daniadmiss

Don't Fight it, Feel it

2012-01-20T07:48:00.000-08:00

Come Together

2012-01-20T07:02:00.000-08:00

A Plea For Tenderness, curated by David Raymond Conroy

Sally-Ginger Brockbank, Hal Hartley, Andy Holden, Sean Landers, Paul Lewis, Lee Lozano, Jonathan Richman, Jiri Skala, Carey Young

Seventeen Gallery

I hold a genuine appreciation for a will to counteraction, to show the world up as being not what it really is. Moreover, it is a difficult task to unravel this process of negation, revealing the equilibrium that it operates in at the same time displaying the residues of its actions to reach this pure undoing. A Plea For Tenderness is and consists of, a collection of such attempts. The exhibition posits two assumptions: irony and sincerity and all that lies in between. Writing in the press release artist and curator, David Raymond Conroy, opens with the lines ‘I want to make a show that tries to illuminate the space that exists between sincerity and irony, or between apparent honesty and the techniques used to convey or convince people about the truth of what they are being told.’

Handled with the utmost care and precision there are no real objects in this show. Instead there are subjects, whose performances manifest in a cacophony of self-evident, self-constructed and self-obsessed melodrama of identities. Each is caught, one after the other, in an existentialist crisis between two opposing factions and in one all-consuming snare. We are asked to question, the legitimacy of the roles these actors are playing and the meaning behind the uncertainty of not only theirs, but everyone else’s will to believe.

The sound of a gallant Sean Landers dominates the upstairs space with his composition, The man within, 1991. Landers’ words of incitement, amplified by the rousing melodies of an American anthem are part of a larger economy of deafening self-promotion. The work is split between, his frenetic enthusiasm, which borders on a type of personality disorder and a self-aware description of the preposterousness of his interior self, depicted in the works title. A little more nuanced is the ease with which the work sits within the conduits of a proclaimed American identity and which ultimately reveal a type of uneasiness at the core of the work.

In contrast, at the other end of the gallery sits Carey Young’s video, I am a Revolutionary, 2001. Made a decade later, her unnerving nature circumscribes her demeanour and overrules her attempts to embody this polysemy. Dressed in a conformist black business suit and set in the empty room of an office-block Young is struggling, despite the presence of a coach, to get through her lines. The backdrop of transparent glass looks out onto other offices and magnifies the potency of Young’s work, which lies not in the inherent irony, or futility of the actual turn of phrase that she is repeating, but rather that it is difficult to make any concrete judgement on which of the many contexts the phrase exactly operates on. Both Landers and Young’s works sit metres away from one another, but paradigms apart in terms of a conduct of a system of self-belief. It is these two utterly different spaces that each piece occupies to make relative commentary on the same thing, which makes language and more precisely an articulation of language so much about a sense of freedom that course through most of the works in the exhibition.

A strength to A Plea For Tenderness is that it finds fruition in languages inability to precisely locate and sustain a place for meaning. An example of this is in the relationship between the works of Lee Lozano and Laurie Parsons. Both pieces are painstakingly understated, in fact Laurie Parsons ‘lack of work’ is only represented in the exhibition through her absence, reflected by a gap in the list of works between exhibits no.2 and 4 and is one of a few subtle acts of trickery that run throughout the show. Lee Lozano’s General Strike Piece, 1969, is displayed as an incongruous couple of paragraphs on a page of A4. The text outlines Lozano’s plans on how she intended to withdraw from the art world and this distance is exasperated by a series of further removals; her words are reproduced from a book made of a magazine in which they were originally published. This seemingly submissive style of representation requires a sense of dedicated curiosity to uncover not an act of disappearance as one may think, but rather a downward spiral of consistent questioning. It motions to a pre-occupational hazard particular to artists and their ego’s - how to present themselves to the world? Rather than a heavy-handed attempt to uncover the artist’s identity, Conroy chooses to represent them with an apparent ‘tenderness’ reflecting their wish to anonymity. This rhetoric of disappearance echoes 70’s conceptualism and one cannot help but think that the level of detail of this homage is a deliberate attempt to question the premeditation associated with any humble gesture made by artists the world over.

Sally-Ginger Brockbank’s creative prose is also subject to subtle placement, found under a desk lamp in the darkened space downstairs her photocopied essay performs, ontologically, a ritual of simultaneous commonality and singularisation of self-recognition. This stream of consciousness touches on the conflicting interior landscape of a flickering, reciprocal showing and telling of one’s identity and draws equally on a sense of alignment as it does expose itself as part of a Western process of ‘othering’. In this way Brockbank can be seen to be speaking of a type of détournement about the regard of authenticity and opens up Conroy’s curatorial intentions - illustrating that perhaps, in this show, he has found a balance, locating a common sense of self through others work and typifying this as a form of universal pursuit.

In a further manifestation of the textual nature of A Plea for Tenderness other linguistic couplings are at play, counterbalanced by the presence of something that punctuates, or puts into question this cyclical unity. For instance, US identities surface repeatedly seen in the works of Hartley, or Holden, who use the heightened language of Hollywood cinema to reinforce a type of earnest and heartfelt vigour. Holden’s manifesto, MI!MS, 2012, calls for ‘Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity’. Typically understood as originating from certain aesthetic, political, historical and namely European traditions Holden has taken the format of a manifesto and embellished it with a highly stylized cinematic language that today has come to be associated with an act of deception. This is one of the many deeds of seduction Conroy has placed throughout as a cultural marker of sorts. What works particularly well in the exhibition is the ‘othering’ of space, illustrated by the works of Jonathan Richman and Jiri Skala. Richman, because although he is added to the list of works on the press release his music is not actually in the show, just interviews of him talking about his work – the part where his songs play have been cut. Skala, because Foreign Bodies, 2011, is the only video to gesticulate to the relationship between irony and sincerity ‘outside’ of a paradigm of self-reflection. Instead it references an actual geographical location, Brno in the Czech Republic, rather than purely an identity associated with a certain territory.

If you are aware of the work of David Raymond Conroy it is hard not to see his-self inscribed in A Plea for Tenderness. In this manner the exhibition is not just an extension of his work, but is the work itself, as it is part of a trajectory that further compounds a problem between perception and experience. Once a meaningful message has been spoken, acted, written, or performed all that we are left with is what people are trying to say about the relics left behind from a particular social consciousness. This line of thought compliments the feeling of nostalgia exuded by the exhibition, everything in the gallery space feels like it comes from yesterday, but not quite from a time that has fully past. This can be seen everywhere; in Hal Hartley’s nubile 90’s American protagonists, in Andy Holden’s manifesto, in the MTV-esque footage of Jonathan Richman, in the emblematic American harmonies of Landers sound piece, or in the thrice reproduced words of Lee Lozano’s will to dematerialize.

Maybe this question is just a bypass to a more deeply rooted enquiry that defines Conroy’s practice - that each work, which he has quite beautifully selected as being irreducible into the many other things that we are surrounded by, for the reason that they are (un)knowingly sincere about being ironic. This is part of a wider story about the infinitely complex interplay of gestures that are all part of a setting that tell us how the world works. What this sense of allegiance implies is that albeit, we may be lost in hermeneutics, but we are not alone in this. Then again, walking out of the exhibition, once the music has ebbed away and the film credits have ended I am back in the wider world and can’t shake the feeling that much of the shows success was because of my readiness to be part of the story.

Still Remains: A classic that survives reinvention

2011-12-19T14:38:00.000-08:00

In January 2005 Gene Kelly appeared on our television screens with a reinterpretation of his original classic Singing in the Rain. He walked along the same street holding the same umbrella and possessed the same asphyxiating smile. He had the same build, wore the same clothes and appeared, for a brief couple of seconds, to adopt the same swagger, the same gait, the same steps. The song then slides effortlessly into a remix and the original dance is replaced with an updated version; a reflection of the times we found ourselves in then. The commercial was devised by the advertising firm DDB for Volkswagen’s (VW) new Golf GTI and followed the brief: a classic that survives reinvention[1]. DDB had the set and costume arduously reconstructed along with a meticulously choreographed performance, a conscious development of every gesture Kelly had originally made. Whilst the illusionary dancer David Elsewhere, recently made infamous by a viral video demonstrating his extraordinary body-popping skills[2], carefully and in a controlled way brought to life the phrase ‘a classic that survives reinvention.’ As the advert comes to a close, Elsewhere addresses the Golf, tipping his hat towards the car in a mutual recognition of exchange. Both survived the reinvention of time.

