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The Principle
of Hope
Three Colts Gallery, London
5 June – 4 July 2004
At the conclusion
of a talk at Cubitt Gallery last year Stephan Dillemuth made the
comment that we should kill the Pope and baptise ourselves. I asked
him what he meant, and he used Cubitt as an example. He was referring
to the idea that as an artist-led initiative, Cubitt was independently
organised and, by extension, self-legitimising.
Perhaps the Pope,
his physical body, isn’t the problem. Freedom isn’t a
necessary consequence of self-organisation. An artist’s practise
is just as shackled by learnt prejudice as by any external ‘institutional’
limitation.’ The Principle of Hope’ was successful when
it revealed and questioned art’s self- delusions.
‘The Principle
of Hope’ was an act of self-curation. My desire was to develop
something on my own terms. For this to take place I needed like-minded
individuals. ‘Collaborative independence, involving hospitalities
within hospitalities, is a form of independence that does not delude
itself that autonomy (self-determination) is equivalent to isolation
(the myth of the self-created self).’ [Dave Beech]
Three Colts Gallery
seemed empty. Of the little work included, most of it was small
in scale. Pieces were strangely difficult to locate. Anna Mitchell’s
untitled photograph lurked behind a pillar, while the fanzines sick
happy idle and Radical vans and carriages intermingled with flyers
for future shows. Babak Ghazi’s pieces were particularly physically
insubstantial – pathetic even. Untitled is an empty Calvin
Klein box with a tinselly fringe. The self-effacing quality of this
piece is emblematic of the general effect of the show as a whole.
The literal and figurative space between works became as important
as the works themselves, leading to an interrogation of the notion
that value and meaning reside solely within the form of an artwork
or exhibition.
The exhibition began
informally and developed through negotiation and trust. The role
of the artist as producer of ‘originality’ augments their
isolation. Subjectivity is not the sole domain of individuals. The
people and activities that surround the making of artworks are formative
of artworks. To reference your surroundings is to acknowledge their
productive aspect. Ideas are co-produced. Artworks are co-produced.
Babak Ghazi www.babakghazi.co.uk
Steve Klee steveklee@blueyonder.co.uk
The Principle of
Hope’ was curated by Babak Ghazi and included Johanna Billing,
Dave Carbone, Lisa Castagner, Emma Hedditch, Steve Klee, Anna Mitchell,
Radical vans and carriages, sick happy idle, Joanne Tatham and Tom
O'Sullivan.
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Escapism
– A Viable Political Alternative
Champion Fine Art, New York
22 July – 20 August 2004
Curated by Fia Backström,
‘Escapism – A Viable Political Alternative’ is number
12 in Champion’s on going series of 21 artist-organised group
shows (they are counting backwards down to zero). The walls of the
gallery are grey and the lighting low, the work presented in an
old-fashioned conservative display, elegant and boring, in contrast
to the fascination of the contemporary dialogue with hippie/psychedelic
chaos as a fake radical language.
First I see Roe Ethridge’s
digitally altered photograph of our moon in duplicate. The subject
is echoed once more in Dan Torop’s Ocean, a digital environment
programmed by the artist where I can navigate through an evening
seascape, altering the details of the space as I please. Between
them, Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s sculpture Darth, is a miniature
Balzac made of a plastic CD holder and papier-mâché.
On the third and final wall of the show Fredrik Söderberg’s
digital prints, which draw their phantasmic images from Viking lore,
video games and children’s books, are paired with Jonas Nobel’s
lit poster exclaiming THE IMPORTANCE OF ESCAPISM AND OTHER POLITICAL
MOVEMENTS IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.
Presenting work relating
to outer space, the sky, the ocean, Caspar David Friedrich, the
romantics, nineteenth-century nature and expanded mind frames, the
show seeks a new definition of the political in art. Subjective
introspection rather than the general belief in the political as
documentary or interested in reality. Escapism as a concept simultaneously
reaching out to outer space and into the deepest subjective space,
to the ever growing unconscious. Escapism as an active, intimate
act of ‘in-touchedness’ and of personal responsibility.
Soon the streets of New York will be filled with political screaming.
It is too bad this place of escape will no longer be around.
