c a t e g o r i s e y o u r c a t e g o r i e s

Going into Manhattan today allowed us to go to a few galleries while we were there. Simon Preston gallery had a group show titled ‘Signal to Noise’. Zarouhie Abdalian’s piece, ‘Buoy’, was a favorite; it was a small galss of water filled to the brim with a whistle at the bottom and a cork ball resting on top. It brought up ideas of invisibility, time, and space; the whistle has been deconstructed and had its components placed in a glass of water, silencing it into sculptural form. All these topics are equally nebulous and confusing but at the same time can be very suffocating and it appears to be reflected in the imagery created. Hester was showing ‘Be a funny mom’ by Lisa Holzer where she exhibited a variety of photographs of pig ears, or treats depending on whether you’re a dog or a human. The most thought-provoking aspect of these works is the sweat-like material on the inside of the frames; a translucent material that looks as if it’s oozing down the interior of the glass. CANADA was another gallery on today’s list with ‘Unhappy Users’. Luke Murphy’s exhibition includes these diagrammatic paintings in the front room and then digital animations further back. Viewers shift between these two worlds, one analog and the other technological, through a tunnel lined with keyboard e-waste. The keyboard tunnel was a bizarre aspect to it; it was a suggestion more than an instruction, although probably due to what was probably required for people using wheelchairs. However, it was still interesting to consider when telling someone to walk through a tunnel made of keyboards is different to giving them the option to. It adds to the classic ‘can I touch the art’ discussion. Our top gallery of the day had be Essex Street and Bea Schlingelhoff’s work that accompanied it. Schlingelhoff paid the art dealer to read ‘Misogyny Re-loaded’ by Abigail Bray. The gallery is completely empty. The sound is the only thing being presented and your body is the only thing on display in the starkness of this space as you listen to a woman’s fatalistic words, read by two men. It seems that what’s broken down is not feminism but a kind of humanism, the remains of which we experience in Schlingelhoff’s barren box. “Now repeat after me, I am free.”

We rented a camera today too and tried out some experiments for the piece were we sweep up the debris from the studio. We collected our ‘findings’ and recorded ourselves sweeping. Embarking on these tests made us think about what the work was really about; we had a crit yesterday and all the work is still up and therefore is present in the films we had made. This makes it very clear that the detritus is that of the work in the video. The dust is what makes the work whole; it’s the excess marble that changes Michelangelo’s ‘David’ into just another slab of material. This is when we had the idea to contact famous, or at least well known, artists and inquire as to whether or not we could come in and sweep their studio and keep the dust. This would then become a body of work involving pieces such as ‘Damien Hirst’s Dust’ or something to that effect. The work would obviously also be the email correspondence; including those who reject us. The prompts for the speech are completed but we’ve had some issues with fiverr so we might have to employ an alternative website to recruit someone to write and read the speech.

Looking into the work from the previous year at Compass made us feel more hopefully of coming up with something both entertaining for the audience and for us. ‘You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive me’ by Brian Lobel sounds absolutely hilarious; one-to-one viewings of Sex & The City with audience members. First they complete a 92-question survey (adapted from each question typed by Carrie Bradshaw) and are then diagnosed with an episode which will change their lives. In addition to the obvious hilarity there is also a true relational feeling behind this; we all know the effect of bingeing on T.V. ‘Of This Room’ by Oliver Bray also sounded like something we could get into; somewhere in between winging it and trusting in fate, his performance was/is entirely dictated by the room and the people in the room.  So, assumedly, he would respond to everything that happened, which was very much to do with his audience. Our proposal might now look like more of a funny lecture/participatory-learning environment; we’ll keep researching/thinking.

We’re thinking back to yesterday’s crit and how there was much talk about categorisation, how things within the art world are labeled and how certain things are grouped together for reasons other than logic. These thoughts led us to Aristotle and his opinions on categorisation with reference to classes and objects. He divides all of being into ten categories and of the ten Aristotle considers ‘substance’ to be primary. This is because we can conceive of a substance without any given qualities but we cannot conceive of a quality except as it pertains to a particular substance. One important conclusion from this division into categories is that we can make no general statements about being as a whole because there are ten very different ways in which something can have being. An example would be that there is no common ground between the kind of being that a rock has and the kind of being that the colour blue has. This sounds fairly obvious and yeah sure, it is hard to imagine any of the other categories (quantity, quality location, time etc.) in a universe without substance, but it is equally difficult to imagine a substance that has no qualities, or no location, or that sits outside of time. There is something strange that happens with the language here and pushes us into a position where we’re trying to label and categorise our categories. For example, what’s the difference between classes, types and kinds? We can talk about the class of human beings, just as we can talk about the type, human being. One might well think they are not actually different categories of being, but typically, while both are treated as abstract objects, classes are not usually treated as universals, whereas types usually are. This use of language and how we differentiate between what people might be talking about vs. what they’re actually talking about is hugely applicable when considering story telling and fiction. Something that feels quite amusing with relation to categorisation is the words taxonomy or typology; there are many categories of a word that’s used to describe categorisation. Telling a story is an important and difficult skill, one that is within our lives everyday.

