w e l c o m e t o t h e r e a l w o r l d

The degree show is now completely non-existent. We took it to pieces and then threw the whole thing in the skip. It’s a strange but pleasurable experience to destroy something which you’ve spent so much time and energy on. More people should probably go through this process to teach them not to be so precious about stuff. We remember in first year where they try to get you into that sort of headspace by getting you to make loads of work and not worrying about the consequences. However, the real test is if you can spend literally hundreds of pounds on making something for it only to exist for 6 days. Not that people shouldn’t keep stuff or be proud of what they’re produced. But sometimes it may have served its purpose and it becomes a burden. Our practice and work is potentially much more suited to a commission/residency style; meaning that we really enjoy producing site-specific/experiential art and this means it generally doesn’t have a life outside of that context. This is definitely something to think about moving forward as we have to work out how to exist as artists. We don’t make beautiful objects that people want to hang on their wall or have in their garden, but that’s only one of many avenues to go down. 

Speaking of working out how to be artists, we’re in the process of putting together our application for a studio. Unfortunately, due to the number of applications they’re going to receive, what you’re allowed to send in is quite restrictive; only 5 images with no context other than your answers to 3 questions about what you think you’ll gain from the programme. There are only 8 places and due to being a collaboration we will take up 2 spaces (something we don’t necessarily fully understand and must be due to fire safety etc.). This will either work in our favour, we’re clearly open to working in a shared space, or not because we take up the space of two people but are technically one artist. Either way, we’ll just move on to another place if it doesn’t work out so it’s not the end of the world.

t h e f a t l a d y h a s f i n a l l y s u n g

Our degree how private view was the other night and went really well! lots of people enjoying the mascots and lots of people asking about the 4th floor! This meant we were also able to go round and look at the work of our peers. The first work of interest was Lenny Watson’s piece Trouble in Clubland where she tells the story of live music venues closing down and nightlife culture relocating to small-scale and domestic environments. It’s told through a screen recording of someone searching through YouTube and taking you on a journey through other material. It’s an nicely relative way of using found footage – as opposed to just cutting them together seamlessly, you see the search and the jumps to related videos. You also see that it’s 1.32am when these are being searched for. The environment is key too; a sofa surrounded by the chaos of empty beer cans and cigarette ends. It all contributes to a picture of a group of people sitting around watching/sharing YouTube videos, chatting about what’s happened to the club scene. 

Chloe Abrahams made an exceptionally good film about acting and reality and the lines between them. Needless to say, it was right up our street and we were so excited to feel so manipulated and confused by a work; we continued to think about it much after we left the show, running bits of dialogue through in our heads. The setup was Chloe and her sister were having a conversation, sometimes you could tell they were reading from a script but you weren’t sure if that script was made for/by them or it was a conversation they had overheard or made with someone else. That line of thought is just the tip of the iceberg. We can’t wait to see more of her stuff in the future. 

Connie Search made a discussion between two slide projectors about becoming obsolete. Each slide was another sentence of dialogue, a bit of a one liner but funny all the same. 

Kana Ikezawa was showing some photographs (or potentially videos) on side-by-side screens. We’ve heard Kana speak before about her work and she displays photos of monitors because people expect things to move. A piece of paper will be dismissed but we expect TV screens to display moving images. 

Emma Clayton made a film about falling from great heights which was positioned on a back to back TV screens suspended from the roof, viewable from the second-floor bridge. The film was strangely hypnotic, perhaps due to the excellent positioning. 

Billy Sassi started a bowling team called The Bad Boy Bowlers. His work is made up of merchandise, trophies, framed team photographs, and a documentary. It’s all set up like the domestic shrine of an amateur sporting enthusiast. It’s very thorough and planned, it all fits very snug together. 

Elliot Hewgill’s film brings previously unfeeling cables to life. Personified with a demon-like voice we hear about the frustrations of the life hacker who wants all their cables neat and tidy using paper clips or specially constructed desks. The cable drawing is a really great touch, we always enjoy when people are able to incorporate the essential elements of an installation into their work. 