Drew Heitzler www.championfineart.org
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David
Shaw
Feature Inc, New York
15 May – 19 June 2004
In David Shaw's new
show the forces of barbarity and civilisation are conjoined. The
organic is constantly being pitched against the geometric. In one
drawing fluorescent mould grows on a fluorescent grid while, in
another, raindrops form a pattern, but only as separate phenomena
– they are not affected by one another. However, things are
not always in opposition, this is also a world were the simulated
grows out of the natural and vice versa.
A material that he
has been using a lot for some years now is a ‘3M’ laminate
that creates a rainbow sheen over everything it is stuck to, dissolving
the materiality of the object. In the past this has included a picnic
bench and a campfire. Now it seems as if the artist has changed
his position from rambler and observer to shaman and has entered
the spirit heart of nature and rebuilt it from the inside out.
The stand-out piece
in this mind-warping show is Root. Standing on one 'foot' in the
centre of the gallery is what looks like a deconstructed tree. It
actually has branches on its outermost points, but they have been
pollarded, implying another space that contains the object. From
the outside in, it begins with branches that then become blocks
of treated wood and then an unruly geometric skein of ‘3M’
laminated lines. It is as if the piece describes in concentric patterns
the human influence on the organic, from untutored nature to the
designed, finally arriving at the technologically transformed.
This piece is the
centre of the show. It debates the current status of our relationship
to the natural world. This is something a number of artists here
in New York are concerned with. There is a great deal of ecologically-minded
art here. How many artists do you know who answer 'landscape' when
you ask them for the subject of their work. It has led to a kind
of 'Romantek' atmosphere in the city. The Atomic Age promised that
technology would save nature. Perhaps this is possible when technology
becomes nature. The logic of the internet is increasingly fungal:
information flowers at the end of thick branches, far more like
a cauliflower than a web.
Millree Hughes millree@mindspring.com
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John Timberlake,
Another Country
The Agency, London
16 June – 29 July 2004
John Timberlake brings
politics to art. Political art is deeply unfashionable, tainted
by the historical ruin of a realism grounded in theories of reflection.
This ruin, however, can be seen as an opportunity rather than a
defeat: an opportunity for a politics in art that does not begin
from a simple diagnostic of social ills but from the internal contradictions
of the social. Not the least dilemma for the political artist is
her or his own formation by, and participation in, these contradictions.
John Timberlake has
constructed pictures of a gap: that between seeing the sublime image
of a nuclear mushroom cloud and the impending destructive force
of the explosion. Figures in the foreground are about to be blown
off their feet. These are large photographs of model figures standing
in a model foreground, backs to the spectator, looking at a painted
backdrop. Each painting is a transcription of a landscape painting
by a European, romantic artist with the addition of a nuclear cloud
from a British nuclear test: an explosion in another country. This
collision of landscape and skyscape is an unlikely détente
between two remaindered ideological images, from different times
and different places.
In bringing these
different representations of power together in a mediated image
these pictures embody contradiction and generate unease. The painting
is mediated by being photographed, a process that emasculates some
traditional vaunted qualities of painting; here painting might be
no more than a decorative backdrop rather than a fetishised surface.
The portent of the iconography is further undercut by the associations
of model making in the foreground: model making being the pursuit
of the hobbyist. One is left looking at multiple and contradictory
things at the same time. There is a further gap here between what
we see and what we know. It is our knowledge of the impending destruction,
of inevitable consequences, that makes this scene of tranquillity
a picture of apocalypse. The only way to attend to these pictures
is with a sense of anticipation: to see what is not yet there.
The impassive figures,
turned away from the onlooker, are a device for showing the impossibility
of experiencing the landscape. They stand for a certain kind of
impossibility in the face of the sublime. This allegory of impossibility
is what it means to be a political artist (which, in the last analysis,
is the only kind there is).
Mark Hutchinson
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Ram Lounge
The Ship, London
22 Sept – 21 Dec 2003
For ‘Ram lounge’
the interior of The Ship was completely covered by swathes of industrial
black plastic. This curatorial intervention was part of our attempt
to counter prevalent common-sense attitudes about what counts as
‘progressive’ curating. The writing of Nicholas Bourriaud
has shaped and popularised these new attitudes and was the starting
point for our critique. One of his central premises is that art,
or more accurately the ‘relational art’ he champions,
provides sanctuary from a ‘degraded’ broader culture.
Art is one of the few, perhaps only, cultural arenas in which an
audience is free from manipulation. This suspect claim is premised
on the belief that ‘relational art’ doesn’t lie,
doesn’t withhold and is in fact transparent.