l u c k = o p p o r t u n i t y + p r e p a r a t i o n

In today’s crit we showed ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’ and the piece we’ve decided to call ’12 Angry Men’ (last supper name cards), images of both should be up within a couple of days. The titled is derived from the film involving a jury immersed in a murder trial. The film is about a case that is perhaps not as obvious as it first appears. The film portrays the notion if truth as malleable and personal, which we felt was hugely referential to the ideas we were attempting to convey in the piece; other than the obvious 12 white men around a table. Since both works had been shown in a previous crit there wasn’t a huge amount of new information that was gathered, other than the fact that it wasn’t merely the select few who had seen it previously understood what was being thought about. Saying that, the idea that the nametags are almost unnecessary; everyone knows who they are, why would they require nametags? We also wanted part of the table to be blank to suggest an ‘unfinished-ness’ which was only picked up on in today’s discussion (perhaps due to the new arrangement). The fact that they are only celebrity-esque to the group was also a new element brought into the mix; there are no last names and some, ‘James’ for example, are fairly common names. It was also mentioned that via a nametag one is capitalizing on the success of said name; this can be compared to famous athletes etc. ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’ was a similar experience; there were obvious parallels between this crit and the one before but also some fresh opinions. People were more inclined to empathize with the individuals in the film; considering that perhaps we don’t all go to the ‘art supply store’ anymore but we go someone to purchase the things we’re making art from. Someone also deliberated over the idea of capitalism in the arts and how even though we’re supposed to be in this environment where it shouldn’t affect us it still does. This lead to thoughts of categorization and how in a supermarket the beer is never next to the cheese because that’s ‘just-not-how-it-goes’, even though the two compliment each other very well. This is just the same with shops where one is expected to purchase ‘art supplies’, print-making is different to painting which is different to drawing etc. etc.

How things are of organised/unorganised through display or exposition is a huge drive behind this work. In browsing for additional thoughts on the subject we found Lev Manovich writting about the aesthetics of contemporary video owe much to the experiments of the 1920s. He is talking here about the idea of montage. Sergei Eisenstein is the person who he believes carries the most influence here; Eisenstein believed that film montage could create ideas or have an impact beyond the individual images. Two or more images edited together create a third (thing) that makes the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. Kurt Koffka is often misquoted in saying ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ when in fact the original quote is ‘the whole is other than the sum of its parts’. One suggests that 1+1=3 but the other is far more ambiguous than that; it’s suggested that whatever the whole is, it cannot be quantified by the elements making it up. Returning to the idea of the montage; Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetee’ creates the illusion of movement through dissolves and fades; Paul Sharits’ ‘Word Movie’ demonstrates how meaning can be created and destroyed; Hollis Frampton’s ‘Nostalgia’ examining time and memory through the asynchrony of film sound and images; and to tie it all up is Robert Bresson’s claim that “an image must be transformed by contact with other images, as is a color by contact with other colors”.

Our point is that the cinematic power of editing seems ubiquitous, phrased far more poetically by Francis Ford Coppola, “the essence of cinema is editing.” So, basically, Sergei Eisenstein was interested in creating new meaning through film editing. This definitely captures a lot of our thoughts when making films of this nature.

John Cage has always been a favorite of ours and so to be presented with an article titled, ‘10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent’ was very entertaining. While Cage was quoted directly in Rule 10, after doing some further reading, he was by no means a collaborator of the list. Nevertheless, it was still exciting to see/consider the rules in terms of our art making process. The general consensus of the rules seems to be fairly similar to how most people talk about how to ‘make-it’; the more the do the better you get, period.

Compass Festival, the Leeds biennial festival of live art is something we’re also looking into applying for this year. They seem to have a fairly ‘hands on’ sort of idea; they enjoy the community aspect of the art making. The amazing element is that they award you £1000 if you’re chosen for the festival (obviously the first thought is to just buy 1000 McDonald’s cheese burgers but I’m sure we can resist temptation). We’re still thinking about what our proposal might be but we’re thinking about some kind of game/workshop to do with people. More research needs to be done into previous years in order to establish the ‘feel’ of it.

p a y m e l i k e o n e o f y o u r f r e n c h g i r l s

We’ve had another think today about works that could perhaps benefit from existing in the tangible world. ’You've Got Your Arm In The Head Hole [The Label's Sticking Out]’ is primarily focused on mapping, and the divisions it leads to, and the differences between places (virtual and physical). So we landed on the idea of a whiteboard, one that you might find in a school classroom, and on one side to have the film projected onto it, and the other to have a map of the world drawn in marker pens. School is the beginning of mapping oneself in the world; it teaches you about place and situation, whether it’s with reference to politics or to geography.

An early work titled, ‘A Lover's [Online] Discourse’, is an interpretation of Roland Barthes book, ‘A Lover’s Discourse’. It’s comprised of, primarily, the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, as opposed to exchanges between lovers. He is attempting to simulate love, an unadulterated version, with all the confusion and absurdity that is often left out of literature. This is mirrored not only in the content but also in the structure of the book; it is illogical and nonsensical as it’s subject matter. As a response to this, we created a system employing the next word function on an iPhone and sent similarly bizarre messages to people on a chat room – all sentences began with ‘I love it’. The computer took on this persona of the confused lover; it had these emotions that it hadn’t felt before and didn’t know how to communicate them. This is a piece about naivety, confusion and the vulnerability that accompanies them. Therefore, we thought an accurate setting for this work would be somehow making the laptop appear to be in danger. So, in an attempt to combine Jimmie Durham’s ‘Still Life with Stone and Car’ and ‘Levitated Mass’ by Michael Heizer, we thought suspending a relatively lard rock or a number of breeze blocks above the computer seemed appropriate.