Campbell McConnell has managed to increase the production of his usual bizarre performances to bring us a Roman table tennis tournament complete with singing assistants and a procession of a cardboard Trojan Horse. Truly insane. 

Finally, there’s Sophie Popper’s incredible audio guide which takes you on a rhyming journey down the main exhibition space, discussing the potential conversations that might occur while viewing the work on display. It’s both very fun and comical but also delivers thoughtful critique. Taking the platform of the degree show and running with it. It’s been a good 4 years, we’ve all done pretty well.

d e g r e e s h o w s e a s o n i s u p o n u s

Made a venture over to Tate Modern to see some new additions to the tanks, unfortunately the most anticipated work (Jordan Wolfson’s giant animatronic puppet) was closed for maintenance. However, we did still get to see Joan Jonas and Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s project No Ghost Just a shell. Joan Jonas was a little busy for us; lots of energy and curiosity, you can tell she runs with her intuition, unabashed and unafraid to see where things will go. Nothing really moved us, and often her art seems like a grand exercise in misdirection. Who is Joan Jonas, and where is she? Drawing lines in the sand, a shadow on the beach grass. We weren’t convinced.

No Ghost Just a Shell however is something we’ve been aware of for a while, ever since seeing an aspect of it at a show at Zabludowicz some time ago. The basic idea is that Huyghe and Parreno purchased the cartoon character AnnLee from a Japanese manga company and this then lead to a succession of pieces beginning with a poster designed by M/M, followed by films made by Parreno, Huyghe, and other big artists such as Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija. It brings up all these exciting questions about the status of the image, of representation, of beings in the world of the character, and on the very polyphony of the work. It was great to see so many aspects of the work in one space. 

We also went to the Slade degree show opening which was fun and informative. We always find that it ends up being lots of stuff that looks like art which is mostly always the way at a degree show but specifically with Slade and Goldsmiths. It’s all very well made and looks like the inside of an art gallery in a cartoon. However, there was still a number of works we picked up on, the first being a beautiful animation by Frederick Freebury Williams.

Shenece Oretha had made an entire room into her work in a very precise way; the space was a round room painted orange room with speakers all around the outside pointing in. You could hear all different voices telling different stories. Really well produced, intentional work. 

Milan Tarascas was doing a performance where he was playing some sculptures/musical instruments. The objects looked like to love child a Henry Moore and a guitar. Quite amazingly strange creations. They were being played by Milan and some additional performers/musicians. They were all wearing these plain robes which were also quite fascinating. It felt like the performance version of ‘things that look like art’ – it’s always difficult for us to get our heads round the artistic licence of the way a work looks since we tend to go down a fairly logical route.

Finally we had Kara Chin who had gone all out on their work about basil. The room was full of stuff from giant wall to floor wooden frames to pots of basil growing under lights. Our favourite aspect was a beautiful mechanised cog which brought a blind up and down by just continuously turning. For us could have a work on its own; an empty room with blackout blinds going up and down but obviously this is a different work for another day.

t w e n t y s e v e n g r a n d l a t e r . . .

Everything’s finished and even though it’s not all perfect, we feel as if we’ve made some progress in a variety of ways during this project. We’re actually quite looking forward to the degree show now; getting to talk with people about the work and also just revealing it to the public in general. 

On a slightly more negative note, the website looks absolutely awful. All the text is on top of each other rendering it almost completely illegible. A lot of the images don’t load on the page and the whole thing is on a black background! And supposedly it also cost £700 which is probably one of the reasons why there’s now NO FREE DRINKS at the degree show private view. We always thought that it was ticketed because of the free drinks but now it feels completely pointless. Anyway, enough moaning! It’s going to be great.

a l l d e g r e e s h o w a n d n o p l a y m a k e s s i d a n d j i m d u l l

We’re now in our spaces for the degree show! The information stand is all put together and the first bit of vinyl are on which is exciting and stressful. We’re just a little bit away from the entrance which feels appropriate for the subject matter. Video for the screens is getting there, getting the mascot designs to remind people to take their key for the lift or see the sculpture garden. We’ve also finished writing the stories which means we need to quickly get down to designing the leaflets and print them as soon as we can.

