<h1>Archives</h1>
    conceptual art, contemporary art, media art

    Cory Arcangel, Beat the Champ, 2011

    February 15, 2011

    This post, about art hacks, has almost nothing to do with cultural journalists. It has more to do with a visit to the Cory Arcangel installation at the Barbican and computer hacking.

    Arcangel has taken 14 games consoles and fitted a chip which allows the system to play itself. His coding dictates that the central character in each of the games, all ten pin bowling, always loses.

    Media art as practiced by Arcangel may be new, but the spirit of it goes back some way. You might argue that a famous 16th century painting could contain a skilful hack into our field of vision.

    Modern art is meanwhile full of examples of what you might call hacking. Pointillism found a short cut to the visual cortex. Cubism fixed a few residual problems with perspective. Surrealism cracked the firewall of the preconscious mind.

    And the spirit of sabotage is certainly there in the work of Nam June Paik, whose first show in 1963 featured pianos which had their keys glued together and were otherwise wired up to fail. So this is a tendency which has been in media art since its beginnings.

    Games consoles may not be quite as resonant as pianos, yet. So Arcangel’s history of bowling games is a pretty narrow theme. But it no doubt acquires depth and relevance if viewed from the right angle. Just like that skull by Holbein, in fact.

    Blogger Thomas Schickle offers one such angle with his review of the show and interview with the artist.

    Meanwhile, here’s a glowing review from self confessed fogey of sorts Charles Darwent in The Independent. Here’s a featurette on the show with quotes from Mark brown in the Guardian. And finally,here’s my slightly less enthusiastic review for Culture24.

    Beat the Champ is on show at The Curve in the Barbican Centre until 22 May.

    conceptual art, contemporary art, film art, live art, sacred music

    Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File under Sacred Music, 2003

    February 10, 2011

    Since singer/songwriter Tom Verlaine cropped up in a recent post, it seems excusable to quote him with regards to the subject of this one: a re-staged gig by The Cramps.

    Both emerged from a scene based around New York venue CBGB’s during the mid 70s, but the gig in question was played in 1978 to an audience of inmates at the Napa State Mental Institute in California.

    The event was filmed by Target Video, leading archivists of the punk scene, and on the evidence of this YouTube clip it was a lot of fun. It features the kind of happy, harmless lunacy you get in feature films. And lead singer Lux Interior appears quite benevolent towards his audience – it is after all a free concert.

    In 2003 Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard remade the cult film, drafting in contemporary musicians for a re-enactment at the ICA. Once again the punk community and the mad community, so to speak, were represented in the audience.

    But there are a few striking differences between the two sets of footage. Picture quality is not great in either, but in the new film it appears to be worse. The degradation of the stock might stand in for the passing of time and the mythic haze surrounding the original event.

    Secondly, Forsyth and Pollard have set in motion a much darker, scuzzier performance than the one I saw online. Again, I could be wrong, but this might reflect the myth of that gig and the projections of all concerned, in the same way as the damaged sound and picture.

    And thirdly, the contemporary art duo have produced a backlit poster for their 22 minute movie, certainly an asset which the first film has done without. The earlier version has been distributed through networks of fans and record dealers. This new incarnation has an artworld gloss and seal.

    Which brings me back somehow to Tom Verlaine, who once sang “I recall the actor’s advice/That nothing happens until it happens twice.” In other words, now that someone’s made a film about it, we can say for sure that an infamous gig really did take place.

    As if to prove it, here is that official poster: Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File under Sacred Music (Lightbox), 2004

    File under Sacred Music can be seen as part of Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard: Publicsfear at South London Gallery. It is a really great show and if you can make it there before March 18, do go.

    Here is an early review of the show from Rebecca Norris at Culture24.

    contemporary art, contemporary installation, sound art

    Susan Hiller, Witness, 2000

    February 7, 2011
    Witness, 2000 (Tate Britain Installation shot). Original commission Artangel. © Susan Hiller. Image:Tate Photography/Sam Drake

    Truth, it is sometimes argued, is an effect of discourse. And discourse in this case has given rise to a nebular, eerie-glowing alien life form. You cannot hear it, but it speaks many tongues.