The advert has played on my mind recently. It is not my aim in this text to describe the public reaction to the commercial, nor is it to cite it within an expanded field of anthropology, technological shifts, or even digital culture. Instead, I am concerned with its refusal to be incorporated into a broader cultural synecdoche, as part of a larger act of assimilation into the past. Because it won’t easily embed itself into this mélange of mediated artifacts, because I am unable to fully grasp its repercussions, rather than it’s intentions, is precisely why I do not want to decode it in this way.

As an alternative, let us look to Foucault’s essay on the Diego Velazquez painting ‘Las Meninas[3].’ Foucault’s essay was deemed radical not through it’s decoding of sociological, or ideological systems, but as a carefully constructed analysis of representation as a system of power. In the words of Craig Owens, Foucault is ‘interested less in what works of art say, and more in what they do[4]’. It is a performative reading, which shies away from interpreting works of art, as ‘if to interpret them is to assign them a meaning.[5]’ In this, now perhaps traditional approach, I want to talk not about what that advert says, or does, but what has ‘been done’ to Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain. As what has been done to it may offer a potential insight into why I find the re-using of historical material both alluring and troubling against a backdrop of shifting boundaries in our approach to the historical.

So, what has been done to Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain? It has been replicated so that in many ways it is entirely faithful to the original, but Kelly and his signature dance moves, have been hollowed out and replaced with a newer model, David Elsewhere. Inside of Kelly a process of re-inscription has taken place - he has been re-written. As viewers, we are presented with a replica of the context, whilst the content has changed, ultimately altering its form.

This is similar to a manufactured product, such as the Golf GTI, which is constantly being revised, honed, or worked on, most likely inspired by an earlier edition, a different model, or another car. The process is constantly being subject to a series of revisions, framed by the considerations of usability, safety requirements, efficiency of performance etc, but the car, in some way, still remains. The advert exemplifies this thinking, we still recognise Kelly even though his demeanour and gestures are different and it illustrates this by association, despite the many reincarnations of the car the idea of it still persists. Beyond mass manufacture and reproducibility the Golf GTI actively displays an ethnographic present; a perception of time, described by Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, as condensing past, present and future into a continuous present.

‘Whatever is presumed important about the past is assumed to be making itself felt here and now.[6]’

What has been done to Gene Kelly then, can be more widely associated with how we come to narrate history today. In The Shape of Time, (1962) George Kubler describes certain objects in time as being able to be defined by terms of sequences, rather than as series’, or other chronological models. He goes onto ask, ‘where are the boundaries of a formal sequence? Because history is unfinished business, the boundaries of its divisions continually move, and will continue to move for as long as men make history.[7]’ As Kubler points out, viewing time in terms of sequences - an ordering of certain elements without summation, is subject to the continual development of history. History is forever unfinished precisely because it is a social process.

How can things survive time then? What is the meaning of their survival? What still remains?

Looking at it from a another vantage point it is just as relevant today to ask how do we structure a discourse around historical thinking? Speaking in ‘The State of Design History,’ (1989) Clive Dilnot attempts to chart the topography of Design’s past. At the time of writing Dilnot was still grappling with the legacy of modernism in design and increasingly aware that we can be defined as a ‘designed society’. In relation to how to position design history within this, as something that straddles the realms of both the social and the professional, he questions what should the debates of this discourse involve?

“Context depends on definition, which in turn depends on context. The process is circular: The way one segment of the problem is defined determines the answer for the other.[8]”

Dilnot is highlighting, by questioning the use of terms, the location of meaning; which requires the combination of context and definition for it to be translated and reinserted back within a discourse, such as history. If we view the revised version of Singing in the Rain through these positions, we start to see why breaking this cycle between definition and context is unsettling. I am not interpreting the remixed Gene Kelly to find his ‘place’ within history, but instead looking at what has been done to Kelly as an example of how we use the historical to define a location of meaning through representing the past. In a similar way to Foucault’s demonstration that representation is not neutral I am keen to expose history as using methodological instruments to forge a system of representation.

The advert is telling us that the Golf is ‘a classic that survives reinvention’, but what does this also say about how we use historical thinking today? With the above three sources in mind we can see that certain artifacts of history remain because of our active, present understanding and this understanding is forever shifting. The VW advert cites a present dance star, David Elsewhere, inside an icon of the past, Gene Kelly. This illustrates a certain type of active social process, which plays with the current systems of historical representation.

To clarify this point, let us think about how we record the immediate past today, by way of aggregated feeds, newsreels and mediated video updates. These do not present us with the meaning of the event, in fact quite the opposite, providing us purely with a commentary of what happened, over and over and over[9]. When we actually see the event in real time, does this not open up the notion of a closed historical event as having a beginning, middle and an end? VW, rather than re-playing Singing in the Rain, re-designs it. Stitching together elements to create a sequence, which represent an artifact that is implicitly involved in providing a continuous contextual present. As Kubler eloquently writes,

“The Shapes of time are the prey we want to capture. The time of history is too coarse and brief to be an evenly granular duration such as the physicists suppose for natural time; it is more like a sea occupied by innumerable forms of a finite number of types. A net of another is required, different from any now in use.[10]’

This poses a question about what happens to the past, when Kelly’s dance becomes part of the present? By inserting Elsewhere inside of Kelly, not in purely spectral terms, but rather through the activity of embodiment, Elsewhere has literally been inscribed within Kelly, altering the way that we interpret Kelly’s surface. In this way the advert shows both that the ‘idea’ of certain elements continue over time, but also that the past, through our eyes, can be seen as always already having the present inscribed within it also.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKtqNQJuDuw, (2005)

[2] David Elsewhere at Kollaboration, (2001) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyTK6jF5o8

[3] Michel Foucault, ‘Las Meninas’ in The order of things, (1966)

[4] Craig Owens, ‘Representation, Appropriation and Power’ in Beyond Recognition, (1992)

[5] ibid

[6] Mary Douglas & Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods – Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (1979) p.23’

[7] George Kubler, The Shape of Time, (1962) p.35

[8] Clive Dilnot, ‘The State of Design History’ in Design Discourses, (1984) p.215

[9] Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event’ in The Persistence of History edited by Vivian Sobchack (1996) pp. 17-38

[10] George Kubler, The Shape of Time, (1962) p.32

2011-12-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

Karsten Bott, One of Each, 1993 part of the exhibition "Deep Storage" which showed some of the contents of Andy Warhol's time capsules.

The design museum’s recent event ‘Collecting and Collectors of Contemporary Design’ was the 6^th conference to be organised by Professor Catherine McDermott and Design Museum Head Curator Donna Loveday. Part of a wider effort to discuss and debate issues relating to curating contemporary design.

The Design Museum Director, Deyan Sudjic, was the first keynote of the day. Sudjic chose to focus on the impulsive act of collecting and the legacy of connoisseurship through key collectors such as Jean Paul Getty and Andy Warhol. Although his opening invoked a sense of the historical and timeless qualities associated with collecting, the remainder of the morning provided an insight into the contemporary realities, as part of a larger design economy.

Following on from this and in an endeavor of cartography as much as history, DeTnk co-founder Rabih Hage and Jeremy Morrison, former London Head of Design at Sotheby’s, set out to demystify the design market. Loosely figured within the question 'what drives the market?' Hage drew from the DeTnk. Market Report, 2011, in an attempt to decipher the rise in design purchasing. Best described as ‘a holistic analysis of the emerging collectible design market’ the report consists of data collected since 2005 and Hage used it to support his prediction of the end of fraudulent limited editions, in favour of commissioned objects. Feeding into the traditional notion of value, as being original and rarified, Hage highlighted production numbers as consciously driving the value of goods, a key theme of the day. In addition, Morrison reminded the audience of how young the design market actually is detailing the unpredictable nature of highs and lows in auction houses over the last 50 years. Acknowledging the difficulty to know what and when something will sell Morrison explained memorable sales at contemporary design auctions, such as Tom Dixon's S-Chair for Capellini, (1990), which was sat in Dixon's studio for years before he had it re-upholstered after his child's rabbit ate the original cover.

