murmurART - International Contemporary Online Art Gallery

RIBBONS! (The Shape of an Exhibition)

dje — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:01:51 +0000

Many readers might remember the recreated office staged last May by project space Auto Italia South East at Tate Modern’s No Soul For Sale 2010. The gallery’s real foam panels ceiling hung from the roof of the Turbine Hall to hover just a couple of meters above a meeting room, where a group of artists would present works, hold workshops and share their experiences with the visiting public.

Most of the activities devised by Auto Italia seem to reflect upon the exhibition-making process and the role of the gallery space in a meta-narrative fashion. RIBBONS! (The Shape of an Exhibition) is no exception. French artist Breer Lazidj Nahr has suspended a sparse number of coloured ribbons from trees in the small green area opposite the project space, just off Old Kent Road. Auto Italia South East occupies a rather anonymous shopfront, located between a car park and a garage, and this open-air installation fully reflects this understated appearance. Its subtle presence in the park can be mistaken for the remnants of an outdoor birthday party or local fête, common scenes of urban conviviality surrounded by streams of traffic and retail outlets.

As the first instalment in The Shape of an Exhibition, a series of projects interpreting the previous and future lives of the block currently hosting Auto Italia and its immediate surroundings, RIBBONS! is a reflection on an anonymous corner of London, and at the same time it functions as a blueprint for the projects to come: with its linear plastic presence, RIBBONS! is described by its creator as a three-dimensional drawing, aleatory and subject to change, a diagram that intervenes directly on the space it seeks to symbolise. This brings to mind the paradoxical one-to-one map described by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “On Exactitude in Science”, although the curators locate the models for The Shape of an Exhibition in Julien Gracq’s 1985 novel The Shape of a City or in Jacques Demy’s 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

As a sneak peek into the finale of a story yet to be told, RIBBONS! anticipates the conclusion of the project by evoking the final installation of a permanent playground in that very park. Breer Lazidj Nahr’s ribbons may not be leftovers from a non-existing children’s party, but they might well be premonitions of future social gatherings, perhaps inspired by Auto Italia’s interventions on that overlooked plot of land.

RIBBONS! (The Shape of an Exhibition) is on until 22 August. http://www.autoitaliasoutheast.org/

Blood Tears Faith Doubt at the Courtauld Gallery

dje — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:04:38 +0000

Blood Tears Faith Doubt is a very small show that asks some very big questions. The themes addressed within the walls of these three small rooms are eternal, divisive and incredibly complex.

Fortunately however the student curators have not attempted to resolve them. They have not attempted to answer such questions, instead allowing the natural and remarkable relationships between the featured works to speak for themselves.

The three rooms in which the work is hung are tiny. Dim lighting and dark painted walls add a solemn, even sobering feel to the space. It is not, for me, unlike entering a church in the middle of the day. A sudden change in light, shadow and temperature plunge you immediately into an acute awareness of yourself and the space around you.

Here and there, as well, bloodlike ‘seepages’- Adam Chodzko’s Secretors- high on the walls add a distinctly troubling sense that something or someone unknown is in action beyond what we can see.

This is appropriate though as it seems, though the works included are stunningly accomplished examples of their respective media, that it is not the work itself but the process, the practice, the representation of these themes through art that is the focus of the exhibition. Surely, one might suggest, continuing use of religious imagery in art is in itself an expression as well as an exploration of faith.

Here we see public demonstrations of at times, it seems, intensely personal struggles with faith or doubt or all the rest. Christ Crowned with Thorns, for example, is intended specifically to engage an audience, inviting empathy or at least contemplation.

The artist achieves their objective, no doubt, but no more so than Siobhan Hapaska’s Saint Christopher who sits, excluded by the church and yet, even in his exclusion, his calm expression suggests he waits only to be remembered, to be awakened. Or, perhaps, to awaken something in us. For me, this simple and beautiful mediation on faith is the most powerful in evidence.

It is particularly poignant when considered in relation to that most famous of sceptics, Doubting Thomas. His existence, despite his actions, is apparently without doubt, and a reminder of the moment at which he is forced to confront the injured Jesus reinforces, I think, the intensity of the relationship between personal, internal faith and the challenges one faces in expressing or reconciling such beliefs in an often hostile environment.

Go and look around these three small rooms; go to see what faith and doubt might mean to you. Chances are even considering, and perhaps as a result of, the religious imagery through which these themes remain consistently and perhaps most clearly expressed, you will see something that renders them universal and eternal, whatever you believe you believe.

