PAUL PIERONI'S PROGRAMME

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| Jan / Mar

2012-01-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

GALLERY: Hex

ANNEXE: Marlie Mul - No Oduur

LIBRARY: Xeroxlore

BLACKBOARD: Stuart Elliot - Object Lesson

/////////

GALLERY: Hex

Moving image work by Hex, a rave-culture period collaboration between video graphic artists Hardwire and DJ/producers Coldcut. More info and images here.

///////

ANNEXE: Marlie Mul - No Oduur

Cigarette will be gone soon,
Cigarette is guilty, has apologized a thousand times.
There is no place for cigarette,
Cigarette,
In a smoke-free world.

More info and images here

////////

LIBRARY: Xeroxlore

Indigenous to offices and shared workplaces around the world, xeroxlore - defined as anonymously printed and photocopied urban folklore - comes in the form or cartoons, mottoes, poems, sayings and parodic memoranda. SPACE's library hosts a collection of such material gathered in America and the UK by folklorists Alan Dundes, Carl Patger and Nicolas Locke between the 60s and the late 90s. More info and images here.

//////////////

BLACKBOARD: Stuart Elliot - Object Lesson

A new Blackboard project by London based artist Stuart Elliot. More info here.

////////

Nottingham Contemporary talk...

2012-01-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

... info here

ICA talk - the trouble with productivity

2012-01-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

Artists, writers and curators today, more than ever, take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance. One is constantly expected to be productive, professional, and to deliver good work. Is this the way we really want to work? How do people working within the arts manage the imbalance between work and life? Can one be productive by being less productive? Are there creative possibilities in exhaustion, failure and laziness? Writer and critic Laura McLean- Ferris, Paul Pieroni, curator of Space, and writer and philosopher Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, discuss the potentials in being less productive.

More here: http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=31496

Plus TLS blog coverage of the event: http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2012/01/the-trouble-with-productivity.html

DAAR Stockholm Architectural Rehab Camp / psychotropic language talk

2011-12-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

Earlier this summer I was invited to talk part in DAAR's art and architecture rehab camp residency - hosted by IASPIS in Stockholm. I presented a talk on psychotropic language. You can now hear a recording of that talk below.

More info on the camp here

Paul Pieroni – on psychedelic art (soundfile w. images from camp) from Iaspis video on Vimeo.

Aaron Angell - Time out review

2011-12-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

Aaron Angell's solo show at SPACE has been reviewed by by Time Out ... see here

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| Nov / Dec

2011-11-03T03:36:00.000-07:00

GALLERY: Neu! Aaron Angell: The Devil's Arse

ANNEXE: Terry Dennett & Jimmy Merris - ECONOMICS 101

LIBRARY: THE ANTI-LIBRARY

BLACKBOARD: Peter Kennard

///////////////

GALLERY: Aaron Angell: The Devil's Arse ///

Bad studio pottery, rural and craft culture, obscure folk music, art-house porn – just some of the many marginal reference points informing The Devil’s Arse, an exhibition of ceramics and wall paintings by Aaron Angell.

Aaron Angell was born in Kent in 1987 and lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade (BA) in 2011. He made his solo exhibition debut earlier this year with The Year of the Left Hand / Fokal Point, Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2011). Group shows include,Young British Art, Limoncello, London (2011) and ‘Outrageous Fortune: Artists Remake the Tarot, Focal Point Gallery / Hayward Touring (2011).

full text + images here

/////

ANNEXE: Terry Dennett and Jimmy Merris: ECONOMICS 101 ///

A collaboration between photographer, social historian and archivist, Terry Dennett (b. 1938) and video artist Jimmy Merris (b. 1983). Dennett’s Crisis Project (1973 – 1992) is presented alongside Merris’ FOR SALE video installation.

The Crisis Project deploys what Dennett describes as the ‘historical imagination’ technique. In photographing scenes of social and economic crisis – improvised bivouac shelters, cardboard cities, closing down sale signage, industrial destruction and civic degradation – across London, Dennett, in his own words, ‘proceeds as if given a historical commission from a future government to produce visual material for a criminal trial against those who have presided over the despoliation and destruction of our society’.

Displayed on the walls of the ANNEXE gallery at SPACE, The Crisis Project is accompanied by a new single channel nine monitor installation by Jimmy Merris. Representing a radically different approach to economic downturn and the social conditions that prevail under its sign, Merris work for the exhibition – titled, simply, FOR SALE – progresses asymmetrically via a series of loose and absurd solicitations. “Jamilas Shoes For Sale” – proposes one video? We do not know who Jamila is, nor are we sure how to respond as the next offer flashes on screen, “Pickled Jar For Sale”…

full text +images here

/////

LIBRARY: THE ANTI-LIBRARY ////

… a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The possibility of an anti-library – a library of the books you haven’t read – as well as ideas of anti-knowledge and un-learning, informs a new project in SPACE’s LIBRARY gallery. For six weeks in November and December, the Anti-Library will house unread books gathered from over 150 invited contributors. Participants in the project include:

Oliver Laric, Cally Spooner, Arnaud Desjardin, Ed Atkins, Åbäke, Jamie Shovlin, Am Nuden Da, Pieternel Vermoortel, Mike Sperlinger, Kathy Noble, Maria Fusco, Kate Owens, Gavin Everall, Ian Law, Francesco Pedraglio, Athanasios Argianas (amongst many others).

The Anti-Library will be displayed within an environment developed by Fay Nicolson and Oliver Smith, in which all the books and short texts submitted by participating artists will be available to handle and read.

Full text +images here

/////

BLACKBOARD:

#4 Peter Kennard

Blackboard@Earth

For over forty-years Peter Kennard’s photo-based work has represented a singular commitment to the political effect of images.

Extending his @EARTH project, already a major solo exhibition at Raven Row, London and a book published by Tate (both 2011), Kennard’s work for SPACE’s Blackboard will explore the relationship between environmental degradation and the exploitative nature of our global political system.

Peter Kennard was born in London in 1949. He is a senior tutor in Photography at the Royal College of Art, and has a studio with SPACE at Martello Street.