Take the recent prevalence
of curatorial ‘display systems’. It’s almost a relief
to come across an exhibition where the art isn’t propped up
on, or inside, some kind of plywood ‘support structure’.
These platforms are an attempt to incorporate the conditions under
which an artwork is viewed, render them thematic. By making the
relationship between an artwork and its context transparent, ‘display
systems’ appear to offer the possibility of full interpretation.
We have a problem with this ‘objective effect’. Surely
perception is warped through different subjectivities? Art objects
always have more to say…
Hayley Newman combined
the strategies of process art with deception. She faked an encounter
between pint glasses and snails, painting their trails with a homemade
concoction. Nick Evans’s video of his own visceral sculptures
was a combination of an artist’s documentation and a forensic
examination. John Russell seemed to go a step further. His rope
web, which contained fragments of newspaper articles, mystical symbols
and obscene drawings seemed intent on ripping up the notion of objective
reality; MAT-TEER-REE-AAL-IZM AZ A FIK-SHUN.
In opposition to the relational curator’s propensity for transparency,
‘Ram Lounge’ was literally and figuratively opaque. The
space was difficult to read and navigate. A bit like a fun house
or ghost train, it encouraged fantasies as well as neurotic reactions;
people worried about the state of decay below the wipe-clean surface.
Meanings proliferated and took off in unexpected directions.
Steve Klee
‘Ram Lounge’
was curated by Nick Evans, Ben Fitton, Babak Ghazi, Steve Klee and
Dylan Shipton, and included work by Dave Burrows, Nick Evans, Ben
Fitton, Babak Ghazi, Steve Klee, Bjarne Melgaard, Hayley Newman,
John Russell and Dylan Shipton.
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Russian Doll
MOT, London
16 April – 21 May 2004
you only see what
stops you seeing
only hear what stops you hearing
only feel what stops you feeling
only like what stops you liking
love what stops you loving
hate what stops you hating
are only interested in what stops you being interested in something
you are not the same
you are you
you are
you can only be what you can be
layer upon layer upon layer
skin after skin
paint upon paint
wall upon wall
a heart like a cabbage
a page on a page
one word following another following another
a letter in front of a
a face on a page
really small then small then almost medium then medium then tedium
navel to nipple
one before too before free b4 five before sechs before 7 before
otto before the other after the next
and the line goes on............
Russian Doll was
a layering, a thing within a thing within a thing
MOT painted the walls a particular shade of cozy blushing lipstick
pink............womb-like in it’s fleshiness............making
the first container, the box, pink cube............body
Martin Creed showed
a framed (creased from folding then unfolding), A4 blank piece of
white paper............rectangles within rectangles within............marked
by it’s own making............and the lights stayed on and
the lights stayed on.
Liam Gillick allowed
visitors to spray the American alcoholic cocktail mixture ‘Black
Russian’ (vodka and coffee-flavored brandy) out of mini perfume
aerosol bottles............into the air or into the throat............creating
a sweetly sticky atmosphere that filled the gallery, occupied the
void, contained the space.
Elizabeth Price borrowed
a mummified dog (as you do) that had a mummified rat in it’s
mouth, (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly): a literal swallowing
of stature turned statue, frozen in a kind of Victorian curiosity,
time and space at a standstill.
Peter Suchin attempted
to put the exhibition into a critical perspective layer by reviewing
the show before our very eyes: in a series of large printed texts
pined to the wall............assuming an air of distance by adopting
a removed attitude............an out of the gallery as body experience............the
whole show contained within his words.
Was there too much
literal translation of the exhibition title? Was the title too close
to being a subject. The notion of an exhibition of one thing containing
another thing containing another thing is not without possibility,
or is without possibility! Another group show trying
very hard to be not what it is. To address the container that contains
the container. Feeding the hand that bites.
My work was also in the show.