The mascot heads are looking great too, the felt is on and there’s just one to construct now. The cut outs have been cut too, just need to print them off and build stands for them and we’ll be good to go.

l o s i n g s c o t t i s h v i r g i n i t y

The mascot heads are starting to take shape now. We’ve positioned hard hats within the papier-mâché shell in order for people to be able to wear them properly. We’ve also got the faces cut out so all that needs to happen is felting them up! We’ve decided now to actually make the rest of the costume due to a variety of things such as being low on time, money, and any real skill when it comes to fabricating clothing. 

We’ve really got into the writing the stories for the leaflets. It feels much better and much more exciting (to write and hopefully to read) than the previous work we had done which is good. We’ve been reading a whole load of short magical realism stories about all sorts of different subjects. It has also been beneficial to approach the invention of the works from an emotional/experiential level; by this we mean deciding on an emotion that we want to touch on (e.g. fear, heat, etc.) and building the work around that. 

This week was the opening weekend of Glasgow International! We’ve never been to Scotland before so it was great to see so much stuff going on outside of London and seeing people that we know and feeling a part of it in some way. We’re just going to roll over some highlights/things we fancy writing about since degree show has slightly taken over our lives. 

The first day, we encountered Urs Fischer’s work at the Modern Institute which consists of two fist sized motorised snails, slowly crawling round and round. One of the best things about this was that it’s a fairly sizeable gallery space and so it’s mostly empty, we always love that ‘where’s the art?’ thing. Obviously, this can’t be the case with all art but it felt quite refreshing to not be told anything and just to be left with something to consider. 

Cécile B. Evans’ piece at GoMA was very exciting. It was a set for a series of films focusing on an architect living in the building that he’s made. One of the best bits was that on the back of this miniature set, you can read the what’s going to happen in the scene through notes that has been scrawled onto it. 

Something that we initially winced at due to its appearance was Sam Keogh’s performance detritus installation. The objects themselves looked tacky and dated but when you put on the headphones, you’re subjected to a tale of space exploration, gallons of human sperm and frozen eggs, as a craft malfunctioned somewhere on its mission to seed distant planets with the human race. You’re left with this voicemail from space, something that would have been much stronger if you didn’t have to look at the car crash it took in physical form. 

Mark Leckey at Tramway was brilliant. The room is massive and if we were ever presented with something this daunting, we would have some real trouble not just feeling like we had to fill it. Well Leckey does fill it with a spotlit, deeply troubled figure. Enlarged from a small figurine in the Wellcome Collection, Mark Leckey’s Nobodaddy is a seated god, full of wounds, holes and knobbly excrescences. His body hides speakers, and a voice fills the surrounding darkened space. A CGI apparition of the same figure hovers on a large screen across the gallery. He provides the voice of this abject figure, accompanied by horrible gurglings and rumblings and complaints. 

Also at Tramway was Tai Shani’s performance and we really wanted to enjoy this piece. There’s a voiceover or narration that continues throughout and it talks about mirrors and mirroring and how a mirror is similar but can we always be different in some way. The way the text is then spoken changes; the narrator speaks backwards and says words in the opposing order, acting like a language mirror. It’s difficult to keep up with but that’s the point and we liked that point. The staging is weird, the set a sort of mix of Joan Miró and new age Tumblr shit, including a giant outstretched hand, hanging things that glow like ceramic jewellery, coloured balls and small platonic solids littering the floor, an orange puddle. Ups and downs. 

