Many
things have occurred this week, from going to a variety of exhibitions and an
artist talk to progressing forwards with my own works. I feel that it’s been a
good week, steadily moving closer to the end of term with projects coming
together and the last delights of London being used to their full potential.
In
terms of my own work, I’ve begun to transform the data works into more
substantial sculptures whilst also enhancing the relational aspect of the work.
This has manifested in the form of forcing multiple blocks (or monoliths)
together to create a wall/tower of some sort. This within itself is simulating
the form of a data tower or cell tower where data is communicated – personal and
impersonal – between different sets of people. I also installed an external
charger within one of the blocks which allows participants of the work to
charge their devices whilst they interact with the work. This slightly reminds
me of Alex Dordoy and his work Consumer (MacBook
Pro) where he embedded a MacBook pro in a plinth-like structure. I think
that this a really interesting progression, moving from the individual bricks
on the floor to the delicate yet strong tower that holds a range of private
information. By adding external charger to the work I feel that it gives the
viewer an incentive to investigate what’s going on, even if it is to simply
gain free electricity.
I
did experiment a little with adding colour to the assemblage/sculptural works,
but it slightly took away from the dull/raw aesthetic of the objects. And who
wants to paint anything anyway?
After
a lot of thought this week I’ve decided to simply use one image/video per USB
stick. This is a direct reaction to how I’ve been feeling about stealing people’s
data, dirty and uncomfortable. I hope to rectify this by using someone else’s
picture that functions as if it could be mine, or anyone’s; a ‘traditional’
image, if that’s the right word. The video/photograph that could be from anyone’s
collection, one that doesn’t actually identify any of the individuals that are
caught on the camera but simply embodies your own experiences, or, in
actuality, my own. To say ‘everybody’s experiences’ would be entirely wrong,
maybe ‘every middle class person’s experiences’ for lack of a better explanation.
These clips are chosen because of the affinity that I have to them and the
mixture of private/public inherent qualities that are present within them.
People will still be very welcome to add/take away/delete files, but now there
will only be one per USB to view. Although the lack of files within the
different USBs will definitely discourage participants from adding to the work,
I think that this is a small price to pay to feel better about robbing people
of their data. Although information is
beautiful (David McCandless) it is also cheap and easy to get a hold of,
something that Constant Dullart makes clear through his piece High Retention, Slow Delivery, where he
bought over two million Instagram followers, distributing them to a range of
prominent people in the art world.
In
this last week of uni I hope to make two more of these towers, to re-reference
the three monoliths in 2001, three monoliths made up of many monoliths within
themselves. To have created three would also be interesting in terms of
installing the work for next terms offsite shows, as they would affect the way
in which one explores the space, slightly mimicking Jack Brindley and his
installation Untitled (Handrails).
This work forces you to navigate the exhibition space in an unnatural way, simulating
the ‘digital shepherding’ that occurs on the internet. I like this concept,
even though at The Ryder the installation didn’t really force me to walk around
it in a distinctly ‘different’ way. I do like the concept though, that is
intriguing. A concept that I may choose to appropriate as my own.
In
terms of my screenshot assemblages, I’ve been making ‘leaps and bounds’ this week.
I moved away from the idea of hanging the fabric from two television mounts, as
that felt too literal, too obvious – it’s already a screengrab of a screen, I
don’t really need to make it even more evident by hanging it from the mounts.
Instead of this I decided to use camera tripods, which brings the concept back
to surveillance and the voyeuristic nature of surveillance in general. I’m also
a big fan of Rear Window, and even
though James Stewart never uses a tripod in the film, I still think it’s relevant
to the work – someone being able to see everything but do nothing. Kind of like
everything really.
I
also had one of my images printed out fairly large onto paper, just to see how
it would work. I really enjoyed how it turned out and seemed to work a lot
better than the canvas works did. Although I can now look back at the canvas
pieces as a failure, I feel that I can still incorporate them into the
installation, be it by showing the progress/process that occurred in the lead
up to the ‘final piece’ or for another purpose entirely. I have vague plans for
the ‘test’ large scale image, maybe crumpling it up into a corner or something similar…
As of this moment I’m unsure of how to proceed.
