w h a t h a p p e n s i n t h e l i f t s t a y s i n t h e l i f t

Our day job involves us getting into lifts a lot and it’s made us think about the potential for a new film based around scenes shot in lifts. Whether it’s fighting, loving, or keeping it all bottled up inside, the enclosed space and forced intimacy is the perfect platform to bring out the best and the worst in people. Some attempts have been made, in fact, to film an entire movie inside the pressure cooker of an elevator. The soothing ding of the elevator, the often-incongruous hum of placid music, and the plain interior (usually wood or brushed metal, sometimes there’s a mirror) all provide the perfect blank slate for whatever kind of scene you want to set. And don’t forget what can happen outside the comfort of the lift walls. All those cables, grinding gears, and heavy-metal parts did provide an almost irresistible temptation to the bombastic action directors of the 90s. But the deceptively calm interior and the dangerous exterior are nothing compared to the elevator’s most cinematic feature: those sliding doors. Outside of an antiquated wipe transition, it’s cinema’s best answer to the stage curtain. Our idea was to create a Frankenstein’s monster of a script (one which is made up of other scripts from scenes which happen in lifts) and have an extended lift scenes from an unknown, untitled film. 

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

After visiting White Cube’s summer show at Mason’s Yard and finding it pretty dull, we braved going to Bermondsey with the hope that perhaps it would brighten up on the other side of the Thames. We were kind of right. The show is similarly made up of arty-looking-art but then in the corner at the very back of the last room they’re showing Christian Marclay’s film ‘Made to be Destroyed’. We have never seen this work and we were genuinely jealous of how close it is to ours and how we definitely could’ve done it. it’s a 24 minute montage showing a succession of different film scenes in which artworks are being destroyed, juxtaposing an incredible myriad of genres, narratives, contexts, sound-effects, with the common denominator of one fundamental action. The film serves as a powerful concluding piece for the show open to different interpretations. It can be easily viewed through the political lens where the media directed to the masses revels in depicting destruction of elitist artifacts. It can also be more directly viewed as a depiction of destruction as an irresistible human impulse, as arguably art (both in its creation and destruction) transcends class struggle. For us, it really made the show.

We also watched Gone Girl for the first time this week. We thought we must’ve seen it before but after putting on and not remembering the first 5 minutes we realised maybe not. First things first, we absolutely loved it and watched it for a second time within the next couple of days. The movie crosses the thin line that divides genre fiction from postmodern fiction; it is decisively unreal, in the manner of Fight Club – a movie in which the actual and the symbolic occupied the same slice of reality. Its characters are ciphers, its setting is perfunctory, and its violence is stylized. Gone Girl is what the critic Ted Gioia calls a “postmodern mystery”: it lets us luxuriate in the “reassuring heritage” of the traditional mystery, which feels like it’s building toward a tidy solution, even while we enjoy “the fun of toppling it over and watching the pieces fall where they may.”

As in many postmodern narratives, the heroes and villains in Gone Girl aren’t people but stories. We hope that the familiar, reassuring ones will win out (they don’t). In fact, the film is so self-aware that none of the stories it tells can be taken at face value. The film’s drama and characters have been streamlined so as to reveal their underlying mythic power. But Gone Girl is also anti-myth. When Amy says, of her plot against her husband, Nick, “That’s marriage,” you’re not supposed to believe her. If the myth of the perfect marriage is poisonous, then so is the myth of the continual “war of the sexes.” The question the film asks is: Are there any stories that we can tell ourselves about marriage that ring true?

If that question sounds familiar, that’s because, in some ways, with Gone Girl, David Fincher has returned to the structures of Fight Club, substituting a married couple for Tyler Durden and his gaggle of disenchanted bros. In both stories, the characters rebel against the unbearable myth of attainable perfection, substituting for it an alternative one of transcendent, authentic, freedom-giving destruction. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need,” Tyler Durden says. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.” Durden’s response to his disillusionment with contemporary masculinity is to embrace a seductive, violent, and supposedly more genuine idea of “real” manliness – but that alternative turns out to be a disastrous illusion. In Gone Girl, it’s the mythos of coupledom, not the mythos of masculinity, that’s oppressive. But the imagined solution is the same: “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face,” Amy says.