‘Russian Defence Ministry/Migratory Birds Flying Over Venice’ is the final work that doesn’t have a physical presence. For this we wanted to incorporate a live element; having some play Sergei Rachmaninoff's 'Piano Concerto No. 2' in the space, on an actual piano. The films would play side by side, projected onto a wall, and Captain Panic's 'Chill' would be played via headphones. These methods reflect how each of pieces of music would stereotypically be listened to; one as a live, group experience, the other a contained, solitary one.

‘Neoliberal Lulz’ is an exhibition on at Carol Fletcher at the moment and looks at artists who have adopted corporate strategies to their own ends. We were looking at Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion’s piece in the show, ‘Untitled SAS’. This is the name of their corporation whose purpose and medium is to exist as a work of art. In France SAS is the equivalent of an LTD. So the medium is a genuine company and the service it’s providing is to be a piece of art. There’s a commentary on the nature of art being outside of the rational space of the market while still being subject to selective norms of economic behaviour. There’s also a strange relationship between businesses and art; art is seen as being unquantifiable and businesses very calculated. This is shown through the sales each subject is engaged with; the price of art can differ radically with very little logic where as a businesses price structure tends to be far more rigid. Very thoughtful crossovers between art and business – check out the show if you’re in the area.

We’ve also been thinking about a proposal for ‘The Listening Booth’ – an online listening gallery of sound based art and experimental music. The idea of a speech came up; art being presented to an audience in the shape or words. We thought it would be more interesting to have someone else say the speech than for us to do it ourselves. Fiverr is an online marketplace offering tasks and services, mostly for $5, and so we thought it might be a good place to recruit someone. The subject of the speech would then have to be about the various fictions being created and to go even further into it we decided to get someone on the site to write it too. Someone giving a speech about us, congratulating us for a variety of achievements we haven’t reached, exhibitions we haven’t had, prizes we haven’t won.

After reading the weed-labeled-as-art article yesterday, and generally considering the labeling of things as art, we came across this quote from ‘Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance’ By Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick:

“Using Oscar Wilde’s idea that objects were transformed into art by the critic through writing, Watkins argued that curating was a form of artistic practice and that curated exhibitions were likened to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Readymade Aided’ artworks, where the display or exhibition is aided by the curator’s ‘manipulation of the environment, the lighting, the labels, the placement of other works of art.’ (Watkins 1987: 27)”

This led us to Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Critic As Artist”. It’s structured as a dialogue between two characters that are deliberating over the value of the critic. They discuss the potential of the critic being equal to the artist; both are inventors, the only difference is the content. It is also suggested that the critic produces an even higher form of art due to the fact that they’re forming a creation within a creation. It then concludes with a message not dissimilar to the thoughts of John Stuart Mill; the path to becoming the closest to truth begins with learning how to incorporate the thoughts of others.

These are both fascinating texts and have given us some stuff to think about with regards to the process of ‘things’ become art and how that process can be tampered with.

r e m e m b e r t o r e a d t h e l a b e l

Art Language Location (ALL) is an art festival that takes place in a variety of locations throughout Cambridge and we finally applied to be part of it come October. We decided, since the festival is about language, to create an artwork that creates, for lack of a better word, a dialogue between the art made by artists for this project and children viewing the work. Children are supposedly less adept than adults when employing the spoken word. However, this innocence gives them freedom, which enables them to be, in the words of Dylan Moran, ‘the most honest critics’. We wanted to explore that honesty, employing the art at Art Language Location, as its subject matter; we want to would be thoughts and opinions of children. They would be shown the work and be given the prompt, ‘what do you think about this?’ Each audio piece would only be as long as the child spoke about the work. We also had the idea to recruit children from primary schools in Cambridge (fulfilling the ‘location’ aspect of the title) but this might not be possible.

David Hammons was also someone who caught our attention today. He’s a character that’s popped up many times before either in the context of a seminar or at an exhibition. This being said we’ve never made that much of an attempt to look into him more deeply; specific works, life, politics etc. ‘Bliz-aard Ball Sale’ is a work that sticks out. The photos portraying Hammons with his neatly arranged rows of snowballs for sale are probably the most frequently reproduced images. The piece has become sort of iconic, the single ephemeral work – a work that is essentially about ephemerality – that has come to stand for his entire practice. As it comes down to us in documentation, it is a portrait of the artist as an anonymous and disreputable peddler, an absurdist street hustler. Hammons’ notion of an artist includes a constant flirtation with notions of the illicit and the fraudulent – the ever-present suggestion that the whole business might be a scam. What, after all, could be more of a scam than selling snowballs in winter? But this is an obvious betrayal, which certainly changes it from careless deceit to something perhaps more mysterious. He is revealing what no one else wishes to, but that everyone is hiding.

Hammons has nodded to Duchamp repeatedly throughout his career one of the being installing numerous urinals on trees in a forest in Ghent. His most direct homage is also, in its own way, a kind of protest; ‘Holy Bible: Old Testament’ is a black leather-bound, gilt-edged volume which appropriates Arturo Schwartz ’Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp’ as its text. Although it seems initially like a simple one-liner, the trajectory of the critique here is actually fairly ambiguous; does this piece merely mark that Duchamp is ‘overrated’, his work taken all too often as Godly? Or is the object of parody Schwartz’s text – a complex and multivalent history of public and private art-making reduced to an inventory. (The Old Testament, after all, is itself a kind of catalogue raisonné, an attempt to turn a messy collection of anecdotes into a coherent narrative: the Complete Works of God.)

