<h1>Archives</h1>
    colour photography, contemporary art

    François-Xavier Gbré, Untitled, Tracks Series (2010)

    October 31, 2010

    It appears there was a steel fence preventing access to the rubble. But the barrier has been pulled away and we can now see what perches at the top of the steps: chaos on an epic scale.

    This is an inversion of the expected order, which puts chaos below and clouds and serenity above. It now looks like disorder awaits no matter how much you strive and climb.

    Which of course is pretty much true. Bodies collapse just like buildings. Plans go awry. And after the moment of death, if it is a single moment, things get really out of hand.

    These steps were here before us. Our path has been mapped out in some planner’s office, in which social dreams were pitted against economic realities and clearly fared the worse.

    Look down and you will see they are already littered with hints of what is to come. And that nature has been quick to welcome the demolition of this contingent living arrangement.

    Grey colours the entire scene, which speaks perhaps of bureaucracy and the vague future which, in non metaphorical terms, surely hangs over this neighbourhood of Lyon.

    For now, it is a lost city in ruins. No wonder the authorities here were keen to conceal it.

    Several works by François-Xavier Gbré can be seen in Uprooting the Gaze: Foreign Places Familiar Patterns at The Old Co-op Building, Brighton, as part of Brighton Photo Fringe, until November 14. See Photo Fringe website for more details.
    NB: the glare on this image is not in the original and is the result of me trying to photograph it, badly!

    contemporary art, installation art, kinetic sculpture, sound art

    Ray Lee, Murmur (2010)

    October 27, 2010

    First please allow this bold claim. The appeal of a model train set lies not in the sexual inadequacies of a certain type of man, but in the chance to see a world made of cycles.

    Watching Murmur by Ray Lee puts one in mind of these maligned toys. It has been installed in a basement filled with a mechanical whirr. LEDs travel around on wide aerial circuits.

    There are no trains but, when the main lights go down, it is not hard to imagine planes. With eight or nine sets of spinning arms on metal tripods, it suggests the air traffic of an entire hemisphere.

    But planes and trains are not the only things to circle our planet. Artist Ray Lee is more interested in electromagnetism and other invisible fields. The whirring tripods play music. It is celestial.

    In full flow, murmur is breathtaking. It is a landscape with a pulse. These points of light cannot be stopped and you worry there may be just too much activity. But nothing goes wrong.

    Which brings us back to train sets. These, likewise, never crash. It could be they too are following invisible fields of energy, or possibly that is just what they reveal. No wonder they divide people.

    Murmur can be seen in the show Phase 5 until 27 November as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2010. For more details see the Biennial website.

    contemporary art, Deleuze & Guattari

    Rhizomatic at Departure Gallery

    October 19, 2010

    In most fields of human endeavour, many people put certain people at the top of the tree. But why should a few household names eclipse all contemporaries, precursors and descendants in this way?

    So any attempt to replace trees with a less hierarchical grass-like model of appraisal and influence is to be applauded. Something like that has now been achieved by Departure Gallery.

    Rhizomatic is a group show with more than 200 artists and an open curatorial plan: selected artists were each asked to invite six more artists, who in turn brought in six more, who in turn brought in another six.

    The result is an industrial volume of work, which has been assembled in two vast warehouses on a trading estate in Southall, outside London. The rhizome in action is bewildering.

    There are no maps. You have to find your own pathways through it. You have to look at the work before you see what it is called and who it might be by. Senses guide you, and often waylay you.

    It is even probable, the show sets up lines of becoming, or lines of flight, to borrow some more terminology from Deleuze and Guattari, who supply the show’s name and organising principle.

    Perhaps, in this case, those two can be believed, although philosophy does not really do household names.

    Thanks to Corrina Spencer for my invitation to the PV of Rhizomatic, which came in a decentered way via twitter (@Corr_). Her drawings are worth looking for if you make it out to Southall.