Gone Girl, in a sense, is Fight Club squared. To explore the positive and negative sides of the manliness myth, Fincher had only to propose a single character, a man with a disassociated personality (Tyler Durden is the alter ego of Edward Norton’s unnamed, milquetoast protagonist). Gone Girl demands two bifurcated people, each of whom must play both the victim and the aggressor. And the mythos of coupledom is more complex and troubled than the mythos of manliness. Even back in 1999, when Fight Club came out, there was something trumped-up and artificial about the idea that men were experiencing a crisis of masculine disenchantment. (The urgency of that crisis, if it did exist, certainly seems to have faded.) Coupledom, on the other hand, is and remains genuinely fraught territory. While our cultural imagination no longer fixates on the Great War or the Western frontier, the idea of the perfect couple (and, especially, the perfect wife) is still alive and well.

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

We’ve taken a trip to Leeds and subsequently a couple of galleries big and small. First we went to serf, a small artist-run-space which has studios connected. Initially we were very excited by the show, it was described as the culmination of a two year project where the artist has collected the mail of the previous tenants from her flat and created fictional stories of a man and woman who lived there. However, it was a little too much of the artists interpretation of the tenants lives though sculpture than writing. This is obviously just a personal preference and perhaps we were comparing it too much to Alicja Kwade’s exhibition at Neuer Berliner, which is a series of letters that the artist copied then sent to a series of graphologists, people who analyse hand writing. Obviously more of a cosmetic link than a thematic one but we really enjoyed it.

Even though we had seen this show before, we felt it necessary to revisit Andy Holden’s touring Artangel show. It’s still just as good on a second viewing and it was good to see it restaged in a different venue. Really made us think about how location can redefine a work.

p l a n n i n g t h e f u t u r e

A couple of evening’s ago was another Isthisit book launch! Always an exciting time since the show it’s fairly certain the show will be a good one. The book is also consistently thorough and well-constructed. The show and book is all about surveillance, the monitoring and mediation of online/offline lives by corporations and government bodies accompanied by the monetising of one's personal and private data. Some favourite works would probably be the McDonalds knuckleduster, a great idea and a really beautiful object and the unattended bag, complete with a 3d printed Mark Zuckerberg head.

We’re in the process of getting ourselves a shared studio with a big group of friends which will be really exciting! Having a place to make art, come up with ideas, even a venue for social interaction will be good. Making work without anywhere to put it feels bizarre but having a studio feels like it almost makes that OK because it’s not just filling up your house with crap. We’ve found a space in crouch end so fingers crossed everything will go through and we can give this whole “artist” thing a shot and keep tinkering around and making stuff.

s u n n y l o n d o n s u n n y s h o w s

An amazing exhibition we would highly recommend visiting is at arbyte gallery. It’s a collaborative effort by Lawrence Lek and Kode 9 called Nøtel. The installation itself is an amazing spectacle; at the centre of the gallery four screens hang from a black metal structure placed in an Ø-shaped pit, outlined in green neon tubing. Two of these screens are attached to video-gaming consoles, the other two to virtual-reality headsets, each offering a different method of navigating the digital rendering of the Nøtel. Architectural drawings of the building (itself an Ø shape) are hung on columns, and an edited ‘trailer’ for the Nøtel is projected on to a larger screen on the back. The video is narrated by two robotic voices reciting the company’s ‘CEØ statement’ – also printed on a nearby wall: ‘Nøtel Corporation is proud to present our first marketing suite for the Nøtel, our flagship range of zero-star™ hotels that embody the concept of fully-automated luxury.’ It’s a truly stunning sight. 

