as his references to the pagan Venus as an “amorous strumpet” and the Virgin as a “sweet, compassionate, approachable being”. 

She repurposes them for a world where social media defines femininity and womanhood – her characters are called Siri and Alexa, among others. In a riotous denouement, Maclean unleashes a volley of voices questioning feminism today and in the recent past. Filled with humour and no little anger, it’s consciously excruciating at times, yet always captivating. 

The other works are similarly engaging yet discomforting: Spite Your Face, that we first saw at the Venice Biennale last year, is Maclean’s post-truth retelling of the Pinocchio story and the VR work I’m Terribly Sorry places the viewer in a post-Brexit toytown dystopia, its closing twist tapping into modern Britain’s seething tensions. Maclean’s films are so engulfing that when you emerge, reeling, into the outside world, you feel almost like they’ve spat you out.

s t r e t c h i n g o u t t h e a r t m u s c l e

We’re working on a proposal for a new artwork for an exhibition titled The New Age of Babylon. Our piece is going to focus on how science fiction films often present viewers with visions and hypothesis for the future, Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985) gives us a glimpse of a bureaucratic future in which people live in ‘Utopian People Housing’. This housing, situated in The Shangri La Towers, is directly connected to a power station churning out smoke. 

The work itself comprises of fragments of the design process that would have gone in to making The Shangri La Towers in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985). No longer needed, these items have been discarded and utilised for other, more menial, tasks: a book mark, folded paper stabling a chair, and maquette of The Shangri La Towers acting as a door stop for one of the entrances to the gallery. 

An architectural sketch of the Towers will be folded and placed under the leg of an unstable chair in the corner of the gallery (near the main entrance), which the invigilator of the space is invited to use. The invigilator will also be given a bookmark they can use in their book if they are reading one (if they’re not reading, we will provide a book that can be placed near the invigilators chair). The bookmark will feature a design plan for the cloud pattern painted on the cooling towers of the utopian housing development. A small detailed maquette (30 x 20cm) of the Shangri La Towers will be placed by the entrance via CSM reception to act as a doorstop. 

New Babylon is a design from the past for the future. Our proposal is begging the question of what happens to those plans, now that the future has become the present and those plans haven’t quite come to fruition. We see a parallel between this and films and literature set in the future. This is the beauty of Science Fiction; it has the ability to tell a story that relates to the current world, but which can be set in a future of limitless possibilities. Until you reach 2015 and realise self-drying clothes, flying cars and hover boards aren’t yet available (Back to the Future 2 predictions), there’s no one to tell you, you’re wrong. 

In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), we see a portrayal of how someone can at once be a victim of the society they inhabit and also complicit in helping that society function. The now dysfunctional metropolis depicted in the film was built with the intention of it being a paradise; the infamous tower block Shangri-La Towers is named after the utopia described in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. This, like Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, is another idea where time has caught up and reduced its function to viral that of a brick or small piece of wood. Holding only value to those who desire to prop open a door.

t a t e a i n ' t s o b a d a f t e r a l l

Managed to see Christian Marclay’s Clock at Tate Modern 3 times in the past week. The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. It’s literally called “The Clock” and lasts 24 hours, and potentially the world’s most popular piece of conceptual art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It’s been really fun to be able to pop on for 20 minutes or so and see something different.

While there we also got to check out Tanya Bruguera’s new turbine hall commission. It’s probably the least visually spectacular work in the Turbine Hall so far we’ve ever seen; no giant slides, no vast yellow sun. Yet it might be the most radical. Through “stealth interventions”, Bruguera asks us to wake up to the migration crisis.

Thunderous rumbles intermittently shake our bones. In a “crying room”, tears flow from our eyes, induced by chemicals; a sardonic response to superficial or even absent empathy. The work’s title — the number who migrated from one country to another in 2017, plus those who died trying — is literally stamped on our skin and will rise as more perish. Bruguera has involved Tate’s neighbours too. The Tate’s north building has been renamed in honour of local activist Natalie Bell. Bell has also suggested the subject of a photographic portrait concealed in the Turbine Hall floor itself — Yousef, a Syrian migrant who found support through Bell’s SE1 United charity. The portrait is hidden under a heat-sensitive floor. If enough people pack onto it and then rise up as one, the portrait will be revealed.

f r i e z e w e e k i s u p o n u s

We visited a couple more Frieze openings this week! One being Chris Burden's very pristine, very meticulously executed show ‘Measured’ at Gagosian. Ever since learning about Burden’s work we’ve been big fans, especially the the early work where he caused himself pretty serious physical damage and did the whole does-what-it-says-on-the-tin labelling. Since Burden is sadly no longer with us, here we see the type of work he was making towards the end of his career, installations and sculptures. There’s always a weird feeling when you walk into Gagosian’s Britannia street gallery...perhaps it’s that nothing can ever be as spectacular as the interior of the building itself; massively tall ceilings and totally blank walls. Therefore, when you’re presented with a porshe counterweighted with a meteorite, or a crane truck painted to show its weight-lifting ability, it’s strangely unimpressive. Even so, Burden played such an important part in the birth of performance art, and it's definitely worth taking the time to see these artworks on display, even if it’s just to marvel at how well the cars have been restored. 

Another opening we went to was a project by Ryan Gander and Jonathan P. Watts titled ‘The Annotated Reader’. The final product is a 281 page crowdsourced document, where contributors were invited to select the one piece of writing they would want to keep them company if they’d missed the last train somewhere, and asked to annotate their text with notes, thoughts, feelings, drawings and more. The amazingly layered results are arranged on the gallery walls to be collected and taken away in paper form, or available as a PDF from a vending machine. One of our favourites was Andy Holden’s page; he had selected a page where Charlie Brown is attempting to make a birdhouse but is worried about his poor craftsman skills. He then goes on to say that it's going alright - very much how artists produce work. Very knowing/funny. 

Frieze was particularly dull this year; only a couple of things that really stood out as being really great and the rest was very same-y/missable. Something very clever (almost frustratingly so since it’s something we would love to have made) was a separate room within the Stephen Friedman Gallery room. It was a work by David Shrigley which consisted shrigley’s vocal imitation of extractor fans and a series of mock extractor hoods. A continuation of him demonstrating his uncanny ability to play with the mundane nature of banal objects and scenarios. 

We also visited Sunday Art Fair which is could be described as the “poor man’s Frieze” but nonetheless we still managed to find a great work which we really loved! It came in the form of a trick shot video by Josep Maynou. We’re unsure of whether these are all by the artist or just a collection of videos they’ve sourced from the internet. Either way, was a fun contrast to all the mediocre wall based work.