Giorgio Sadotti
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Caroline
McCarthy
East End Academy, Whitechapel Gallery, London
11 June – 29 August 2004
Given a cargo of ready-meal boxes turned art
to find words for, you may find yourself diving in at the spot marked
JUMP, launching an argument about mass consumption with a Baudrillardian
lament as to the loss of ‘the real’, as in a recent review:
‘the pots contain fine herbs cut out
from ready-to-eat meal boxes; a witty allusion to the fact that
every day signs maintain us in a constructed reality.’ (‘East
End Academy’, AN, August 2004)
This would not be wrong, but that plummet would
be missing the subtleties of the work Promise (2003) by Caroline
McCarthy. It has a gentle wit that bypasses the force of the literal
Marxist reading that it may initially evoke. The movement from the
object to the subject in this work is part of its force. It is not
a simple reductive move from ‘ready-meal’ to ‘constructed
reality’. There is another kind of virtuality here that is
an opening of possibility and not just a straightforward critique
of consumption. I was thinking here of a virtuality more influenced
by Deleuze than by Baudrillard:
‘ the actual image and the virtual
image co-exist and crystallize; they enter into a circuit which
brings us constantly back from one to the other; they form one and
the same “scene” where characters belong to the real yet
play a role’. (Cinema 2, Deleuze)
Promise brings together the familiar
and the unfamiliar simultaneously – like a déjâ
vu, they split; we know these objects though we have never seen
them before. All the elements in the work are what they are, they
are not metaphorical; they are themselves and they are actors in
the scene. The meal box is empty, the sprig is in a pot but it won’t
grow, (despite the warmth of the lamp) – everything has a possible
function which is not cancelled but is doubled with ‘thought
use’.
The work has a love of the ludicrousness of
things, an eye for detail that shifts the everyday to an extent
that destroys a throwaway irrelevance and transforms it into a seed
that spawns a cosmos. All this could happen while you were thinking
of an instant ‘shepherds pie’ after a night down the pub.
It is this transformation of the everyday that makes the work extraordinary.
To just isolate a sprig and stand it up, a slight gesture, the pots,
the lights; it is both nothing and everything.
Lindsay Seers lindsay@lseers.fsnet.co.uk
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Do
Something for Floating IP
Floating IP, Manchester.
28 June – 27 August 2004
‘Do Something’ was an open-submission
show for proposals which demanded affirmative action, with strict
criteria as to what was acceptable; any proposal that fulfilled
these submission criteria was included. The injunction to ‘do
something’ is phrased in a manner that suggests inclusiveness
and democracy regardless of perceived artistic quality, but is in
fact disingenuous in that it moulds the likely responses by it’s
style of presentation. The most worthwhile responses to this demand
demonstrated the way in which a rigid structure can be taken as
an opportunity to explore either the limits of that structure or
how the imposition of external rules interacts with the artist’s
own self-imposed frameworks. The expressions of dissenting/anarchic
opinions about the exhibition, or things in general, were often
flippant and humorous and prevented the whole thing becoming over-serious.
The number of proposals intended to conform in a conservative manner
without questioning the system imposed was mercifully low.
Anyone looking at this exhibition had to do
a fair amount of reading from A4 printouts, some of which was rewarding,
some less so. Many of the proposals were interesting in their own
right but sometimes lack autonomy; their existence depending purely
on the framework of the exhibition and therefore you could not escape
the feeling that their presence was secondary. This is in some ways
problematic. Floating IP considers itself to have presented the
first proposal by conceiving of the exhibition, so by implication
all the other proposals are documentation of this curatorial decree.
The process then becomes one of linguistic juggling to ensure the
correct work is selected without actually breaking the laws set
down.
This leaves a bureaucratic structural position
not dissimilar to that of, say, the Arts Council or indeed any political
institution. The extent to which this can be seen as a full-on critique
of systematic methodology is unclear but it demonstrates what can
be either included or excluded if you put your mind to it. Floating
IP manages to fulfil its own criteria for doing something, and the
exhibition was successful in its demonstration of how a dictatorial
position can be manipulated by dissenting voices, while at the same
time remaining intact as a framework. As soon as a power position
becomes one of written record, it is open to interpretation and
the activity becomes a dialogue. ‘Do Something’ sits on
the edge of that reformulation.
Jonathan Trayner www.trayner.org
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Johney
Ohene
Tablet Gallery, London
19 March – 25 April 2004
Back in April, at the Tablet Gallery in Notting
Hill, the Ghanaian painter Johney Ohene showed six of his new pieces,
drawn not on canvas, but in the virtual studio of his laptop computer.
