In 1899 Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. Inspired by King Leopold II’s exploitation of the Congo region for the extraction of ivory and rubber, Conrad’s novella explores the consequences of men operating outside a social system of regulation, and the inevitable corruption of power. His story begins on the Thames, where his protagonist, Marlow, begins an account of his steamboat journey into the Congo. Marlow, in pursuit of Mr Kurtz - a renegade ivory trader - unearths the savagery and ‘horror’ of the Company’s treatment of the native inhabitants.
Fiona Banner’s project for PEER gallery continues her long-standing preoccupation with Heart of Darkness, and resulted from an invitation to collaborate with the Archive of Modern Conflict. Rather than delving into the archive itself, Banner commissioned Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin, known for his extensive coverage of international warfare, to document London through the guise of conflict photography. Employing Pellegrin’s images, Banner uses Conrad’s tale of Imperialist hypocrisy as a framework for investigating financial institutions as a site of twenty-first century conflict.
The focal work of ‘Mistah Kurtz - He Not Dead’ (this title is misquoted from Conrad’s novella, reversing the fortunes of ‘Mistah Kurtz’, who is pronounced dead by a servant in Part 3) is Banner’s six-minute film, in which Pellegrin’s monochrome images pulsate and flicker to a soundtrack of open outcry trading at the London Metal Exchange underscored by a perpetual drumbeat. Presented with this rhythmic momentum Banner’s ideological filter is swept to the fore; every aspect of London life is recorded as evidence of a political regime. Here, trading platforms become battlegrounds, offices become hubbubs of conspiracy, and workers are kept under constant surveillance.
The images are both complicit and distanced; re-framing a landscape that is at once unknowable and completely known. Resurfacing outmoded clichés such as pinstripe suits and strip-club frequenters, they simultaneously subvert and reinforce the stereotypes associated with the ostentatious lifestyle of a City Banker.
Banner employs museum techniques to display further images and objects, using vitrines and archival captions to elevate them into the historical realm. An aerial view of London is peppered with red markers, pinpointing the locations of numerous strip-clubs. These clubs can no longer obtain licences to operate within the city itself so instead exist immediately outside it; visible indication of the dependency between the two worlds. These items are presented as artefacts, but the subversion of archival techniques renders them empty, reducing them to novelty.
Similarly, the pinstripe suit as the uniform of the financial marketplace is echoed throughout the exhibition: monolithic graphite drawings adorn the gallery walls - crotches and arses loom ominously at eye level. A set of false nails lies in a vitrine bearing the pinstripe insignia. The stripes become soporific and redundant in their repetition - stripes are, after all, mere pattern.
Banner’s analysis of the financial market highlights its mysterious nature; it can be intelligibly reduced to its components, but it is fundamentally intangible. How many men will have seen the money with which they are trading? Stocks and shares are not physical objects. Thus, she reveals the arbitrary correlation between elusive financial products and the notoriously luxurious lifestyle they generate.
Although Pellegrin is an expert in documenting war, the success of this project stems from Banner’s decision to frame London as a landscape embedded with conflict. To approach The City as a theatre of war is to suppose a fundamental corruption; to reveal a seediness and ruthlessness that is already legendary. The City is the archetype of social elitism. Looking at it through this lens renders it mythical; it becomes fiction in its absurdity, and, paradoxically, its apparent realness.
Banner creates a parallel between Conrad’s narrative and her investigations into London’s contemporary financial affairs. That is not to say that she directly equates the two, but rather indicates that they are irredeemably linked; that no understanding of Colonialism can exist without an understanding of the City of London - the global headquarters of international finance. Additionally, through her use of documentary photography, Banner implicates the necessity of witnessing horror in order to accept it. Only faced with these images can we understand the myth of The City. Banner’s misappropriation of Conrad’s writing reverberates with unsettling accuracy: Mistah Kurtz - he not dead.
Several years ago, while I was still a student and first learning about contemporary Chinese art, I had two considerable influences. The first was the artist Ai Weiwei, whose work I still greatly admire, and who needs no introduction. The second interest was of a very different kind. Rather than the work of an individual Chinese artist, I was more interested in a particular approach to art making, and this was typified by a single image I came across. It was a photograph of woman painting. It was a beautifully composed image, and showed the woman sat a table, with a small brush in hand. In front of her, stretching right to the foreground of the image, was an enormous scroll. Every section of the scroll was meticulously painted, although from the photograph it is not clear what the content of the painting is. While I was impressed by Ai Weiwei’s bombastic commitment to his political position, here I was moved by the profound commitment to the creation of a single artwork. I loved the repetition and simplicity of the piece, as well as its haptic quality: the fact that much of the work’s meaning was embedded in the fact that it was handmade, and painted by a single artist. Although I later forgot the name of this artist, the strength of this image remained with me. Why I mention this will become clear.
I now live in Beijing, and recently, following a series of unexpected events, I found myself in a taxi and on my way to Ai Weiwei’s studio. A friend with impressive contacts was having lunch with Lu Qing, and was able to extend the invitation. You may not recognise her name, but you will perhaps know who Lu Qing is: in the media she is usually referred to as simply as Ai Weiwei’s ‘long-standing wife’ - or some similar phrase - despite the fact that she is also a successful and internationally recognised artist in her own right. I didn’t know much about her work, and I wanted to use the opportunity to learn more about her artist practise that seems to receive so little coverage.
Over lunch Lu Qing spoke a little about her artistic background. She trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and specialised in banhua, or printmaking. I ask her if she still does any such work, but she says she hasn’t for many years; after finishing at the academy she painted primarily abstract works, using oil on canvas. Since 2000, however, she started working in a new way, using acrylic. She goes upstairs and brings down a small, slightly dusty exhibition catalogue, from a group show she had in Japan in 2002. She flicks to the back and shows me her work. It is a roll of Chinese silk, stretching the length of a room, covered in small black squares. At certain points the squares are almost entirely black, others only lightly shaded. Although it is geometrically constructed, the changes in tone suggest no overall pattern, and vary seemingly randomly over the length of silk. It is a simple but beautiful artwork, and impressive even in reproduction.
I’m interested to hear about the process of making an artwork of this scale. The image she shows me is one of 14 paintings. The series, she says, started in the year 2000, with each painting taking an entire year to complete. Each scroll is 82 feet long, and some years she finishes the length of the scroll, others she doesn’t; however much of the scroll is painted at the end of the year is the final state of the work. She describes the process of making the work as ‘continuous in time’, even though she may not paint a section every day. I ask her about the use of black paint, but she corrects me: she doesn’t use black, but a very dark grey colour, which can approximate more closely the different shades of black used in traditional Chinese painting. The use of this colour, she says, references that artistic tradition as well as being in some way elemental, or going back 'to the basics of things’.
The dichotomy between ‘Western painting’ (xihua) and ‘Chinese painting’ (guohua) is still strong in China, and Chinese art students to this day are asked to choose one or the other when beginning their studies. Lu Qing’s work draws from both traditions, although the artistic decisions she makes are not the result of laborious or lengthly contemplation. In describing her practise, the word she uses most often is ziran, meaning ‘natural’ or ‘naturally’ (as in English, it can also refer to ‘nature’ or the natural world). Her choices of colour, form and style all presented themselves ‘naturally’ to her - all were very intuitive decisions. The decision to begin working on this series was itself also a natural one: she says she made no particular or conscious decision to begin these pieces, she just started one day. Her entire approach has this instinctive, intuitive quality, and it is refreshing to hear someone speak honestly and openly about their artwork without feeling the need for excessive conceptual justification. She says that, 14 years ago, she didn’t necessarily expect to continue the process for this length of time. Nor does she know how long it will go on for.