The afternoon session concentrated on design objects and their cultural value, assigned through exchange and distribution. Tony Brooke, founder of SPIN, was the only designer to speak that day and this was reflected in his anecdotal presentation, which confessed his obsession for collecting. Brooke brought attention to the fact that like design itself, collecting is an exploration and expression of ones relationship to the world. As we had seen earlier on in the day much of design purchasing is driven by exploiting strategies, hidden under the anonymous face of the market. Pazit Offner-Dines, an Israeli marketing and consultant researcher, was the final keynote and she revealed some of the characteristics behind this ambiguity. Examining the status of the design object in relation to market value, she used correspondence archives from the V&A to chart the buying and selling of key design objects such as 'Cinderella' table, by Jeroen Verhoeven, (2005-6) and a set of drawers entitled ‘You Can't Lay Down Your Memories’, by Tejo Remy of Droog (1991). Highlighting value as being configured through a complex cultural process of trade.

Overall the event presented a timely relationship between collection and consumption. A relationship defined by its circulation, manipulated by production and constructed by capital value. It is interesting to note that the majority of keynotes analysed archives, in one way or another, to make this point. Indeed as Sudjic had initially pointed out, there is a heritage involved in the act of collecting. Using data produced from these transactions speakers such as Hage, Brooke and Offner-Dines demonstrated the importance of comprehending the actualities that are played out in these systems. I couldn’t help but think it was a perfect environment not to just present this reality, but to question it as the only way forward as well?

As if to make this point, the discussions at the end of the day acknowledged the museums responsibility as part of a larger pursuit towards a collective knowledge of design in the world. This was posed in contrast to the economical purchasing power, which markets are built on. What struck me about the days events is that 40 years after the first contemporary design auction at Sotheby’s in 1969 design is more, not less subject to being understood in relation to two powerful houses; the museum and the auction house/the trade fair. How we construct value within these two spaces becomes increasingly mired by the dominance of the marketplace and although the notion of value was at the crux of all the presentations on the day, as a term it was never actually defined. Maybe the conference would have been better served if it had been the question raised from the very beginning?

And you'll see why 1984, won't seem like 1984

2011-12-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

Apple Macintosh commercial 1984

“If the possible has become impossible I must allow myself to believe that the impossible must become possible.” Shelly Silver quoting Goethe on her blog

‘Creativity can solve anything, anything’[1]. These are the closing words, which ring out in Art & Copy (2009), a documentary on the last fifty years of American advertising. This sentence could easily be dismissed as a maniacal statement emptied out of all meaning. Something that we have come to expect from an industry built on the complex and unregulated production of selling our image and understanding of desire back to ourselves. In fact and as I hope to point out, it actually holds a potentially implosive position for those who work in the creative industries.

A lot could be said about how the filmmakers have chosen to promote advertising as a business in Art & Copy. Notably how the film exposes the industry as a pioneer of disconcerting social norms at the same time it repudiates certain ethics and moralities. Any negative side to advertising is seamlessly debunked by experts, whose only judgment criteria seems to be one that states a truly great advert can never be bad – on any level. One could ask, who even remembers No Logo nowadays anyway, right?[2] (Insert said preferred level of irony here please).

That aside Art & Copy is a fascinating, well-edited and gripping watch. I knew it would be and as such I was consciously prepared to rationalise this highly stylised endorsement frame-by-frame. How could any documentary on advertising, not be one big advert? It is pointed out in the film that everything is in some way an advert and for documentary to be thought of in this way and with all the cynical connotations we associate with advertising, I was ready to break down some of those layers.

The film was delivered by a handful of passionate and powerful moguls whose sheer exuberance and compelling anecdotes on seminal adverts kept the pace and depth ‘just right’. Did I mention they were compelling stories? Such as the Nike slogan ‘Just Do It’, which was inspired by and originates, in part, from a quote taken from a man on death row before his execution. Think. Just think of the enormous repercussions of this statement. One of the most well recognised global mantras of the 20^th century, indicative of the ‘me’ generation, which literally instructs at the same time it permits the universal-individual to self-empowerment and emancipation from the grind of daily life was derived from a person, who is now dead executed by the state for a crime. Complex, yes, difficult, definitely.

“All we were doing was reflecting peoples lives and doing it in a way that touched that audience.”

For me, it is important here to use the powers of critical writing to its fullest advantage and acknowledge the dominant hierarchies inherent in any system of communication. Even when they are anecdotal and personal musings, which I value in writing very much and interestingly an approach used by advertising to persuade on mass. Namely that not only have the very few dominated the position of authority of speech for the many. Not only do advertising companies have untapped power allowing them to shift a person’s perception of themselves and the world around them, even in the face of ‘regulating bodies’. But also and very importantly that there is still on some level, to some people and at some times a ‘real’ need to address who gets to say what and where they have authority to take this information from.

I repeat: Who gets to say what and where they have authority to take this information from.

Let me explain. The documentary was structured so that there was a loose chronology of the ‘history-of-advertising’. Beginning with nostalgic representations of the first advertising power houses and moving into the present day, where not much has changed; 4 companies control 80% of the advertising on US screens[1]. Throughout this are, as I have mentioned above, deeply compelling individuals, bursting at the seams with joie de vivre, telling equally compelling insights into ‘life-changing’ adverts. Each of these ‘characters’ were exquisitely painted as mavericks and visionaries with a disregard for the normal ways of doing things – every little move they made was magic.

Interspersed between both of these narrative schemas however, is the story of advertising as cited within different spaces of production. Early on in the film we see Chad Tieman, a ‘rotator’, who in his words ‘rotates [advertising] copy around the city’[2]. We see the public billboard spaces across different parts of the city, we see the scale of these spaces and we see the daily operations that take place to make an advert become apparent to its audience. In short Art & Copy makes public where desire, which has been registered and regulated, is promoted.

A little later on in the film we see a shift from the advertising canvases in the cityscape to the seemingly discreet repetitive markers in the shape of satellite dishes that litter our horizon. As well as the ‘private’ space where satellites are launched into orbit[3]. Exposing the spaces in which the advertising message crosses over from a place of consumption to a space of production. The fact that these places range from visible to inaccessible spaces, signals the indivisible and invisible messages of power and desire embedded within this very, same landscape.

Lastly, these spaces dematerialise completely and the film addresses some of the exuberance that it has been mood boarding. The film has told us that everything can be perceived to be an advert. It has told us that we all love to hear stories – we, must we not forget, are built to tell stories, as cognition is an exercise in narration. Now the spaces of production become blurred between the places of sentiment and liberation. There are explicit references to the personification of brands likened to interesting people you and I would like to get to know. Much like the true origins of the Nike advert, we are being shown that the new spaces of production now reside within our imagination. Cleverly revealing to the audience the code of belief that the medium is the message and that the message equals power, but also the message as power.

“Ill never forget the first time I first walked in and showed the President [Regan] the ‘Morning In America’ spots he teared up and said I wish I was that good.” Ed Rollins, Art & Copy (2009) 01:04:53

I don’t think it is particularly revolutionary to think that advertising designs our imagination, desire is built on creating narrative landscapes for fantasies to reside within. However, what I think is important is where these two ideas meet in the film – the idea that the message is synonymous with control and that creativity can solve anything.

I was watching QI the other night[6], which featured the Japanese robot asimo. Asimo was brought on stage to perform a few crowd-pleasing tricks and for the panel and audience to be awestruck at the new marvels of technology (a fairly Victorian notion in itself). The robot ran. Steven Fry emphatically tried to show that this is an unparalleled level of sophistication and advancement in technology. All I could think about was I had seen it all before and done much better in AI, or Tron, Bladerunner. I have watched cyborgs and robots perform the most mind-boggling tricks and not only defy, but destroy nature on every single possible level that the human mind can imagine and fit into 180 minutes of digital film (within budget). I had to watch the episode again to really let the ramifications of this act sink in. Because if I didn't make myself really think about it, it didn't really matter to me which one was real. I was more impressed by the films and that is where the meaningful encounter resided, for me.