I
also made some progress with the collaboration this week. I began to combine
the various videos that Laila and I have been creating, making a sort-of
narrative. This is what I have so far, which is in itself the very beginnings
of a thing. I am thoroughly enjoying working in a collaboration though, sharing
thoughts and being honest about the work that you both create for one another
is an interesting experience. The very monotonous scrolling through of the 3D Warehouse
reminds me a lot of Camille Henrot’s Grosse
Fatigue and parts of Lucy Clout’s Warm
Bath that partly features various videos of a man filming a drainage ditch,
twice a day, every day. The repetitive nature of this is overwhelming to say
the least, something that we may (or may not) be attempting to reciprocate in
our own video piece.
As
well as this I made an incredibly didactic film about bitcoin. It’s basically a
compilation of various YouTube videos, each of them attempting to explain what ‘bitcoins’
are, how they’re used, etc. These videos act as voiceover to the ever spinning
bitcoin coin that’s on the screen. This isn’t quite a ‘finished video’ just
yet, but will become one soon. The idea initially stemmed from encountering
people who didn’t actually know what bitcoins were, which blossomed into this
un-interpretative, extensive and repetitive way of informing people. The video is
around two hours long and will (hopefully) be incorporated into my installation
for the offsite show. This concept of an assemblage that I’m playing around
with in both of my projects at the moment was best summed up this week when I
saw an installation at the Cabinet gallery produced by Ed Atkins. It was
basically four different things placed in a room, all responding off of one
another. It formed a collection of sorts. The compilation aspect from my video comes
back to what I was thinking about a few weeks ago, where every artist has to
make a compilation video during their life, whether they like it or not. I
think that this ‘bitcoin compilation’ is a much better idea than my previous
one, collecting all the times where someone in a film says the films name. This
new concept is a lot more suited to what I’m interested
in and a little less basic and ‘BuzzFeed-esque’. In a video piece by Louis
Judkins, the different production companies of various films keep popping up in
an endless cycle, which leaves the viewer to wait for a film that will never
start. This is an example of an idea that was better than my own, with ideas
surrounding capitalism built into the work from the ground up. Unfortunately I'm yet to upload a more 'up to date' version of my film, so you'll have to make do with a very early version.
Oh and I
also started a new project; buying different domain names and having them
re-routed to my own website, creating a ‘domain dynasty’ if you will. For the
moment I’m collecting names that are very similar to the most used sites on the
internet, like Facebook or YouTube. I think that this is an incredibly humorous
way of ‘claiming’ various parts of the internet as your own. I hope to continue
to accumulate these domain names, adding to the piece over time. This comes
back to the idea of data being cheap and easily gotten, buying your way to ‘fame’.
I had my
last lecture of the term this week, which was looking at The Emancipated
Spectator and Jacques Rancière. Although it was an interesting talk about the
viewer and emancipation, I’d already read a lot of the books mentioned,
including T.E.S, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectatorship and The Society of the Spectacle. So it was more of a re-hash
than a presentation of new ideas/information.
On Tuesday
the artist talk was actually good at Chelsea, after two weeks of not going
because it was literally figurative painting it was a relief that the artist,
Colin Priest, was in fact interesting. Lots of his work was centred on interacting
with the community of a given place, gaining commissions and being invited back
for more. This way of working, coming into a community as an outsider to create
something that’s personal to a location reminded me of a lot of different
artists, but in particular it made me think of Spotlight and all of the things that was said of ‘the new boss’ of
the newspaper, coming into a place as ‘a Jewish man who doesn’t like baseball’ –
‘shaking things up’. I did enjoy the series of installations that he created
under the title Flash Fog, where he
built an environment for people to manoeuvre through and interact with, but I’m
unsure if the idea of the commission is something that entirely interests me;
it feels very commercial, an incredibly obvious thing to say.