I ask her if, when complete, the paintings feel at all like a diary: although they are of course a record of experience, I’m interested to know if Lu Qing is able to ‘read’ them in some sense, and identify individual days or periods of time within the painting. She says that it is in some ways a kind of ‘abstract diary’, in that it represents an abstracted emotional record. She says that she never sees the entire piece at one time, unless it is exhibited, as each completed section is rolled up to allow her to continue working on the subsequent area. This in itself is also in-keeping with the Chinese tradition: while we are used to seeing Chinese scrolls ‘unrolled’ for display, this is not how they were traditionally seen or intended to be experienced. Scrolls were kept for private contemplation rather than public display, and were ‘read’ in small sections. After one section of scroll was examined, it was then re-rolled to allow for the reading of the next section. Unlike the Classical tradition in Western art (as it manifested in painting after the Renaissance), the Chinese traditional painter did not work with single point perspective. This single perspective necessarily locks the image to an isolated point in time; in Chinese painting, multiple perspectives are shown in the same image, implying movement in time. Further progression in time is then of course also suggested by subsequent sections of the scroll. Both kinds of representations of time are present in Lu Qing’s pieces, if in a paired-down form, where time itself becomes the subject of the work.
This is one reading at least. While the squares in Lu Qing’s work could be read as ‘units’ of time, other interpretations are possible. We may look at the expanse of carefully rendered squares and be reminded of pixels on a screen, or of modern technology in some form - a nice tension between that ‘modern’ association and the traditional scroll format - but in Chinese culture the square also has other, much older resonances. The ancient Chinese believed in a square shaped universe, and ancient Chinese cities were correspondingly constructed around squares of increasing size, with the Emperor at the centre (look at the map of Beijing: what are now traffic clogged ring roads where once ancient city walls). The Chinese writing system is itself also based on the same structure, with each character fitting within a square format. In the case of Lu Qing’s work is it this association that perhaps has the most relevance, as rather than readable characters that would fill each ‘square’ on the scroll, we are presented instead with a kind of private or abstract language. Throughout Chinese history, artists have often stressed the essential similarity between painting and writing, with both originating from the same source, and students of Chinese are still encouraged to think of Chinese characters as individual ‘paintings’. In order to be good at calligraphy this is precisely how you need to think of a Chinese character: as an individual painting in its own right, with its own internal logic, structure and composition. It is with the same care that each section of Lu Qing’s painting appear to be treated, although in a way in which she has pushed the ‘abstraction’ of the written language to its logical conclusion, and created a piece that is in some sense both ‘written’ and painted at the same time.
I ask her if she has any upcoming exhibitions where I can see her pieces, but she says that she doesn’t have any planned. In fact, it emerges that the small catalogue she showed me was the last time she exhibited anything, 12 years ago. Of the 14 years that she’s been working on this project, only two have been seen by the public: she explains that she has no desire or need to exhibit her work, and actively doesn't want to, as it is too personal for public display. For her the process of making these monumental paintings is itself part of the artwork, and this too is of course both a personal and private action. I ask if there is anything meditative about the process of painting these works, and she says that there is. This ‘meditative’ quality of their production again adds another level to their meaning. In Lu Qing’s practise the appearance of the final work and the entire process of making it are united to make a coherent whole: the fact that the piece is made by an individual artist, that it requires such enormous dedication in terms of time and labour, that the work itself relates to ‘time’ and represents a year in the life of the creator - all these things are important in understanding the work. I mention some of these things to her, along with the fact that I enjoy how she can start with something so simple - a single painted square - to make something so complex. She laughs and says she has never thought of it like that. All these aspects that lead to such a rich and interesting artwork were all just ‘natural’ to her, and didn’t require thought. Again it is hard not to connect what she says with some aspects of the Chinese tradition, and I am reminded not only of the Chan Buddhist tradition in Chinese painting, where artists would work instinctively and ‘naturally’, but also of the ‘artist recluse’, who is a central figure in Chinese artistic culture. Retreating from the public or political sphere, these ‘recluses’ were lauded for their commitment to their art, and came to serve as the embodiment of the Confucian moral conscience of the State. The ‘artist hero’, who in times of political turmoil was viewed as a symbol of resistance to tyranny, is also a recurring figure in Chinese history. Pursuing either of these ideas would however have to wait for another day.
I thank her for her time, and unfortunately have to leave the calm of the studio to go back to work. In the taxi back to the centre of Beijing I think over our discussion, and of how perfectly Lu Qing’s work exemplifies the kind of approach I found inspiring in Chinese art when I was a student. In my own artwork I tried, in some small way, to combine something of this approach with the social and political engagement I found so impressive in Ai Weiwei. I thought to mention this to Lu Qing, how several years ago I had once seen a photograph of a work that reminded me of hers, and how interesting I had found it, but I didn’t. It is after all bad form to tell an artist that their work reminds you of another artist’s work, and after Lu Qing had been so generous with her time and so willing to answer questions, I was cautious about saying anything that might offend her. Later that night I decided to try and find that image, to look up who that artist had been, and after some time I finally found it. I look at the caption. It reads: Lu Qing.
Celyn Bricker is an artist based in Beijing. www.celynbricker.co.uk!
With special thanks to Linda Yi for her invitation to lunch and her help with translation. See her
I’m doing some research at the LUX here in London at the moment. I was looking through catalogues from the London Electronic Arts today, early 90s touring programmes, and I noticed a work called ‘A Spy, Hester Reeve Does the Doors’. We got the tape out of the archive, almost not believing it would be you. It was part of a programme the LEA did called Visionary Sexualities, with annie sprinkle, franko b, sue zando and others. Do you remember it? I was so excited to see this queer drag performance. How did the film come to be made? It said you originally performed it at switch and bait in Chicago, at the Club Lower Links? What was that about? And how did the performance get to be filmed by Suzie?
Thinking of you and sending love, Patrick xx
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J2
What about the errors in memory when you are recounting stories, when you get things wrong because you don’t remember properly, and how those margins of error are actually linked to the process of editing. Editing is also a process of changing meaning and you can accidently edit just in terms of recounting an event.
J1
Yes, I know. Hester names all of these different people but she could have easily forgotten someone, and in which case that person, in our minds, never existed as part of ‘A Spy, Hester Reeve Does the Doors’. Through her lack of memory, the video that we know, some people are excluded.
J2
And this idea of recording is also echoed in the line where she says how in that version she hid a camera in her loin cloth and ended up taking a photo of the audience. It denies the spectacle as much as it upholds it.
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It made me think about Patrick’s work and that fact that again it denies the idea of spectacle. Rather than there being a passive audience who watches the performance, it’s a case of everyone participating. Do you remember the performance that he was telling us about? Everyone was performing so therefore how could you record it without having a separate camera or someone external? The way that he defeated that was by each performer having their own camera. You get multiple recordings and from completely different perspectives, from the body of the performer themselves rather than the external spectator. I think that ties into what Hester says about filming back to the audience or turning your own body into a camera. It’s about using yourself both as the subject that records as well as performs.
It’s interesting to think about that process of historicising and recording stories etc., in terms of us talking now. The interview speaks of a time maybe what 15 years to the fore? And now we are looking at it 10 years on. I was thinking about the structure of the project and where we want to go with it, how we map the conversation.
J2
Oral histories are usually seen as an alternative way of recording history. When you interview someone you often get a completely different story. There are so many untold stories that get written out of history because the whole idea of recording or making an archive is governed by people who make decisions about what is going to be remembered. For example Gombrich’s ‘Story of Art’. You choose what you make the story of art to be and you elide everything that doesn’t fit within your conception of it.
J1
That fits with the way that Patrick researches, interviews and the use of oral histories. Even from the fact that we have received two conversations from him. And obviously both texts have been so edited. How relevant is it to go and read the original transcript of the Sandy Katz interview? Do we just work with what we have received or do we delve deeper into the content?