    Rhizomatic is open until 12 November by appointment. See gallery website for address and for more information please contact enquiries@departuregallery.com.

    contemporary art, documentary

    Gillian Wearing, Self Made (2010)

    October 16, 2010
    Ash Akhtar plays himself in artist Gillian Wearing's first feature film

    Compared with art, film has a closer relation with truth. It was a spirit of scientific inquiry which drove the first experiments in taking a rapid succession of still photographs.

    Perhaps the best known pioneer of moving image is Eadweard Muybridge, whose work can now be seen at Tate Britain. Around 1878, by using multiple cameras, he recorded how horses gallop.

    Then there was Albert Londe who worked at the Salpêtrière Clinic in Paris. In 1893 he developed a 12 lens camera for recording fits of hysteria. His serial images were used in early psychiatry.

    More than a century later, cinema is still obsessed with both subjects. The action movie is the most bankable Hollywood genre. Psychoanalysis is still a mainstay for reading films.

    Now artist Gillian Wearing has made a feature film which reveals as much truth as any other you are likely to see. Her documentary Self Made explores the psychology of seven non actors.

    Members of the public were invited to participate in a method acting workshop. The demonstrations of rage, despair, sorrow and alienation are as real as any found in a clinical report.

    Moments of action, which include a stabbing and an assault on a pregnant woman, are thankfully staged. But the film offers a real understanding of the emotional dynamic in such events.

    Of course cinema has its share of artifice and fantasy. Yet Self Made takes us back to the origins of the medium. It is a project of discovery which just happens to entertain.

    Self Made is showing at Vue West End, London, until 21 October: a few more details here. You can read an interview with Gillian Wearing in Time Out here.

    conceptual photography, contemporary art

    Dylan Thomas, Crash #2, Crash #1, Crash #3 (2010)

    October 10, 2010

    If photos of anything, these are of altars. Beyond that it is difficult to say what we might be looking at. The titles suggest compacted blocks of wreckage with few other clues.

    One implication of the recessed alcove and the lighting in these shots is we might still come to worship at the indeterminate objects. These are staged shots with real presence.

    But the chapels are in a bad state of disrepair. So if a god of any sort be here, he is without a doubt “ill,” to quote this bleak poem in translation by César Vallejo.

    As for the altars, they look to have seen one sacrifice too many. The priesthood have given them up out of remorse. It was necessary to abandon them for some reason.

    And in architectural terms all three scenes bring us face to face with a dead end. The series is called Crash. It is hard not to think some disaster must have befallen this religion.

    The possibilities are numerous: World War I, World War II, World War III, or it may be a sad and simple case of a single road death.

    So this is wreckage after all, put forward for our contemplation in a gallery. It has strong aesthetic qualities, and that may be the worst part of it.

    The Crash series can be seen at Grey Area, Brighton, until 23 October 2010. It is part of Brighton Photo Fringe.

    contemporary art, documentary, film art

    Phil Collins, marxism today (prologue) (2010)

    October 7, 2010

    marxism today (prologue) is unelaborate art. If it was on TV you would think it a more or less ordinary documentary, with just one or two creative flourishes.

    Once, the voice of a presenter from East German TV is faded down and music is faded over the top. The track is a bittersweet instrumental in the mould of Stereolab.

    Music is again used towards the end of the film, where library footage is speeded up in a time lapse sequence. Here the shots are of a sports ceremony in the former GDR.

    Documentaries are not meant to bend the facts in this way. By adding these touches, artist Phil Collins offers strange feelings which go beyond the usual interest and empathy of the genre.

    He puts a contemporary spin on the past. The presenter’s words are of less interest now than his ambience. The socialist training regime of the athletes could do with some fast forward.

    Which brings us to the third arty flourish, a tangential title for the film. This is not about the past. The three former East Germans who are interviewed in it are still alive and well.

    Collins keeps his 10-minute prologue short. As the maker of a documentary, he cannot film the future. But as an artist, he can exhibit part of history and make it seem new.

