<h1>Archives</h1>
    contemporary art, curating, fan art

    Jeremy Deller, The Uses of Literacy (1997)

    March 9, 2012

    You may not think much of this picture and I should point out quickly it is not by the artist Jeremy Deller. It is by an anonymous young person and fan of therein mentioned band.

    But the onetime inclusion of this work and many like it, in a show given over in its entirety to art by fans of the Manic Street Preachers, is a really wonderful thing.

    The Uses of Literacy (1997) demonstrated the ways in which a rock group has served as an “alternative educational resource” for those who consumed their music and press appearances.

    It is hard to take lyrics as seriously as the syllabus for A level English, but perhaps we should. Which of us has not been led from an album sleeve into a bookshop?

    But this was, to be fair, a more common phenomenon in the 80s, when NME journalists regularly dropped references to Kafka, Camus, Dostoyevsky, et al.

    By the time the Manics broke through in the 90s, intellectual pop music was as defunct as the Soviet Union. And it has never really made a comeback.

    Yet fandom, as expressed by a show like The Uses of Literacy, can be expression of more than idolatrous desire. Here it was also once a commitment to bettering oneself.

    And besides, idolatry never did that much harm. One can quite easily see the history of art as a catalogue of fandom: Jesus-worship, Mary-worship, nude model-worship, etc.

    Deller himself is clearly a big music fan. His oft mentioned lack of artistic training means that in some ways he makes work as a fan, rather than an artist.

    This gives his new show at the Hayward an impulsive simplicity, like that in the picture above. “I am a simple man, making simple art for simple people,” he said in a recent BBC documentary.

    If simple art can sometimes be naive art, as this picture shows, then it is also an innocent form of engagement with the world. Bad technique is even a sign of good intentions.

    And only an innocent would tow the remains of a Baghdad car bomb across the United States, as Deller has done for his project It Is What It Is. Who else would have got away with it?

    For that reason I’ll happily go on record as a Jeremy Deller fan. I defy anyone who’s ever had a record collection to see his new show at the Hayward and not be converted.

    Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is at Hayward Gallery until May 13. See gallery website for more details.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 04/03/12

    March 4, 2012

    Some links from the week that was:

    • China Miéville offers a dystopian portrait of London which most will recognise. Can he do some more cities, please? (via @AnnaMinton)
    • Martin Creed, artist behind a redesign of part of Sketch restaurant, tells The Independent he prefers to eat at home.
    • On art-Corpus, there’s an in depth review of the Boetti show at Tate. Sounds like a must see.
    • Rare photo of Andy Warhol having fun on Animal NY.
    • What connects anal sex to space probes? Well, this Geoff Dyer piece for starters. Thomas Ruff also features.
    • Nothing says controversy like a local news report. Take this footage of Sarah Maple and Beverley Knowles, for instance.
    • The gamefication of your 80s angst is here at last with the hilarious Super Morrissey Bros on Sound Cloud (thanks @thebenstreet)
    • The gamefication of neoplasticism can be found on Beautiufl/Decay. Who could have seen this one coming?
    • Nice photo essay about a Paris trip in Pipe magazine. I’m always up for a second hand boat trip on the Seine.
    • Witty interview with a binman from Georgiasam (via @jod45) but I’m not sure who is the real target.

    contemporary art, film art

    Interview: Asheq Akhtar

    February 29, 2012
    Akhtar on location (c) Jo Irvine

    When Asheq Akhtar answered a small ad calling for non-professionals to take part in a film, he could not have predicted the results. After three week’s training in method acting he was out on the streets before a full feature film crew. And no one who saw the movie Self Made will forget his barely scripted attack on a pregnant woman.

    “It was a really hard day in Newcastle,” recalls Akhtar. “It was cold. It was bitter. It was in the same place I grew up in where my mum was abused by this ex boyfriend of hers. So I had all these memories, all this stuff to contend with.”

    And for anyone who needs reminding, he adds “I’d never seen a film crew in action like that. It’s a very challenging environment to work in if you’ve never shot a film before.”

    Plaudits and brickbats for this striking piece of reality cinema have since fallen the way of artist and director Gillian Wearing. And many said that her cast of novices, who all played out challenging psychodramas, were victims of an exploitation flick.

    “When I watched it I thought people are going to read this the wrong way and it was a real worry for me,” says Akhtar, who sounds nothing like a psychopath when we talk on the phone. “I was thinking what have I done. What have I actually done? What are people going to take away from it?”