J2
I’m not sure what Patrick would have thought but he did give us the links at the top of each document, the video and the full transcript. So there is obviously that desire to maintain a connection to the original transcript. And in terms of Hester, from a quick Google you can find that video of her, you can actually visualise it.
Hester Reeve does the doors...came about because Suzie Silver and her then girlfriend Iris Moore were getting pissed that all the guys in the Chicago queer community were having their fun dressing in drag and women didn't have their equivalent. It seemed like yet another inequality. So they devised a night 'Bait and Switch' at Club Lower Links, a great underground venue in Chicago that opened only for a few years in the city's live art hey day. I was blessed enough to be studying and living there on and off during it. The audience was literally made up of the live art community and when you performed you didn't get paid – no one ever did - but you got a bottle of wine. I remember walking down a road on the southside one morning and a car screeched by, halted suddenly, reversed and Suzie stuck her head out the window and said "Hey Hester, do you want to do a drag lip sync next week for me? We’re having a meeting at club lower links on Monday night!". No admin or proposals in them days. Bait and Switch only happened once. I know Dani K also did a lip sync...there were a few others, but my mind is blank. Since my mind has focused back to that event, I have a sneaking feeling that photos were not taken. Someone we called Sherry compered. Mary Brogger had to be involved, so did Nancy Forest Brown, as they were always in the centre of things. They ran a fashion catwalk show first, where they dressed a group of us up as famous lesbians through out history and then after that some of us got up and did our own lip syncs as drag kings. The lip sync was my own creation, but it caused an incredible reaction that Suzie said she wanted to put it down on tape and I agreed she could turn it into a video piece. I've performed my drag king of the kings live at a few other venus and sometimes to other songs - PIL's Burn Hollywood Burn was one. Suzie shot me doing the performance for camera against a green screen at the Video Data bank in Chicago. All the back imagery is her work. I have a video of me doing Jesus live at Grunt, Vancouver later that year. I have images from Grunt but not digitized yet. I really need to sort my own archive out if I am honest. Much needs digitizing and even the digital now exists across boxes of floppy discs, CDs and folders on my laptop. But in that version I hid a camera in my loin cloth and ended by taking a photo of the audience. I liked the tension as I fumbled in my groin at the end, back to the audience. The faces on my breasts are angels, that look adoringly up to God...I incorporated them to push the gender fuck along - big boobs and yet a man, a top man god.
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J2
Did you watch the video that I sent you?
J1
Yeah I did
J2
It’s funny isn’t it?
J1
I really enjoyed it…drag queens to drag kings.
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I was thinking after how there are so many different roles and bodies that perhaps we occupy multiple ones. Like an empty vessel that can be charged with…abled or disabled. In the video there are all of those images of women getting flashed in a kind of montage; they become recontextualised…they become almost disabled in that context.
J2
That’s what is interesting about the contrast of placing her drag body over the top of these conventional ways of viewing women. And that’s the thing about abled and disabled bodies: how your subjectivity is modelled on what the norm is and how you fit into society. When something doesn’t it is like an anomaly or it’s wrong, it’s ill. It’s an ill body…
J1
It’s revisiting ideas or ‘bringing in from a different time…’
J2
Yes, the gap between the actual live performance and then this video that was modelled or based on the performance; a further fiction is created. There are all these chains – taking one element of it but then making it into something else. There is no genuine article; it just becomes this chain of derivatives from something live, a live conversation or interview, or a live performance in Chicago.
J1
In which case I wonder then, if in this time and place, in this set-up, if there’s a coming together of Sandy Katz and Hester Reeve. If we have to create the fiction then they have to exist together.
J2
That’s really true, but it’s also about ethics. How ethical is it to take these two pieces of material and treat it as plastic that you can just mould and shape as you will?
J1
Because I naturally see one as the other now.
J2
Yes, I do as well.
J1
They coexist in my mind, as that’s the first time that I’ve seen either.
J2
And that’s completely deliberate on Patrick’s part.
SS: Change tapes? Okay.
SK: Okay, I need to pee.
SS: Okay.
SK: Do you want me to just pick up where I was?
J1
The format of this interview with Sandy is really…I guess we have to guess how much Patrick has edited and formatted it himself. It seems so purposeful how he’s left some parts…It’s very…
J2
…contrived…
J1
He’s really trying to create something with this document by including those parts.
…
I was thinking of creating a subsequent document as an interview between you, me and Patrick, to create a new fiction. We could develop a script to include stage directions. We could really play on this script format and, like you said, continue to edit and create further fiction.
J2
I like that idea of those interludes being like stage directions. Creating a play.
J1
Do you think he has left them in order to create a sense of context to the interview?
J2
Maybe it’s trying to show the artificiality of the set-up. Even though it’s a really real testimony, the interview format is also a very artificial construction. For example the fact that they have to change tapes every forty minutes. I’ve watched transcriptions of interviews before and when you have to change tapes it’s actually really frustrating moment because someone can be in the middle of saying something, quite a good thought or point, and then because of a logistical concern when it comes back to it that thing gets lost and that thing never gets said. It’s really hard to get back to it. I was once transcribing some documentary and just watching the way that the interviewer tries to steer it back but it’s really hard to interview someone and get them to think. So maybe that’s why he’s included it, to show that technological interruption and how it affects the story.
J1
It’s also about how much ‘umming’ and ‘arring’ you choose to put in, because you don’t really need to if it’s just for time coding. But this transcript does make notes of all those bits.
J2
I wonder if the interview continued beyond that. Patrick could just be giving us…
J1
It does say at the top ‘edited email’. Did he cut bits out before he gave it to us?
J2
It’s a shame we didn’t record our conversation with Patrick.
J1
I just felt we would have done so if it had felt comfortable to
J2
I think you’re right. I don’t think going back and listening now would be that helpful. I think it’s actually interesting to not include a conversation with Patrick. I think it’s interesting that he’s given us these two pieces, not really said anything and then we have had these responses.
J1
He almost seems like a fictional character, an in-between person, an enabler or facilitator, connecting these two texts. Whatever comes out that we create is kind of Patrick Staff. That’s all you get of him. It’s what we choose to…through our own voices.
The edited conversation that you have just read forms a single iteration in a continuing chain of derivatives. The index of this chain is a meeting between Patrick Staff, Joseph Constable, and Jessica Dunleavy, which was then followed by a series of emails and Skype conversations. Patrick submitted two pieces of his research material: an edited excerpt from an interview between Sarah Schulman and Sandy Katz from the ACTUP oral history project (2004) and an edited email between Patrick and the artist Hester Reeve (2014).
The idea was that these two pieces of research material would begin a breadcrumb trail whereby the subsequent exchanges between Joseph and Jessica would become a continuation of this ostensibly concrete starting point. Through the building and rebuilding and editing and re-editing of the emails, texts and conversation transcripts that arose out of these two pieces, the distinction between fact and fiction was blurred and the idea of an ending point, or ‘final piece’, was rendered futile. What is presented here, then, should not be viewed as a concluding response to Patrick’s original artistic research, but rather one of many dots on an open-ended line of research that is spurred on by spontaneous starts and stops in act of finding meaning through conversation.
I wonder if he’s still alive, that’s what I always thought
J2
Sandy Katz?
…
Tape I 00:05:00
SARAH SCHULMAN: Ready?
Sandy Katz: Oh, so you’re gonna film me from two different angles?
SS: Yeah. Look at me.
Jim Hubbard: Look at Sarah.
James Wentzy: The tapes last 40 minutes, so we’ll change tapes every 40 minutes.
SS: Okay. So the way we start is you say your name, your age, where we are, and today’s date.
SK: Okay. My name is Sandy Katz. And we are at Short Mountain Sanctuary, where I live, which is in Cannon County, Tennessee. I’m 42 years old. What was the –
SS: Today’s date.
SK: And today’s date is October 15th, 2004.
…
J2
Do you want to take me through your notes?