    We realise almost at once this is a sound installation. Those are not tentacles and suckers but speakers hanging from the ends of cables. The voices and languages are all human.

    But the effect is extra-terrestrial. That is even before you tune into some of the narratives and work out they are all eye witness accounts of visits from UFOs or creatures from another world.

    These witnesses do not often get heard. But their speeches are not unlike the on-the-ground tales we might hear down the phone from members of public on the TV or radio news.

    Mainstream eyewitness accounts are given full credibility and help to construct our very sense of geopolitical reality. And of course history and law both depend on this sort of testimony.

    So this far out piece by Susan Hiller raises a serious question: who gets called upon to witness and which scenes get an airing? If overlooked discourse can conjure a living, breathing alien, what else might it call into being.

    Witness can be seen in the Susan Hiller show at Tate Britain until May 15. Read Laura Cumming’s review in the Observer.

    20th century, contemporary art, contemporary sculpture, Uncategorized

    Susan Hiller, Lucidity and Intuition: Homage to Gertrude Stein, 2011

    February 4, 2011

    What could be more uncanny than neat piles of books actually underneath a desk, if not neat piles of books on a decidedly uncanny subject? In this case, automatic writing.

    For Gertrude Stein, to whom this sculpture is intended as a homage, the books represent a return of the repressed. The writer went from experimenting with the technique to denying it existed

    The binder on the work surface contains her postgraduate work on the topic, with an introduction by Susan Hiller. This is the dry, public facing side of the work, the writer and perhaps the artist too.

    But the subterranean library is where you’ll find the action. Suddenly we have colour. Those books give the sculpture a transgressive energy. They fly in the face of reason.

    For me, the most unheimlich thing of all was to notice who gave Hiller her first books about Stein. According to her introduction it was Tom Verlaine. I assume that’s the singer and guitarist.

    His former band Television looms much larger in my imagination than the towering figure of 20th century art and letters to whom this piece is dedicated. Although I probably feel they shouldn’t.

    Ironic that one of my earliest influences should have found its way into this piece about suppressed artistic sources. Not that I would ever disown my love of that whole New York punk scene.

    I wouldn’t want to come home to find a poltergeist had bricked up my desk with records, after all.

    This piece can be seen as part of Susan Hiller: An Ongoing Investigation at Timothy Taylor Gallery until 5 March. See gallery website for more details.

    You might also read an interview with the artist by Rachel Cooke in the Guardian and this piece about the show at Tate Britain in the same paper by Rachel Withers.

    conceptual art, contemporary art, contemporary sculpture, modernism, performance art

    Rory Macbeth, The Wanderer by Franz Kafka, 2011

    February 1, 2011

    Looking at art and reading can seem poles apart. Galleries are public spaces in which we move from one room to another. Reading is usually sedentary and usually in some way private.

    But The Wanderer by Franz Kafka, by Rory Macbeth, suggests otherwise. The title promises a mobile activity, while the reading which took place held many gallery goers in one spot.

    In case you were wondering, this does not represent the discovery of a lost masterpiece by Kafka.That is a home-made book, a translation, and Macbeth claims not to speak German.

    Gregor Samsa crops up, so we may take this to be a version of Metamorphosis. And we may also take it that in every act of reading some translation, or metamorphosis, takes place.

    Of course, reading does get done in galleries. We read plaques, interpretation boards, even the works themselves. But this work suggests it may all stray from the path of intended meaning.

    The modernism of Kafka et al may be to blame. And this may be a warning, given the outcome for his best known protagonists. Wanderings can only go so far, after all.