Converse/Dazed 2010 Emerging Artists Award

dje — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:06:19 +0000

Converse and Dazed and Confused are the next art prize sponsors to emerge from the corporate world. They have brought together five emerging artists and put them in an exhibition at Stephen Friedman.

This is a small group show including film and sculpture along with a series of photographs from the overall winner Peter Ainsworth. It’s a serious and professional looking show, and although the artists are ‘emerging’ some are already becoming familiar names in the art world.

Francesca Anfossi’s film ‘Hand-Made Machines’ stood out for me with its slowly animated images and collages set to clunky music and noise. The photos of scenery, situations and places lie somewhere in the gap between the new age cash-in and the sort of photographs you get when you give a child a camera and then there’s a rainbow. It’s crass and melancholy and in my opinion the most interesting work in the show.

There was also something curious in Steve Bishop’s sculptural pieces. The layering, with its clipping and taping of colour and glass had the appearance of being casual and yet decided and refined. The confidence of the works gave them a vulnerability, not only in their physical fragility but also in their emotional resonance.

The overwhelming factor in award shows like this is the element of comparisons; as a viewer you can’t help picking favourites, and as an artists it’s hard not to let the spirit of competition influence what you show. Another symptom is that the curation becomes incredibly democratic, a democracy which can interfere with the placing of the works in an exciting way, because that might mean prioritising, or focusing on, some artists over others. The curation of this show was demure and ordinary and the possibility of engaging comparisons was lost in formality of the arrangement.

The quality and sophistication of the art was high, but this might of been because the judges played it safe with a selection good works that weren’t particularly challenging or ambitious. But it was a showcase that led to me further investigating all five artists and possibly that was the point.

The Marquise Went Out at Five O’Clock

dje — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:27:27 +0000

This exhibition’s title is as intriguing as it is arbitrary. Taken from the novel All the King’s Horses by Michele Bernstein, the phrase epitomises the scepticism towards received narratives characteristic of the 1960s Situationist movement of which Bernstein was a member. Contempt for the prescriptive nature of both language and the structure of the city led the Situationists to practice ‘detournement’ - navigating the city in unexpected ways to establish a personal, alternative narrative. In this vein, this exhibition presents seven artists who take a critical approach to conventional practices of recording and reiterating.

Excerpts from Bernstein’s book appear in large letters on the gallery walls. Despite this, the show seems to encourage the viewer to wander from this staunchly conceptualised underpinning: to partake in a Situationist ‘drift’, following the individual thematic whims of the artist rather than any prescribed curatorial pattern.

If these artists are carving their own paths, their winding detours are by definition unique and subjective. At one extreme sits the pure beauty and technical mastery of Stuart Bailes’ photographs. At the other, the ostensibly political nature of Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann’s Museum, a video about the proposed cultural regeneration of 1950s Baghdad by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, soon gives way to a nuanced reflection on medium. The video’s historical narrative is taken from Wikipedia, its images from Google. Alongside its overt commentary on cultural transplantation via architecture, this video highlights the imperialistic powers of visual and verbal language: specifically, the emerging authority given to Wikipedia’s blanket narrativisation of the world’s past and present history.

The best work in the show is that which is also exceedingly frustrating - a necessary paradox, since easily consumed messages are thin on the ground in an exhibition about the limitations of narrative. Jorge de la Garza’s photographic collages are formed of bluntly truncated scenes and obscured body parts: eerie minimalist tales with cliff-hanger endings. The undeveloped stories behind Noemie Goudal’s stunning large-scale photographs send us on fruitless deciphering missions.

In Adam Thomas’ Free Fall series, paperbacks on politics, history and psychology have sections of their covers cut out to reveal the books’ contents. In doing so, these texts gently ironise the book covers’ attempts at an all-encompassing visual representation of what the book contains; on a deeper level, they reveal the complexities of defining abstract concepts in words. Thomas’s work draws upon a conclusion central to this show: that penetrating to the heart of the matter, whether in a direct or roundabout way, rarely answers more questions than it offers.

World Photography Organisation Tour and Talk

dje — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:45:40 +0000

‘Exposed’ becomes a loaded word with reference to the photographic medium. An example that immediately springs to mind is the exposure of light to film. Or the exposure of a private moment. It is also the sentiment visitors may experience after viewing the Tate Modern’s similarly named exhibition.