J1
The interview appears to be part of a bigger project that this woman, Sarah Schulman, was doing at the time…ACTUP…
J2
ACTUP…yes. And it was an oral history project.
J1
What’s an oral history?
J2
It’s based around the process of interviewing and creating an oral history through that medium. So there is less of a focus on documents, cold, factual elements etc., and more of an interest in speaking with individuals, getting their personal stories and creating an archive – a living archive of their voices.
…
SS: Do you remember how you became aware of it?
SK: I can’t remember the first references to AIDS or gay cancer, or whatever. Later on, in retrospect I’ve read the early articles that appeared. But I don’t specifically remember seeing them. But by the time I started having sex with men, I was definitely aware that there was this health crisis in the gay world, and that I, that there were precautions. I think that, I think I was aware of, say, of some basic safe-sex ideas before I was having sex with men.
At the same time, I’ll say that sort of because of what I was just describing, of this idea that I just was so strongly not identified with the men who I could tell from a block away were gay. I did feel sort of weirdly distanced from AIDS in my early sexually active years. I felt like the guys who I was having sex with didn’t really fit the profile, and I wasn’t, I don’t think I was really sort of seriously considering the idea that, that they could have HIV.
…
J1
One part of the interview that I found particularly poignant were the sections about medication, which seems to be quite a contentious issue at the time, whether you took the prescribed medication for HIV/AIDs or whether you didn’t.
J2
Well that medication came out as new medication just as HIV/AIDs was considered a new disease. There’s a fear around how you actually treat it and deal with it. Because in many ways it’s the unknown.
J1
And it’s interesting how he put off the fact that he was sick. It got me thinking about the idea of abled and disabled bodies again…
J2
Yes, it’s interesting to question at what point you become a ‘disabled’ body. Is it from the moment that you start to feel physically ill or at the point when the doctor diagnoses you? In many ways you become a disabled body because the diagnosis and prescription of medication tells you that you are.
J1
And for a long time Sandy seemed to be in denial about that, thought he was…before he was positive…when the results came back inconclusive.
…
SS: Well did you ever conceptualize of yourself as a potentially future person with AIDS?
SK: Not really. I really just, I just, I guess I felt I had enough information, and – was smart enough that I wouldn’t get it. And I never particularly had any anxiety about having been exposed to it. And the times when I got HIV-tested, it was always as a companion to someone who was filled with anxiety about having been exposed, and just wanted a friend to go get tested with. So, and it’s kind of interesting.
I didn’t test positive myself until 1991. But I did start testing inconclusive in 1988. And on two different occasions, it was the same scenario, of a friend who was filled with anxiety. So I went with them to get tested, and got tested, really just thinking I was doing it as support for them. And then, they came back negative. And I came back inconclusive. Which I didn’t really interpret as positive. I sort of constructed all of these elaborate – reasons why I would have an inconclusive blood test. I had had malaria in the late ’80s, and some doctor told me, maybe my malaria was making the test read strangely, or. Um. But it, no, it wasn’t ’til I actually tested positive in ’91 that I really thought about the possibility that I could be positive. I had even had boyfriends who were positive, but I just felt like I was being so careful and by-the-book that, uh, that I’d be okay.
Critic and writer Kirsty Bell is interviewed by Chloe Reith in Edinburgh where she recently delivered a multimedia slide lecture based on her new book The Artist's House: From Workplace to Artwork. In this book Bell narrates a series of intimate encounters with artists for whom the home is the locus of artistic production and the role of domestic space is in direct relation to the work.
Krasinski Interior
Chloe Reith: You worked for many years in various galleries in London and New York. How has this influenced your approach to the subject of the artist’s house?
Kirsty Bell: Though I studied art history, my first encounters with contemporary art came through work: I began as an intern filing press clippings at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in the early 1990s, went on to be exhibitions assistant there, spent a couple of years freelancing as an artist’s assistant and curator, and then as director of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York from 1997 to 2001. So my interest in contemporary art was never academic or theoretical, it really came through the practical experience of working directly with artists, and building up ongoing relationships that had as much to do with their daily lives as with the works they were making and showing. This hands-on approach influenced me when it came to the subject of the artist’s house in that I wanted to get as close to the situation as possible, to base my research on site-visits and interviews with the artists; field-work rather than second-hand analysis. Although theory did have a part to play, this came later.
CR: Were artists always willing to share their private spaces with you?
KB: I had worked with many of the artists in the book before in some capacity, having either written about their work, or gotten to know them when working in galleries. Even those I'd had no contact with before were more than willing to share their private space, perhaps because they could see that my interest had to do with their work and was not voyeuristic. For the particular artists I was interested in visiting, the house also played a significant role in their artistic practice and they were keen to discuss this.
CR: The book is divided into categories of dwelling and dreamspace; the house as workshop; total interiors; the house as sculpture; and from house to exhibition. How did these categories suggest themselves and what was the purpose of grouping artists in this way?
KB: This structure actually came very late, towards the end of the writing process, though I had always intended to organize the case studies thematically rather than chronologically. The book’s structure is not intended to be a definitive categorization, however, but rather a device that allows for a kind of telescoping view on the subject: starting with the most private of interior spaces – the bedroom – and pulling back until we end up with the presentation of the house as a whole to a viewing public in the exhibition space. Through this structure, I was able to break down the uses of the home into different categories, and analyse how these uses were played out by different artists.
CR: The Artist's House led me to thinking about the way in which the spaces where artworks are conceived, produced and exhibited seem to be customarily approached with a fraught, problematised rhetoric. Can the artist’s home maintain a certain amount of authenticity (for the work) or neutrality even? Can it be considered the ‘ideal’ space, or perhaps a creative safety zone, even more so than the studio?
KB: I would be wary of talking about ‘authenticity’ or even 'neutrality’, as no space - or artist’s work for that matter - is really either of those things. I do think that the home-as-workplace escapes the problematic aura and expectations of a studio however. Whereas the studio is dedicated to the production of work, other things take place in the home. It can be seen as a boundary between a private centre and the world at large, or a container for everyday experience, so it allows for a certain porosity between different aspects of life.
Whether or not it can be called ideal depends entirely on the artist’s practice, however. For Marc Camille Chaimowicz - whose work has so much to do with the boundaries between private and public experience and whether décor, furniture making, and the staging of private activities could be allowed into artistic production - his own apartment was the ideal place. For a painter like Alice Neel, however, who always worked from home, a separate studio may have been more ideal, but was not an economic possibility. The startling directness and intimacy of her portraits may partly be to do with the domestic environment in which they were painted, though it is hard to claim this definitively.
CR: Following on from that then, do you think the domestic sphere can or should be critically questioned in the same way as the studio/gallery?
KB: As a workplace I think it can be analysed, and the role it plays on the work made in it can be interrogated, although of course in some cases this is more rewarding than in others. Felix Gonzalez Torres for instance was explicit about the role that the domestic played in his work, calling himself a ‘kitchen table artist’. Although initially he simply couldn’t afford to rent a separate working place, later in his career it became a conscious decision not to separate his working practice from the rest of his life, and to allow this porosity to become integral to its production. In his case, and in others such as Jorge Pardo or Andrea Zittel, it is not so much a ‘creative safety zone’ as an arena in which to investigate the boundaries between public and private zones and roles, and the materials of everyday life, as well as a zone within which to experiment.
CR: I have noticed what seems to be an increasing tendency towards the domestic in artworks and exhibitions in terms of space, scale and objects (from soft furnishings to textiles and ceramics) resembling stage sets or pastiches of domestic interiors and lifestyles. Artists like Martino Gamper or the Granchester Pottery group, Jesse Wine and even Laure Prouvost comes to mind as practitioners who are directly borrowing in different ways from the home, recontextualising the gallery as a domestic space. How would you account for this tendency?