Another activity of the day has been thinking up ways to bring previous works to life; allowing our works to only live in the virtual world isn’t necessarily a bad thing but some works have benefited from being realized physically so it can’t do any harm to try the same tactic with others. Reflecting on Jon Rafman’s show at the Zabludowicz Collection definitely plays a part in this train of thought; a show which is essentially 9 films which have been given life via the exhibition. ‘The Best 4 x 4 x Far’, is included in the works we’d like to complete. It’s a work concerned with the bizarre nature of the British Empire and how this is elitism can, very easily, be compared to that of the art world. Our thoughts were to have a union jack on the back of which had the film projected onto it. It would be interesting to attempt to somehow, artificially, keep the flag up, either with a fan or fishing wire. ‘Lose Yourself in the Music’ is another of these which we intend to put the last touches on. This would be set up in a karaoke style; a microphone, a separate (smaller) T.V with the lyrics of the song, and the film being played on the wall behind.

‘A Scanner Darkly’ was also on today’s agenda. Richard Linklater’s second rotoscope feature (a form of animation where the figures are drawn from live-action footage). Rotoscope is, as a technology, about adding a level of realistic motion to the usually fantastical nature of animated worlds. With ‘A Scanner Darkly’, Linklater has a different discourse in mind. For starters, the story is neither fantasy nor fairy tale. Based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dicks, 'A Scanner Darkly' is a story of an undercover cop, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), who attempts to combat a dangerous and ultra-popular drug to which he is fully addicted. The novel and film’s representation of drug makers as eco-terrorists living and working within Arctor’s highly-regulated society is a distinctly dystopian narrative, in some ways similar – with its emphasis on long tight spaces, drugs, and the battery of tests undertaken by men who run afoul of the law – to A Clockwork Orange. But basically, the film is grounded in realistic events and much less of its scenery alters or moves. This is Linklater’s ultimate point in using rotoscope; ‘A Scanner Darkly’ is an animation based in realism, questioning the relevance, even the safety, of fantastical illusion. So, all in all, fairly entertaining flick.

Finally, we were hugely amused to read this story about New York police discovering approximately million dollars worth of weed in a crate labeled as ‘art’. We were considering the, Duchampian, idea of just labeling things as art, but the identity of the items is always concealed via the use of packaging or other protective material. This then leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not ‘art’ is really present and what then becomes the art if it’s not. The emperors new art work.

w h a t ' s m i n e i s m i n e a n d w h a t ' s y o u r s i s m i n e

During this week we were challenged on the work ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’. We displayed the work via a projector; the film was then projected onto a canvas that had been purchased across the street at the notorious BLICK. It was brought up that perhaps we should consider the implications of purchasing everything apart from the videos used in the film. The piece is all about buying, yet there is an aspect that is stolen rather than bought. Questions of how one would go about buying a YouTube video were raised and this is definitely something that we will be looking into; do we purchase a copy? Do we purchase the original? If we do purchase the original, must the creator delete all trace of it from both the Internet and their own files? This thinking then acts as a catalyst for ideas regarding other things, which are thought of as free and what would happen if one were to attempt to purchase them. But this can very quickly become condescending which would need to be heavily considered if it were to go down that route. The idea of what comes ‘next’ with the last super name cards was also an interesting discussion; it feels as if they’re a beginning of something or a suggestion or what’s to come.

A performance or re-enactment was considered; just like a film of an awkward office ice breaker session or general ‘work-do’ but everyone is wearing the nametags. Perhaps the tags are just at the gallery show and can be worn for whatever period of time they audience wants and then can replace them. Either way it seems like we’re moving towards some sort of embodiment of these characters and the stories that it might tell. We also worked with Clerk 37, a music producer in Leeds, to create a music video for his new track Flow Sowii, which can be found here. There’s a link to his Soundcloud in the description.

Riding bikes, sculptures made out of mirrored road signs, flashing neons, broken walls, a live broadcast of a T.V show, kaleidoscopic videos, customized carpets, a continual birthday party, a cardboard Louis Vuitton shop, silicone skeletons, Oculus Rift worlds, exploded basket balls, and what could have been a set for a theatre production about ancient Rome. Spring/Break Art Show was like no other art fair we had ever attended. Mostly, note the word mostly, art fairs are places where wealthy people go to make investments in a commodity that happens to be art. It’s not even where good art goes to die. If the way you make your living is by selling portraits of peoples cats or attempting to revive history by making huge abstract paintings, these are the places for you! However, Spring/Break is different, there is far less emphasis on the work’s ability to be sold and more on just being a place where people show thought provoking pieces. Some favorites were LV DIY created by Alfred Steiner, a parody Louis Vuitton boutique filled with ludicrously fake merchandise. All the walls are covered in cardboard and duct tape to mirror the wood finish and metallic trim of the actual store. A funny and well-executed critique of luxury consumerism.


Chris Bors had ‘24 Second Psycho’ playing on a continuous loop, a reference to the Douglas Gordon’s ’24 Hour Psycho’ – both a the film Psycho slowed down or sped up to last 24 seconds or 24 hours. ‘No Gains on Sacrfice’ contained a machine capable of turning speech into a slogan written across a virtual t-shirt (available for purchase). There were also a variety of lights that had the part with the bulb set in a block of concrete – they also had a devices supposedly proving that the light was on inside the concrete. ‘Surface Feat’ appeared to be a number of abstract paintings balanced on bits of fruit. However, they were all in fact casts of such things, all painted meticulously in order to act in a fraudulent manner.


