2 weeks and a lot has happened, well,
some has happened. It’s mostly been dominated by planning and installing the launch/exhibition
of isthisit? issue 3; It doesn’t take
long to find new targets. Other than that I’ve been trying to make some new
work alongside going to as many shows as I can before going away from London
for a few weeks for Christmas. It’s such an odd feeling, missing a space that I
always end up being tired of after a week or two, knowing that I will and
missing it anyway, wanting to go back for a bit, escaping the ‘buzz’ of London.
I’m sure if I were to go back and look at the posts from around this time in
the past I’d see the same thing; obsessing over time or a lack thereof and just
general distress over the future accompanied by the boredom associated with
moving back to the country for a moment. Isn’t it lovely to reminisce…
So the exhibition, which opened on
Thursday 7th December, is now on until the 16th. I’m there
on the weekends from 12-6pm and it’s open by appointment during the week. I
still hate the invigilating process, since The
Choice of a New Generation I obviously haven’t learned anything. For my
next show I vowed to put on accompanying events, talks, a panel, but right now
I’m just writing my blog in an empty gallery listening to the screams of a
digital prostitute being chased in GTAV. Obviously nothing was learned, even if
this whole experience is a continual learning process in itself! The private
view was of course great, lots of people came and all the physical copies of
the magazine sold out, a fact I’m incredibly happy about, but who else will see
this show? It will leave on in highly edited photographs and be a part of my
portfolio of shows, but has anything actually changed because of it?
Anyway, the show is made up of 16
artists, all work I really like; Marc
Blazel, Elliott Burns, Joseph DeLappe, Jon Haddock, Stelios Ilchouk, Claire
L.Evans, Eva and Franco Mattes, Oliver Payne, Liv Preston, Michael Pybus,
Stefan Schwarzer, Georgie Roxby Smith, Viktor Timofeev, Willem Weisman, Mathew
Zefeldt. The main theme is violence in video games, beginning the show by
encountering Eva and Franco’s Freedom,
quite a naïve piece of work that sees the artists going into the video game Freedom and kind-of trolling the players,
asking for their lives to be spared and questioning the whole experience. Kind
of like taking the high road, a fact that is obviously embedded within the work
and the reason why I positioned it towards the audience as they enter the room.
I remember being shown this work a few years ago by my brother when I wasn’t
into ‘digital’ art, back when I originally began this blog and was making work
about my emotions being carved into wood. At the time, from a ‘gamers’
perspective, I disliked it, wondering why they has chosen Counter-Strike, a
video game about team work and precision timing, rather than Call of Duty, a
game franchise that is heralded as the epitome of first person shooters.
Anyway, I still disagree with the potential thoughts behind the work, or the voyeuristic
position of the artist entering a world and prodding the inhabitants in an
unfamiliar territory, but I wanted to include it in the show as it is an entry
point, it’s how people in general view ‘gamers’, how they’re portrayed in the
media and how the #gamergate movement probably looked from outside of the
gaming bubble. In that instance the naivety and potential ignorance of the
artists I think serves the work well, especially in this environment of fake
news and altered facts. You then end the show with Georgie Roxby Smith’s video
work Fair Game [Run Like A Girl],
which sees the video game GTAV being utilised. The work involves the player in
third person as Franklin, a young black man, chasing down a white prostitute
for nearly 14 minutes until the NPC eventually gets hit by a car. The screen
then fades and the cycle is repeated once again. Having this as an end point
for me takes the show back to thinking about the current socio-political
climate surrounding women and abuse. In the work the player becomes the
machine, never stopping or wavering from their target. Ironically the NPC is
programmed with tiny attributes and assertions, making them appear a lot more
unique than the player. In my opinion it’s an incredibly clever, simple,
considered work that highlights the problems embedded within the game industry.
Anyway, if this sounds interesting to you in any way, come and see the show, on
until the 16th December, or email isthisit96@gmail.com if you want to book
and see it during next week rather than coming on Saturday.