KB: This tendency towards the domestic is something that has recurred in different forms since the 60s, if not before. The 60s saw artists taking actual items from their homes and installing them in the gallery, or, in the case of Lucas Samaras, transplanting his entire bedroom with all its furnishings into the exhibition space, as a kind of surrogate self-portrait. The recent tendency for artists to work with textiles or ceramics on a more domestic scale could also be seen as a turn towards the haptic pleasures of craftsmanship to counteract the pervasiveness of dematerialised, digital realities. The home is the perfect place for such small scale craft-oriented activities to take place, though of course the digital may be just as present in domestic settings as the world at large.
CR: But the artists I mentioned do appear to project a different set of motivations to some of the cases you cite, for example Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 7th St Apartment which was faithfully recreated in the gallery for the primary purpose of producing a participatory, populated space.
KB: Rirkrit’s recreation of his 7th Street Apartment, first in the Kunstverein in Cologne in 1996, and subsequently in several other gallery locations, had more to do with bringing the social functions of the domestic sphere into the exhibition space than its contents per se. It was intended to be a model in which its audience could partake in or perform, versions of everyday activities such as cooking, sleeping, bathing, watching TV; that is, activities beyond the usual cognitive functions of observing and analyzing that occur in the gallery space. Of course it was part of an expansion in the field of art that had to do with institutional critique, and this is not necessarily what the artists you mention have in mind. Although the participation and group dynamics its encourages may correspond in some way to the activities of Granchester Pottery, for example.
CR: I was particularly interested in the studies you made of artists homes that have been posthumously transformed into museums such as the studio-home of Polish artist Edward Krasinski. I find this concept, particularly peculiar. Do you think there is value in these highly staged, fortified spaces?
KB: A visit to Edward Krasinski’s studio-home is certainly valuable, even without his living presence, and offers a fascinating insight into his work. The problem is how to preserve such a static situation, and how to accommodate or counteract the deteriorating effects of time. How long can you preserve a place as ephemeral as this?
The opposite approach can be seen in Donald Judd’s Spring Street Loft in New York, which was recently renovated inside and out at a cost of $25 million. Both of these examples can be seen essentially as Gesamtkunstwerke; the home as permanent installation. Of course Donald Judd and Edward Krasinski worked in very different ways. Krasinski was more concerned with temporary, perceptual transformations of existing situations through, for example, his signature gesture of applying a strip of blue tape to the walls at a constant height of 130cm. For Judd, however, permanence was the thing. In Spring Street as in Marfa, he was interested in long-term, permanent installations of objects that remain in place despite – or even in defiance of - changes brought on by time, environment, or atmospheric conditions.
The value in preserving these spaces is somewhat different than, for example, Louise Bourgeois’s New York townhouse which is currently undergoing renovations and preservational measures, and will be open to the public by appointment. It remains to be seen how much of her vitality and manic working activities will still resonate in this static form, but nevertheless I can’t wait to see it myself. There is a perennial curiosity to see how artists or writers live and work – look at how many there are: Moreau, Morandi, Brancusi, Vanessa Bell, Bacon, Pollock, etc.
CR: In the epilogue you touch on the erosion of the traditional distinctions between work and leisure and the conflation of the two spaces for these distinct activities – has the home been reframed as a new centre of labour, production and consumption, oscillating around commercial activity - not only for artists but for all of us?
KB: The effects of various technological advances – most significantly the Internet - have had a significant impact on the home, as they have on so many other aspects of daily life. The Internet, personal computers and, more recently, smart phones, are eroding notional boundaries between work time and leisure time, and importantly public and private. More and more people adopt work at least partly from home. Similarly, as you mention, digitized consumption is also brought into the home through the computer screen and online shopping. The effects of these rapid changes are just starting to come into focus. In the epilogue of my book I ask if it will result in the kind of fragmentation of experience that lead Kurt Scwhitters in the post war years of the early twentieth century to begin his collage-based practice that resulted in the sculptural installation that ended up taking over his home, the Merzbau? At this point I have a lot of questions but very few answers.
CR: How do you see the 21st century home evolving? Should we be concerned about the increasingly ‘fragmented’ space of the home as you describe it?
KB: I am curious to see how the 21st century home will evolve. The trend certainly seems to be towards smaller and smaller living units, as property prices increase and more homes are needed for individuals living separately rather than in larger family units. The problems we face regarding the erosion of private and public meanwhile also now have more to do with technology, corporate interests and government, as NSA Google scandals has proved; the assumed privacy within the four walls of the home no longer plays such a role.
But I don’t want to end on such a pessimistic note so I’ll go back to the examples of artists such as those you mention earlier, whose work suggests a counterpart to the problems of the digital realm. Or the many artists, such as Danh Vo, who I discuss in my book, whose work has to do with the movements and histories of tangible objects. No matter what technological developments may occur, the home and its contents remains intertwined with biography and memory, it is still “where the story of our lives takes place” as Marguerite Duras put it.
The Artist’s House: From Workplace to Artwork is published by Sternberg Press.
Humour is a slippery fish: a conversation between Catriona Gallagher and Siân Robinson Davies
Recently I responded to an open call to participate in a performance project by Siân Robinson Davies, an artist I had met a few times before. Usually I wouldn’t be interested in this kind of thing, as I have an aversion to the idea of being in front of an audience, but it caught my eye as I have been on the lookout for a subject for this article. I’d been asked to write about an Edinburgh based artist and I’ve been intrigued by Siân’s work for a while, having seen, by chance, a gig she did at The Stand comedy club last year, so I emailed her expressing interest. We arranged to meet at her studio in Rhubaba, an artist run space in Leith, to discuss the idea. I thought I could use the opportunity to find out some information for my writing, and decided to record the meeting surreptitiously. I’d prepared in a café over few coffees planning how I could steer our conversation towards the questions I wanted to ask about her practice. The caffeine had left me feeling a little edgy, and I was nervous because, with Siân, I’ve been told you can never be quite sure when she’s being serious and when she’s joking.
Siân Robinson Davies: Hey Catriona, thanks for coming. Thanks for replying to my email, How are you? Would you like coffee?
Catriona Gallagher: Err, yeah, I’ve already had one but that’d be great, thanks.
SRD: Grab a chair.
CG: Great, thank you. So maybe you could tell me about what I’d be doing in your project?
SRD: Sure, right, well firstly I should say I’m so glad you’re excited about this project, I really try to work with people who are really passionate about this stuff, you know? And I should also say that it’s really not about me telling you what to do, I’m not imagining that I would be giving you directions. The idea is more about a life practice than an art piece, which is key. But that’s why I wanted to speak to you, because your reply to the call I put out seemed really in tune with that idea. So great, thanks again for coming.
(Pause)
SRD: Right, so lately I’ve been thinking about different forms of participation in art, but in particular, heckling. I’ve been looking at examples of interruptions in live contexts, thinking about the potential of the heckler, but I’m struggling to make work about it, because a heckle is, by it’s nature, an unplanned event. Instead of making art about it, I thought it would be much more interesting just to go out and do it, so I want to start a heckling group where we go out and interrupt situations. And I am thinking of that very broadly, we don’t need to be limited to shouting out during someone else’s performance, we can think about other situations, like football matches, or car boot sales, and we could just go there and… get naked! Or we can talk to people. Or I dunno what else. I mean, we can think about it together, it depends what we decide as a group. I don’t want to determine things too much, I think it’s good if we work together, lead by our joint enthusiasm… do you take milk?
CG: Yes please. Thanks. Yeah, it sounds great. Who else is involved?
SRD: Well, so far it’s just you and me, but I’m sure other people will get in touch.
CG: I see. Sounds interesting. It would be great to hear more about where this idea has come from though? Have you worked with this kind of participation before - heckling I mean? Because you see heckling as a form of participation, right?