‘L Dopa’ had turned one of the bathrooms into an institution for the mentally unstable. It involved a doctor and some seemingly crazy people. The funniest thing about this was when someone from the press tried to talk to the doctor about this live experience and then the people who were controlling the atmosphere via the creepy music that was being played made the phone ring and he answered. This meant he was no longer talking to the reporter but was giving her all the answers to her questions simultaneously; this is what the piece is about, subversion.


The reason we were able to get involved in the fair was by running some work to it for Eva and Franco Mattes. Their piece consisted of a shower curtain, a calendar, a key chain, a dress, and a bottle. All the items had the same image of a woman on it, who was clearly in distress, which matched the titled ‘Panic Attack’. The image was sourced from a search engine when typing in those same words. The origins of the piece go back to an artist called Kevin Bewersdorf; Eva and Franco bought the idea of putting the same image onto various Internet bought items. They then used this idea in a variety of different ways, this being on of them. The items they have chosen are all related to this notion of anxiety and potential techniques which one can utilize to avoid it. For example, a calendar is for planning, a keychain helps you locate your keys; a bottle gives you convenient access to water wherever you are and a shower curtain gives you the privacy required to shower without disturbance. A thorough and contemplative piece, as always.


Some other shows we’ve managed to see were ‘Above and under L-train’ by Isidro Blasco manifested as a hugely complex and seemingly haphazard sculpture. However jumbled the wood appeared, it was obvious that there must’ve been some highly systematic design supporting the façade. Even though the subject of the work is the subway system, it definitely has some noteworthy contributions when thinking about general systems (economic, political, ecological, etc.) that have slightly more nuances than they originally appear.


‘We Need To Wake Up Cause That’s What Time It Is’ by Glen Ligon was a silent; seven channel installation, which features Richard Pryor. Pryor is famous for his dark humor but here; his voice has been removed, forcing the viewer to focus on his body language. The silence is referencing a moment in the orginal film where he says “the madder I get, the quieter I get”. An interesting idea about Brian Willmont’s ‘Chaos and Willd Again’ was the production of painting but then not showing the painting itself but turning it into a wall paper on which to show other works (also copies as opposed to originals). Walter Benjamin’s notorious essay ‘A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ comes to mind; the copy of the work becomes less important and therefore utilitarian (wallpaper) as opposed to being considered as a work in and of itself. Michelle Vaughan’s ‘Generations’ took a while to figure out, and it was only due to the multi-disciplinary nature that we didn’t just walk right by. The subject was history and how new information can effectively rewrite it. Contradictions are the key to growth; if you’re never wrong how can you be expected to learn. The subject matter for this was digitally manipulated portraits of the family of King Philip IV. The work is a series of copies; Vaughan selected web images where the original course if often unknown, the removed the digital information and copied multiple times, in different media. This reflects the reproduction of portraiture of the times; the artists apprentice would copy the original and then all the works would be attributed to ‘The Studio of…’ ‘Codes for Conduct’ staged some controlled and unrehearsed interactions between the body and digital tools. Madeline Hollander and Alexandra Lerman’s video sculpture scrolls through a brainstorm of collected references that transfer rather than discard and end where we begin. It poses questions about the interface and if it helps us realize the body’s limit and its augmented potential, it also mediates a fluid recalibration of gendered, raced, aged, placed, and abled bodies. Caroline Santa and Jen Schwarting put on ‘Conversation Space’. Schwarting had made some bizarre/hilarious pieces made by insetting digital images of “drunk girls” found on the Internet within paintings and columns that borrow from Bauhaus textile and furniture design. Ben Coonley had a show titled ‘Moonley’, the most captivating aspect being the centerpiece; a virtual classroom installation titled, ‘Trading Futures’. A 9-foot handmade cardboard geodesic dome housing a 360° 3D video featuring a spandex-clad professor leading a discussion on financial derivatives trading and other subjects before his virtual children – a cat, a human daughter, a 3D model of a dancing baby – and the off-screen viewers of the work. Lucid fantasies and nightmares periodically interrupt the talk.


‘Break Ground’ featured an artist called Joe Amrhein who had produced a pile of what could have been old signposts or markers of some kind. Each piece of wood had writing of some kind on it; much of it was only marks to us. This kind of ‘used up’ feeling to them was strange, it felt similar to a prop for a film or a crime scene style work that had been removed from its appropriate setting. ‘Scriptive Formalities’ by Paul D’Agostino was a series of fairly uninteresting abstract paintings varying in size. The selling point of Signal gallery’s show ‘Watermark’ was the unconventional sauna installation (below), however there was also an interesting video of people unwrapping packages; the things they were using to unwrap each package, came from the package they had previously opened. The objects then almost owed their freedom to each other and therefore were connected in some way or another.


(no idea why this is dated as March 7th when today is the 8th #timetravel)

S P O I L E R A L E R T

We spent Saturday going around the galleries in Chelsea, it is a very different experience to London; with streets upon streets of galleries one is able to walk down the street peeking into shows and making split second decisions whether to go in, safe with the knowledge that there will always be another street with more art. This act of window shopping for art forces the first point of contact with the work to be aesthetically based; if it looks good then you go in, if it doesn’t then you move on to the gallery next door. Its abundantly clear that this structure isn’t set up for people shopping for ideas, and by default the art within the system isn’t either. This instantly puts the art on the pedestal of unaffordability for 99.99% of people, and, as a result it is placed within the realm of unreachability; for the general public the pedestal is as tall as it is decorative; very!