Full text + images here

LUCKY DRAGONS at SPACE

2011-10-20T03:49:00.000-07:00

SPACE have collaborated with Upset The Rhythm to present a workshop and live performance by LA based experimental group Lucky Dragons

/////

LUCKY DRAGONS means any recorded or performed or installed or packaged or shared pieces made by Luke Fischbeck, Sarah Rara and other collaborators.

Lucky Dragons inhabit Los Angeles. They create an ecstatic form of electronic music that celebrates the spirit of life as well as the magic of genre boundaries. Their music is surprising, inventive and uplifting much like their impressive live performances, which usually involve brain-wrangling visual projections and various forms of inspired audience interaction.

Lucky Dragons came together in the spring of 2000 in an attempt to create a band that would never break up. The name is borrowed from a Japanese fishing vessel caught in the fallout of a US hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific Ocean that became a focal point for worldwide anti-nuclear sentiment in the 20th century.

Cory Arcangel interview /// Live from Frieze

2011-10-19T03:12:00.000-07:00

Full interview here:

Frieze Art Fair /// LuckyPDF TV

2011-10-17T03:06:00.000-07:00

I was invited to host the first of four live TV shows produced by LuckyPDF for Frieze Projects this year. You can see the fruits of our labour here:

Aaron Angell /// Pamphlet text

2011-10-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

I've written a new pamphlet text about Aaron Angell in Artlicks. Aaron will have a show at SPACE in November.

KEEPING IT SLLOW AT SCREW'S HOUSE

2011-09-23T03:23:00.000-07:00

I've curated an evening of slow images for PAMI

Here's the blurb and the full showreel!

////////////

How can we account for the emergence of “slowness” as a trope in recent cultural production? Might it be an alleviation of sorts? A palliative against the awesome velocity of the now…?

Featuring: John Hughes /// Three-toed sloth /// Paul Virilio /// Rebecca Black /// DJ Screw /// Hype Williams /// Jimmy Merris /// Jonathan Meades /// Andrei Tarkovsky /// Andy Warhol Eats A Hamburger /// Time Warp: Water Balloon to the Face /// Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| Sep / Oct

2011-08-28T03:59:00.000-07:00

GALLERY: Neu! Bevis Martin and Charlie Youle: A Parade of Problems

ANNEXE: RHODODENDRON (ii)

LIBRARY: Watch Out Kids!

BLACKBOARD: Banner Repeater

///////////////

GALLERY: NEU! Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle: A Parade of Problems

A Parade of Problems continues Bevis Martin and Charlie Youleʼs ongoing, more or less directionless, exploration of human knowledge via the production of handmade approximations of mental structures.

Full text here

/////
ANNEXE: RHODODENDRON (ii) - Curated by Harm van den Dorpel /////

Juliette Bonneviot, Charles Broskoski, Harm van den Dorpel, Martijn Hendriks, Joel Holmberg and Marlie Mul. Curated by Harm van den Dorpel

SPACE presents an exhibition of work by an international group of young artists whose three-dimensional work, while founded in media art or Internet culture, or made using software, nonetheless expresses a profound enthusiasm for the physical form of the art object (size, material, colour, shape, composition, etc.).

Full text here

/////
LIBRARY: WATCH OUT KIDS ////

Sharp, brash and ideological, Watch Out Kids (1972) is a fascinating counter-cultural document; at once historical yet entirely personal. For the exhibition at SPACE the entire comic/book will be displayed on the Library walls alongside a video archive featuring a new interview with Mick Farren by SPACE curator Paul Pieroni.

Full text here

/////
BLACKBOARD: Banner Repeater ////

Banner Repeater is an artist led project space and reading room based on platform 1 of Hackney Downs railway station in East London. The project was initiated by SPACE studio artist Ami Clarke in 2009.

Over the last year Banner Repeater has hosted a number of talks exploring the notion of the diagram. The talks utilised the framework of the diagram to consider both aesthetic and pedagogical themes in art, as well as broader concerns relating to how we might find ourselves in the world today. The Blackboard Series at SPACE will continue this line of thought, offering a practical analogue to the project, as well as an opportunity to look back, before moving on.

Contributing artists:

John Mullarkey
Claire Nichols
Dean Kenning
Clunie Reid
Dave Burrows

Full text here

OH, DELIRIOUS REVINDICATIONS! at Wysing Arts Centre

2011-07-25T04:36:00.000-07:00

I have curated an exhibition for Wysing Arts Centre...

Oh, Delirious Revindications!

/////////////////
Wysing Arts Centre
23/7/11 - 24/7/11
/////////////

In a psychedelic state formal symbolic structures tend to fracture and crumble away. Language and meaning are pushed to their very limits during a psychedelic experience (and sometimes well beyond…).

OH, DELIRIOUS REVINDICATIONS! takes the epiphenomena of psychedelic language as its starting point, presenting in the main gallery a display of works by Kate Owens, Damien Roach, Hilary Koob-Sassen and Mark Essen alongside a filmed interpretation of those works by poet and performer Lawrence Upton and violist/composer Benedict Taylor.

OH, DELIRIOUS REVINDICATIONS! has been devised by curator Paul Pieroni for the Department of Psychedelic Studies at Wysing Art Centre. Filming and production for the project by Thomas Lock.

The Department of Psychedelic Studies is the second of three departments within Wysing Arts Centre’s programme for 2011: "The Institute of Beyond".

(SAMPLE) OH, DELIRIOUS REVINDICATIONS from Paul Pieroni on Vimeo.

(film sample)

The Karaoke Pavillion

2011-07-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

SPACE presents"The Karaoke Pavilion" feat. LuckyPDF and House of Hot Breath at SP11

Converse/Dazed/Whitechapel artist award

2011-06-16T04:16:00.000-07:00

I'm on the judging panel for the converse/dazed/whitechapel artist award this year. My fellow judges are Darren Flook, Sadie Coles, Eva Rothschild, Kirsty Ogg and Francesca Gavin...

Much more here

Time Out review: Roy Ascott

2011-06-13T04:25:00.000-07:00

Time Out review of the show here

Roy Ascott at SPACE

2011-05-18T04:12:00.000-07:00

... delighted to be hosting The Syncretic Sense at SPACE. Info Below

////////

Roy Ascott

The Syncretic Sense

20th May - 25th June

SPACE is proud to present the first major retrospective of Roy Ascott, the British artist, theorist and teacher who has inspired generations of artists. The Syncretic Sense is a touring exhibition from Plymouth Arts Centre curated by Paula Orrell in partnership with i-DAT and the University of Plymouth.