SRD: Yeah, definitely. I would say heckling is uninvited participation. The most recent performance I did was a comedy set at The Stand where I had a heckler planted in the audience to interrupt me at a specific point. The whole thing was based on the idea that I had forgotten the joke I had planned to tell. So I went out on stage and I was silent for good 30 seconds, moving towards the mic as if I was going to speak and then never quite managing to say anything. After a while I started to grasp around for the words and I spent the next five minutes describing the joke, Why did the chicken cross the road… without saying any of the words in the actual joke. So, I would say stuff like, “the pigeon went over the motorway,” and “the squirrel went around the roundabout”. In the end, a friend who was in the audience shouted out the actual joke and I pretended to be pissed off.
CG: Ahh, so that was a planted heckler? I didn’t realise.
(Pause)
CG: Oh, right, I never mentioned, I was there in the audience.
SRD: Oh, you should have said-
CG: Yeah sorry I didn’t want to cut you off there. It’s good to hear you explain it, I wasn’t really sure what was going on at the time.
SRD: I see.
CG: But surely the idea of a planted heckler is an oxymoron, no? If they’re invited? But, maybe, I mean this is something I was wondering about participation in performance generally, where the line is between what the artist intends to happen, what they design into the performance, and the audience’s freedom to really do something unexpected. Is the artist still controlling the audience, are the participants ever completely free to do what they want? Presumably the audience don’t usually want to make it go wrong, they’re also wanting to create a good outcome, and they have to imagine what the artist expects?
SRD: It’s a total minefield. At worst, participatory work is a patronising invitation that bolsters the artist’s position of power. Why should an audience want take part in my thing? But even when they don’t want to, they often will, because people usually want to be polite.
CG: Yeah, of course, people always want to do the ‘right thing’.
SRD: Yeah. So while I would say I can’t control the audience, I am aware that they will often do what I ask them to, but that often ends up being boring for everyone. The constant battle is understanding how to generate something out of our relationships with one another.
CG: Maybe that has something to do with charisma, or social ease? Certain people are so good at bringing out the best in people, making people feel comfortable.
SRD: Negotiating the audience is an absolute art, and not one I have mastered but I believe that it’s a craft that I can get better at and am trying to improve by learning how to listen. I go to improvisation classes, and try to pay attention to any situation where I have to be responsive to other human beings. It’s all about being sensitive and reacting to those who you are on stage with. I’m trying to learn to trust in the potential of mistakes. The thing that excites me mainly is how you bring many different people together, each with their own imaginations, and really make the most of all that imaginative power, because so often when a group of people come together, nothing interesting happens, and that seems like lost potential.
CG: But isn’t the planted heckler still keeping things within your control?
SRD: My experience is that the planted heckler can create an atmosphere of uncertainty in the room, which has to potential to lead to further unplanned situations. But until now I feel I have always been seduced by wanting to create a “good performance" with a neat narrative arc to really carry through with that, but it’s a challenge. Having the power as the artist is always the thing that needs undoing in the work. And that’s why the art frame can be very frustrating and also the reason I’m interested in our heckling project, because when we go out there into the world, we are just like everyone else and that’s a great place to start. Do you feel like going out and doing some this afternoon?
CG: This afternoon? Yeah… yeah, sure we could do that. But I was wondering - and I hope you don’t mind me asking so many questions about your work, but it’s good for me to get an overall picture of it - how do you see collaboration in all of this? Because in my mind working with audience participation is actually collaborating with them. You collaborate in the production process too, don’t you? I saw that video online, the one with you and the guy having a conversation about a haiku?
SRD: Yeah, that’s right, that’s Diego [Chamy], I work with him under the name of Internet. We’ve been working together since 2009. Before that I always worked on my own, and I think that was, in part, down to the way art school is structured. If you study theatre or music, the whole thing is about playing different roles within the whole. At art school, we were never encouraged to work together. I think that’s down to a number of reasons: certain hangovers from the idea of the artist as genius, problems of authorship when the activity often isn’t craft based but where you are supposed to be assessed and given a qualification. But things changed for me when I met Diego. It’s been really great working with him, we have a lot of similar intuitions, there is a lot of trust, and I feel that working with him unlocks creative doors for me.
CG: It sounds like a really great way to work, a very positive experience. But then again, in collaboration there’s also the fact that you have to let go of complete control. As well as it being a case that two heads are better than one, there’s also a point where you have to compromise. All parties have to reach a middle ground that they are happy with.
SRD: Middle ground. Funny term that, isn’t it? It suggests something diluted and murky. With Diego I don’t feel like the compromises lead to settling for something less. I feel like we extend each other’s individual ideas. We definitely push each other further. There are times when we both want two different things, and we have to talk it through and often we find a third solution that we are both excited about - which is like… new ground!
CG: Yeah, of course, that’s great!
SRD: You want more coffee? Oh, is it ok? You haven’t drank it.
CG: Oh sorry, yeah I just forgot, it’s fine. I’ve never had that experience with collaboration before, it’s always felt like two people with opposite ways of working, coming from two ends of a spectrum and meeting in the middle. And it becomes even harder to find the middle ground with a group of people rather than a pair. But then realistically life is all about working with other people. Like when you cook a meal with someone, and maybe it’s a case of someone being in charge and telling the other person what needs to be chopped and how, but you’re both working for the final result. That doesn’t often feel like having to compromise, especially if you swap roles when cooking the next meal.
SRD: Cooking is a great example. But maybe a common difficulty is finding people who are willing to commit to working together on something more long term.
CG: Rhubaba is an example of a group people working together in a committed way, right?
SRD: Yes, three of the current committee members are from the original group that founded Rhubaba in 2009. I am relatively new, only having joined a year ago.
CG: And you all collaborate together on the public programme?
SRD: Kind of like your Head Chef/Sous Chef example, the projects are not all decided on through group decision-making. Each project is initiated and led by one person or sometimes two people. While we discuss all the ideas as a group, support each other in producing the projects, talk through the ideas, there is always one or two people who are fully 100% engaged with the project and invested in making it as good as it can be. You just can’t have that from everyone all the time; it’d be too exhausting.
CG: So not everyone contributes in the same way on every project?
SRD: Exactly, and some people don’t want to lead on any projects and that’s fine. I guess the important thing for that to work is that that the structure has to stay flexible enough for people to feel that can make changes to it if it doesn't fit anymore. If someone doesn’t want to chop any more and wants to prepare the dressing instead, there has to be room to be able to communicate that. Trust is key. And maybe that’s what we need to develop for this heckling project together. When we go out there in the field, we really need to feel like we can trust each other. If I shout something out, I need to know you’ve got my back - you know what I mean?
CG: Yeah, don’t worry you can trust me.
SRD: Good.
CG: And, by the way, what do you think about the use of humour in art? It’s something I’ve always been interested in, but not something I’ve found a way to use.
SRD: You mean you don’t use humour? Or you’re not funny?
CG: [laughs]
SRD: You seem funny to me.
CG: Erm… thanks. I’m -
SRD: Well, humour is addictive, but it’s a slippery fish. As soon as I realised I could make people laugh on stage, I was hooked. It’s like a big load of love being thrown at you. Sometimes you have to be strong in not delivering a punch line though, in order to do something unexpected that might be more interesting and sometimes an audience won’t like you for that. I remember being really disappointed by Tarantino’s Django Unchained, have you seen it?
CG: Yeah, I have.
SRD: You know, near the end of the film where Django is killing everyone in the house, and Miss Lara, the sister of the plantation owner, is up next? Miss Lara wasn’t a particularly malicious character in the film; we weren’t made to hate her. And she’s also a woman, which emphasises the tension around any violence towards her. In the end her death was made ridiculous. Django shot her and she flew backwards out of view, in a slapstick manner, and I thought that decision was cowardly. In a way, the fact her death was one of the most ridiculous was revealing, but it totally sidestepped the ethical issues. Maybe that’s when using humour is a shame; when it’s used to turn away, rather than face something.
