t h e a r t i s t s h a v e b e e n b u s y

Seen some good art this week! South Kiosk had Franek Wardyński’s solo show ‘Reunification of the Motherland’ which was dealing with something close to our hearts, stock images. The exhibition was all about the sad afterlife of a stock photo, it just ends up in some boring catalogue that no one ever looks at. The show was questioning what if there was a spiritual reunification with the images’ suggested origin, placing it back to the environment that it had the ambition to depict. The show itself is a short film and photographic series portraying a stock footage banner forest on its pilgrimage back to reality. The artworks deal with the issue of life as a journey, recognition and the struggle of self. It’s about liberating the forest montage, a bit like when you buy a goldfish in the market and let it go because you want it to be free. 

APT gallery had a short exhibition titled ‘Bodily Encounters’ with some exciting artists and it didn’t disappoint. All the works are beautifully made and there’s a consistency to them in that in all the works a body (individual or collective) is implied. There’s all these bodily traces, fleshy textures, stand-in bodily elements, architectural interventions and functional-looking objects that suggest human interaction. It’s very much show-don’t-tell which is always ideal. A favourite work was an amazing climbing frame by Emily Woolley that had all these small details such as hand prints in the poles as if the hulk had squeezed them a little too hard or suggesting that it was made of soft clay as opposed to metal. 

GOOD GRIEF, CHARLIE BROWN! Was mighty disappointing. The shows at Somerset House always feel museum-y and a little too educational and this one was no exception. The installation of the artwork is just so unimaginative too – everything has its own stand and its really boring. The art itself is high quality but the show as a whole is really poor. To top it all off, Andy Holden’s new film wasn’t working! It was pretty much the only reason we wanted to go and we didn’t even get to see it! Fun to see David Musgrave’s intricate snoopy anatomy artwork and Ryan Gander’s replica of Charlie Brown’s kite caught in the infamous SKATE sign atop Somerset House. Our advice would be not to bother, it’s the best work in the show you’ll save yourself 16 quid…

d i a m o n d i n t h e r o u g h

It’s come around to Bloomberg New Contemporaries again and since these people are our peers it’s fun to go. Unfortunately, it was all a bit of a mess… First of all was the nearly an hour-long queue to get in even though we arrived at the start of the private view. Secondly, once we did finally get inside it was a fiver for a tiny can of beer! The show itself felt like it was curated by numbers due to being oversubscribed; every inch of wall was covered all the way around the room with mediocre (at best) paintings with a few floor based works thrown in to even it out. Chris Alton’s work was our favourite and only work we liked. A massive banner saying ‘after the revolution they built an art school over the golf course’ – funny, insightful, and truly well made. 

Another event this week was Martin Creed’s solo show at Hauser and Wirth titled Toast. There are a couple of thoughtful ideas such as an excessively complex machine which only purpose is to wiggle a sock around on a plinth and an old classic of the intrusion/protrusion on the wall (a gold one for this show although we prefer the one which matches the wall colour). But these are minor features in a show which is dominated by awful paintings, truly uninteresting and unconsidered. 

Next was the Elephant x Griffin Art Prize which was surprisingly good. We say surprisingly because it’s a prize exhibition of younger artists and they can be fairly hit and miss but everything seemed very well done; the curatorial decisions were visible and the artworks were varied but consistently high quality. Realf Heygate was our favourite to win, due to him being a friend but also because we’re really fond of his work. he presented a number of his small, highly detailed paintings alongside one of his videos of the same content. He’s really managed to crack the art code of making things which are beautiful and desirable/sellable and also have a great idea at the centre.

b u i l d i n g a s t o r y f r o n t s c r a t c h

Whitechapel have an absolutely incredible show on by Elmgreen & Dragset. It begins with an installation of a disused public swimming pool. The attention to detail is amazing – from the peeling wallpaper and the subtle smell of chlorine to the invigilators wearing guard uniforms, we found everything like music to our ears; becoming almost giddy with joy every time we spotted something else. There were also individual artworks dotted around this construction; a toppled bronze beefcake on the poolside and a lumpy aluminium rock, too bulked-up to use the trampoline, a slug, the changing room doors with a handle on both sides, and the urinals at the back, with their exposed plumbing entwined in a lover’s knot. 

The fictional tale that goes alongside this part of the show is that this is the old Whitechapel swimming pool and after it was shut down in the 1980s, there were the club nights, the squatters and the illegal raves. It was an institution, proper old East End. The Whitechapel pool has been sold to some art hotel and resort corporation. It will soon be a spa, with reduced-price membership for locals on Wednesday afternoons and slack time for wellness junkies and gym bunnies. 

The Whitechapel pool is a comment on the privatisation of public amenities and spaces, the corporate taking over from the communal. Sadness and humour overlay one another in this arresting double-take. We almost feel bad by revealing what the artists have done so whoever is reading this can also falter on the threshold, momentarily speechless and gawping, confused and amazed. 