With former students including Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, Stephen Willats and Paul Sermon, since 1962, Roy Ascott has pioneered the creative use of cybernetics, technologies and interactive media in art. He coined the term ‘telematic art’ - the integrated use of computer communications networks - and has been instrumental in projects from the Venice Biennale to Ars Electronica. As an Art Educator he established the radical ‘Groundcourse’ programme in both London and Ipswich, and went on to teach in Toronto, San Francisco, Vienna and Newport, Wales.

The Syncretic Sense, Roy Ascott’s first solo show in London for 40 years, presents an overview of his artwork and rhetoric. From his early participatory ‘Change Paintings’ to his development of telematic art through computer networks, the exhibition considers Ascott’s theory and experimental teaching approaches and is supported by a programme of events.

More here

BOB COBBING | publication

2011-04-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

SPACE exhibitions, in collaboration with the Estate of Bob Cobbing, have republished A PEAL IN AIR - Collected poems of Bob Cobbing (Volume Three (1968-70)). The book is available from the gallery.

Mary Barnes | Frieze review

2011-03-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Mary Barnes has been reviewed in the April issue of Frieze. You can read the review here.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| MAR/APR

2011-03-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

GALLERY: NEU! JACK NEWLING: then again

LIBRARY & ANNEXE: Some Variations on a Theme of Bob (Curated by Lawrence Upton)

BLACKBOARD: # 2 Vicky Wright

////////////////////

GALLERY:

NEU ! Jack Newling

then again

Fred: "...one thing keeps cropping up is this thing about 'subtext,' songs, words, plays –

they all have subtexts, which I take to mean a hidden meaning or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the meaning, or message, that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious...What do you call what's above the subtext?"

Ted: "The text."

Fred: "OK, that's right...But they never talk about that".

--Scene from Whit Stillman's Barcelona

We could describe this exhibition as superficial.

Filled with artworks that are pure surface.

Not the formalist ‘surface’ so contested in the history of western modernism (though the work certainly remains in dialogue with some of the key concerns of that discourse). Rather, surface as a series of possible effects drawn from the material, visual and symbolic conditions of the things that interest Jack Newling (stuff like cups, roof and floor tiles, windows and microwaves).

Newling uses high-control techniques like screen and digital printing to make his work. He also draws heavily from graphic and commercial design. The result is a profoundly processed style, one in which the slight of the human hand has been supplanted by a mechanical production standard. With their manufactured feel Newling’s artworks effuse a sort of prior-availability: a visual or emotional familiarity that is accessible to most viewers in one-way or another. However, they never seek to properly represent familiar things. Instead they prefer to ‘stand-inʼ; playing with the inherent pathos and boredom of those things, absorbing and regurgitating their superficiality in order to propose something altogether more distant, awkward and slippery for the viewer to negotiate.

Jack Newling (born 1983, Nottingham) graduated from the Royal Academy in 2009. He has twice been included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2007 and 2009). Other recent exhibitions include the Jerwood Painting Prize, London (2010), Pop Will Eat Itself, Art on the Underground, London (2009) and Plastic Culture, The Harris Museum, Preston (2009). This is his first solo exhibition in a UK institution.

////////////////

LIBRARY & ANNEXE:

SOME VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF BOB

Curated by Lawrence Upton

Bob Cobbing (1920 – 2002) was a poet, painter and musician; an activist for Poetry and Poets; a maker of poems that challenge some ideas of what Poetry is; A remaker of our idea of Poetry.

There are those who say that he was an artist of the greatest importance. It may be too early to say whether or not that is true; but it is not the most important issue.

He was, beyond doubt, a major force both locally, in London and UK, and upon the international community of poets interested in extending what could be done with “the poem” into the sonic; the visual; and, centrally, the performed.

He made significant poetry from, in part, the unremarked, the overheard, the fragmentary. See his books such as Sound Poems (1964), Kurrirrurriri (1967), Sonic Icons (1970), The Five Vowels (1974), Processual (mid 80s), Domestic Ambient Noise (1994-2000), Sign Writing (2000), Members only (2000) and with our tongue our drils and quadras (2001)

He was a master of bringing the potential out of his fellows and of confronting the mediocre and self-obsessed. He ran a publishing house, Writers Forum, based largely on office copying machines, which, over half a century, produced over a thousand publications which were examples in themselves of book art.

This exhibition looks at some aspects of Bob Cobbing – including a sample of his early sound work, a look at the period in the 1980s when he switched from ink duplicator to photocopier as general purpose too, and an examination of some of his last works, when he was still experimenting.

There are some examples from a long life of campaigning – for the recognition of the poet as a professional figure, for the need for a National Poetry Centre, for the interests of Little Presses.

Some Variations on a Theme of Bob is curated Lawrence Upton, AHRC Research Fellow at Goldsmiths. Upton worked with Cobbing in a variety of capacities over many years.

////////////

BLACKBOARD: # 2 Vicky Wright

Vicky Wright presents a continuation of her Extraction and Guardian series, an ongoing project focusing on the paradoxical nature of portraiture, politics and patronage.

Wright will present ’Altarpiece Redux’: an Iconoclastic revisitation of the altarpiece revived as a blackboard.

Vicky Wright (b. Bolton, 1967) studied at the RCA and Goldsmiths. Recent exhibitions include The Informants, Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2010) and Comma 14, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2009).  BLACKBOARD is a new project involving artists who have studios with SPACE. For each exhibition cycle a studio artist will be invited to make an intervention on a blackboard hung behind the front desk of the Triangle building. The first participants were the design group Modern Activity who occupy a studio in the Triangle building.

SEAN (1970)

2011-02-17T13:09:00.000-08:00

The twelfth exhibition in an ongoing programme i'm curating for Seventeen's basement space...

Sean is a 14-minute interview film made by Ralph Arlyck. It takes as its subject a talkative and curious four-year-old boy.

In 1969 Arlyck rented an apartment in a building on Cole Street in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Living two-floors above him was Johnny and Susie, an archetypal hippie couple who had transformed their apartment into an oasis for the neighbourhood's drifting population. Arlyck was drawn to them. In particular to their son Sean, 'a wonderful kid' who would often visit his flat downstairs.