CG: I hadn’t thought about that side of it before. But when it’s effectively used, humour is definitely a hook that keeps people interested.
SRD: Yes, definitely. Usually, when I start making something, I think about what would be the most exciting thing I could imagine if I was going to be in the audience (that’s something I learnt from Diego). This usually involves playing with the audience’s expectations, or inventing some massive disaster or drama. And then from that, work out how to bring out interesting questions. But it’s often the surprises that people find funny.
CG: Inventing disaster is something you use quite a lot, right? I think invention is a powerful tool, fiction being used to conjure something. It works even better when there’s a blend of fiction and reality, and the boundaries become blurred. Especially if there’s only one or two elements of fiction, then that makes you question what you know to be true. That’s more powerful than creating something entirely fictional, I think.
SRD: I’m actually just finishing up a piece of extended fiction at the moment. It’s about two hecklers who go out and intervene in situations. I like to think of writing fiction as being a kind of training for life. First I have to really imagine the thing I want, flesh it out through the stories, and make it real and possible in my mind, before I can act on them. So writing this book was like the training for our heckling project. Maybe I can send you a copy and it might help you think about ideas for things we can do together. I’m pretty excited about this.
-Hey I like your broach. It’s beautiful. Wait… is that a… it’s look like a… microphone?
Modern Edinburgh Film School, A new island forming, a fighting island, its surfacing painful from freezing, unfathomable waters, says “the reality diagonal”, itself a floating cinema, and is a cathartic event 2014
Coined by writer, artist and self-proclaimed ‘concept engineer’ Kodwo Eshun, the term Sonic Fiction refers to the myriad statements, titles, costumes, relations, speculations, rituals, hidden tracks, production techniques, economies, patois, basslines, gestures and images close to a genre of music, generating a trans-media narrative, immanently connected as they are to the speculative potency of the sonic grain of each song. As the enigmatic art collective 0(rphand(rift> have said, “the solitons of the music tell a story.”
The key development that has made thinking Sonic Fictions possible is certainly Afrofuturism: a name for the alternative histories and alien futurities generated amongst Afro-diasporic cultures. As an epistemology, it considers Black artistic production as a dispersed modality of wresting forms of science-fiction, utopian thought and modernity from a situation in which the Black subject is inherently alienated by the events of dominant historical narratives, speculating upon this alienated character as a future-oriented subjectivity in-production.
Consequently, Afrofuturism is familiar with the disruption of dominant cultural imaginaries, while claiming for a Black diaspora, a relationship with some kind of ‘Outside’ – whether this is the future-as-noise or a cosmology based on a Black kinship with outer-Earth. This contravenes popular modes of understanding art as representation; revising such reductive socio-economic-centric readings of, say, Jazz as being a musical form wholly representative of a Black improvisational struggle for freedom within the context of a racially hostile American culture. Instead, Afrofuturism tends towards an enquiry of the peculiar material arrangements that make up such musics as speculative objects themselves – paying attention to the proposals of the images invoked by Jazz, Hip Hop, Detroit Techno, and moving away from a “compulsory [biographical] logic explaining all Black Music, conveniently hearing antisocial surrealism as social realism.”[1]
Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen was developed around these very ideas concerning the political valence of science fiction, with speculation as a method of probing and mutating the present through (re)imagining the future. The artists contributing sound-work and music to the project, responding to the concept of Sonic Fictions in different ways, either conjure alien worlds and narratives that reveal radically alternative futures to the one tethered to the present, or they mine the occulted entrails of the existing world in a contemporary form of nekyia – an ancient Greek cult-practice through which ghosts were invoked to be questioned about the future.
Plastique Fantastique record the final exploits of human consciousness as it prepares to merge with technology, birthing the post-human experience-less subject; Neuropath Feedback Loop 3.0, Head Gallery describes the scatological activities of a post-apocalyptic Nu York artworld; The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ continue the work of their deceased namesake in a Hip Hop inflected ritual frenzy that scrambles through the rubble and collapse of modernity; POLLYFIBRE generates a post-digital opera and Jillian Mayer’s pop tunes advertise a post-human techno-singularity as a desirable consumer product.
These tracks, and several others, all appear on a limited edition USB device designed by Plastique Fantastique. The USB was produced with the objects of veneration of Cargo Cults in mind. This phenomenon describes the impact of networked trade routes upon Melanesian residents who discover lost cargo washed up on their shores. The objects are unable to be decoded as commodities attached to their intended purpose and thus mutating a given system with alien values. The mp3 tracks act as indexes of alien futurities, cargo cult objects washed up on the shore of the present.
Dane Sutherland
[1] Kodwo Eshun, “More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,” p4.
On Frame and Ground present a series of visual slippages; a heap of broken images that move between two and three dimensionality
Featuring work by Mark Corfield-Moore, Jessica Dally, Marie Jeschke and James Richards, the exhibition attempts to question the differing statuses of these images: the cinematic, the low-resolution, the repeated and the constructed. Through sculpture, photography and projection the ostensibly fixed boundaries of frame, ground and screen become plastic, flexible mediums to be ruptured and crossed.
Bending Light: making work for the real and the virtual realms
‘Bending Light’ was the first exhibition organised by the curatorial research group Home Platform. Produced by curator and artist Charlie Cousins as part of Bristol Art Weekender, ‘Bending Light’ selected the work of emerging artists working in the spaces between the real and virtual realms. This excerpt is taken from a panel discussion organised by Home Platform to support the exhibition and consider the questions it posed.
Chaired by:
Charlie Cousins: Curator of Home-Platform, Artist and Writer
Georgina Bolton: Programme Coordinator at Situations, Writer and Researcher for Line Magazine
Contributions from:
Menna Comminetti: Exhibiting Artist
Sebastian Jefford: Exhibiting Artist
Kit Poulson Artist and Lecturer at UWE
Tom Johnson Artist and Co-Founder of Madescapes ^
Charlie Cousins: Hi everyone, welcome to ‘Bending Light’ the first exhibition from Home-Platform. For those who aren't aware, Home is a curatorial research platform examining the relative positions of object, image and gallery. Trying to work both on and off-line to explore the space in-between the virtual and physical realms, and question the role of the gallery space within a post-internet culture. Today is a chance for an open discussion about the themes that have been brought together in the show.
Georgina Bolton: Thanks for being here everyone and of course a huge thanks to Charlie, Will and all artists for putting on such a fantastic show that has both set the context and provided content for this debate. So I guess this started out when Charlie and I had a conversation that triggered a mutual curatorial interest. As someone also fascinated by screen/surface, object/image relations, I’d been developing research with Line magazine for a couple of months, with ambitions to co-curate and launch a new experimental online platform for Line, titled ‘Curator’s Space.’
We wanted to think about ways in which we could utilise and maximise online space. To create a platform that was more than just a documentary presence of an exhibition that had passed, but a screen-space dedicated specifically to new work. Traditionally there is a physical spread in the magazine called ‘Curator’s Space’, and it grew out of an inspired idea to translate the section to a digital format, inviting artist led groups or a specific curator to create an online exhibition that was solely created for, and existed on screen.
CC: So this exhibition has been created somewhere between virtual and physical space. We’ve been thinking about the screen as a surface, a physical thing in itself that you can immerse yourself into. It holds a lot of layers and potential for development…
GB: Yes definitely, I’ve enjoyed exploring that idea in the past through my writing, looking at dimension, either of flattening, or the idea of pulling out elements from the screen into physical space. This is exactly what this what ‘Bending Light’ explores, and what Home-Platform plans to continue to experiment with in its future editions.
CC: I think one of the interesting things about the show is the international edge. Tristan, for example is over in Canada, whose conversation with us has been entirely virtual. Every part of the process of communication has been through digital means and now it exists in real space. The things he talks about are very ephemeral, so it’s interesting that he’s able to materialise those ideas to create his installation (www.bodyflex.me).