This marked a shift. Things do not amaze in the same way. Perception, experienced through narration and subsequently integrated through mediation into our understanding of the world, is the actual unparalleled advancement. It not only collapses our sense of space and time it redefines who we are as people, precisely through the cyclical nature of representation, which reconfigures how we perceive ourselves. Who controls the message then, which we either choose, or not choose to believe, literally alters the perception of ourselves and our world. And it is becoming pointless to make distinctions between what is real or not. Just what matters most to each of us.

To come back to Art & Copy then and acknowledge that the film showed us that it is not the power of the message, but the message as power and that message has the ability to redefine our very notions of reality and all that is bound within that. Creating and solving everything and anything in all the levels, which our existence operates on is a very profound state of affairs. The position of the storyteller then can redefine us planting, through a process of inception, the desire to want certain things, see no difference between other things and make everything around us into a sensually animated advert. We can be turned onto everything, no matter how immaterial, and for this to be framed within an industry that does not separate between desire and capital means that creativity does solve anything, because it has the power to create anything and has been permitted to tell any story it wants from anything it pleases.

[1] George Lois, Art & Copy (2009) 01:23:12

[2] Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2000

[3] Art & Copy (2009)

[4] Chad Tieman Art & Copy (2009) 00:03:06

[5] Art & Copy (2009) 00.25.08

[6] QI Series I, episode 13 'Intelligence' Dec 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b017z0zx/QI_Series_I_Intelligence/

When I had drank all the whisky in my glass...

2011-11-21T15:52:00.000-08:00

...and all that was left was the transparent layers of glass against residue against melted ice, I thought... why aren't I asking what makes a difference, rather than what is real?

'The Dangling Conversation'

2011-10-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

The heat has been saturating. It’s October and I have moved through the streets of London similar to that of a levitating banshee. Each particle of air quivering, shimmering almost to lift me off my feet and transport me to where I never thought I needed to go. It has felt like I have been cushioned, cuddled, enveloped by the warmth and all in all has given me a feeling akin to a red bull without the crappy after taste. Red Bull gives you wings, indeed!

To accompany this atmospheric tremolo is the beginning of the autumnal season. Bright hues of berries squish onto the pavements, golden leaves dazzle and the sun setting a little earlier each day have typified the last fortnight. Today I found myself staring down at the floor at a cluster of empty horse chestnut shells. Laying on the ground like empty bullet cases I almost felt their inertia pull me down further into the moment when they collided with the ground and split open into the universe. Outstanding, it is almost like time-travel, don’t you think?

The soft jazzy notes of Gabriel Yard’s song ‘Betty y Zorg’ fill my room as I write. It is all about timing - reaching out and crossing over.

I always felt inadequate in Spanish lessons at school. The teacher, Mrs. Day, a slight woman besides from her protruding lower belly wore high-waisted skirts that accentuated her senescent curve. She’d pair this with a cream blouse and spectacles, which hung on a metallic beaded chain around her neck. She was fond of me and I appreciated her warmth, although she was particularly Victorian and prickly to the other kids. To be fair I needed all the help I could get, I wasn’t exactly liked by child, or adult alike at that point in my life.

In our school we had to line up outside each classroom before a lesson. This was probably issued in a vein attempt to exercise the mantra of discipline at all times. It rang through that institution like an unwelcome foghorn and to which I had an exacting deafness. There was one day in particular when we all came bustling in after standing outside in the strikingly beautiful sunshine for what felt like an eternity. The room was hot and uncomfortable, so much so that the school desks just didn’t appear large enough for our awkward and clumsy young-adult frames. Mrs. Day tried to calm the class down with her frighteningly high-pitched voice letting Spanish tumble out of her mouth until she tipped over into the territory of frustration and instructed us to just bloody well shut the hell up, or else.

“Who is the most important person in your life?”

The class fell into a murmur. Who is the most important person in your life? Someone piped up and said their parents, another chose to sit on one-side of the picket fence and say their ‘mom’. I think another said their sibling, or twin, or some other rubbish. Coming from a single-parent-only-child lucky dip the family combo thing didn’t sit well with me and I was uncharacteristically quiet. Usually the smart aleck with all the wrong answers Mrs. Day cast her eye over me. “Well, none of you are right, again, who is the most important person in your life, and this time ladies in espanol por favor!”

Apparently the correct answer was yourself, is yourself, sorry. A pretty large metaphysical question for a Tuesday morning I would argue, but her point had something to do with the subject pronouns of Spanish. Well didn’t that just get my imaginative juices secreting. Subjectivity and the way it flows in and out of other people has always interested me.

I spent a good chunk of my day yesterday in either sickeningly bright-white or blacked-out rooms full of art. There was a great show by David Panos and Katja Kirschner entitled ‘Living Truthfully under Imaginary Circumstances’ at Hollybush Gardens. A girl and a guy sit opposite to each other – the sexual tension is immense. Fuck, I want her hair. I love the way it sweeps across her forehead and is pulled back by a bobby pin. Fuck, I love her teeth too. Maybe, just maybe I could get my teeth pulled into that shape. She looks like a more interesting Kirsten Dunst. You know how Dunst’s teeth are flat and straight except for her two canines that sit angled against the rest. It says: I’m perfect and misshapen, all at once.

The actors are using a technique devised by Sansford Meisner, which in its approach apparently uncovers “the ‘true’ nature of human behaviour.” Fuck, maybe she knows she looks like Kirsten Dunst. If so, does she model her look around her - just to accentuate it for her burgeoning acting career you know. They are picking up on each other’s facial expressions and repeating it back to one another.

“You are smiling”

“I am smiling”

“You are smiling”

“I am smiling”

You get my drift, right? So, anyways the two actors are doing this and they end up in the realm of “you like me” “I like you” “You wanna fuck me” “I wanna fuck you”. Not exactly this, but in so many words. And I think did you guys get instructed to stray into this territory of foreplay, or is this the true nature of human behaviour coming through? Bloody brilliant. I thought about it all the way home, how much am I trying to hide my human behaviour, or not, in every encounter I have with another human being? Does the simple, but relentless act of repetition allow for a shift in the cosmos of reality and open up a whole world where we, the viewer, read between the lines that little more clearly.

I decided I am going to repeat things back to people when I am next confronted with a mis-subjective social situation.

“You are fucking making this shit up, right?”

“I am fucking making this shit up, right?”

“It’s all in my head?”

“It’s all in your head”

“It’s all in my head”

“It’s all in your head?”

“It’s all in my head!”

“It’s all in your head!”

"Yes, we speak of things that matter,

With words that must be said,

"Can analysis be worthwhile?"

"Is the theater really dead?"

And how the room is softly faded

And I only kiss your shadow,

I cannot feel your hand,

Your'e a stranger now unto me

Lost in the dangling conversation.

And the superficial sighs,

In the borders of our lives."

Simon & Garfunkel The Dangling Conversation

All of me, why not take all of me

2011-09-22T03:48:00.001-07:00

As Above So Below

2011-08-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

Catalogue text for In Search of Alchemic Times curated by Cecilia Wee
235 Brompton Road, SW3 2EP

I run my fingers along the few remaining hairs, which have escaped being worn down by the tarmac. The rubber is bald and warm and tactile and I cannot detect the perforation as my thumb continues round and round the tube. Noticing the black stains left on my skin, I submerge part of it into the water. I watch as I push it under the viscous surface and up out again. The black robe slips off in one smooth gesture and I am not sure where this action begins and ends.

Sat in the middle of the room I discern, first a window at one end, then turn to see one in the other. The light decants into a continuous shaft and the two ends meet seamlessly, magnifying an already intense heat.

Turn, blackout, turn, blackout, collide.

Once consciousness is regained it transpires into flat expanse. Heat causes air to surmount, pushing against the surface. It peels away to create bubbles that rise up to the ceiling. Collecting, they migrate towards one another and overflow to the surface. There is the leak.

The roar of the plane engine becomes noticeable along with the other layers of velocity and I let my eyes drift out of focus tracing the interior shape of the machine. As we ascend we pass through layers of clouds that materialise into differing bandwidths of light. Hot, sticky, radiant, melted, solidified. I lift my jumper off over my head and become distracted, immersed by the ice crystals forming in between the layers of porthole. I reach over to look closer. The top falls from my lap half onto the floor, half into the bucket. Water climbs into its fibres and blooms into a rapidly spreading dark patch.