A conglomeration of 250 works by image makers, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera addresses the medium of photography by questioning what we consider ‘artistic’ or, indeed, a ‘photograph’, and how we feel about living in an age replete with images and recording devices.

Because the exhibition addresses such a loaded, broad topic, the curators designed a deliberate thought-path beginning with introductory ideas of the ‘unseen photographer’ and their technologies through to dense considerations of the poetics of awareness and surveillance.

This progression strides five cohesive sections, the first of which equips the gallery viewer with a crash-course in surveillance photography (including the coveted shoe with hidden-camera). Pairing a series by Philip-Lorca diCorcia (2000) of images of modern-day New Yorkers photographed as they traverse a skillfully concealed stage of camera lenses and lighting with Walker Evan’s portfolio, Subway Passengers (1930s) sets the stage well; we have always been innately interested in observing each other.

What follows is a palimpsest of images from popular culture to the dark corners of society. Traversing rooms that build themes such as ‘Celebrity & the Public Gaze’, which contains well-circulated images of the rich and famous (Paris Hilton under arrest, Elizabeth Taylor canoodling with Richard Burton) or ‘Voyeurism & Desire’ delineates how invasive photographs can be.

In a time when personal devices (phones, computers, digital cameras) allow us to capture mundane moments (pub nights, cute pets) as well as impromptu ones (accidents, sunsets), we all have the power to expose. So what is Exposed trying to drive home?

It is not until the end of the exhibition that the real principle emerges. The act of surveillance becomes a self-reflexive activity. From politically fueled espionage (Sophie Ristelheuber, 1990s) to capturing the infrastructure of surveillance (Jonathan Olley, 1999), the final rooms exhibit work that consciously engages with the process and power of surveillance.

While the dense and varied content of the exhibition may seem unwieldy, I prefer to see it as an offering for the viewer, thus allowing them their own set of strategies and tactics with which to consider the theme.

What confirms this is the Tate’s provision of an opportunity to engage critically and artistically with the ideas presented therein via a photographic competition in cooperation with the World Photographic Organisation and Young Tate Online.

The week ahead

dje — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:20:26 +0000

This week focuses on making sure you don’t miss a whole series of exhibitions all due to close this week.

FRIDAY

Following the success of the The Brian Mercer Residency in 2008 (an opportunity for sculptors wishing to develop their skills with bronze under the expert guidance of the artists at the Fonderia Artistica Mariani), this is the last chance to see Studio Gallery - an exhibition celebrating the work of Immanuel Klein and Briony Marshall, two of this year’s residency artists.

SATURDAY

Having launched the  Converse/Dazed  2010  Emerging  Artists  Award today marks the last opportunity to see the exhibition, which inaugurates a new  art  competition  designed  to  offer  an  exciting  platform  to  emerging  artists. On the award panel is Tim  Marlow,  Sadie  Coles,  Isobel  Harbison,  Francesca  Gavin,  Mark  Titchner  and  Tom  Morton. This years winner is Peter  Ainsworth who graduated from studying MA Photography  at  London  College  of  Communication (2007).

SUNDAY

Closing today The Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition. Now in its 242nd year, the exhibition continues the tradition of showcasing work by both emerging and established artists in all media including painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, architecture and film. For this year’s exhibition Stephen Chambers and David Chipperfield, have selected works for the exhibition around the theme of ‘Raw’.

27 Senses is the Chisenhale Gallery’s summer exhibition. Curated by Lina Dzuverovic and produced by Electra, 27 Senses is a group exhibition focused around the participating artists’ investigation into a forgotten moment in the life of seminal artist Kurt Schwitters. Participating artists: Kenneth Goldsmith/ UbuWeb, Carl Michael von Hausswolff/ Selmer Nilsen, Karl Holmqvist, Jutta Koether, and Eline McGeorge.

This time at V22 for the second in its series of installation solo shows Phyllida Barlow’s Swamp. Some of Barlow’s larger sculptures can’t leave the room they are made in without being dismantled. This means the current venue is their only habitat and that’s why Barlow’s use of ‘room-peculiar installations’ to describe her work seems particularly relevant.

Boris Groys at the ICA

dje — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:00:53 +0000

Jazz accompanied the entrance of expectant faces whilst hand held fans rattled, shifting hot air until the arrival of the speaker. The buoyancy of the crowd seemed a strange pre-text for a lecture by renowned philosopher, essayist, art critic, and media theorist, and for this occasion internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet postmodern politics.