Another show worth checking out is a new one at Auto Italia titled “Sister said to Satan: my diary is too hot for you”. There’s a variety of material; texts, posters, and four moving image works. Everything is exploring the allure of gods and legends, alternative belief systems and healing rituals, as well as trans-national tourism and ideas of destiny. The works also engage with the destructive forces of late capitalism on the body and city: from mental disorders that rupture and realign the self, to the intense depression and recession that tear apart the fabric of the city. This juxtaposition is treated half in reverie and half critically, producing a surreal exhibition where fact and fiction melt together in the heat, and remain unhinged in time and place. 

g o o d i d e a d o e s n ' t a l w a y s e q u a l g o o d a r t

We’ve seen the current exhibition by Banu Cennetoğlu at Chisenhale Gallery recently and had a couple of thoughts about it. The premise is that it’s the artists entire digital archive of images and films from all her devices, over the past 12 years. This is then put into one huge moving image work; 128 hours long. The idea is this allows viewers to build up a picture of the artist; who they are through what the decide to document. A lovely idea, one which we’ve seen before from the likes of Eva and Franco Mattes who produced Riccardo Uncut, an uncut and uncensored portrait of someone's life through their phone. Although, we kind of prefer Eva and Franco Mattes’ version because it feels much less self-obsessed; they are thinking about it with reference to another person, completely estranged from them and therefore it brings up questions like “how do we construct our digital memory?” and “is there still such a thing as a ‘private photo?”. It’s about building a character and the fact that private photos aren’t necessarily sexual or explicit. But Banu Cennetoğlu’s show feels much more indulgent and dull. Although, neither of the outcomes of these ideas are particularly exciting; merely a slideshow of images and videos. Better of as ideas.

Went to see Incredibles 2 and it was even better of the first one. It’s so clever and beautiful and continues to build upon the question of are super heroes actually a good thing but does it in a different way to the first one. In the first film we saw the challenges of middle-age for Mr. Incredible but then he realises that normalcy can be great and family is worth the sacrifice. The major evils are bureaucracy. 

Now we have superheroes are fighting back against them being illegal and we’re questioning whether the laws correct. Elastigirl engages in an act of civil disobedience by going back and doing superhero work, almost like a modern day Gandhi. The message then becomes, if you believe something is wrong then you are allowed to do something else wrong to change that wrong thing. The key is all about changing public perception of the superheroes which references the commercial world where if you come to a problem then all you have to do is re-brand. We see them operating in a post-truth world where there’s no good and bad, truth and lies but just what people believe. And in the end it’s another great message about parenting and how family is strong together. All summed up by a quote by Edna “done properly, parenting is a heroic act”.

a r t i s t s m a k e a r t

We’ve got back on our feet and we’re trying to start making some art again! There is a slight monetary barrier which means we’ve decided to not make art with our own money for a while and instead apply for commissions and residencies where there’s a budget (even if it’s purely for materials). We made an application to make a film about the legend of Saint Margaret. Our proposal was to tell St Margaret's story through audition tapes. We will film actors reading excerpts of their respective parts of the script. Using these screen tests we will edit them together to build a narrative where the progression of the story is cohesive but the delivery is down to the interpretation of the actors. This is a slightly edited version of another idea we’ve had for a film for a while but it does make sense with the subject matter because St Margaret's story has many subtly different versions and, as with all stories, even more interpretations. All renditions involve her warding off a dragon but not always via the same method. The piece proposed is a moving image work made up of a selection of audition tapes for a film about St Margaret's story. It will make use of these ideas in relation to narrative construction and interpretation. Fingers and toes crossed. 

The White Cube Masons Yard summer show is pretty weak. It felt boring and grand, massive works with no feeling or thought. Perhaps the Bermondsey section is more exciting… 

However, the Tenderpixel summer show was very fun and, as always, had a superb handout containing a conversation between a person and a plant.