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.

r a c h e l m a c l e a n k i l l i n g i t a s u s u a l

Finally managed to see the Rachel Maclean exhibition at The Zabludowicz Collection! As with her other works, Maclean has used green-screen technology to perform against a backdrop she’s designed, in this case a Barbie-Dreamhouse makeover of a Brutalist seminary outside Glasgow. For the first time, she’s used a cast of actors alongside herself; the intensity doesn’t drop for a second. She often uses found audio material and lip-syncs to it: her authoritarian villain here speaks with Kenneth Clark’s voice from the 1969 BBC series Civilisation. And because her film is an exploration of feminism, she subverts his patriarchal, patrician voice, wittily collaging snippets from his series, such as his references to the pagan Venus as an “amorous strumpet” and the Virgin as a “sweet, compassionate, approachable being”. 

She repurposes them for a world where social media defines femininity and womanhood – her characters are called Siri and Alexa, among others. In a riotous denouement, Maclean unleashes a volley of voices questioning feminism today and in the recent past. Filled with humour and no little anger, it’s consciously excruciating at times, yet always captivating. 

The other works are similarly engaging yet discomforting: Spite Your Face, that we first saw at the Venice Biennale last year, is Maclean’s post-truth retelling of the Pinocchio story and the VR work I’m Terribly Sorry places the viewer in a post-Brexit toytown dystopia, its closing twist tapping into modern Britain’s seething tensions. Maclean’s films are so engulfing that when you emerge, reeling, into the outside world, you feel almost like they’ve spat you out.

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

We’re working on a proposal for a new artwork for an exhibition titled The New Age of Babylon. Our piece is going to focus on how science fiction films often present viewers with visions and hypothesis for the future, Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985) gives us a glimpse of a bureaucratic future in which people live in ‘Utopian People Housing’. This housing, situated in The Shangri La Towers, is directly connected to a power station churning out smoke. 

The work itself comprises of fragments of the design process that would have gone in to making The Shangri La Towers in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil (1985). No longer needed, these items have been discarded and utilised for other, more menial, tasks: a book mark, folded paper stabling a chair, and maquette of The Shangri La Towers acting as a door stop for one of the entrances to the gallery. 

An architectural sketch of the Towers will be folded and placed under the leg of an unstable chair in the corner of the gallery (near the main entrance), which the invigilator of the space is invited to use. The invigilator will also be given a bookmark they can use in their book if they are reading one (if they’re not reading, we will provide a book that can be placed near the invigilators chair). The bookmark will feature a design plan for the cloud pattern painted on the cooling towers of the utopian housing development. A small detailed maquette (30 x 20cm) of the Shangri La Towers will be placed by the entrance via CSM reception to act as a doorstop. 

New Babylon is a design from the past for the future. Our proposal is begging the question of what happens to those plans, now that the future has become the present and those plans haven’t quite come to fruition. We see a parallel between this and films and literature set in the future. This is the beauty of Science Fiction; it has the ability to tell a story that relates to the current world, but which can be set in a future of limitless possibilities. Until you reach 2015 and realise self-drying clothes, flying cars and hover boards aren’t yet available (Back to the Future 2 predictions), there’s no one to tell you, you’re wrong. 

In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), we see a portrayal of how someone can at once be a victim of the society they inhabit and also complicit in helping that society function. The now dysfunctional metropolis depicted in the film was built with the intention of it being a paradise; the infamous tower block Shangri-La Towers is named after the utopia described in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. This, like Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, is another idea where time has caught up and reduced its function to viral that of a brick or small piece of wood. Holding only value to those who desire to prop open a door.