    This film is showing as part of Phil Collins: marxism today at Cornerhouse, Manchester, until 28 November 2010.

    contemporary art, installation art, performance art

    Antti Laitinen, The Bark (2010)

    September 30, 2010

    Around the last corner of his show at A Foundation, you stumble upon this workshop of nature-loving Antti Laitinen. The scene is not filled with charm or wonder, but rather shock and horror.

    Something unexpected and industrial is going on. There are gas cylinders and what look to be tar bricks. Work has suddenly stopped, hence the volume of wood shavings on the floor.

    The boat looks crude. It would do. Its main constituent is bark from the floor of the forest in Finland where Laitinen lives. To make this vessel seaworthy is requiring some violence.

    A week after the show opened, the artist rowed this very boat up the River Mersey for three and a half hours. His trip combines elements of the magical and the manic.

    Perhaps all ecological statements need a little of either. Fairy-like, the trees shed their bark for our use. Termite-like, humans will work with whatever they can get.

    Other works in the show feature the artist digging a burrow into the soil and, apparently, eating ants off the end of a stick. More horror results, but you would have to call Laitinen a survivor.

    The Bark is a new commission by A Foundation and the Liverpool Biennial 2010 and can be seen in Laitinen’s show at the former until November 28 2010.

    You can read more about the artist on the blog Big Fat Failure or the artist’s own website. Here is also a film on YouTube about a previous 19-hour voyage he made in a bark boat.

    contemporary art, installation art, Uncategorized

    Will Kwan, Flame Test (2010)

    September 28, 2010

    Putting out the flags has become the most recognised gesture of welcome in every part of the world. Here we all are, they say, together in our differing categories.

    Seen all at once, they inspire optimism. All these national emblems will fit on the end of a flagpole or a world cup wallchart, so it stands to reason the countries themselves may co-exist.

    Indeed the 36 raised pennants on the outside of the Scandinavian Hotel flutter in the same breeze. On a sunny day, they look more or less the same.

    But the cosmopolitan mood soon darkens. The flags in Flame Test appear to be burning. On closer inspection you realise that each of these nations is guilty, and their guilt makes them distinct.

    Having been printed up from actual press agency photos, the installation brings home how much each of these countries is somewhere hated. It is hard to continue subscribing to the innocence of flags.

    Perhaps we would be better off without our categories, certainly we would be less likely to go to war. Burning one flag is an act of hate. Burning them all is surely an act of love.

    Flame Test can be seen at the former Scandinavian Hotel, Liverpool, until November 28 2010, as part of the Liverpool Biennial. For more details visit www.biennial.com.

    Uncategorized

    Liverpool Biennial/Alfredo Jaar/Wolfgang Tillmans/Jonathan Baldock

    September 26, 2010

    In case anyone is interested, here are some pieces written for Culture24 last week:

    And here is a music review written for News of the World:

    contemporary art, performance art

    Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980-1981 (1980-1981)

    September 23, 2010

    A man enters a room and punches a clock every hour on the hour for 365 days. It is like something from the Guinness Book of Records. The achievement is so athletic it transcends art.

    But there is nothing quirky or sporty about the current exhibition of Tehching Hsieh’s performance. More than 8,000 documentational photographs reveal an expression of unvarying seriousness. He wears a uniform. He does not cut his hair for a year.

    Owing to sleep and other factors, Hsieh misses just 1.52 clock-ins per day on average. The New York artist set out to achieve something both mad and surely maddening.

    By punching the clock with insane frequency he is raising the stakes in the system of labour relations. His performance is a frenzy. It threatens to break the machine, or at least you hope it will.

    No one can look at these timecards and these photos and not wish for some relief for the artist, and a bit of freedom for all those who work long or difficult hours.

    After one year, this record of suffering is all there is to show. But it can still be used, and, unlike our time, it cannot be taken away.

    There is an exhibition about One Year Performance 1980-1981 at FACT, Liverpool, until 28 November 2010. For more details see the gallery website. The show is part of Liverpool Biennial 2010.