We also had
a lot of discussion this week focusing on the offsite shows, and even went to
see the exhibition space that we were able to secure. The space is quite
awesome, with white walls and concrete floors, and big enough to house us all,
located in Dalston. We’re slowly moving towards an overarching theme for the exhibition,
which was helped further by having the discussions surrounding what to do for the
essay with the same people from my exhibition group. This is another aspect of
my week which went well, finding a (loose) title for my essay; when did the
future become a dystopia? How technology and the internet is viewed in today
society. This is, as I say, a ‘starter title’.
I also went
to various exhibitions this week. I feel that this term I’ve probably been to
less exhibitions but have been a lot more careful about which exhibitions I’ve
actually been to. This ‘quality control’ has saved me a lot of time from going
to galleries filled with paintings but has used up a lot more time researching
the different spaces and the different exhibitions that were occurring in each.
During the
week I went to a range of second year offsite shows, with a variety of results.
It was more of a relief than anything, seeing how bad (or how good) different
people’s work was. It’s kind of obvious really, but comforting nonetheless. The
only work that I really loved was the video piece that I already mentioned that
had been created by Louis Judkins.
In terms of ‘professional’
shows I went to the Photographers Gallery, which was incredibly dull and
disappointing as usual. The only highpoint was the Media Wall, which featured a
variety of videos using PowerPoint, considering the platform as a place to
create work, which was interesting. Another – small – enticing element was the
interactivity of the slide projectors on the second floor. You were allowed to
turn them on after they had turned off after a certain amount of time. How exciting…
I then went
to Pilar Corrias which was showing a film by Rirkrit Tiravanija called Chew the Fat. I haven’t seen a lot of
his work, apart from the relational stuff he’s most known for, so it was
refreshing to see this video piece, discussions with artists and collaborators
about their practice and what interested them. As I was right next door, I had
to go into Carroll/Fletcher again, which was as good as it was the first time I
visited Neoliberal Lulz. I’ve also heard that Eva and Franco Mattes will be having
another show their soon, which is a truly exciting prospect.
Raven Row
was next on the list, with a retrospective of Channa Horwitz’s work. The
details within the assortment of works was incredibly precise and elegant, but –
to me – it had no real substance. The colourful lines were fun and
aesthetically pleasing for the eye. From there I went to the Cabinet Gallery,
which had the aforementioned Ed Atkins assortment of assemblage. I did enjoy
the use of the live Sky News broadcast. I’m very wary to whether or not you’re officially
allowed to use such a thing as the connotations are so broad. I did enjoy the
whole production though, in a stand-offish way.
I then
walked to Modern Art, which had a group of sculptures accompanied by music, a
collaboration between a poet and an artist. It was the kind of work that I
might have loved a year ago, but now, not so much. The use of ‘live’ wax did
remind me of Urs Fischer and his installation of continuously melting wax
sculptures at the Venice Biennale in 2011, a work that I loved at the time.
After Modern Art I travelled to Beers London, for a show dedicated to some
quite dull paintings… Studio Leigh had some cool glass sculptures which were
hung from the ceiling elegantly. It was more technically impressive than
anything else.
Carl
Freedman was next, which had work by Tori Wrånes being shown. The performance work
(from looking at images online) seems amazing, whilst the
sculptures/installations/paintings that are left over are not as exciting. I
did enjoy some of the subtler things happening in the exhibition, an always-spinning
cross embedded in a painting as well as paintings embedded within beanbags.
Both intriguing elements. From there I went to Kate Macgarry, which was pretty
much glorified pottery. This was the same for Betty Woodman’s exhibition at the
ICA, So many fucking pots. Since when did pottery become art? Did I miss the
memo?