Heading towards the rest of the show you see the gallery’s Perspex donations box on the landing is full of rubbish. A single trainer, an old Oyster card, a bronze OBE decoration (bought on eBay), a remain flyer, a starfish and a bottle of poppers nestle among dollar bills and fivers. Easy to miss, unlike the lifelike sculpture of a sleeping baby in a carry-cot, left beside the ATM at the top of the stairs. It’s very destressing. The sleeping child is a modern infant Moses, adrift in the stream of money. Or no money. It is almost a Victorian parable. The rest of the older works, white sculptures of figures, aren’t really to our fancy but we were still riding the high of what came before and so didn’t’ care at all. 

The approach gallery was next; titled ‘Eight Universes and The Machine’, the artist Hun Kyu Kim has painstakingly created eight parallel universes across eight paintings, comprising four seasons, night and day. Numerous hybrid animals within each painting symbolise a social status such as scholar, artist and labourer. The worlds created by Kim are imagined to be controlled by one huge machine – neoliberal capitalism – which has been the dominant and increasingly pervasive economic system of the contemporary world since the late 1970s. Despite the insanity of depicted in the paintings, they come across as very beautiful. 

The works are the first eight paintings from a much larger ongoing project that the artist is embarking upon, which he refers to as The Big Picture. A huge endeavour, meticulously illustrating – in obsessive detail – a story combining Korean fairy tales, political history and folklore, as an original science fiction epic. Defining himself as a storyteller, Kim’s images of fragmented and scattered narratives tangle together to make a more complete and cohesive picture. Each story works as an independent entity, but shares a common world full of imagination, informing a single overarching narrative.

h o w a s c e n e i m p a c t s a f i l m

Took a trip to the cinema to make sure we got to see Steve McQueen’s new film Widows in all its cinematic glory. Unsurprisingly it was amazing. 

There was a particularly remarkable extended shot which we wanted to mention as it could almost be an artwork in itself. Colin Farrell drives in real time from desolate slums to grassy mansions, the camera focusing not on the conversation inside the car (although it can still be heard through the entire shot), but on the changing world outside, where wealth and poverty are only blocks apart. The expansive widescreen frame frequently emphasises the distance between characters, with faces seen in mirrors and through glass, amid crystals of reflected city lights. It was a metaphor for the entire film but was just neatly slotted in; simple but so very intentional.

b a c k o n t h e a r t m a k i n g t r a i n

Finished production of the Brazil artwork! It’s a little rough around the edges - if we were to remake it/re-show it we might make the maquette out of thin ply as opposed to card. However, there is something very disposable about the material which works very well with regards to how the objects are supposed to be discarded. When we finally added the tiny trees it really helped with making it seem real - we thought about maybe including a car or a bench but decided against it. It does feel nice to have made something new but the production was a little last minute and felt like a bit of an afterthought, almost as if we regretted applying...Perhaps it’ll feel better once we have the studio because we won’t just feel cramped up in the living room trying to live around the work and vice versa. Either way, we’re looking forward to seeing how the rest of the show turns out (we’ll upload the work to the site once the pics are in) and getting onto our next project.

t i m e i s i t s o w n c u r r e n c y

This week has been focused on a few tests for how the final production of the Brazil work is going to go. Initially we had struggled with trying to find something which would be right for the concave shape of the cooling towers but two plastic shot glasses end to end has really done the trick!

Thinking more about the extra pieces - bookmark is going to be practicing making the clouds that go on the sides of the cooling towers. It will be different techniques of painting them and making them seem more ‘cloud-like’. The folded architectural drawing makes us think of a story someone told us about an architect at a party; after asking a stranger at a party what they do for a living and being told they’re an architect, they go on to tell them they’re looking to redo their house and if they could take a look and see what they think. The architect says sure and picks up a napkin and does a sketch which takes about 30 seconds, hands it to the other person and says, that’ll be (insert inappropriately large sum of money). The other person is very surprised and says ‘but that only took you 30 seconds’ and the architect replies ‘oh no, that took me 30 years of practicing architecture’. A very long winded way of saying that actions add up; becoming an architect takes about 7 years of training and learning, becoming a doctor takes even longer etc. Things that at first might appear not to have immediate value because they share the aesthetics of something that is unconsidered (sketchy or incomplete) may in fact hold much greater value due to the previous thought that’s gone into it. This can then be linked back to conceptual art; things which don’t necessarily appear to have lots of production behind them but are heavily considered.

e x h i b i t i o n c o m i n g u p

We have some good news! We got “The New Age of Babylon” exhibition and so we’re in process of making/planning the work. We’ve never made an architectural model before so it should be fun. We’ve began by making the bases for the towers out of card which seems to be going well. It’s now coated in PVA and is going to be sprayed white. The model is going to be based on the left three towers for ease and isn’t going to have the water and then the drawings are going to be based on this image too. We’ll have some time next week to continue developing it so will send updates then.