e a s t l o n d o n e x h i b i t i o n s

Hit up a few shows this week. The first was Soufiane Ababri at Space Studios. The installation is made up of a series of drawings; a chain of dancing figures painted directly on the wall; a sculptural form functioning as a barrier to restrict movement as well as a football enclosure; an audio piece of boisterously cheering football fans; and a macabre performance by three young men embodying characteristics of Holiday, Fashanu and Malcolm X. The exhibition’s central point are the 6 intimate and erotically explicit drawings entitled Beautiful Fruit, inspired by pornographic films of gay black men engaged in sexual acts with each other. The drawings attempt to dislodge the black body from tropes of blackness and hyper-masculinity, such as athleticism and animalism, which have been deeply inscribed by the Western heterosexual and racialised colonial gaze. 

Next was Cell Project Space with Alan Michael’s Astrology and the City. It’s one of those shows of paintings that are nearly interesting but really the artist is just trying to find a thoughtful context for work they’ve already decided to make. The show is a series of paintings based on photographs of models hired from an agency who are documented wandering through central London, using clichéd formats of classical street-photography and fashion editorials as reference points. 

After that we headed to IMT Gallery for a group show titled Chop Leisure. It’s an exhibition of ideas designed on much the same principles as present-day motorway junctions. Our favourite aspect was the focus on genre fiction and storytelling. As you enter the exhibition go immediately to the photo collage to greet the figure standing in front of it. The press release is very well written too – really takes you on a journey. 

Finally, we had Ryder which felt pretty weird. At certain times during the exhibition, vocalists and performers transform the gallery into an immersive theatre of light and sound. Live voices activate space, producing a chorus that seems to emerge from a primitive instinct, atmospheric resonations that undulate like wind. Natural sounds and chants rise, articulating a transformation from state to state in a sonic ecosystem that is alive and active. 

Actually, quite looking forward to looking round Frieze next week. Even though it’s not always the best place for art it’s quite fun all the same.

m i x e d f e e l i n g s

Lawrence Abu Handman had an opening at Chisenhale this week and we’ve got some seriously mixed feelings about it… 

The idea of sonic memories and how not all things look the way they sound or sound the way they look is very exciting. However, the show itself is a room full of crap. There’s a bin full of plastic tubing and a cricket bat, a stepladder, metal shelves covered with popcorn, teacups and trainers, watermelons on the floor, big bottles of fizzy drink, a paddling pool. Just a bunch of stuff hastily and messily laid out. The display is frustrating; it feels too much like art objects/trendy assemblages. They aren’t random though, the objects all relate to testimonies such as someone who has described gunshots sounding like “the popping of balloons” or the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy like “somebody dropping a rack of trays”. There’s an additional element to the show which is a pitch-black listening room where you sit and listen to interviews the artist did with detainees of the Syrian prison of Saydnaya. This also makes us feel slightly conflicted because he’s profiting off the pain and suffering of the victims of the sound recordings. Overall, it’s a pretty great show and even one that made us slightly jealous; we also had the opportunity to listen to Handman talk more about his ideas which always helps to sell a show.

f r o m r a g s t o r i c h e s

Jenny Holzer has a new artist room at Tate Modern which we took a visit to. Other than showing a great span of her very exciting work, it also shows what happens to certain artists when they are given more money; older artists seem to just do what they’ve always done but in a more expensive way. An example being that she used to print her text works on cheap things just as t-shirts and cups, now it’s marble benches and massive LED light strips. This is in no way a criticism but it does make for a weird and very traceable lineage. The legacy does make for a good show which is definitely something which is valued in the artworld.

Went to an opening at Anka Kutleys by Olga Fedorova. We were mostly excited by the massive USB drives made of granite, almost like gravestones to the analogue era.

s i t e s p e c i f i c a r t c o m e s i n m a n y f o r m s

Holiday time meant we got some reading in. We went for Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another which is about site-specific art and approaching it as a “problem-idea” (using the authors words) according to its political, cultural and even social dimensions. The author analyses the different reconfigurations of site-specific as a genre within the cultural frame, considering the political and social problematics that accompanied the evolution of site-specific art since the 1960s. 

We always knew we were making work that might blend in to the background or work that is specific to the place but until the last year or so we never thought of it as site specific but reading this book really did cement it in our minds; the work and its context are inseparable. There’s also a great quote by Richard Serra's "to remove the work is to destroy the work". Something which we definitely relate to, we barely keep any of the work we produce because it doesn’t make sense outside of its current situation. 

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.