    But as the DVD release approaches, he advises me the film “takes repeat viewing” to get a better sense of why he might want to play out such a brutal denouement. And a year and a half on from the premiere, he can laugh about the controversy it caused.

    “It’s been a mixed reaction,” he says in a tone of understatement. “It’s very difficult for my family to watch and they were the people I was most concerned about. I had a lot of talks with them about it”.

    Turner Prize-winning artists are just the latest thing his family has had to contend with. “[They] have been through so much: from the days of the partition in India, to the Bangladesh civil war, from migrating over to the UK and there’s been so much history.”

    Some of this may explain the anger in Akhtar’s performance, yet the mild mannered Londoner explains that the final cut of Self Made makes his experience look harsher than it really was. “I found it very liberating,” he says cheerfully, “very enlightening and very interesting”.

    If anything, the worst part were those accusations of cast exploitation. “It’s strange how people never gave us the credit to know what we were doing and know what we were getting ourselves involved in. And I think that’s been the most painful thing.”

    “We just wanted to do something to express ourselves,” he continues. “So someone provided us with an option, with a choice…They asked do you wanna take part in it? Absolutely! We could have pulled out at any time.”

    In fact, the closest art lover Akhtar came to dropping out was when he heard about the involvement of YBA Wearing. “And all of a sudden I was absolutely terrified,” he admits. “I thought why am I even going to go to this audition.”

    But his controversial debut may be the making of a new career. For the next two years he continued classes with the film’s drama coach, Sam Rumbelow. He says now he is a “wannabe, struggling actor”, albeit one who has recently landed an agent.

    “So that was my training,” he says of the chain of events kicked off by the film, “I’d definitely like to be an actor, but it’s not where I envisaged ever ending up at all.”

    Along with his own astonishing performance, the coming DVD offers the chance to watch two of his group’s end scenes, which didn’t make the 90 minute edit, plus a workshop in which all the group reflect on their experience.

    “I look back on those times so fondly,” says Akhtar who is still in close touch with the film’s other stars. “I think we were such different people back then, two or three years ago. It will be interesting to see that stuff now and say, ‘Isn’t it amazing how far we’ve come?’”

    Self Made is out on DVD on March 26. It is available from www.cornerhouse.org and from The Whitechapel Gallery shop to coincide with Gillian Wearing’s upcoming show.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 27/02/12

    February 27, 2012

    My weekly round up of links is back. Sorry if you missed it last week.

    • Ai Weiwei risks everything to give an interview to the FT. Prepare for some vicarious paranoia.
    • Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal visits Tracey Emin. A nice portrait, but you cannot help comparing artist-governmental relations with Ai (via Art Observed).
    • David Shrigley tells Phaidon how he posts eight hour days, six days a week. Although his work could not look easier, he explains it is really hard work.
    • In the New York Times, Roberta Smith gives Cindy Sherman her dues but explains how organisers of her show at MoMA “blinked”.
    • Ever-interesting blog We Make Money Not Art offers a quick guide to the urgent, confrontational work of Santiago Sierra.
    • Slideshow of the week goes to the Smithson, who pull together seven famous photographers who worked with Polaroids.
    • “Absence of density” was my one reservation about Yayoi Kusama at Tate. So I was glad to read this review in which Beverley Knowles defends it.
    • Animal NY get a bit upset about a machine for aging books. It is not as bad as burning them, but still.
    • The Japan Times review the English translation of Land, the Korean answer to War and Peace which runs to almost 1,200 pages.
    • Also on a Far Eastern tip, part one of David Blandy’s anime series ANJIN 1600 can now be seen online at Animate Projects.

    contemporary art, sound art

    Fedora Romita, For Informational Purposes Only (2010/11)

    February 22, 2012

    In all the guidebooks available to Berlin, you are unlikely to find one which recommends making audio recordings of your journeys on the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn.

    But that is the method used by Fedora Romita to orientate herself in a new city. And this results in one CD for each of the five lines U1, U7, U8, S1 and S42.

    The beauty of the work is its minimalism. It was exhibited at the Meter Room with just discmans, headphones, lists of stations, plus a couple of print outs of the network.

    Plugging in to the rumble, PA and chatter of public transport in Berlin and looking down at Midlands buses in the rain, it was easy to imagine yourself 600 miles away.

    (And as a local friend points out sometime later, it so happens bomb-scarred Coventry and the onetime German capital have got some history between them.)

    It comes as a surprise to find that sound provides such a strong sense of orientation. So what appears as a somewhat whimsical exercise is really quite effective.

    Those lacking in imagination or unwilling to suspend disbelief might claim that Romita is just pretending to use scientific method, or doing make believe geography.