The rough edge finds the tip of my thumb and slices through the top layer. The ridges on my fingerprint splay open revealing blood underneath. Clouding the water, the rubber appears as a shade of aluminium punctured with window holes. Light and water mix in and out, reconciling with one another. I pull out the tube, pulling it apart slightly to reveal a clear transparent crystal.

Wriggling in my palm I close it quick to form a fist, so as not to lose it. Dirt clings to it. Held in between my thumb and forefinger I run the stone along the rubber, slicing the taught surface open. Snapped apart it rests awkwardly and contorted from its original shape - a broken bond. Again, I run my fingers along the few remaining hairs. I hold one tight and tug, teasing out a slowly degenerating thread that was once static form until there is nothing left, but a dust trail on the floor.

Turn, blackout, turn, collide.

Point of Inaccessibility

2011-02-14T02:30:00.000-08:00

Catalogue text for Point of Inaccessibility by Charlesworth, Lewandowski and Mann
Wasp Room, Nottingham

Looking out it is clear and starkly bright. The earth’s crust is pulled taught and there is nothing but flat expanse. The horizon slices up the offing, creating a crease that runs as far as the eye can see and which hides more than my imagination permits me to perceive. Far in the distance I can make out a sole construction, man-made and austere in its demeanour it ruptures the, otherwise pervasive silence across the plane. And out further than this, when opacity momentarily breaks free of itself, two flat vertical surfaces appear and meet at an angle forming an obtruding edge. These walls of immense stature are white, like everything else around me and appear to be an extension of all other surfaces in which I am trussed. I fear they may be an optical trick breeding in my mind. Of my whereabouts I cannot be sure about much more than that.

The woollen overcoat in which I am cocooned stays away most weather and I have learnt to keep my hands clenched with fingers tightly curled, furrowed blindly within my pockets. The patch of concrete upon which my back is pressed costs me precious warmth, but in turn provides me rest although not as much shelter as I would like. Goodness knows how I ended up leaning on Lenin, a political irony if ever I thought of one.

“Lenin.” I cry, my voice a small blemish in the overall landscape. “Did you know you are my only companion in this uninhabitable place?”

He looks passively onwards. No reply. “I thought as much.” Scrambling to my feet I walk forward enough to be able to look back at him, tall as he stands I can still make out the contours of his jaw and moustache. If I walk back farther still I can even see as far up as his eyebrows.

I heard that in Kerala, the southern-most province of India, the streets are littered with statues of Lenin. A communist state nestled in the roots of a jungle, drawn up by long and ambling rivers and bejewelled by Thai fishing boats and monsoons. “It would have been far more accommodating of you to invite me there instead, don’t you think?” No reply, as I continue to tilt my head back, staring past him and beyond to the barren nothingness in which he is set. My imagination flashes with images of remote tropical backwaters, bustling markets and colonial townscapes. I smile to myself; well you couldn’t get much further from Kerala, could you?

Still he looks out, the arc of his gaze connecting with all his other concrete renditions in every which communist society where he has been erected. Looking up at this petrified apparition, whose impact imparts a similar, albeit diluted effect that Medusa inflicted on her victims, his watch burns through the fragile paper-sky.

Thinking of the people of Kerala; young girls menstruating; men arguing at injustices conducted in business transactions; the youth tending to their older relatives and former carers; I feel as if his political essence is vapid, as lifeless as his expression is proud.

“Bah, didn’t you spend most of your time in exile anyway?”

I remember learning about Lenin in school many moons ago and seeing pictures of a fragile old man sat in a chair with a blanket over his legs sucking on a pipe. I see that picture remote as it is in my mind’s eye (embellished with the passing years) withdrawn compared to the intricacies incurred by the architecture of time. There he sits, Lenin in exile, on a lawn clearing set within thick woods. A white-wash house with a porch behind him he is caught in the murky contrast of early photographic imagery and I wonder how this oversized ornament changed the world.

As I reflect on how to connect to Lenin here in this vast openness, melancholy spurs me onwards and I decide to begin the long walk to the next stoppage point in the distance.

As the journey moves forward I am less panicked by the remote setting. I am less inclined to feel trussed by the inaccessibility of my exact location. Before, every step I took I felt the emptiness bear down on me as the worldly weight of omission collapsed into gaping ravines just inches behind my every step and each foot I placed in front of the other sparing me just in time. Before, the ground would give itself up completely into this pressure. I pause and breathe, my fingers pawing at the innermost point of the inside corner of my pocket.

In an effort to remain calm I think about a book I once read. Losing myself in its pages I awake to find I am the main character, whose narrated life begins shortly after an undisclosed trauma. Suffering from the loss of his memory, intense headaches and unnerving black-outs he is unable to adjust to his new life and becomes increasingly removed from his waking reality. One day, whilst he is in someone else’s bathroom, he finds himself caught in a trance and is transported to a moment in his past, free from his present affected state of mind. Intoxicated by this desire to break free of his present condition he launches into an attempt to duplicate this memory. Infatuated by these brief seconds he sets about re-constructing the bathroom, the building, even the street, right down to the grimy grout in the tiles. So arrested is he, by the intermittent details of the sallow air and the cold porcelain tiles, most of all of the presence of the world outside goes by unnoticed as he becomes increasingly more manic in his obsession to replicate these few precious memories. Having lost himself, he finds this re-enactment potently addictive and as I inhabit his eyes, both of us are caught in his memory of his life before the event, beholden to this marvel I feel removed from the feeling of myself. This is how it feels to be here in this point of inaccessibility, alone except for my thoughts, which in essence is all we are left with when we are alone with ourselves.

Pause. I think. I populate this thought and its simplistic beauty drowning in the fraught efforts of this character I am lost in his base intentions to inhabit an ephemeral dream. A bead of sweat breaks on my brow and I lose my connection to my conclusion. Impulse drives me to swerve around and seek out Lenin in the backdrop. At this distance, he radiates an immense power and just as quickly as it flows out from him, creating an aura it dissipates into nothingness.

I carry on walking towards the construction.

“bbbbbrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”

“bbbbbrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”

For a while I thought the noise was my skeleton trembling and moaning, whirring lost in this tundra. Until, I came across my second encounter. The slope in what I at first considered to be a perpendicular plane becomes a slight dip in the altitude to create a shallow basin. In front of me is a low level square timber structure filled with concrete in which speaker diodes are set. The rumble rippled past me long before I cast my eyes on its frame. A space made up of invisible force; insidious as it is imperceptible. I lean into its powerful crests of sound letting it contaminate every innermost space of my skin. I breathe it in as pure life and hold my breath, tasting its morsels before letting it slip down my gullet and into my gastric chamber.

Just ahead of me is the construction. Sleek and cold, stone to the touch I look up to see the figure of a jaw and a moustache. Lifting my head and eyes upwards I begin to feel slightly giddy and sit down leaning my back against the concrete. I think.

I wait.

Looking out it is clear and starkly bright. The earth’s crust is pulled taught and there is nothing but flat expanse. A horizon slices up an offing creating a crease that runs as far as the eye can see and which hides more than my imagination permits me to perceive. Far in the distance I can make out a sole construction, man-made and austere in its demeanour it ruptures the, otherwise pervasive silence across the plane. And out further than this, when opacity momentarily breaks free of itself, two flat vertical surfaces appear and meet at an angle forming an obtruding edge. These walls of immense stature are white, like everything else around me and appear to be an extension of all other surfaces in which I am trussed. I fear they may be an optical trick breeding in my mind. Of my whereabouts I cannot be sure about much more than that.

Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann

Salon Performances as part of the Anti-Design Festival

2010-09-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

Besides from readjusting back to life in the UK, (which warrants no more words than that) September has been, for me, a whirlwind punctuated by an exciting string of quadrophonic displays, thematical and practical presentations, and spectacularly lo-fi productions. I have just finished working on the Salon Performances Program with Cecilia Wee, who curated this program for the Anti-Design Festival.