Sean pretty much had free run of Haight Street. Since I needed a subject for a film class project I got on my skateboard with a small camera and followed him around. Then I sat him down on my couch one day and interviewed him...

Sean's candid pronouncements, which range from the whimsical (reasons for being barefooted, confusion about the order of the days in the week and looking like a girl) to the more serious and historically particular (smoking pot, living with speed freaks, hating the police) lend proceedings a dual vocality. Indeed, in addition to being an outstanding film about childhood, naivety and appearances, Sean is a cypher for tensions endemic in the already waning ideologies and lifestyles of late 60s counterculture.

Arlyck offers us a view into how the supposedly sovereign - and certainly celestial - thoughts and actions of a 'generation lost in space' were transferred from the knowing to the innocent.Sean is a film that allows us to glimpse both the successes and failures of this transfer; a film that asks a very real question of its generation: is this free thought or dogma in action?

When released, Sean brought Arlyck a number of accolades. The film won multiple awards and had an extended theatrical run. It was screened in The White House and was shown in tandem with Francois Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage at the 1970 London Film Festival.

Over a distinguished career, Ralph Arlyck has produced more than a dozen prize winning, independent films. Arlyck's work has been broadcast on PBS and the BBC and has been screened at the top international festivals. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and is a board member of Input and a long-time active member of AIVF and New Day. For more info on Ralph Arlyck visit here: www.followingsean.com

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| JAN/FEB

2011-01-19T10:17:00.000-08:00

/////////

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| JAN / FEB

/////////

GALLERY: NEU! GEORGIE NETTELL

ANNEXE: NAM JUNE PAIK

LIBRARY: AM NUDEN DA

BLACKBOARD: MODERN ACTIVITY

Featuring paintings by Georgie Nettell in the GALLERY, a Nam June Paik Satellite television 'experiment' in the ANNEXE, an exhibition by Am Nuden Da in the LIBRARY and the first in a new series of BLACKBOARD projects.

///////////

GALLERY: NEU! Georgie Nettell: Ultra

In two-tone colour (beige and grey), Nettell traces the recurrence of a single stenciled motif over multiple variously sized canvases. Bathed in the white glare of wall wash floodlights, Nettell’s dyadic canvases transform the GALLERY into a stark and ascetic space.

'the point of the pointlessness of the effort of this work is to re-process a recognizable engine so to discover new ways toward abandon.'

Georgie Nettell (born 1984, Bedford) studied at the Slade School of Art. She lives and works in London.

Ultra is the sixth NEU! exhibition at SPACE. Previous exhibitions include: Mysterious Cults by Charlie Woolley (Sep 2010), AMAXAMA by Ben Sansbury (May 2010), colourless green ideas sleep furiously by Adam Thomas (March 2010), What I Believe (a Polemical Collection) by Ruth Beale (November 2009) and PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER by Richard John Jones (September 2009). NEU! is an ongoing cycle of solo exhibitions by emerging artists at SPACE.

/////////

ANNEXE: Nam June Paik: Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984)

An early experimental satellite TV "installation" by Nam June Paik.

On New Years day 1984, Nam June Paik orchestrated an ambitious intercontinental television experiment. Connecting WNET TV in New York with the Pompidou centre in Paris via a live satellite link that also took in broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, Good Morning Mr. Orwell reached an audience of over 25 million worldwide.  

A chaotic and entertaining collage of haute and pop culture, of mass media and the avant-garde, Good Morning Mr Orwell features performances from Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Peter Gabriel, Allen Ginsberg and Joseph Beuys, amongst others.  Good Morning Mr Orwell - Credits: Original event conceived and coordinated by Nam June Paik. Executive Producer: Carol Brandenburg. Partial Post-Production: Nam June Paik, Paul Garrin. Post-Production: Broadway Video, Post Perfect. WNET, New York; FR3, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; WDR Westdeutsche Fernsehen. Editor of single-channel version: Skip Blumberg.

Exhibition design by New Display Strategies

//////////////

LIBRARY: Session_14_Structure an exhibition by Am Nuden Da

3 Smartphones

Dictation software

HTML

Monitor

Steel pole and brackets

A4 printouts

www.amnudenda.com

Jpeg

//////////////

BLACKBOARD #1 : Modern Activity

BLACKBOARD is a new project involving artists who have studios with SPACE. For each exhibition cycle a studio artist will be invited to make an intervention onto a blackboard hung behind the front desk of SPACE. The first offering is from the design group Modern Activity who occupy a studio in the Triangle building.

VERSUCH

2011-01-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

I have an essay in the journal portion of VERSUCH: 'Notes and Projects': A Journal and Exhibition, curated by Gil Leung at Hollybush Gardens...

Have have extended 'SHITS' a brief text on Mary Barnes' coprophillic persuasions...

The exhibition includes works by Ed Atkins, Babette Mangolte and Robert Morris, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, Lucy Pawlak, Pamela Rosenkranz, Alexandre Singh and Patrick Ward.

The journal also includes texts by Jesse Ash, Ed Atkins, Andrea Buttner, David Raymond Conroy, Jesse Aron Green, Pablo Lafuente, Liang & Liang, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, Charlotte Moth, Francesco Pedraglio, Colin Perry, Heather Phillipson, Hannah Rickards, Alexandre Singh, Luke Skrebowski, Alexis Marguerite and Jesper List Thomsen.

Stuart Elliot /// Jimmy Merris at SEVENTEEN

2011-01-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

I have organised both the basement and the upstairs shows at SEVENTEEN this January...

Here's the info:

/////////////////

Stuart Elliot

Wednesday 12th Jan - Saturday 12th Feb 2011

Multiple canvases, equally sized, are installed close together on the gallery walls. So close, in fact, that it is hard to experience one of them without the presence of another bleeding into the percept. This is a phenomenon of quite some significance. A salient, though by no means unique example of what we might call the ethics of painterly deflection running throughout this exhibition.

About deflection. In abstraction, this might be understood as a sort of moving away from the idea. Not showing the idea fully - and certainly not being it.