That being said we don’t necessarily disagree with this system (there is still some brilliant work), we’re merely noting how it’s bizarre; the structure of the gallery network is probably how it is because it is necessary for its survival. If this is the case then it is a shame that the petrol that fuels the art world is extracted around the notion that the artwork is treated in a god-like manner. In doing this there’s not really any risk from the galleries; perhaps if the art was viewed as a peer rather than a god then the system would be able to sustain itself through creating a more relatable connection to the general public, thus increasing the audience size and public attention. For example, lets say a company sells really fancy coffee cups for £35.00; they sell 1,000 a month generating £35,000. If their coffee cups were priced at £3.50 then they would have to sell 10,000 in a month to make the same money but people would be more likely to buy it due to the its low price. The company loses some of its aura as a brand, but it’s low price increases the chances of its exposure and potentially could lead to more sales. This is obviously a risk, if it doesn’t pay off then the company will lose money; perhaps the galleries need to take this sort of risk, who knows? It might be beneficial! Not necessarily a monetary reduction but a reduction in the mystery of the ‘genius’ artist making ‘genius’ artwork for their ‘genius’ friends that doesn’t require a logical explanation because the art simply runs through the artist’s ‘genius’ veins. Perhaps it’s naïve of us to believe that making work more accessible will make more people pay attention to art, but surely it’s worth giving it a shot!

Aside from some mild frustration we still saw some great work. Pace gallery had a show by Tim Hawkinson called ‘Counterclockwise’. Hawkinson works using commonly found objects, they are then reinterpreted into difference forms or used from difference purposes. The recognizable nature of these objects causes the viewer to relate to them in relation to body or function, so regardless of how far Hawkinson forces these objects to travel in terms of purpose one cannot separate the work from the original function of its constituent objects. Hawkinson is obviously aware of this and uses it to his advantage, producing an interesting critique of the use of materials in art; the individual material objects used to make a piece of work should inform the idea as much as the appearance of the objects collectively.  One of the most interesting pieces in the show was the mechanized work ‘Signature’ where, sitting on a small desk, a small handmade machine signs the artist’s name on receipt papers repeatedly. After every signature the paper is automatically cut and falls into a pile on the floor where the viewer is invited to pick one from the large pile and keep. The act of signing one’s name on an artwork is not for the benefit of the artist; it is one for the buyer – a stamp of originality and a confirmation of uniqueness. By delegating this task to a robot and making it happen repeatedly Hawkinson degrades the value of his own signature through the production of hundreds of copies (limited only by the ink in the pen) but also by removing himself from the entire act. The school desk leads one to think of classic forms of school punishment, and naturally ways to avoid getting caught; Hawkinson has been punished and he crafted a robot using things in the room to write his lines for him. Like an ape with a rock the use of the environment is a primitive form of technology but also represents a very intelligent level of creativity that is present within people – especially children.

Gaggosian Gallery had a brilliant exhibition from Taryn Simon with her work ‘Paperwork and the Will of Capital” where she recreated the bouquets of flowers that were present when powerful men signed agreements that influenced the fate of the world. Simon examines accords treaties and decrees drafted to influence systems of governance and economics, from nuclear armament to oil deals and diamond trading. All of the works involve the countries present at the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which addressed the globalization of economics after World War II, leading to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Using photos of the signing of these documents Simon worked with a botanist to create an “impossible bouquet”—a concept that emerged in Dutch still-life painting parallel to the country’s seventeenth-century economic boom, which ushered in the development of modern capitalism. The existence of the “impossible bouquet” is dependent on the existence of the global consumer market, the very market that the singing of these important documents shaped.

Flowers also have strong connections to stereotypes of femininity and peace, this stereotype, created by men, is exploited by Simon to highlight the absurdly small number of women that were present or influential in these decisions. These works are presented as large photographs with colourful, painted backgrounds; In each work the image of the bouquet is informed by a description of the event where the bouquet was present, thus highlighting absence of any actual photographs of the event. Simon’s choice not to include these images replaces the recognisable faces of these events with recognisable species of flowers of various colours in various arrangements questioning the validity of the arrangements of such singings. The events are as equally artificially arranged as the flowers are in a bouquet; the powerful men in the original images are curated and arranged by even more powerful men who act behind the scenes, much like a florist or even an artist.

Mark Dion had two large works at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; ‘The Library for the Birds of New York’ is a large birdcage containing 22 live birds and assorted books, magazines, images, ephemera and objects related to birds. At the centre of the work is an 11ft oak tree; trees are representative of many things; food chains, knowledge, and evolution all important philosophical and scientific constructs. The viewer is invited to walk around the cage; the act of entering the exhibit is the same as entering the enclosure at a zoo; it feels like unique and possibly dangerous situation. Entering the cage makes you the spectacle for people exterior of the space, this offers the people outside of the cage to step back and view the full picture; instead of watching someone else you are really watching a reflection of yourself within a societal construct. This is helped by the fact that a cage is automatically associated with microcosms and feelings of being trapped; it is easy to project the world exterior to the gallery into the gallery space and then the art world into the cage. Exterior world > Gallery.    Gallery>Cage.   Art>????