Groys’ appearance muted the throng of punters. Aware of the undeniably vast intellect, fans were replaced with miniature recording devices ready to capture his ‘collage of thoughts’ on his newly published book The Communist postscript. The outset was simple and agreeable; economy is determined by money and politics by language.

Groys pinpointed Soviet philosophy as a shift from the specific control of society by its economy to the democratic and equal medium of language. He argued that this founded equality enabled power and the critique of power to operate on the same platform. Although an admirable statement in its apparent autonomy, I couldn’t seem to remember Soviet Communism ever having such a liberal luster, and I was further surprised not to hear any mention of a hierarchy within language.

Admittedly, dogmatic reality is not essential to philosophy, however Groys’ logic seemed to be confused and often misleading. Groys marked his territory through a series of paradoxes, claiming them to be not only essential in giving scope for ideas but are in fact the way we as humans think and function. It is true that bold statements instigate thought, but I found myself fiddling with sketched, rubbed-out and re-drawn ideas.

His argument was hard to follow by lacking a punch line. Communism was described as both logical and illogical. When logic was described as ‘a lack of contradiction’, I was left wondering whether to rationally or irrationally follow his argument. In neglecting a ‘one-sided’ position we were then led by Groys through a labyrinth of contradictions and statements, fascinating but confused.

Referencing a wide range of political, cultural and philosophical positions Groys posed an elaborate argument. Yet It is difficult to imagine a Communistic rule as being opposite to a totalitarian logic, and it is harder still to abide Groys’ contradictory statements as a formalized reasoning. Although the content was captivating, it is hard to pass judgment on his theories when he assumes both sides. Perhaps this ‘collage’ of thoughts could be rearranged.

Boris Groys spoke at the ICA on Wednesday, 22nd July. The ICA website can be found here

The Moon is an Arrant Thief

dje — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:44:03 +0000

To invoke one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and more challenging works, Timon of Athens, as a point of departure for exploring “a space of reflection on the peripheries of the [conceptual art] debate”, is cleverly ambitious. Curated by Goldsmiths MFA students Thom O’Nions, Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Oliver Martínez-Kandt, and marking the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between the institution and the David Roberts Art Foundation, The Moon is an Arrant Thief intrigues, but doesn’t fully deliver.

The ground floor presents pieces from the 1960s alongside contemporary works, thereby recalling conceptual art’s historical framework and theoretical genesis, whilst attempting to direct focus to the present context and open up discursive relationships throughout the exhibition.

Robert Barry’s drawing, Silver Ring (1967), of a dead-centered ring in an exhibition space, provides a sophisticated juxtaposition to the delicate glass plane sculptures by Kitty Kraus that balance on the gallery floor. William Anastasi’s pour of one gallon of industrial high-gloss down the wall, initiated by the artist in 1966, and the ten pounds of sputtering carbon dioxide entitled The Ten-Pound Seed (2010) by Bradley Pitts, initiate questions about natural forces and cosmology, as well as those relating to the residual and immaterial.

I do think that Robert Kinmont’s hermetic, fragmented chair sculpture, My Favorite Chair (1969), is so detached that it provokes a coldness disrupting greater possibilities of inquiry amongst the other works. Downstairs, the The Weight of Voids (2010) by Bradley Pitts, comprising a copy of the book Voids resting on a scale, proves distracting in its obvious irony (as opposed to the inaccessibility of the Kinmont piece).

It is tempting to consider elements of the exhibition against the title’s literary reference, and delve into analytic frenzy: the play and conceptual art both question the nature of art; the play’s concern with the illusory nature and similarity of poetry and painting, and conceptual artists’ incorporation of language in their work; the drama’s authorial attribution that is not solely to Shakespeare, and the rejection of authorship in conceptual art, etc. However, such a saga is unproductive in elucidating what the exhibition does, which is generate a “space of reflection”, but not necessarily serve as a conduit for overall discursive fluidity. Good title, though.

The Moon is an Arrant Thief, curated by Thom O’ Nions, Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Oliver Martínez-Kandt is showing at the David Roberts Foundation until 18th September. See the David Roberts website here for details.