So that’s the show and what it’s about,
the set up took 3 days, realistically could have done it in 1, which is great
to know, but I think 3 is a healthy number to be working with. The piece that
took the most time, effort and money was Eva and Franco’s, which included a
cable tray hanging from the ceiling. It brings the show together beautifully,
splitting the space up into a corridor like experience which I love and will
definitely be using again for my own work at some point. It cost over £100 to
put together over all, and I love the aesthetic and idea of the corporate cable
tray, so it will definitely be made into one of my own artworks in the new year.
I had an intern called Georgina Rowlands and Jim (my brother) helping out for a
day and couldn’t have done it without them, another thing that’s great to know.
The magazines also all looked great,
apart from annoyingly 2 came printed badly, I asked for a re-print, then the 2
extras sent were badly made too! So I asked for another re-print and am just
waiting to receive those. I then promptly sold the 4 badly printed copies,
calling them ‘draft’ copies. They all sold too which is really exciting,
meaning next time I do this I can order more, maybe 75, or 100, although that
would probably be pushing it. We’ll see what happens and what kind of gallery
space I obtain for the next issue’s launch!
What next? In my own art I’ve been
trying to create some new things, no more work has gone into the cupboard idea
or the creation of a new fictitious world, but I’ll get onto that. I have
however built a circular tube-like structure from the plastic cases that the
SIM cards I’d bought for the previous project arrived in. I like re-using the
resources. I then purchased an incredibly cheap drone to work with, to sit atop
this tower like structure, a tower of detritus cast off in order to access the
data that was once stored within, with the drone having SIM cards attached to
it in some sort of weird upper class way. The drone signalling a new
surveillance elite that takes away the resources of the tower block. It kind of
makes sense in a very off way, although I’m not totally sure if I’m happy with
it yet, plus the tower keeps falling apart which makes it incredibly unsustainable.
Although that could be a part of the piece? I need to think of it some more,
and have a week before I leave London, so potentially I’ll have it made by the
time I leave. That would be nice…
I also finally got around to making the
vinyl prints of the portal like works into a reality, taking two MDF boards and
gluing the vinyl to the back of them. They look really nice and slick.
Also in the past few weeks the old text
of mine considering Trump and memes was published again in a book by Stimuli, a
great platform run by Federico Sargentone & Ulya Soley, featuring other
writings by Elliott Burns (who wrote the essay for press release of my show on
at the moment), Matilde Cerruti Quara and Geert Lovink (an amazing writer). So
that’s kind of great!
Another new work I’ve been thinking
about, which is super simple, is turning crypto currency logos into children’s
puzzles, working off of the common idea that everyone seems to know now about
these currencies but don’t understand how they work, or something like that
anyway. I’m still thinking about it. Or maybe it’s about how none of us really
understand the technology, continually being told about how it works in
incredibly simplistic YouTube videos? It’s a work-in-progress that I just need
to print basically. More money…
The last piece of exciting news is that
the Annka show has been announced, which is great! It’s a nice selection of
artists, 3 of which I saw at the MFA shows at Goldsmiths and the Slade. There’s
also an award involved for the show, which is cool; The award recognises the artist that produces the most outstanding
exhibition, as determined by the award’s jury, which will consider interest
shown in the artist’s work, the number of gallery visitors it attracts and the
number of likes it gets on Instagram, as part of its deliberations. The award includes a cash prize for the
winning artist. How exciting, although potentially harmful in pushing you
to make Instagram friendly work! Maybe that’s the fun of it though?
I’ve been having various chats with people
about upcoming projects, a studio request or two, working towards some
workshops in the new year and other things, but they’re just beginnings of
things rather than anything solid right now. I’m still in the process of
planning the online show on isthisit? for the end of this month, very few
people responded to my emails which is kind of annoying, but some did! Enough
to make an interesting show at least! The bulk of the work for that will happen
once I leave London next week.
Aside from that it’s been mostly
isthisit? admin stuff, currently planning next issue, which will be about AI
fitting nicely in with my dissertation plans and for something to publish the
essay in. Oh speaking of the essay, I had an idea to simply film someone’s day talking
to their phone, going about their day, shopping, jogging, cooking, etc, whilst
having this incredibly diverse conversation with a bot that’s residing within
their phone. As if this is a common occurrence and happens on a daily basis, AI
replacing your friends and family basically. But yeah, that’s a future thing,
or something I’m in the process of planning anyway.