Initially trained in Ghana, his studies in
London in the 1970s led to a deep affinity with the early avant-garde,
and Cubism in particular. Johney marries a European idiom to the
schematic, non-perspectival drawing of Ghana. The obvious aesthetic
rightness of this collision is a reminder of the formative influence
that African art had on Cubism in the first place. The critic Mercedes
Carmona posits two key qualities of modern African painting –
the liberation of the artist as a creative individual and the acceptance
of the formal structure of paint on stretched canvas. This format
leads quite naturally to questions of the picture plane, and the
endlessly fruitful dialectic between abstraction and representation.
Johney’s conversion from paint to computer
has necessitated the development of an entirely new way of working
in a number of ways. He starts off with a small gestural pencil
sketch, perhaps no more than a few lines, which is scanned and digitised.
It is then possible to add colours, textures and geometric shapes
using a specialised pen and tablet interface designed to mimic the
effects of pencils, paintbrushes and spray paint, with dozens of
customised options for every tool. This ease of composition is only
half of the story, however, saving multiple copies means that radically
different versions can constantly be worked on, stored and recalled
at whim. The artistic question then becomes one of deciding exactly
when it is finished. Or of choosing between alternative versions.
This flexibility has inevitably resulted in
a different kind of image. There is greater complexity with a huge
number of different elements dispersed more evenly over the picture
surface. Links to Cubism still remain, notably perhaps in Ohene’s
frequent use of an oval or circular structure that floats within
the four edges of the canvas without committing itself to being
exactly on, or beneath, the surface.
And yet his multidimensional, high-resolution
files are forever in a state of flux, disconnected from stable realities
and material concerns. His practice exists as a way of life, an
endless tinkering, that only sometimes has to obey the normal rules
of space and time to enter our familiar physical world.
Mark Wilsher
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Explosion
LTTR
Art in General, New York
17 July – 21 August 2004
The intricately crafted journal LTTR, alternatively
signifying ‘Lesbians to the Rescue’ or ‘Listen Translate
Translate Record’, exploded in New York City with live art
and spontaneous artist collaborations. Celebrating the release of
the journal’s third issue titled Practice More Failure, editors
Ginger Brooks Takahashi, K8 Hardy and Emily Roysdon organised the
Explosion events. Vastly boosting Art in General’s typically
modest attendance, LTTR awakened an old-school New York avant-garde
spirit of yore. By all means, this event represents the fate of
queer and feminist art – still a thriving field indebted to
a dense legacy of contemporary art. Since LTTR’s inception,
the project has smartly considered its historical precursors from
Womanhouse to Group Material.
Queer art has certainly been present in recent
years, but mostly among young boys in the gallery set. Ryan McGinley’s
solo photography show of his entourage of posing friends at the
Whitney Museum of Art perhaps heralded the reign of the young New
York art fag and the insidious ‘star system’ that plagues
a market-obsessed scene. LTTR Explosion is something entirely different
– for one thing, mostly lesbian – and also full of collective
production, ephemeral performance art and plenty of theoretical
treatises.
Lesbians on Ecstasy kicked off the events,
clad in leather daddy gear, while repossessing painful dyke anthems
from Indigo Girls and company with radically redone keyboard beats.
Downstairs in the project space, Toronto artists Will Munro and
Jeremy Laing performed as Virginia Puff-Paint, a pair of queer beasts,
costumed in sequin and lace bodysuits with many fabric orifices
and phallic protrusions. In line with Jack Smith’s junky decadence
and Leigh Bowery’s fatalistic glamour, Puff-Paint’s enduring
libidinal performance consisted of ‘public sex’ for hours
in the project space’s storefront windows.
Throughout the Explosion, pairs of artists
collaborated during two-day residencies in the street-side space.
Leaving traces of their temporary projects, painter Carrie Moyer’s
posters mixed with emailed drawings by GB Jones, clever optic shapes
by Xylor Jane and Matt Keegan, and Luis Jacob and Leidy Churchman’s
wall drawings. Emphasising the journal’s theme of failure,
the artists’ experimental processes purposefully didn’t
bear any finished masterpieces. Nonetheless, lectures by filmmaker
Greg Bordowitz, poet Eileen Myles and queer theorist Judith Halberstam
gave the punk-rock atmosphere its Ph.D. Rarely in the New York art
world do such inter-generational cultural forces combine –
furthermore, in the genuine spirit of community. Far from the competitive
myopia of the politically paralysed gallery scene, we can rest assured
in Lesbians to the Rescue.
Matt Wolf www.mattwolf.info
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