One gets the sense that Elliot is a ludic operator in the studio. His paintings deploy a mish-mash of strategies and techniques - often to paradoxical effect - in order to institute or delimit their own context, their own way. Variant tones, forms and gestures occur and concur over multiple canvases in a loose and willingly undirected fashion. The colouring of these canvases is spontaneous and deviant (metallic, transparent, scatological, voided, fluorescent) as well as purely readymade (paints are seldom mixed). Titling of works (and shows) is eschewed, as is, on occasion, the distinction between support and surface (very basically primed monochromes will be included in exhibitions, as well as more salubrious 'stand in' supports like inverted stretches of zebra print).

As we explored earlier, and as a final observation in this brief and far from comprehensive inventory of applied deflections (for sure, we could go on...), Elliot's paintings are never monadic. Their conception and material presence is fundamentally plural. Accordingly, the 'truth' of any one painting - the idea that any one painting could have a truth - is neutralised by the always ever-present imposition of another, ready and waiting to deflect things somewhere else altogether.

////////////

Jimmy Merris

finding your feet in the times of the worried man

Wednesday 12th Jan - Saturday 12th Feb 2011

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! How like an angel in apprehension. How like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? - Withnail (reciting Hamlet).

Jimmy Merris makes short and strange videos. It's probably best not to say too much about them. What we will say is this. You can expect asymmetric humour. Not funny things. But the sense of a wit at work.

There is also pathos (... or should we say bathos?) Between these two poles then...

Funny sadness. Fucking weird funny sadness.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS: MARY BARNES

2010-11-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

After working on this show for about four years, I'm delighted to at last present Mary Barnes' work at SPACE. Press release below:

/////

MARY BARNES

In 1965 radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing co-founded an experimental therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in Bow, East London. Presenting herself on the brink of a serious mental breakdown, Mary Barnes (1923-2001) was Kingsley Hall’s first resident. Under the guidance of Laing and his colleague Joseph Berke, Barnes underwent a near total behavioral regression. Refusing to eat, dress or wash, she was in her own words “going down.”

Around this time she produced her first artwork – a pair of black breasts painted on the wall of her room in her own shit. 

Focusing principally on her time at Kingsley Hall (1965-70), Mary Barnes presents painting, drawing, sculpture and writing produced by Barnes alongside an extensive archive of documents, films, audio recordings and photographs relating to her work and the legacy of R.D. Laing’s thought.

Accompanying the main exhibition will be a cycle of films. These include Abraham Segal's Coleurs Folie(1986) and Asylum (1972) Produced and Directed by Peter Robinson.

A series of events will accompany the exhibition, commencing on November 16th with an evening workshop led by Oisin Wall:

‘The Actual Ping-Pong of the Abyss’
Comments on the History of Madness and Liberation
Tuesday November 16th 2010
7.30pm, SPACE

Further workshops by Victoria Jane Childs and Leon Redler, a major roundtable gathering and a film-screening programme will be announced shortly.

After the opening, together with FormContent and Am Nuden Da, there will be a get-together at The Haggerston Pub on Kingsland Road.

For press inquiries or further information regarding events please contact Paul Pieroni:paul@spacestudios.org.uk

MARY BARNES is kindly supported by The Elephant Trust and The Mercers Foundation.

Oliver Laric @ Frieze

2010-10-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

Oliver Laric is presenting his latest 'version' of Versions at the SEVENTEEN booth at Frieze. More here

Millar-Urey Bong, 2010

2010-10-07T04:37:00.000-07:00

Paul B. Davis has been talking to me about this project for an age. Finally it materialises. Press release below. More images here

///////

Dimension/Next*

Miller-Urey Bong, 2010

* a collaboration between Paul B. Davis and AIDS-3D

In 1952 Stanley L. Miller, working in the laboratory of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, attempted to clarify the chemical reactions that gave rise to organic compounds on primitive Earth. The experiment ran as a closed loop connecting two flasks. One flask contained water that represented Earth's ocean, a second flask contained a mixture of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), and hydrogen (H2) that represented a hypothetical 'reductive' atmosphere. Miller heated the water to simulate evaporation and rainfall, and used electrodes to simulate lightning, guessing that lightning was a likely energy source for ancient chemical reactions. After running the experiment for one week Miller found that as much as 15% of the carbon in the system now existed in the form of organic compounds. While the Miller-Urey Experiment did not conclusively prove the chemical makeup of primordial Earth, it became a classic experiment on the origin of life.

'We really don't know what the Earth was like three or four billion years ago. So there are all sorts of theories and speculations. The uncertainty concerns what the atmosphere was like. This is the major area of dispute.' - Stanley L. Miller

Miller-Urey Bong allows experimentation with genesis models of the early Earth atmosphere by re-creating the Miller-Urey experiment with the additional functionality of adding any combustive material to the atmospheric simulation. The material is heated using a high-powered laser and the vaporized remnants are drawn into the experimental apparatus through the combined use of a specially designed stem system, carburetion port, and user provided suction. Employing the same suction, users can also orally sample the experiment's contents at any time for further analysis.

Dimension/Next specifically proposes that the addition of C21H30O2 to the existing Miller-Urey hypothesis of CH4 + NH3 + H2 + H20 has a high chance of producing exceptional results. However, in the interest of scientific objectivity, Miller-Urey Bong is BYOW (Bring Your Own Whatever).

Due to the inherent dangers of Class 4 laser technology, stringent controlled conditions and safety procedures govern the interaction of Miller-Urey Bong. The work will be fully interactive only at specific periods during the installation, however performance documentation will be on view at all times.