With nine nights of performances, talks and lectures by some very interesting people. Highlights included: Peter Lewis & Makiko Nagaya with their palimpsest and hypnotic floor paintings accompanied by the drones of drums; Richard Thomas' AntiMatter evening with a wide and rich variety of lectures and presentations by persons working within the themes of the eponymous title; Jenny Walshe's dizzyingly unstable solo voice performance; Ken Hollings truly fantastic musings on trash amongst other things; Le Crouton Jonez's heterogenous and shamanistic noise ensemble; and Steve Ounanian's enchanting lie-detector test amongst others. I must stress this was amongst a plethora of diverse and stand-out performances, please excuse the overly sanguine feedback. It was just fun.

One more night that is worth noting was Jon Wozencroft's (Touch records) evening with Philip Jeck performing his 'An Ark for the Listener'. For those of you who do not know about Philip Jeck his musical ouverture is produced using found and collected records and record players. Jeck recycles already recorded creative produce and creates further constructing his own musical language. Without the technical rigour of a music critic I can only think of two apt words to describe his work and that is haunting and enrapturing. I advise you listen for a more in depth anlayses.

What I found particularly interesting was that the first half of the evening saw the two of them [Wozencroft and Jeck] playing and speaking about their favourite records. This was without doubt a success, with the venue at full capacity and all sat, (uncomfortably on old milk crates,) poised in absolute silence as they recalled where they had first heard the track and why it stood out still today, in what is obviously their vast music library. The room was dark with a set of decks and reading lights on stage and it was mentioned more than once that it was the perfect broadcasting opportunity.
Having a slight obession with the archival in current aesthetic and cultural production I figured that one could argue that today people seem to understand, or derive more pleasure out of experiencing archives than live performances.

2010-05-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

STATES OF FLUX
Late at Tate Britain curated by Cecilia Wee
10.04.2010
Text to accompany the event as part of a pamphlet designed by Jonathan Barnbrook.
State of Corporeal

The corporeal human has
voyaged to the frontiers of
unknown territories capitalising
and corporatising them until any
original language of synthesis
has shattered. The corporeal
human sought out the fringes of
liberty seeking to break through
each identifiable threshold.
The many curvatures, wormholes,
and endlessly repetitive coils of
space are suffocating from this
corporeal presence.

If utopia sprung forth from the
maps and imaginations of former
Western literature, then let us
re-imagine the performative
body as having in their regard
a multitude of variable utopias.
And in every waking moment we
can conjure up a million different
utopias of our choosing based
on the fluctuating rhythms of
our desires.

One would conclude that
prevalent over space is time.
Time is immortal memorial of the
limitation of all that is corporeal.
Abandon the space that we
move through, at ease and with
destructive force, and welcome
the arrival of existence outside of
time. Espouse suspended states
evocative of timelessness. Hail to
the egoless corporeal.

2009-09-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

"At one point everyone thought the earth was flat" Microsoft advertisement, 2007*

Some words by the curators

The Earth Not a Globe took its impetus from an advertisement in which Microsoft sought to anyone dubious of the potential of the new "Windows Vista" operating system in being as good as a flat-earther. Whilst, unsure of both Vista and the marketing campaign behind it we were intrigued to consider the position of the flat earther.

For us, the idea elicited themes of perception, of its extensions and limitation, and of how we may cope with, and resign ourselves to these on a tangible level. The concept provided a point of reference for an enquiry into how the emphasis on 'context', both artistically and curatorially, invariably perpetuates the relocation of meanings immanent to works of art. As such, the truth or truths particular to a work are often quietly sidelined in an endless deference and deferral to other epistemologies and spatial constructs and the constructs and confines of discursive thought.

On the one hand, the Flat Earth Society doctrine may simply appear no more than the promotion of a factional Biblical literalism. Yet we would be unfortunate to neglect its other, more important and truer secular nature. The Rowbotham doctrine, from which this exhibition takes its name, speaks of truth seen and deduced, embedded observations and a maligned yet refreshing empiricism. Their emphatic refusal of an institutionally established transcendent reality and their preference instead for the enactment of a truth in renewal is celebrated. The operation of a knowledge and observation, and the preference instead for the enactment of a truth in renewal is celebrated. The operation of a knowledge and observation; these paths could lead towards unexpected possibilities. From the perspective of landscapes such as these one would intuit in "Windows Vista" the patterns of something that strives toward an experience of totality; one where such geographical markers as the horizon and the station-point (the subject) are not clearly visible. In opposition, flat-earthers contest this notion of a universal perspective;; the airy vista. In an affirmative motion of flattening, 'Vista' and total systems are brought immediately into question. Thinking in this way, reductiveness could be hot-wired to one of its apparent antonyms; connectivity.

In many respects, global perception is a concept at odds with itself. Globalisation has ushered in the increasing feeling for a perceptual discontinuity and has contributed ironies to our observations. Rather than being consolidated, the spatial models we inhabit and the radical (but in essence abstracted) nature of how the planet upon which we live is shaped are made profoundly relative. It is in response to the illusion of a smoothly functoning, wholly comprehensive apparatus, which is unable to simultaneously encompass all sensory pathways, that a reductionism comes into play. This may disrupt the contemporary world's need for interconnectivity, or participation. Yet this coping strategy is in no way an exercise in haphazard, self-asured cropping. It might be perceived less in terms of blindness than in highlighting the conditinos under which mundane contacts or access are initiated. By refuting one established patway for another route, 'flattening' could provide a way to identify previously established ideologies, and as a result, identify their grounds and their implications, so illuminating the inconsistencies and contradictions that a globalised perception adopts daily as it goes about its business.

As the title of the show suggests, the slippages between an earthly, telluric experience and a global apprehension are functions of scaling: features within an expansive or reductive series of idioms, events and knowledges. Information, in its many guises, may be considered a perpetually self-updating aggregator, where every instant is recorded and documented and is fed back to us in alternative formats. This abstraction of events presents the possibility of zooming in or out of its updates, the trajectories of which are distanced from an original source or diffusion of sources. Tangentially this reflects the state of artistic production and the act of display, which is inherently part of its very nature. The artwork is subject to a flattening and framing in the very instance of its being exposited. We are asked to regard it within certain parameters or guidelines; as art, as relative to the space, or to the other works present. The focus - even necessity - for us is to adopt a cartographic and partisan strategy of resisting one point of view for the coordinates of another set of potentials.

Knowledge is not a given. We are instructed in particular certainties when we are young, and we spend much of our lives in the process of re-learning a new type of knowledge; something akin to personal experience or exploration, which can be at odds with formal education, institutional or societal understanding. This consistent re-writing of new narratives must measure itself against the intensity and abundance of the information sources to which we are subject, and against the speeds and passages of reinterpretation. According to our definition, refusals are the matrix of the notion of flattening. The artists chosen in this project create their own archives and pathways through which the thought-world of a total experience is renegotiated. By accumulating materials and building up new arenas, and flattening them outright into new manifestations, we are able to deal with globalisation in new and complex ways, rather than simply accommodate ourselves to its modes.

The Earth Not a Globe seeks to emphasise the nature of the context of production, providing the space, or the landscape of a counter-production, is produced through dialogue rather than selection. The relationship between the earth and the globe, between terrain and territory, cannot concern a politics of resistance and a framing of individual and collective views. The approach of each contributor can be read in terms of these wider concerns: as a flattening out of incomprehensible contradictions, of an existence live within series' of multiplicities. An approach to both expanded and reductive fields of vision not only as a coping strategy or unavoidable methodology (in the larger process of the consumption and controlling of information,) but as a valid and affirmative action in its own right. Thus the project becomes a trope of the ways in which we navigate the rivers of communication, whether or not this may consist in a re-deployment of information by a user-generation, a researcher of knowledge manifested through differing disciplines, or as masters of the levels of appropriation.

The Earth Not a Globe is composed of a multifaceted series of materialisations, each highlighting a specific aspect of the program. In the end the project resolved itself into an evening of performances, to back-to-back exhibitons, and a publication. The first exhibition of The Earth Not a Globe, discussed appropriation as a leit-motif/ exposing scenarios or feelings evoked by the methodologies of imaging. For its second incarnation the exhibition focuses upon the ruptures and the circulation of images. The imaging processes available to us in contemporary world are at once both radical and highly direct. The apparent seamlessness of streamed images and montaged narratives thus evoke rhythms, which, in their intensity, speak out in schizophrenic banter against seamlessness itself.