If that’s everything, let’s get onto
shows. Although I haven’t been able to visit any this weekend because of invigilating.
I do however have all of next week to wander around London, lots of time to
visit everything I want to see.
Combining Materials at Rosenfeld Porcini
was kind of dull, lots of artists working with the materiality of things, the
weight of random objects, etc. Artists knowing and understanding objects,
probably the word object orientated ontology is being thrown around, something
like that. Yeah? It was okay.
Lost & Found at Rod Barton was
kind of fun, lots of weighty objects, materialistic endeavours and heft. Not
really my kind of work but I liked some of it nonetheless, works by Tom
Volkaert were fun.
James White at Blain Southern was okay,
glass box cubes on the wall with photographs inside? Yeah?
I’m still yet to go to Sophie Jung’s
show there. I went to the PV but it was so crowded that I was unable to get
into the performance. I’ll definitely be going back in the new year!
Arcadia Missa had a solo show with Maja
Čule, basically one video piece that sees a group of figures patrolling a
forest like area, later discovered to be in the abstract wilderness of Central
Park. I dunno, it was okay, I think I wanted to like it more than I did. One of
the fun things regarding the space, the lights had been crammed full of dead
leaves.
Harm van den Dorpel at Narrative
Projects was great, basically artificial selves being created from algorithms
and making art with them. Definitely go and see that.
Yoshinori Niwa at Edel Assanti was
fantastic, performances/videos concerning ideas that are lost in translation
with a political edge. Getting his girlfriend (who doesn’t speak Japanese) to
read out a policy speech made by the Japanese Prime Minister in 2016. Just
really great basically.
Dani Ploeger’s solo show at Arebyte was
also pretty great, basically works responding to trips he’s made to the
Ukraine/all over Europe, visiting fascist groups that combine new and old
technology together, in particular soviet era weapons with iPhone 6’s. The work
in the show responds to this contrasting climate, from iPhone footage playing
on meticulously crafted 16mm film to a real wooden used AK47 handguard, 3D
scanned and put into the game unity. Really great show with a real sense of
dread and despair.
Annd I think that might be it. As I
say, I haven’t had that much time these past few weeks, things have been busy
and it’s very cold outside. Let’s go onto films and TV now, although I’ve been
truly terrible these past few weeks. A severe lack of films have been consumed.
Let’s start with War for the Planet of
the Apes, which was quite brutal actually. It’s (obviously) a continuation
of the recent planet of the apes films, prequels to the original Planet of the
Apes in 1968. In this film we see a particularly nasty human running an off the
grid militia of sorts, rounding up apes and putting them in camps, starving
them and torturing them in horrific ways. There’s a particularly distressing scene
when apes, now pretty much humans as they speak and can think, are being tortured
and abused on a mass scale. It was great but truly devastating.
Next up is Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special,
Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton, a documentary looking at
the behind the scenes of Man on the Moon and Jim Carrey’s descent into madness.
Even though I haven’t even seen the original film it’s still pretty impressive,
watching Carrey transform himself into different characters. It’s fun but very
bleak and disturbing.
The final film, that I’m truly upset to
have watched, was Happy Death Day, a
terrible film that’s basically Groundhog Day but instead of simply waking up
the main character is killed in a series of brutal killings. Terrible acting
and a sort-of predictable plot. Why did I watch it?
And that is literally everything, three
films in two weeks, how dull. Obviously I’ve been watching lots of TV, catching
up on all the regulars, but I just keep being dragged into YouTube videos,
endlessly repeating 10-20 segments of the same repetitive bullshit. I guess it
always feels a lot easier to watch a YouTube video than to find a film to get
involved with… Anyway, I think that’s it for the past two weeks, perhaps. I
didn’t think any more about the screening in Suffolk, so that’s pretty much gone
to shit. I’m going to begin planning the next issue in the next week I think,
concentrating on that, moving forwards and moving on. One final note, the last season of Adventure Time is currently coming out. How sad.
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