    It works though, so you would have to go further and say perhaps this is real geography, or even science, which always requires such an element of fantasy. Without it, information is quite useless.

    This work was seen in The Mobility Project at The Meter Room, Coventry. Show closed Sunday. Check out Romita’s website for sample tracks.

    contemporary art, film art, synaesthesia

    Interview: Daria Martin

    February 19, 2012

    If you can taste these words or see them in colour, you already know about the condition known as synaesthesia which affects 1 in 20 people worldwide. If you can’t, chances are you might like the sound of that, especially if you are an artist.

    “There are a lot of wannabe synaesthetes, including myself, out there,” says Daria Martin. But at the suggestion we may all be afflicted with the condition on an unconscious level, she points out, “you either are a synaesthete or you aren’t.”

    So who can claim to be part of this exclusive neurological club? Martin tells me that Kandinsky, Eisenstein and Rimbaud were all synaesthetes. But then there are the living examples in hew new film Sensorium Tests, including a man who can indeed taste words.

    “Synaesthesia has been described as a cross fertilisation of the senses,” says the American artist. “So historically synaesthesia has been a model of artistic media cross fertilising one another.” In other words, it’s a boon to painters and poets.

    For the rest of us, Martin’s new show at Milton Keynes Gallery may be the most direct way to understand such enhanced perceptions. The centerpiece is the 10-minute film, Sensorium Tests, which also explores a newly discovered variant Mirror Touch Synaesthesia.

    In 2005, scientists first realised that some synaesthetes have a tactile response to images – feeling pain, for example, when they see someone else bang their head. Martin is surely the first visual artist to explore this pertinent field.

    “This new form mirror touch synaesthesia was particularly intriguing because it introduces a social aspect to synaesthesia. It’s dependent on not only one person’s subjective perceptions…but also on how those perceptions relate to social interactions happening in the world outside,” she says.

    One theory of this phenomenon goes hand in hand with the recent discovery of mirror neurons, the nerves cells which may be responsible for empathy and learning. According to Martin, this does imply “how all of us can become social empathetic human beings”.

    But in the newly discovered group of synaesthetes, such cells are “somehow on overdrive or excessive,” says Martin. So “the exhibition presents mirror touch synaesthesia as a starting point to explore the ways images can trigger – from a distance – physical responses” .

    It does so by recreating a 2006 experiment into the condition and focusing on the interplay of look and gesture between the actors playing synaesthetes and scientists. But other films here may also touch the visitor to MK Gallery, featuring playing cards, robots and musical instruments.

    “The ideas in Sensorium Tests are not only about the objectivity of one’s perceptions but also the converse: the idea that objects themselves might have a sort of subjectivity,” Martin has said. In other words, she hopes to suggest “objects can be sentient or animate”.

    When images, sounds, tastes and sensations all bleed into one another, animism is  never far behind. Science may one day have the explanation for this, but until then we’ll always have visual/sonic/tactile/gustatory and olfactory art.

    Daria Martin’s show Sensorium Tests can be seen at Milton Keynes Gallery until April 8 2012. See gallery website for more details. This piece was written for Culture24.

    contemporary art, sculpture, urbanism

    Peter Marsh in Broken Ground @ Phoenix

    February 17, 2012

    A skull in a three dimension grid speaks of death and eternal life. This one belongs to a fox, at an end in physical terms, but which enjoys an afterlife of sorts in a gallery.

    The virtual scaffold which surrounds and appears to support the skull is the product of delicate handiwork. It is cropped quite close to the bone, but gestures towards infinity.

    There’s plenty more this ambient structure might represent: the gallery, the press release, the works shown alongside this piece in the show at Phoenix called Broken Ground, art itself.

    Along with this wild memento mori, artist Peter Marsh presents the skull using x-ray, tomography (the scanning of slices through a 3D form) and maps which reveal the fox’s habitat.

    Indeed, this is an urban fox, not the victim of a hunt. It haunts the city, so we are informed, like a ghost in the machine, a glitch in the matrix or a thread in the urban fabric.

    And perhaps this is why city dwellers tend to like foxes. Because vulpes vulpes has adapted to an environment which has never been planned to accomodate it.

    If the fox can do its own thing, there’s hope for us. Life feels very programmed in the digital age. The structures we inhabit criss cross in the very depths of our minds.

    But mathematical or topographical, such arrangements surely pre-exist the technology which allows us to visualise or reinforce a grid like this. We discovered them; foxes take them for granted.