-----

Miller-Urey Bong, 2010 is the tenth exhibition in an ongoing programme curated for Seventeen's basement space by Paul Pieroni. The exhibition will run concurrently with Susan Collis' solo exhibition in the main space. AIDS-3D will present a solo exhibit at Frieze with Gentili Apri this October.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| SEP/OCT

2010-09-02T10:03:00.001-07:00

/////////
SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| SEPT / OCT
/////////

GALLERY: NEU! CHARLIE WOOLLEY / ANNEXE: STAGES & SCREENS / LIBRARY: REANIMATION LIBRARY / COURTYARD: !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK / FOYER: LUKE DOWD

Featuring a new installation by Charlie Woolley alongside his Radio Show project in the GALLERY, a multi-screen 60s film and archive presentation by Peter Davis in the ANNEXE, a group show based around Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library in the LIBRARY, an intervention into the financial systems of London and Zurich in the COURTYARD by !Mediengruppe Bitnik and a cluster of screenprinted works in the FOYER by Luke Dowd

//

Preview: Thursday 2nd September 6pm – 9pm
Exhibitions run from 3rd September – 16th October

/////////
GALLERY /// NEU! CHARLIE WOOLLEY: Mysterious Cults

An exhibition of photo and poster collage, textiles and installation work accom¬panied by the artist’s ongoing Radio Show project and a cycle of broadcasted events. This will be Charlie Woolley’s second solo exhibition following I Built My House on Sand (2008) at David Risley Gallery, London, and his first in a UK public institution. Woolley is represented by David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen

Mysterious Cults is the fourth NEU! exhibition at SPACE. Previous exhibitions include: AMAXAMA by Ben Sansbury (May 2010), colourless green ideas sleep furiously by Adam Thomas (March 2010), What I Believe (a Polemical Collection) by Ruth Beale (November 2009) and PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER by Richard John Jones (September 2009). NEU! is an ongoing cycle of solo exhibitions at SPACE by emerging artists.

/////////
ANNEXE /// STAGES & SCREENS: Peter Davis, Villon Films & Friends

STAGES & SCREENS is a multi-screen film and archive presentation by Peter Davis exploring culture and counter-culture in the UK and America through the 60s.

Sixteen films make up the two part programme. Offerings by Davis himself such as Anatomy of Violence (1967), which details the Congress of The Dialectics of Liberation, an international gathering featuring Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse and R.D. Laing, will be presented along¬side works by other directors such as The Russell Tribunal (dir. Staffan Lamm, 2004), a powerful short concerning Bertrand Russell’s 1967 war crimes tribunal featuring Tariq Ali, Jean Paul Sar¬tre and Simone de Beavoir and America Against Itself (dir. William C. Jersey, 1968), a documen¬tary about the events surrounding the infamous 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago).

Cycle I 3rd September - 25th September
Cycle II 27th September – 16th October

/////////
LIBRARY /// REANIMATION LIBRARY: Hackney Branch

Feat. Nina Beier, David Horvitz, Ruth Beale, Hans Diernberger, Richard John Jones, Raphael Hefti and Damien Roach.

The Reanimation Library is an independent library based in Brooklyn, New York. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archaeologists.

Reanimation Library: Hackney Branch will consist of a small selection of books from the main library and a set of locally acquired books that will be made available for the general public to work with in the gallery space for the duration of the show. The branch library at SPACE will also feature an exhibition of artists’ responses to a treasured volume in the library’s collection: Inkblot Perception and Personality: Holtzman Inkblot Technique (University of Texas Press, 1961). Responses to the book will be made by an invited list of artists.

/////////////
COURTYARD & MARE STREET BILLBOARD /// !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK: Too big to Fail, Too Small to Succeed

An intervention into the financial systems of London and Zurich. Private detectives, advertising and media technologies playfully probe the blind spots of the financial districts and question the shift in power from state to corporation. This is Swiss artist collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s first UK solo exhibition and is presented concurrently with an exhibition at Les Complices in Zurich. It follows their three-month

PERMACULTURES residency at SPACE investigating the parasitic potential of media-based sys¬tems against the backdrop of the financial crises. !Mediengruppe Bitnik describe their work as an ‘explorative practice’ to determine how systems can be subverted, interfered with and transformed.

/////////
FOYER /// LUKE DOWD
Luke Dowd works with screen-printed and spray-painted surfaces to create works that question our perception of value and quality. For the Foyer Space he will present a cluster of brand-new works on canvas including original abstract paintings, expressive koi screen-prints, and copies of modern masterpieces.

Luke Dowd was born in New York City and completed an MFA at Chelsea College of Art & Design. He has recently exhibited at Hotel, London and The Breeder, Athens. Dowd lives and works in London.

HYPE WILLIAMS - GYPTIAN LOVER

2010-08-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

HYPE WILLIAMS

GYPTIAN LOVER

SPACE

13-15 August

Hype Williams are adept at conjuring ambiguous and sensual environments through their musical and artistic productions. Channelling myriad influences (entheogens/psychotropics , mysticism, esoterica, obsolete technology, net culture, street vernacular, death cults, American pop culture, improvisational music, Noise) Hype Williams has developed into an ever changing concatenation of forms, ideas and attitudes.

Originally a two-person music collective founded in London in 2008, Hype Williams’ project has expanded to include a broad network of collaborators and participants. Though still grounded in musical production and live shows, they now compliment these activities with works in a variety of media including video, sculpture, installation and performance.

Gyptian Lover will see the Gallery transformed into an active production space where artworks, events and live music will be presented by as part of a three-day exhibition.

This will be Hype Williams’ second presentation at SPACE following their involvement in Destroy All Monsters: Hungry For Death in February 2010. Then, they occupied the Annexe for The White Powder Truth Sessions, a two-day residency peaking with an open-invite improvised session by the Bo Khat Family Band.

176 talk

2010-08-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

I was invited by 176 Zabludowicz Collection to talk about their latest show. SYSTEMATIC, curated by Ellen Mara De Wachter, is a nicely expansive treatment of systems in art. I produced a talk with an obtuse title:

bbbbbeyond the bbbbbug (or WHAT JIMI REALLY MEANT)

Ostensibly the talk was about Jimi Hendrix as a sort of proto-glitch artist. I subjected his now iconic rendering of the Star Spangled Banner* at Woodstock to an equally obtuse (perhaps) techno-semantic reading...

My thesis? Well, that Jimi had executed (in terms of his use of feedback) the ultimate glitch gesture all those years ago, but also - and this is crucial - that this gesture was so acute a socio-political critique, that its technicality was entirely transcended. This latter point was raised in opposition to media/data art that exists in what I would call the sphere of the 'techno-hermetic', namely a totally technologically determined place defined by a sort of 'look at this neat thing I did with my computaaaaa' rhetoric. I'm not so interested in this sort of work, indeed for me it never goes far enough to explore the implications (for example, on the formation of new subjectivities) of what McLuhan would classify as our contemporary technologically 'interdependent' world.

Fast forward to our time, I used the Hendrix example as a sort of absolute point for the symbolic political potential of glitch art. This led to a discussion about Beige, Cory and a few others...