Augustas Serapinas at David Dale Gallery could possibly have been our favourite show. We won’t do the full show justice so look it up if you want the full story but our watered-down version is that it’s about the history of the building and the stories that come with that. One story being that forty years ago, the neighbouring building (Clow Group Ltd.) produced a gantry and access system for a commercial bakery. These inspection platforms were placed to go over the large industrial mixing bowls, which is used in producing the dough. Upon completion, an engineer from Clow visited the factory to inspect the platforms. Intrigued by the process occurring below, the engineer leaned over the handrail to look into the mixing bowls. Upon leaning over the handrail, a blue pen which was in his breast pocket fell out and into the bowl. Clow had to pay for the equivalent ten thousand blue loaves, and weren’t invited to produce more work for the bakery. For the private view, they were giving away slices of blue bread and the exhibition was blue bread displayed on those same platforms. Almost poetic.

r e f r e s h e d i d e a s

The light box sides for the information stand are all ready to be sealed up which is good to get out of the way.

We had our final tutorial which was great with regards to ideas and how to move forward but meant we now have so much more work to do. We had finished the leaflet content (or so we thought) and it was 30 pages. However, meeting with our tutor, we were told it was only the bare bones. By attempting to make it too believable we had lost why we were bothering to make it up in the first place. What we had written was too informative and too much like one voice. Since all the works were things we had in our ideas list, they were all actually do-able. This begged the question, why would people want to see these things which could happen anyway? We needed to take on more of the stories we had been reading and make it less of a press release and a list of works, and more like narrative that takes you through experiences that you could only imagine. We’ve therefore decided that the “press release” will be the main focus of the leaflets. But the press release is going to be in a story form and that story will get more and more bizarre, drawing the reader in as they go, until they can’t really remember how they got to such a strange place. We’re going to use more experiential language in order for people to actually want see the work.

This was inspired by a Julio Cortázar story called Axolotl. After being recommended it we read it right away and it’s insane. It does an amazing job of showing how a fantastic reality bursts into the realm of the everyday. It starts in a similar way to other stories by Cortázar, gaining the reader’s confidence, putting readers at their ease by creating a normal setting and conventional characters in familiar situations. But then the readers find themselves trapped by a strange, nightmarish turn of events that threatens and ultimately destroys the logical, routine reality described up to this point. We then did a little extra reading about Cortázar himself who has likened the short story to a photograph. Unlike novels and films, which provide abundant details and complete, well-rounded plots, the short story, like a photograph, limits its scope to a single frame, a fragment of reality that forces the reader to supply the missing pieces. This is exactly what we want to convey with our work. Axolotl is a new favourite; it uses suspense well and explores mysterious boundaries.

The idea of performative writing came up and especially Kate Love’s work. Text doesn’t just say something but does something, it can be an instruction or a demand which takes the reader into a place. We’ve since gone and found Kate Love’s ‘The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language’ which is amazing! She doesn’t write about the experience of art but with it in order to truly capture what experiencing a work of art is like.

We were also made aware of the fact that since the leaflets we were giving out were the actual work, and the rest is just a vehicle for transporting it, we should really take consideration over the design. There are plenty of different ways of portraying the work but we really like the idea of it being something people would want to keep so having a poster on the back is a definite. We also like the idea that the leaflet continues the corporate aesthetic up a little bit so maybe we’ll try and work the design into that. Still thinking about the design, we spoke about how it should be relative to the work and therefore somehow about access to the artwork. Not sure how we’ll manage this but we’ll try to work through it.

It also has its own sculptural form; by people taking the leaflets away it both makes work and destroys. This has some clear references to Félix González-Torres and something we never really realised about so much of our work. we really like people being able to physically take something away from our work, a memento of some kind.

We also spoke about a new gallery that Goldsmiths have been involved in constructing and what that says about the institution.

A great time with regards to ideas and thinking but hard not to think about the past few weeks being wasted *Smiling Face With Open Mouth And Smiling Eyes, but with a single drop of sweat on one side of the face*. We know it wasn’t wasted really but you get the idea.