2009-09-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

Oliver Laric Versions, 2009
http://oliverlaric.com/versions.htm

Versions is an online documentary by the artist Oliver Laric. A group of images were selected from a variety of online databases and archives and assembled into a slideshow format. Each time the work is shown Laric invites a different artist, curator, or writer to record a new voice over accompanying the images.

The Iranian Missile crisis began within the paradigms of secrecy and violence. In 2008 soon after the event images were published that had been digitally doctored prior to public reception. The following manipulated responses produced by individuals suggest that the designated territories of public and private are not purely indistinguishable, and that the public domain (as we are led to believe in our current socio-economic society) is in fact private, and appears to be in correlation with the increasingly public nature of our once private sectors. The onslaught and aggressive rapidity of these additional clones demonstrate that any power lies not in the apparent laws of representation but in the speed and circulation at which their rhetorical siblings attack.

On one hand we can see image and meaning caught in a relentlessly updating process, and in the specific case of these glitches accumulate and deposit themselves virtually as new and immediate archives. Violence is not only attributed to the missile crisis itself, but also inherent in the symbolisation and forthcoming historicisation of each mediated event.

These up-dated images show us that at the inception of each new language we practice it and if, as media theorists have taught us, the message is embodied in it's annunciation then control resides in the tension between what is said and what is understood. As Slavoj Zizek says, we change some things so nothing changes in the end.

-------

Emergent social media systems have led to the decentralisation of power, which could be heralded as an age of loopholes and a platform for feedback continuums. In actuality, the majority of the domain of the internet is used to traffic pornography and SPAM; realities based on self gratifying desire and deceit. The facets of a technological liberation are predominantly used for controlling purposes.

In this State representation presents itself as a substratum of factioning dialectics with cultural piracy as one of its most visible forms of trading. The ability to access and download a streamed archive is adopted by a user generation in a re-direction of information and its pathways from a form of hegemonic control.
Paradoxically one could argue that these constantly fluctuating algo-rhythms are an intense form of mapping, which make it difficult for any true forms of cartographic resistance to take place. It is unrealistic to think that complex and educated institutions of power are unable to operate within this decentralised network. Within the erosion of these boundaries we must reassess what the repercussions of access and privacy are today.

Our ability to identify inter-relational networks means we are more unlikely to be emancipated from their folds. Mapping can be seen as a sophisticated and intrusive form of regulating our desirers within a larger scale of domination. We are not at liberty to escape or quantifiable actions, as they are a predominant and precursive form of representation. Downloading is labeled as piracy., as a deviant to the functioning ideologies of capitalism, but instead exists as an outlet or significant entropic marker in the bounds of advanced controlling structure. A landscape is created that defines our very understanding of desires and dreams and where our imaginations are being monopolised.

---------

In this way an economy of versions performs as a type of cartography whose reconfiguration of distance and formatting can question how society must reassess its moral and ethical structuring. As part of its own political nature the internet allows an apparent emancipation from this via its ability to provide a platform for new and knowledgeable positions. Bringing about an opportunity to reconsider how contemporary society is defined by being regulated and amidst the intangible nature of the virtual.

The internet brings about an opportunity to reconsider the crystallisation and violence inherent in hegemonic ideologies - which are successful precisely because they are to an extent invisible. In this way it does not provide a space for change via a loophole or through the action of downloading and redistribution, but becomes the ultimate mapping tool revealing the degree to which certain dominating ideologies rule our existence.

----------

Bruce Sterling's book on design entitled Shaping Things, asks us to ask what is a thing in an internet of things? The virtual offers us a rewriteable drawing board, something that can swell to encompass a sustainable wasteland and provide new ways to think about the most secretive and demanding ideologies we face. His invention of SPIMES is a methodology and realistic conclusion to how the production of objects can work today. Objects are to be imagind, designed and modified online by anyone, they are produced by digital fabricators and tagged with RFID or GPS tracking systems. They have their own barcode and are able to be reintroduced back into the industrial system, to be recycled and available as source material once more. In this world artifice is embodied as representation constrained as, or consistently grounded by that which is constructed in virtuality, and reality becomes to an extent, a byproduct.

The fetishised object or event is a factor in the production of subjectivity, placing itself into direct relationship with the landscape. De-territorialisation and intense mediation are articulated via models of counter products and possible viewpoints and brought-to-life by the relationships they share with their surroundings. The online variation becomes disturbed from its own image in many ways marked by consignment through its use as object.

This new type of readymade uses the realm of the virtual as a site in which to host dialogue and discussion, in elongating the processes of production, which take place in the virtual SPIMES only use the real as a place for the finished product. Here mapping and regulation relocate the process of imagining and designing concepts.

--------

The receptiveness of mediated events via their online variations index both the homogenization of an incident and it's ensuing conflict on the senses revealing a tension between representations ability to dictate a certain universality and simultaneously hint to the non tangible relations behind it. In other words, a flattening out takes place at the same time that it presents something unclear and unsolved.

The power to re-configure frameworks of the visible and thinkable, are only possible by the distance they demarcate from these structures. The shape of its state is altered by the speed of its reception manipulating its form and ultimately its visibility in the larger realms of the indiscernability between art and life and where artistic creation and anonymity preside. These inbetween worlds of experience possess a potentiality to identify dominating regimes through what Zizek terms as the unknown knowns. As the things we don't know we know.

2009-09-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

Theo Michael

Smoke from the Edge of the Known

AMP, Athens

October, 2009

Theo Michael operates within the layers of history, popular culture and myth making. He weaves together ancient relics, artifacts, popular leitmotifs, and signs of the ancient and modern world to present the viewer with a newly assembled depository of archives and documents. He does this whilst actively resisting the idea of a written and visual history as a fixed thing.

For his first solo exhibition at AMP Michael presents a series of prints and drawings that act as palimpsests on vintage paper. They are shown alongside three dimensional objects and vitrines, which house theatrical props of antediluvian and otherworldly figurines, and prints of bricolaged archives. These depict theological, historical, and cultural mileus. His use of humour combined with an uncanny employment of montage and scene construction draws the viewer into a spectrum of complex worlds and settings.

Michaels' work plays with the inception and annunciation of the archival using the tropes of seventies science fiction, telluric ancient monuments or mythos, and celestial exploration. Through extensive research and databanks of images he creates emergent constellations that combine relics of prehistoric and symbolic cultural memory. These newly composed archives of deeds and cabinets of curiosities, documents and anthropological collections are testimony to the fallacy inherent in the processes of historicization. Simultaneously they include the genres oof modern popular culture political figures or character-like idols; cultural stereotypes that infer the fetishistic allure of staged representation within human consciousness.

Representation is questioned, as it is shown to be deeply embedded within a substratum of superstitions, or fantasy fictions. Our initial recognition of an iconoclastic scenario is quickly challenged by the seemingly odd, but familiar intervention of an oversized basketball alongside prehistoric reptiles, or a bonafied mummy with a drag car. Rather than using this tactic to jar our sensibilities the results offer a familiar occularcentric pattern of discovering worlds within worlds, or meaning in metaphor. In other words, the foundation of storytelling, through histories such as mythology are employed and altered by Michael to illustrate that understanding is derived from a prolonged chain of interpretation and assimilation. Space and time collapse, overlap and fold into each other in a variety of overwhelming and visually abundant molecular expressions, and time is represented as a rupture that reveals residual, eternal or otherworldly matter.

Michaels' use of magnitude and scale relates to his fascination with the spatial model and scale of the cosmos. His cosmos maps are a manifestation of this. A plethora of modern cult images such as gremlins, computers, or Michael Jordan, clutter the canvas. The images float freely on a galactical planes and each artefact shares similarities and differences with its neighbour. The overall composition can be compared to a flow chart or spider web mapping a hierarchy of energy. The result is a series of pictorally exuberant megacosms.

The work of Theo Michael abstains from didactic representation, or any continuation of a history of hermetics, precisely by playing with the enormity and limitations of these ideologies. He questions these methodologies by using mimesis as a type of camoflauge. A sense of pleasure traces the artefact through to perverse artifice. Through revealing and concealing the transparent yet essentialist nature of dogmas, he moves towards a code free communication.