    NB: That’s not the artist in the photo, but someone he delegated to perform The Wanderer at the launch of Display Copy at Kunstfreund Gallery, Leeds (29/01/11). The show features work by Rory Macbeth and Ross Downes and runs until 12 February. See gallery blog for more details.

    contemporary art, contemporary sculpture

    Urs Fischer, Untitled (2000)

    January 27, 2011

    These two mismatched halves, screwed together and suspended out of reach, bring to mind both the promise and the pitfalls of romantic love.

    First there is the seedy, fruitful aspect of these two fruits pushed together. But then there are the unavoidable differences as they find themselves hung out to dry in a marriage from hell.

    Half this story comes from a Greek myth. It is said human beings once existed in pairs, joined back to back, and that jealous god Zeus cleaved them in two “like a sorb-apple”. Aristophanes tells the tale in Plato’s Symposium.

    The playwright goes on to ask what might happen if, “with all his instruments,” Hephaestus offered to re-attach any two lovers in search of their missing wholeness.

    He concludes: “There is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.”

    So no one can resist the invitation of the god of sculpture. This might explain why life is full of odd couples and why we invest so much in a perishable union.

    But we might yet say that this symbol of youth (apple) and symbol of immortality (pear) were made for each other. They hang in perfect balance and it is reported that as both halves decay they really do appear to melt into another.

    This piece is one of the overseas contributions to Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy. It can be seen there, in varying stages of decay, until7 April 2011.

    Read more about Swiss artist Urs Fischer from Calvin Tompkins in The New Yorker or from Adrian Searle in the Guardian.

    conceptual photography, contemporary art, contemporary sculpture, installation art

    Sean Lynch, DeLorean Progress Report, 2009-10

    January 25, 2011
    DeLorean Progress Report, installation view

    Tooling presses once used to manufacture a dream sports car of the 1980s are now to be found 18m below sea level, a habitation for crabs, sea cucumbers and a lobster. This is not a metaphor.

    A metaphor would be the 1981 commercial for the DeLorean DMC-12 which showed the car by the ocean with both gull-wing doors open. This image dissolved into a shot of an actual gull in flight.

    We have long been familiar with happenings in life which get called stranger than fiction. But this installation is comprised of real world objects which appear more wondrous than art.

    There are photos of submerged cast iron presses, together with crabs, taken by industrial divers. And the stainless steel body parts from a DMC-12 were made by a vintage car restorer.

    Admittedly, both forms of evidence were commissioned by artist Sean Lynch. So the first becomes a conceptual photograph and the second a contemporary sculpture.

    And yet biomarine surveys are conducted in Kilkieran Bay and there are many DeLorean owners who lovingly maintain their vehicles. So the works also display what might be called the poetry of fact.

    You may be wondering why part of a car factory is submerged off the coast of Galway. The fact is, after DeLorean went bankrupt, fishermen were among those who brought up the scrap.

    The presses became anchors for fish farms, which themselves are no longer economically viable. So as you can see from its Progress Report, the DeLorean is going nowhere fast.

    Sean Lynch’s installation can be seen as a possible future in Simon Starling: Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) at Camden Arts Centre, until 20 February 2011.

    You can download a .pdf of the car’s Progress Report from the artist’s website, here. And read an indepth feature on the project written by Kevin Barry in the Dublin Review.

    contemporary art, contemporary installation

    Mike Nelson at Camden Arts Centre, 1998/2010

    January 22, 2011

    Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre – An Introductory Structure: Introduction; a lexicon of phenomenon and information association; futurobjectics (in three sections), mysterious island*, or Temporary Monument *See Introduction

    The full title of Mike Nelson’s work is so verbose there’s no room for anything else in that opening paragraph. It is, like the work itself, overwhelming.

    If I could adequately describe it, Nelson would not have had to make it. Indeed, it has taken him four weeks to say something here, and the results left this visitor speechless or at least thought-free.

    Yet part one refers to a text, the Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. A one page introduction is pinned to a noticeboard in a corridor. The coffee stain on this photocopied page hints at the chaos to follow.