Some of the videos I played below. Jimi's original moment, Carl Lewis MURDERING the SSB, The Beatles and the first ever use of feedback on a recording, Steve Reich's feedback work Pendulum Music, Cory's Mario Cloud scroll, Compression 1 by Paul B. Davis and Jacob Ciocci and finally a Kanye rip-off...

* Cory Arcangel's work Apple Garage Band Auto Tune Demonstration (2007) was included in the show. It is based around a reworking of the Hendrix performance

FormContent - HaVE A LoOk! HAve a Look!

2010-07-10T01:46:00.000-07:00

Do Turkeys Have Tits (three artefacts at the wrong end of a craze)

Part of HaVE A LoOK! HAve a Look!

FormContent

09/07/10 - 11/07/10

(listening party, Friday July 9th, 7.30pm)

Do Turkeys Have Tits (three artefacts at the wrong end of a craze) was a presentation of sonic material, related objects and a listening party I assembled for HaVE A LoOK! HAve a Look! at FormContent.

While it is hard to define Audio Verite comprehensively, we might say that Audio Verité is a clandestine discipline aimed at capturing situational sounds made by unknowing participants (be they animal, vegetable or mineral).

The three examples or ‘artefacts’ presented nestle at the more tawdry and end of what remains a largely unclassified audio craze (one that has nonetheless existed since the dawn of audio recording itself). As a final point, all three artefacts can be said to have attained relative cult status amongst interested parties, leading to their reanimation in other formats such as publications, generic merchandise, films, comics, tv shows, etc.

The three artefacts were:

DION MCGREGOR: the world’s most renowned (and perverse) sleep-talker recorded in his sleep over a seven-year period during the 60s.

SHUT UP LITTLE MAN: Secret recordings made by “Eddie Lee Sausage” in the late 80s. SHUT UP LITTLE MAN features Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman, two argumentative and violent San Franciscan alcoholics living together in a bright pink apartment dubbed the “Pepto Bismol Palace”.

THE TUBE BAR RECORDINGS: a cycle of prank homophonic telephone calls made by John Elmo and Jim Davidson (later known collectively as the Bum Bar Bastards) to a New Jersey Bar called the Tube Bar. Their intended target was Louis ‘Red’ Deutsch, a former heavyweight boxer and the custodian of the Tube Bar.

A podcast relating to the material can be found here.

BLOCKBUSTER

2010-07-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

BLOCKBUSTER

Thursday 24th Jun - Saturday 31st Jul 2010

SEVENTEEN

'pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union'

- Samuel Goldwyn

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the title of a 2-minute long film made by Jack Goldstein in 1975. With its emblematic lion, the familiar production logo of MGM is repositioned onto a bright red background by the artist. Commencing its famous roar, the lion is suddenly interrupted as the moving image is rewound back to its starting point. This process continues for two minutes, both lion and logo locked into a Sisyphean loop that allows neither to reach climactic fulfilment.

Goldstein's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer extracts the production logo from its given context. The logo is asked to stand alone, asked to become a feature in itself.

A similar request is made of the material gathered together for this exhibition.

BLOCKBUSTER is a display of movie production logos*. Used by companies to brand what they produce, production logos are usually seen at the beginning of a theatrical movie or home video presentation. Over the years audiences have come to know and love the logos of big movie studios, offerings from the likes of 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal as well as MGM coming to be nostalgic and emotional components in the cinematic experience of many viewers.

The possibility of extracting, collating and comparing production logos necessarily follows on from their distinct and somewhat paradoxical place both inside and outside of the feature presentation. While ostensibly part of the film they accompany, they exist as independent images in their own right. Marked by an autonomous set of aesthetic and economic conditions, production logos have developed their own particular space within the symbolic order of cinema.

Cut off from the movies they serve, grouped together and displayed in a serial loop, the images in this exhibition are forced into what might be described as an 'entertainment vacuum'. Inside this vacuum, the original intended meaning and agency of these logos is stifled. Divorced from any referent (like in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the world of film is never actually reached) and viewed in isolation these images reveal themselves to be marked by a profound and excessive nothingness. What we are left with, then, is a succession of heraldic props and hieroglyphic embellishments; a conglomeration of intriguing though empty husks that reveal much about the Pavlovian conditioning underpinning attempted management of our fascination and desire by brands, be they cinematic or other.

* The initial inspiration for this exhibition comes from Vorspannkino - an exhibition held at KW-Berlin between February and April 2009. Vorspannkino (Cinema of titles) explored a broad range of cinematic genres though the medium of opening and closing titles. BLOCKBUSTERasks the question of Vorspannkino: what else in the cinematic experience other than the film itself and credit sequences might offer readability? In response to this question BLOCKBUSTERtakes the efficacy of Vorspannkino and recalibrates it towards production logos: objects that serve a radically different role and purpose within cinema while maintaining a similarly liminal status within discussions regarding core cinematic experience.

---

BLOCKBUSTER is the tenth exhibition in an ongoing programme curated by me for Seventeen's basement space.

NERO MAGAZINE

2010-06-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

New article for NERO. Looking (gnomically) at the 'capitalisation of culture' that occurred in the mid 80s via Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987).

You can read it here

AUTO-ITALIA |||| NO SOUL FOR SALE

2010-05-16T07:12:00.000-07:00

I was invited by Auto-Italia South East to moderate a talk at No Soul For Sale - the 'festival' of Independents hosted by Tate Modern from May 14 to May 16 2010.

The discussion oscillated between the proposition of 'independents' underpinning NSFS and the idea of the 'independant' or 'indy' record label established in the late 70s by seminal post-punk labels such as Rough Trade, Factory Records, Cherry Red, Fast Product, etc.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| MAY/JUN

2010-05-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

//////////

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| MAY/JUN
////////
Preview: Thursday 13th May 6pm - 9pm (with afterparty)
//////
Exhibitions run from the 14th May - 19th June 2010
/////
LINE UP:

GALLERY: NEU! BEN SANSBURY
ANNEXE: RAVING ’89
LIBRARY: NORTH DRIVE PRESS
FOYER: ANDREA JESPERSEN

AMAXAMA - a new large scale installation by Ben Sansbury in the GALLERY, Raving ’89 – Gavin Watson’s brilliant photo archive project in the ANNEXE, a retrospective of the New York based publication North Drive Press in the LIBRARY and a sculptural installation in the FOYER by Andrea Jespersen.