GB: Yes it’s about how both artists and curators are negotiating this new relationship between space and screen. We’re thinking in new ways now, in Giffs and video clips…
CC: It’s about reach isn’t it? The amount of reach we have now is so much greater. Everything is one surface it seems…
GB: I’ve heard people comment that the Internet is ‘public space’ but I’m not so sure. In some ways it’s the most conflicted and private of mediums, and in others completely uncontrolled.
Menna Cominetti, Hold me around the others body, 2014, jpg, Home-Platform.com
Menna Comminetti: I think what you're saying is that the Internet offers an opening out, maybe a democratisation of audience? I don’t think there’s as much of that as people think there is. The idea of the Internet being an open resource for everyone, I think happens to a certain extent but I’m not sure whether the concept of ‘community’ naturally exists online as much as people feign it to. I think that the mainstay of the Internet is about self-promotion.
CC: That’s a good point because both Tristan Stevens and Rachael Archibold (artists exhibiting in ‘Bending Light,’) both mention those ideas. Rachael especially mentions the loneliness that she perceives we all feel, and the idea that the Internet is quite an internal thing. The same with Tristan, it’s all about the imagined and ephemeral scenarios, and also imagining it’s what others might be thinking about.
MC: I think people can equip themselves with this supposed idea that you’re being very generous by disseminating images and artworks online and that it’s suddenly available to everyone because the web is a global resource, but actually art is still very esoteric and only accessible to a fraction of people...I don’t think we should kid ourselves by saying that just because we could create works that just exist online that’s some sort of generous act. I mean, I still think that if anything it becomes further abstracted into a dialogue which freaks people out...
CC: I think that can be true, the online world can also be quite insular, but there are also things that I think show progression towards something that is more open, free and unified, like the Google balloon. Internet access is almost becoming a basic need for people - it’s way off from being that I know - but it’s the idea that’s interesting. We are a generation where it’s the new norm.
GB: Yes I was reading somewhere about the concept of the ‘digital native’, which is apparently the generation after ours even. They’re the ones (and the generations below that) that are growing up completely integrated with the digital world. It’s going to become a question as to whether we’ll be able to engage with physical things in the same way…
Kit Poulson: As a researcher I’ve learnt that there are particular research skills. People who use the Internet think they’re on this very level field, but people think in very different ways and go on different pathways. It’s certainly something I’ve noticed in teaching, that suddenly someone won’t find something that another does, and they’ve had completely the same access. So I was wondering about the history and trends of technical abilities, are these later generations more skilled than say, I would be, as someone who begun as a historian? It’s really interesting to think about how you approach a keyboard, or the effect of words you put in the search bar...
Sebastian Jefford: I think that a sense of visual literacy is very specific to our generation. We’re so visually literate now. You’ll probably agree that you can probably tell just by the feel of a website the kind of answers you’re going to get from it.
KP: So this is an emotional response to it?
SJ: Yes I think so. I was talking with a friend the other day about this and I thought about how when my granddad uses the computer, he’s not as visually literate with the digital world and there’s a moment of suspense. In comparison, our visual literacy now is extremely nuanced…
KP: That's funny though, for what you say is visual a lot of the time is primarily text based. There’s a lot of imagery that can be completely undefined unless someone has labelled it in specific way, so it’s like searching blind. That direct iteration of the visual is mediated through engines now, which are different than the engines of a book….
GB: So this encourages a comparison of concentration and focus. Is the textual content that you get back from screen-based research as valid or satisfying? Do we feel that in the world of multiple tabs, windows and pop ups that some of that credibility is dissolved and there is a difference between a digital and physical depth of information?
Tom Johnson: I’ve been talking to Rachael quite a lot about the difference of looking at an art work in real life and on the screen, about the general loneliness, and she’s saying she feels less of that online. But even then it always feels behind the screen and it’s separate from the environment I’m in. Ultimately I’m not sharing real space with that object, it’s the computer behind the screen.
GB: In Charlie’s work (Sateen Dura-Luxe, 2014 Cast Silicon, Paint, Wood, C-Type) the silicon here almost feigns a screen, but it’s still so tactile…
CC: Charlie talks a lot about photography. He takes his film camera with him everywhere and takes streams of photographs but then obliterates them with various materials and puts them through digital processes. He talks about the kind of intentional detachment that happens when you put works through a process like his. He sees digital equipment as tools for manipulation.
MC: Yes that’s quite an unusual attitude, to try and make physical a digital experience because it seems that materially you’ll never really be able to capture it. Can physical materials ever masquerade themselves as digital? I don’t think they’re physical things in the world, which will decay like rubbish after a while. It’s strange, the current trends in art; things looking like they’re made by screens, when they’re physical things in the world. I’m maybe a bit disillusioned with that kind of quest I think. It seems like materials will never quite get there if their job is to describe the digital experience. I think materials are materials, and maybe it’s more interesting that way, rather than acting as a describer they can just appear in conversation with whatever you think their hyper digital experience might be. I think it’s less and less the role of materials to try to re-emanate that again and again….
GB: Do you feel challenged by the digital online world, or does it feel like something natural you can work with?
SJ I don’t feel challenged by the presence of it…
CC: I think it’s limitless….
KP: I do think sometimes that it’s not such a different way of thinking that we have now, in this huge virtual world. I find myself reading 16th century texts and thinking actually that their sense of ‘virtual’ is equally as strong, and just as problematic. Virtual discussion often tends to share something with this historical discussion, when does life become matter, or matter become life…. When does it just remain ‘stuff’ and what are the perimeters? Painting is a virtual object, but somehow it’s not in the world, it’s ageless….
MC: I think I do have anxiety about digital representation. Because of its possibilities I think it’s important to understand the extent to which it’s an atmosphere which can be manipulated to many different ends. I think it offers a totally different experience and I don’t think we’re all walking around like computer heads. We aren’t perceiving things totally digitally yet. I think it’s maybe an interesting idea to think about how the digital can be manipulated as a very visceral scenario. It’s a simple reversal, but it’s as interesting to try and do that rather than just re-iterate the context back onto itself, to think about the digital as it’s own opposite - as much a visceral and messy experience, rather than a flat and clean one.
TJ: I think it will be interesting to see how opinions change as we move into the next generation of web browsers. Will we move into a phase of for example, of haptic suits, where we can have digital objects that don’t degrade. The idea that in a 1000 years time you can still see and feel the same experience of a digital object as you could a generation from now…
KP: As long as you’ve got the interface, as the interface would degrade….
GB: That brings up another aspect of the digital challenge – archiving and storage. How will we encounter and access digital archives in the future?
CC: That’s interesting you bring up the question of storage, as I couldn’t help feeling that there’s still a sense of fragility in the digital archive...I mean, what about the recent Heartbleed virus for example…
KP: Menna, can I ask you about digital mess? It seems to relate to all this, digital decay and virtual mess….
MC: There’s loads of mess everywhere, half of its rubbish anyway. There’s mess in loads of different ways depending on how you think about it, but there’s mess in terms of resolution – you might see pictures of famous and important things in bad resolution effecting someone’s recall of the person or object - in a way destroying art’s ‘aura’ and totally throwing away the idea of the nuanced experienced with the artwork in terms of the ability to copy and duplicate. The image might end up on a teenagers’ blog in Atlanta, for example. Making everything so plural means that things end up in places where people don't expect, and that’s messy, uncontrollable and even chaotic. I’ve seen things being renamed too, attached to names that aren't theirs.
KP: So do you see that as an opportunity, a positive freedom?
MC: Yes and I think it’s certainly an example where the digital undoes its corporate slickness and becomes something more human, there are loads of mistakes in there. That’s what I meant about it being something that you can make as tactile as other sorts of things, so yes I think it’s a really positive thing, and the clumsiness that’s already there in the context should definitely be something to be used.
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