After that I
went to the Laura Bartlett gallery, which Becky Beasley turned into a sort of ‘mini-retrospective’
for herself. Taking old pieces and re-working them, using the space to try out
new ideas interwoven within old artworks. I didn’t really like the work, but I
enjoyed the idea of re-working old work and doing so in a gallery setting. I’ve
already talked a little about the Ryder gallery, which was really quite good,
work about the internet that wasn’t being shown on a screen. This small show
gets a thorough recommendation from me. Campoli Presti was on the same stretch
of road so I went there, and, to my surprise, paintings were being shown.
Exciting.
Union
Gallery came next, with a very well put together idea by Liam Scully, taking
all of his meta-data from Facebook, reclaiming the data that’s stolen from you
by Facebook every day. The drawings that occurred on top of the data wasn’t
really my thing, very simple childlike drawings, but I enjoyed the concept
enough that they weren’t too much of an issue. Another good exhibition was Iain
Ball at Cell Project Space, considering the relationship between being shown a
space and being inside that same space. It consisted of a video of a
constructed space which was accompanied by the space in real life at the
gallery. This duality, between the screen and real life space reminds me of Nam
June Paik’s very simple and brutal work titled Three Eggs, where a real life egg is monitored by a camera and
transmitted live to a nearby monitor. I find these concepts and considerations
very interesting.
Seventeen
gallery had a show of paintings, where some of them were actually good, curated
by Gabriel Hartley and Rhys Coren. I remember Hartley giving a talk at the
beginning of this term which was vaguely okay, vaguely. I don’t know whether I
consider them to be paintings, but Letha Wilson had some work there, which is
always good to see. I’m a big fan of the embedded images, especially when they’re
incorporated within the space. The final gallery of the week was Limoncello,
which had a film (that I’ve already mentioned) by Lucy Clout, whose work I
actively like and want to see more of. This is discouraged by the lack of an
internet presence, which is always annoying.
I’ve also
consumed a number of films this week, starting with The Wind Rises and Ponyo,
beautiful films from the genius that is Miyazaki. After watching all of his
films now, I still think that Spirited
Away may well be his best. Mad Dog
Time was this week’s choice for film club, which was a very weird and
humorous experience. Definitely not a film that I would have seen of my own
accord, which is obviously a good thing. Watching Freedom Downtime just made me slightly depressed and reinforced how
fucked prisons and the legal system is. Strange
Days was interesting, and reminded me a lot of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The concept of ‘plugging in’
to a space was explored a lot better in Cronenberg’s film, the classic ‘gross
parts’ of Cronenberg’s films are always delightful to watch.
I wanted to
watch many of the Coen Brother’s films, as I decided that I hadn’t seen enough
of them, so I watched Burn After Reading
which was hilarious and great, then Raising
Arizona which was more fun than anything else, then Inside Llewyn Davis which I wasn’t that fond of. It missed the dark
undertones of a classic Coen Brother’s story for me.
Thelma and Louise was next, which is always good
to watch now and again. I went to the cinema to watch In Praise of Love (Éloge de
l'amour) which was a mind-fuck of a film. I literally have no real idea
what happened, it started with a documentary about a painter for some reason
and then the film started again with the title card! I was outwardly shocked
and worried about what kind of film I’d come to; I have no idea what happened.
The accompanying text slightly helped, but it still felt slightly impenetrable
to me. Maybe my mind is too dulled by popular culture to understand the true depth
of Jean-Luc Goddard’s films. 99 Homes
was an interesting side dish to The Big
Short and Margin Call whilst The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (my
final film of the week) was as dull as part one.
Umm, I think
that’s my week.
The seven
days that lie ahead are going to be full of admin things, showing the work that
I’ve made this term to a group of my peers and filling out various forms. In a
week I’ll be in New York City, which is exciting, gorging on all the art that
is going to be available to me. I’ve been researching a range of galleries,
with Laura Poitras’ exhibition at the Whitney being a highlight, alongside many
others. I thoroughly look forward to it.
Enjoi.
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