2009-08-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

Neil Montier

Oris Magazine, Croatia

September, 2009

This gives me the power to break free from my routine

The eponymous title The belt, 2008-9, is Neil Montier's most recent body of work. Focusing on the outskirts of London, in locations that are peripheral to the motorway encircling the metropolis, the dual carriageway shares similarities to an ancient cities wall, whose function as a barrier pens people in as much as it was designed to keep intruders out. These non-places in which Montier has shaped become new homes for man-made modernist stuctures. He recreates areas bringing to mind places such as Thamesmead, a megalithic social housing complex situated at the edge of the Thames basin, and restages them with startling bleakness and differentiation from their counterparts in real life.

In Arcania, 2007, utilises the jarring effects of montage, to unite architecture with an equally barren and unforgiving, but more rural scenescape. Similar to The belt, the work features isolated modernist constructions, predominantly in the form of social housing with solitary street lamps, overpasses, or a stairwell that are not so much out of place in these new settings as they are a-temporal. Montier's photographs hold such inertia that they act like vacuums sucking all life out of them. Always working monochromatially in sepia tones and with an acute emphasis on scale the stuctures reside in unobtainable places. Either in the far distance, or atop of mountainous regions, the towers becomes overpowered by the dominating foreground of rubble, weed or concrete. They are so suffocating that no life would grow there, even if it had in the past.

Landscapes conjure up scenarios and lend themselves to the temporal. Montier's works play with the collapsible and unrealistic sociological paradigms a phenomenon like modernism had at its core. His photographs can easily be seen as purely dystopian landscapes that act as warnings of the inherent power pertaining to architectural regimes, but I would argue go deeper to unpack our connection to landscape, capsules or the past and personal liberty.

Montier employs a digitally seamless but metaphorically brutal political overture to his works. His choice of montage reflects his interest in how the city, as both a place and as an idea, impacts on the histories of the masses that inhabit them, His photographs are political not for their stated opinions or for the mileus the stage, but precisely because they have the ability to create a disjointed locale framed through the agency of distance and are reminiscent of the works of John Heartfield or George Grosz in spirit, rather than in aesthetic appearance. His photographs shape a way in which the world can be made visible to us uniting the protagonists of inner-city urbanity and apocalyptic wastelands. Bringing together elements that jar against one another forging new connections.

Drawing from histories and narratives of failed housing projects imagined and realised under the constraints of modernism Montier then images certain infamous towers and estates and makes use of them in their materialised form today, opposite to the way in which a conservator would restore relics that lay abandoned in the sediments of passing time. He does not attempt to re-establish them back to what they once were or once signified, alternatively choosing to reinstate them slightly weathered and marked by time passing from one landscape to another. Modernist pioneers such as Erno Goldfinger, whose art brut creations modified a generation's experiences of their daily socio-climate, and archetypal constructs such as The Robin Hood estate are chosen for their two-fold narratives: as the vision they were attempting to forge and the story their failure continues to tell years later. It feels strange to experience these buildings outside of the social parameters that they were originally intended for and the separation does not evoke a sense of reconsiderations as much as a type of stasis, or suspension.

Interested in a spectrum of recent political events and cultural revolutions, from the fall of Sarajevo and the implosion of pirate radio stations to Godard's expanded and semiotic filmic techniques in the wake of the capitalist post-war boom, Montier uses the genre of landscape as a malleable site in which to pour his ideas. However, rather than the identity of a place emphasising personal stories contained within it he reduces a complete system (that of modernism's embodiment of individual subjectivity) to an expression, devoid of all human contact or indexical nature save for the monuments, who although are out of place do not seem awry.

The future is intangible and can only be imagined, understood as precisely that as a projection. We can never know the details of hoe life will be. In many ways this explains the fetish for the past and why our real ghosts are the spectres of the future. Dystopian fictions appear to act like re-writeable drawing boards, where our imaginations can open up new and unexplored places, characterised by a moral or ethical caveat. Montier's works, although inspired by narratives and the buildings that embody them do not reflect on the ideologies encased in the structures we surround ourselves by. He severs our links with the individual subjectivism of modernist tradition at the moment he inserts them into an already disfunctional scene and there is a tension between the idea and the individual, which places like Trellick Tower or Thamesmead play out, acting as mementos of that breakdown.

The absence of the human subject makes it all the harder to avoid questions surrounding the human condition. The very notionb of subjectivity that emerges from past cultural sedimentations, such as social housing of the mid-late 20th Century, illuminates how fantasy operates in the very places void of a certain reality and how, in many ways, we are conditioned by media to understand ourselves through our materialisations. In other words, imagination creeps into the places where reality begins to breakdown. In the case of Montier's works the modernist building becomes a motif for the playing out of the social, whereby he does not reflect back to us a landscape whose story can inform us of a particularity, opting instead to present something so cutting we can barely make out who we are in relation to the works, let alone where we have come from.

2009-05-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

EARTH NOT A GLOBE I
25.06.2009 - 31.07.2009
Private View 24.06.2009 18.30 - 21.00

Matt McQuillan catalogue image The Earth Not a Globe, 2009

The Earth Not a Globe takes as its starting point the phenomena of flat earth theorem whose belief system of 'flatness' diverges from the earth as a globe. Thinking about scales of perception, their limitations and how we deal with this on a tangible level the exhibition brings together a selection of artists who employ cartographic systems of resisting one point of view for another potential combination.

As the title of the show suggests the slippage between what we experience as an earth and what we experience as a globe is subject to scaling; an expansive or reductive series of idioms, events or knowledges. Knowledge is not a given.

Each contributors approach can be read as a flattening out of the contradictions of a multiple existence. There is a tension between universal languages versus personal understanding and although we are still grappling with it’s complexities the acknowledgment that we are embedded within the proliferation of the visual, that makes up contemporary life.

Playing with the notions of an expanded and reductive field of vision flattening becomes an alternative way to reproduce new potential outcomes in the larger processes of consumption and controlling of information. The artists in the exhibition disrupt the terms global and local and refute certain established routes of communication finding ways to counter the production of certain perspectives. Whether this is about a re-deployment of information by a user-generation, a researcher of knowledge manifested through differing disciplines, or as masters of the levels of appropriation.
The Earth Not a Globe is composed of a multifaceted series of materialisations, each highlighting a specific aspect of the program. In the end the project resolved itself into an evening of performances, two back-to-back exhibitions, a publication, and a website.

The first exhibition of The Earth Not a Globe, discusses appropriation as a leit-motif; expositing scenarios or feelings evoked by the methodologies of imaging. Eternal re-occurrences and various converging points elucidate a proximity, which manifests itself in overlaps, or as shadows.

For the publication we asked each of the artists involved in the exhibitions to create a commissioned piece that would work as a singular flat image. We also approached a small range of other practitioners and curators, including a member of the Flat Earth Society, to contribute texts or images. The publication is a limited print edition, which will be available at both exhibitions. Each page will be stacked individually and visitors are asked to assemble their own version of The Earth Not a Globe publication, with as many or as few pages as they desire. The publication will also be available online.

The exhibition is curated by Dani Admiss and Dave Charlesworth.

Contact information...

And some more...

2009-05-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

Artist's Proof

artistsproof.net

Chris Collins * Aleksandra Domanovic * David Raymond Conroy *

Vadik Marmeladov * Paul Teigh & Martin Russell * Theo Michael * Sebastiaan Schlicher

David Raymond Conroy All Revolutions are not the Same, 2008

There are no facts only interpretations - Susan Sontag quoting Nietzsche

A.P is a finite program. The collection of contributors have been invited to realise individual projects, which relate to their ongoing concern about the contemporary condition of the archive.

A.P. sees information as conflicting and irregular, distances from its original roots and without certain destiny it will manifest as a series of exhibitions over a specific period of time. They are part of a larger slipstream of transmission and dialogues that career into muddled and contradictory places.

2009-04-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

THE EARTH NOT A GLOBE

www.earthnotaglobe.org

Kari Altmann, Paul B Davis, Tom Badley, Giles Bailey, Chris Collins, David Raymond Conroy, Richard Healy, Oliver Laric, JT Lowen, Matt McQuillan, Jasiek Mischke, Sean Raspet, Conrad Ventur, Laura White, WITH(withyou.co.uk) and other contributors

Forthcoming exhibition and catalogue June 2009 more details to follow