    Broken Ground also features work by Derek Besant and Jayne Wilson and can be seen at Phoenix, Brighton, until March 25. See gallery website for more details.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 14/02/12

    February 14, 2012

    Not an especially romantic edition of Found Objects this week, but hey ho:

    • It was sad to hear that Barcelona painter Antoni Tàpies has passed away. Check out this obituary and slideshow in the Guardian.
    • Here’s a Tate Shots video dispatch from the Yayoi Kusama PV at Tate. Always good to hear a former rock star doing art crit (and Bob Geldof calls it well, imho).
    • This longform Vanity Fair piece on Lucian Freud harvests quotes from many of those who knew him best to produced a fascinating study of the man (thanks @rosieclarke)
    • Some 43,500 year old paintings have been discovered in a cave in Spain. Brooklyn art blog Hyperallergic catches the buzz.
    • If you don’t already know what a good thing Art Licks has been for the South London art scene, check out this Ideas Tap interview with Holly Willats.
    • Rural France is the last place you’d expect an Ab Ex painter to move to, but Joan Mitchell did just that. Now Art Wednesday carry shots from a show at Hauser & Wirth.
    • Don’t let it be said that artists are standing by while the coalition government dismantles the NHS. Many of them are making work for this tumblr blog.
    • And here’s an even more angry blog about the art world, which you may also find amusing, Moogee the Art Dog.
    • The best Art Thoughtz so far? Hennessy Youngman (aka the Pedagogic Pimp) holds forth on performance art.
    • Oh, and happy Valentines Day!

    archives, black music, community art, contemporary art

    South London Black Music Archive @ Peckham Space

    February 11, 2012

    If we accept the hypothesis that Africa was the cradle of the human race, it follows that black music predates the invention of the archive.

    Yet one of the most compelling aspects of the show at Peckham space is the newness of the exhibits: a Fugees t-shirt, a Cookie Crew album, an Amy Winehouse doll.

    The past few decades are the blink of an eye compared with the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 years which have passed since the emergence of homo sapiens.

    And not even the ancient Greek origins of archiving seem very ancient compared with that. The word comes from arkheion, which was a house of public records.

    One learns from Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida that the arkheion was inhabited by a caste of lawgivers known as the archons. So archives have their roots in law and order.

    Ever one for a spot of wordplay, the French writer goes on to flag up the derived Latin word arca, which would be a chest containing stone tablets.

    Although not quite bearing the weight of chiselled stone, Barby Asante’s show in Peckham does boast a meticulous and fairly gravitational cataloguing system.

    It’s best not to explore much further here the differential meanings of arca, which comes to stand for a cupboard, a coffin, a prison cell, a cistern or reservoir.

    But aside from the dusty world of entymology, the title of this show surely resonates with the legendary studios of dub producer Lee Scratch Perry, the Black Ark.

    Perry’s Ark was certainly in some senses arcane. And if anyone can clue me up any further about the origins of the name of this studio, I’d be grateful.

    A Google search reveals dozens of black history archives, only not so many devoted to music. The art form is not an easy one to seal up via folder, file card, or box.

    South London Black Music Archive can be found at Peckham Space until March 24. See gallery website for more details. I have also reviewed this show for Culture24.

    contemporary art, installation art, Pop Art

    Yoyoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963)

    February 8, 2012


    As if to save those analysts the bother, Yayoi Kusama has already labelled Aggregation as part of her Sex Obsession series. She describes the white growths as so many phalluses.

    So you might see her boat as a metaphor for the conscious mind, floating above unconscious depths. Except here, the mind has been overrun by erotic symbolism.

    Not only has the rower lost control, she has vanished, leaving behind a single shoe. Her sexualised world view appears to have swallowed her up.

    At the risk of pathologising, this work could well dramatise one of the breakdowns which have kept Yayoi Kusama resident in a mental hospital since the late 1970s. Certainly, it is frightening.

    Whatever the artist’s actual condition, one might employ a phrase once suggested by psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He called schizophrenia a “theatre of terror”*.

    And this trauma scene is theatrical. The scene is wallpapered with images of the boat. So the boat itself contrasts with its diminished image and appears live and auric**.

    The other protagonists worth mentioning are Donald Judd, who helped Kusama salvage the boat, and Andy Warhol, who three years later was to follow her lead and produce wallpaper.

    Such decorative repetition might also draw medical attention. But you can be sure it has nothing to do with the boat, and everything to do with what might be in that dark water.

    Aggregation can be seen in Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern until June 5 2012. See gallery website for more details. References: * cited in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; ** idea explored in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.