The Future is Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us

dje — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:00:51 +0000

Scrupulous critic that I am, I’d prepared for seeing Beatrice Gibson’s film – premiered last night in Jean Nouvel’s sanguine, perspex-panelled tent/chapel/womb of a pavillion – by rereading B.S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal, the 1971 ‘geriatric comedy’ which provides the work’s ‘formal departure point’. As such, it seems perverse to deny that the book coloured my response - especially given the appearance of copies of the novel in Gibson’s film, which was, furthermore, preceded by a screening of Paradigm (1969), one of Johnson’s own shorts.

What struck me most was how ethereal, how resolutely disembodied Gibson’s portrait of old age felt in relation to Johnson’s. The latter is thoroughly carnal, highly attentive not merely to the sexuality of its protagonists but also to texture, pain, heft and stench – in short, to bodily presence. The (albeit beautiful) milky tones and delicate colours Gibson’s film favoured, meanwhile, only heightened its air of abstract impalpability.

Of course, there are any number of obvious reasons why Gibson’s piece might come across a comparatively lacking in bite – Johnson was imagining what fictional characters wouldn’t or couldn’t say in a era when standards of living for the elderly often fell hair-raisingly short of adequacy, and his novel is accordingly heavy on outbreaks of obscenity and abuse. Gibson, by contrast, was collaborating with real individuals and institutions on a project more about meaningful engagement than stinging critique. As a consequence there’s little here to upset the horses – or the funding bodies.

Which is not to imply that art has to be obtuse, outrageous or unprecedented. Indeed, one of the most intriguing things about the film was that it suggested how much art – and culture generally – has changed over the lifespan of Gibson’s interviewees. While the myth of the artist as lone (implicitly male) visionary/iconoclast was still alive and well in Johnson’s era, we’re – thankfully - now much more open to inclusive, socially engaged, collaborative and multidisciplinary forms of artistic practice.

It was also interesting to note that if the film – openly indebted to Johnson and to Cornelius Cardew – was highly intertextual, so were its participants’ testimonies, in which personal memories were often framed via references to literature and cinema. But while the film raised some interesting points about memory and language – and did so, moreover, while being funny, handsome and touching - it went about it in a way that was ultimately just a bit too cosy.

Young Gods at Charlie Smith

dje — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:55:20 +0000

Charlie Smith London director Zavier Ellis has chosen nine artists from the ‘best of London’s 2010 graduate and postgraduate shows’ to exhibit in Young Gods. Consisting of eight postgraduates and one graduate, all of whom have graduated from the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths or the Slade (the University of the Arts colleges have evidently been silently omitted) the exhibition takes place in a small room situated above a pub in Old Street.

Welcome, by Lara Rettondini, is a spoken word audio which plays into the entrance stairwell of the gallery. An impersonal female voice reels off an officious list of institutional prohibitions, ranging from the quotidian: ‘Photographing, filming or sound recording are not permitted’, to the bizarre: ‘Discharging bodily waste is absolutely prohibited here.’ These increasingly surreal injunctions accumulate into an ironic disclaimer which occasionally directly contradicts the exhibition’s contents, such as the forbidding of sharp objects as disparaged by Rettondini’s own Point - a steel kitchen knife extruding defiantly from the gallery wall.

Nika Neelova’s sculpture The Night Also Falls resembles a large crashed chandelier, composed of burnt timber and black charcoal fragments suspended in place by a thick rope. This haunting baroque centerpiece sets a strong parallel with other more slight or ephemeral gestures in the show such as Joshua Bilton’s photographic diptych Post 1 and Post 2, which depicts temporary geometric constructions within natural landscapes, or Ryan Riddington’s black and white poster Control, which shows the artist sitting atop a stool or plinth, transfigured by being paired with the printed lyrics to a Janet Jackson song.

Alexis Milne’s video Riot depicts a small group of masked youths throwing placards, a shopping trolley and various roadwork detritus at a projection of footage from riots in 1968. Performed to the soundtrack of ‘Street Fighting Man’, the intermingling images of physical and projected bodies coalesce into a coarse yet sensually rhythmic choreography, however effectively suffer from being here displayed on a small monitor.

The Charlie Smith project, now four years in the running (the gallery space has been open since December 2009,) could have aimed to accomplish more with less works in Young Gods, especially regarding the limited size of the exhibition space, however it is understandable that the gallery wants to promote as many newly graduated artists as it feels it can.

Young Gods at Charlie Smith London ends August 7th, 2010.