The birds, uninterested in the objects in the cage, posses knowledge outside of human experience, rendering them fundamentally unknowable by man. Displaying a detachment from the actual object and literature of the actual object, much like this blog post is completely detached from the actual art, or at least someone’s experience of the art; we are attaching opinion to the objects and events, the discourse between us (writing this) and the viewer (reading this) is confessional rather than factual. Raising the question whether anything(or any documentation) can truly be factual; if everything is confessional to an extent then surely a lie contains as much ‘truth’ as a truth. This has led us to think about the value of confessing; it carries connotations of knowledge of wrongdoing and therefore guilt, if everything we say is opinion based and therefore confessional are we inherently guilty? -  a terrible curse. We are loosely planning a performative confessional piece ‘A Poor Trait of the Artist as a Young Man’, a play on words with the James Joyce novel; fictional works carry as many ‘truths’ as a truth because they’re creation is purely confessional; the only way to experience it is via the opinion of the author. A confessional event can also be linked to religion; people repent for their sins through confession to inanimate objects or people in roles that are sworn to secrecy – people acting as inanimate objects. Although we are unsure of the structure of the work we want to address the fact/fiction boundary that are by-products of guilt, and address the confessional in relation to the largest platform of opinion publishing that has ever existed; the Internet.

The Michael Riedel exhibition at David Zwirner investigated a subject that was close to our recent interests; art supplies. Riedel wallpapered the gallery walls with text extracted from a website selling art supplies, the text is fragmented and unreadable meaning that the content does not inform its origins. In doing this Riedel subverts the intended use of the products that are for sale on the website and uses the information as an art material. The text on the wall has the same effect as white noise, it is the bi-product of something going wrong or a transmission ending, fall out of the media age. Hanging on the white-noise-walls are images taken from textbooks of animal skeletons, their bodies have been substituted with plastic bags from Blick art shop, representing a physical fallout of the man made, the plastic bags, like the skeletons will remain as reminders of presence for years to come.

Bruce Silverstein gallery had a selection of photographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon. The title ‘Got to Go’ is reminiscent of internet slang for good-bye “gtg”, is commonly used to sign off instant message conversations, not only does it nod towards the rapidity of online communication but also suggests a certain physical rush, hurry or panic. The photos reflect this well; presented with Instagram and Polaroid style borders they show quick fleeting moments of life, one gets the impression that the people in the separate images know each other. Like the portraits in Harry Potter they are able to slide out of their frame and into the frame of another, producing a community of images. When you make a community you inevitable make social connections and intricate webs of relationships. As you walk through the space you experience these fleeting and light-hearted connections, there is a sense of happy nostalgia as if you are existing in someone’s photo album. This illusion is broken down when you enter the final room; a three-channel projection slowly cycles through the images from the show you’ve just walked through wile an eyrie synth plays a constant note that changes in pitch when a photo changes. The setting makes the pictures seem much more sinister, and you find yourself detesting them, piecing together twisted fictions of the community that you so fondly remembered from the room before. It’s like the final scene of The Usual Suspects where US customs special agent Dave Kujan pieces together the evidence, the camera, acting as Kujan’s eye flicks between the evidence in quick bursts unravelling the story that has happened before and creating a completely new one. By that point Kujan really has ‘Got to Go’ to chase after the infamous Keyser Söze. ‘Got to Go’ has a really great plot twist. (SORRY FOR THE SPOILERS)

anyway. gtg x

c o m p a n y p o l i c y

Despite both of us being ill this week (btw you can stop sending flowers guys) things really stepped up a gear. After spending the last few weeks mulling over ideas and limply ticking the boxes of the ever-thrilling Pratt assignments, we finally managed to achieve some space to start making these ideas into things. Having actual objects seems to be a necessity at Pratt; heaven forbid that you turn up to a class with just research! Questioning why one is making what they’re making isn’t really a thing that is encouraged here, at least not by most tutors. Anyway, we’ve discussed the bizarreness of Pratt before; we shan’t bore you with anymore.

We recently went to Gavin Brown’s enterprise to see a show by Thomas Bayrle. Dominating the room was four of Bayrle’s recent paintings from the ‘Carravaggio Series’; on a trip to Rome Baryle went to the Contarelli Chapel in San Lugi dei Francesi to see Carravaggio’s famous painting ‘San Matteo e l’angelo’. In response to his experiences on this trip Bayrle repeated images of this work in iphone screens that themselves were twisted and distorted into the forms of ‘San Matteo e l’angelo’. While the reference to hyper-communication and the smart phone acting as extensions of human body is a path well trodden, we enjoyed these works, they didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously and aside from the fact that these images really didn’t need to be painted (they could easily have been made using the very tools it was critiquing) it was a nice idea. This format was repeated over four large canvases, all of which were variations on the same image with different backgrounds or different configurations of iPhones. We didn’t really believe that it was necessary to have so many of these as all it did was nod towards small aesthetic modifications of the same image, thus dissolving one idea over four works. Perhaps that was the point, but it was equally unclear whether this was purposeful. The arrangement was also rather odd, there did not seem to be any progression running through the works. Accompanying the ‘Carravaggio Series’ were three video works, the first two greet you as you enter the space. Shown on two old reel-to-reel super 8 projectors, they project small collage animations that continuously loop. The clicking sound of the projectors can be heard throughout the space, we assume that this sound would be nostalgic to people of a certain age; reminiscent of home movies and DIY film nights. The third video in the space sitting uncomfortably between the ‘Carravaggio Series’ paintings is created using rubber stamps and stop motion. It shows an aerial view of two people pulling up in a car, leaving the car, returning and then reversing off. As this loop repeats itself we get closer and closer to these figures until they are just spots on a screen, unrecognizable as figures, resembling images of cell division. This process then repeats itself in reverse, and loops, creating and dismantling totalities from individual cells merged together to create narrative.