    Part two is an artist’s workshop. This project was borne out of a residency here in 1998. So now we see what his office might have looked like. Reading material by Marx lies alongside a magazine for Mustang enthusiasts,. He jests surely, or does he?

    Moving through another door, we step out into part three. From deep in the midst of this sprawling and towering installation it is hard to get a fix on it. A crackling radio adds to the disarray.

    Stepping away, we see the corridor and workshop from parts one and two have been augmented by a wire mesh coop, a sun deck and three looming stepladders, suggesting a modern Golgotha.

    Among the debris, we notice Mickey Mouse heads with horns, baseball caps mounted as hunting trophies, crash helmets on poles, and a figure captive in a chair. So what is this?

    This, it seems, is Nelson’s Mysterious Island, part Swiss Family Robinson, part hide-out for satanic bikers. This is make-shift civilisation and barbarism side by side. This, clearly, is an artist making themselves royally at home. Trespass at your peril.

    Temporary Monument is back on display at Camden Arts Centre as part of Simon Starling: Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts). It took the artist four weeks to recreate.

    contemporary art, contemporary sculpture

    Damien Hirst, Let’s Eat Outdoors Today (1990-91)

    January 20, 2011

    One way to define contemporary art may be to include anything which provokes the reaction: “That’s not art!” And Damien Hirst is certainly no stranger to this reaction.

    But the genius of this previously unseen work is that when it asks, ‘Why can’t this be art?’ as it surely does, the immediate response is it contains things-we-do-not-want-to-look-at.

    There’s a severed bovine head on the floor of the tank and no doubt tens of thousands of fat black flies. There’s a half eaten barbecue. But people do look at it. They stare for ages.

    Retinal art is back with a vengeance, and it bears consideration that even the first readymade was selected by Duchamp on account of the fact he found the movement ‘pleasant.’

    Hirst demonstrates here that visually appealing art need not even be pleasant. However, the grandeur of the work cannot be denied and even his detractors will be drawn in by the flies.

    Let’s Eat Outdoors Today is a feast for the eyes and this needs to be addressed. It throws into question how we look at art, and the wider world, and what we might be looking for.

    PS: Taking the artist at his word and judging by this interview (with Alistair Sooke in The Telegraph), you might also say this work celebrates the “beauty” of decay and death.

    You can see Let’s Eat Outdoors Today in Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy until 7 April 2011.

    Read Adrian Searle’s review in the Guardian here and Jonathan Brown in The Independent here. Also check out The Daily Mail coverage of Hirst’s piece, always interesting(!)

    contemporary art, futurism, sound art

    Joseph Young of the Neo-Futurist Collective: The End of Listening (ReAwakening of a City #5), 2011

    January 16, 2011

    Here is an urgent response to so-called Neo-Futurism: criticismism feels obliged to vehemently oppose it, although I realise this blog is probably doing a minor service to Joseph Young and his colleagues by doing so.

    Nevertheless, it is to be condemned. The original futurists were seductive right wing agitators who celebrated the advent of World War One and ushered in an era of fascism in Italian politics. Why would anyone want to offer an updated version of that?

    Like their forebears, the Neo-Futurists are keen on avant garde music and manifestos. Their core activities are sound art and knowing displays of self promotion, via both the web and dangerous looking rallies in the streets of Brighton.

    The movement’s avowed aims are to overcome pessimism and futile utopianism. But must it not be said that pessimism has real utility in these late capitalist times and that utopian thinking is never futile. Indeed it is a worse form of pessimism to claim as much.

    The best thing that can be said about Neo-Futurists is that their sound installation at A&E Gallery is by turns amusing and alarming, between 10 minutes and half an hour well spent. I’d recommend you visit or listen in online, only so you know what we’re up against.

    Joseph Young’s show is at A&E Gallery, Brighton, until January 23. See gallery website for more details. Or visit www.josephyoung.co.uk and/or www.neofuturist.org.