In the same building was a Gregory Edwards exhibition at 47 Canal, in which he attempts to tackle the “contextless place inside of the screen”. Instead he creates paintings where the only link to the screen are renditions of recognizable computer icons, symbols and emojis. The works seem to be painted renditions of a vapourwave/PC music aesthetic which has always existed online, it seems absurd to remove these from their habitat when you have easy access to it; by all means look at these aesthetics but painting them and putting your ‘style’ into it seems ridiculous, Edwards has missed the point – even Rhianna stole online aesthetics better!

At Sperone Westwater there was a retrospective in painting, sculpture and installation by the late Otto Piene. Red Sundew 2, 1970, an inflatable sculpture, (installed for the first time since its initial exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts) inflates and deflates within the space on its own accord. The fluctuation of this process gives life to the sculpture; it draws in deep breaths and releases this air as long exasperated sighs. On the second floor of the gallery is an installation of Piene’s ‘Lichtballette’ works; rotating bulbs are placed inside various containers with hundreds of small holes. The light, projected onto the gallery walls, moves around the room colliding with light projected from other similar boxes.

It has began to become clear that in quite a few of our recent works we have been operating as a company; hiring people to accomplish tasks that we may not otherwise be able to achieve, or in general appearance (the shutterstock aesthetic on this website is an early and perhaps previously unrealised example of this). A recent work involving the twelve disciples’ names on cooperate name-tags is an example of this; the badges are to be laid out on a table in a similar manner to that of the entrance to a cooperate event. Historical events (especially those that were recorded in paintings or books) are intricately planned; everything from the people who attended these events to where everyone is sitting is planned. With this in mind the church is no different from a company intricately planning a children’s book or TV show to analyse the best set-up to make the most profit; what characters are children going to respond to positively, what format and what sort of story. It is said that history is written by the winners, CEOs of large companies are definitely the winners of today.

While thinking about this relationship between producer and consumer we have begun to expand this children’s book analogy and actually make one in an attempt to understand the process behind items such as these. There is also an interesting relationship between children’s books and art; an artist is expected to make work while holding a correct moral stance. You rarely get any artworks that are immoral, and if you do then they are generally immoral for a reason, rather than as a by-product of another action. A children’s book has to hold a similar position; they generally teach children how to be morally correct; a curious relationship exists between artist and children’s book author. In an effort to understand this we have written a children’s book about a white crayon who is shunned by her community because she cannot draw on white paper, she eventually finds out that she can draw on black paper and draws the night sky. We have now hired an illustrator to help us complete the book and the preliminary drawings look really great. The company-style method of making work has led us to be interested in hiring people; we recently hired a film-maker to help us make ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’. It felt suitable to make a film about buying art materials by buying it from someone else, we paid Sarah Harvey £30.00 to make us the video. Now we have the video we have begun to think about how it is displayed; the plan is to project the video onto a pre-stretched canvas bought from an art shop still in its shrink-wrapping. The email discourse with Sarah will also be displayed next to this essentially informing the viewer that the video was bought and not made – questioning the distinction between the two.

Making video’s using vloggers is essentially recycles material that we do not own, making art upon art, bringing up the internet authorship debate again – can you own anything online? Should the ‘owner’ of online content be precious about how it’s used?  The notion of ownership is slowing dying; uploading content instantly makes it part of the public sphere, in partaking in this act one relinquishes control of these objects. Users are able to download, share, link, remix and (most importantly) repost. Originality has finally met its match! In highlighting the fact that nothing is original the online world not only questions the validity of the ‘author’s’ possession of content but also demonstrates the perpetual repetition of simply being. We only build on what others have built for us; any new discoveries, inventions or artworks are facilitated by the previous work of others. Hollywood boomed because it was physically far away from the patents of the east coast of America, the patent system doesn’t recognize the value and importance of building upon the ideas of others in order to further accelerate the process of innovation. We are hindered by the myth of the ‘genius’ sitting in solitude creating something that is entirely original and unique. Our social structure treats these people as icons while in reality they re-mold the past into a future that has the appearance of originality. With this in mind we are going to sweep up the studio floor, collecting the dust and debris of student’s artworks over the years and placing it on a pedestal. Art upon art, idea upon idea.

In terms of other work we have bought a large job lot of keys off eBay, which we are planning to use for a performance involving testing these keys on various locked and un-lockable items – also bought online. We have also been thinking about using these keys for a participatory raffle-style work where the viewer buys a small set of keys which they can then attempt to unlock a series of locked boxes containing prizes of some sort. Another idea came form parents measuring the height of their children over their childhood; this tracks a child’s progression in relation to their own body – something that they can instantly relate to when they’re older. We thought we could start offering a service where we use a child’s school textbooks to make a font using their handwriting – thus tracking another form of progression that’s relative to other technologies. As children that have grown up with computers we have typed more than we have written, making a font using our own handwriting removes the universal appearance of documents made using 12pt Times New Roman and replaces them with the ability to be misread ie. The ability to be a human.