/////////

GALLERY /// NEU! BEN SANSBURY: AMAXAMA

Marked by Sansbury’s consciously clunky and totemic aesthetic, AMAXAMA is a mash-up of forms and thoughts centred on a single monumental hub. Housed in a large-scale walk-in structure built by Sansbury over a three week period leading up to the exhibition, sculpture, painting, photography, collage and sound will coalesce to form a single complex installation.

An expanded referential field underpins AMAXAMA as a whole. Sansbury is seduced by that which is old and Other; symbolic registrations drawn from myth and tribe merging with an archival passion for Old Europe and its many alchemic oddities.

AMAXAMA is Ben Sansbury’s first major solo exhibition. He studied at St Martins and The Royal College of Art. He lives and works in London.

AMAXAMA is the fourth NEU! exhibition at SPACE. Previous exhibitions were: colourless green ideas sleep furiously by Adam Thomas (March 2010), What I Believe (a polemical collection) by Ruth Beale (November 2009) and PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER by Richard John Jones (September 2009). NEU! is an ongoing cycle of solo exhibitions by emerging artists at SPACE.

///////////

ANNEXE /// GAVIN WATSON: RAVING ‘89

Raving ’89 is an exhibition by celebrated British photographer Gavin Watson.

Documenting the subterranean rave and acid house culture that emerged across the UK in the late 80s, Raving ’89 is a captivating chronicle of a grassroots social and cultural movement.

20 years after the event, Raving ’89 details the acute tensions underpinning early acid house culture. Watson’s work celebrates the pure hedonistic energy of the so called “second summer of love”: drugs and music fuelling an ecstatic sense of cross cultural social emancipation. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, however, these images also remind us of what was waiting in the wings in the form of The Criminal Justice Act (1994). With its specific impositions against Rave (notoriously of the definition of “repetitive beats”), the Act delivered a knock out blow to a scene captured in an untarnished state by Watson back in 1989.

Between two opposites, then, Raving ’89 strikes an uneasy balance; at once celebratory, while at times stiflingly melancholic.

Raving 89 is presented as continuous slide show accompanied by a soundtrack of period sounds mixed by Neville Watson (co-author of a monograph produced by DJ History to accompany this project).

Raving ’89 comes to SPACE following its American debut at New York’s White Columns (Oct/Nov 2009). Gavin Watson (b.1965) lives and work in the U.K. His photographs have been exhibited widely and published in three monographs: “Skins” (1994, U.S. edition 2001); “Skins & Punks” (2008); and “Raving ‘89” (2009).

/////////////

LIBRARY /// NORTH DRIVE PRESS

In the second of a new cycle of publication themed exhibitions, SPACE’s independent publications and periodicals Library hosts a retrospective exhibition by New York based North Drive Press.

An annual non-thematic art publication, North Drive Press began in 2004. Each issue contains interviews, texts, and multiples. Featured artists include Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Peter Coffin, Anne Collier, Jim Drain, Enrico David, Matthew Brannon, Cory Arcangel, Pablo Bronstein, amongst many others.

Following the recent release of their fifth and final edition, North Drive Press is now complete. This exhibition is curated by NDP editor and founder Matt Keegan, together with NDP art director Susan Barber and was conceived in conjunction with Kris Latocha (PAPERBACK magazine)

///////////////

FOYER /// ANDREA JESPERSEN

Andrea Jespersen’s installation in the Foyer Space examines the cultural phenomenon of superheroes and superpowers, and our need to create and believe in the ‘Ultimate Hero’. Jespersen's work comments on our culture, our habits, our knowledge and faith. Central to her practice is an awareness that we struggle to grasp what reality really is.

Andrea Jespersen completed her BA at Glasgow School of Art and her MA at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, Scandinavia and the USA and will be participating in the group exhibition …and then again… at the City Museum, Lisbon in June 2010. She lives and works in London and has a studio in SPACE’s Triangle building.

FORCEFIELD: VIDEOS - TIME OUT REVIEW

2010-04-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

Time Out says
By Sally O'Reilly

At the top of the stairs, before you descend into the gallery's crypt-like basement, a single monitor offers up a rudimentary digital animation that doesn't bode too well. A diamond pattern, striped and strobing, tries vainly to burn itself on to the retina, but at best recalls digital clichés, when a whole generation figured out how to reflect and reverse an image at the press of a button. But persist and it becomes apparent that this over-familiar trippy techno form is merely a peripheral element in an endeavour that is more subtly psychotropic.

Forcefield were a collective from Rhode Island who, before disbanding in 2002, produced videos and performances heavily laced with textiles and noise. Here a selection of short videos demonstrate a centrality of knitwear that effectively re-casts the opening animation as crafted patterning of traditional origins, rather than the obtuse digitalism we might have mistaken it for. The members of Forcefield appear dressed head to toe in tube-like suits in zigzagging hot pink and Martian green, layered, tight and fronded so as to disguise the human figure as a tubifex worm or alien equivalent.

In one scenario a purposeful individual crosses a road, the point of view (through a rain-dashed windscreen), establishing an anthropological us-and-them narrative. In another, four figures dance ritualistically around a totem that sways and eventually wanders off. It is this sense of looking outwards rather than inwards which rescues Forcefield's antics from pure indulgence. It suggests a performance of creativity that is critically self-aware and self-amused, and produces a weirdness that is generously evocative, derived from recognisable typologies rather than manufactured from the ground up.

http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/183051/forcefield-videos

Whitechapel Salon

2010-03-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

I was invited by Ruth Beale to contribute to her ongoing salon project. The topic of discussion what that curates egg: 'agency'... I was joined by Alec, Ian and Chris from The Hut Project and Sophie Hope. The salon took place in the salubrious environs of Goshka Macuga's installation The Nature of the Beast.

More info here

I who have nothing...

2010-03-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

Following the commercial failure of their recent exhibition "What's in it for me?", New Display Strategies presented a one off party "I who have nothing". Hosted by SEVENTEEN, guests were invited to embrace the last opportunity to see the show and drown their sorrows to a
selection of music which reflected upon or extended the mythology of being poor.

Those on Spotify can download the playlist here

FORCEFIELD

2010-03-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

FORCEFIELD: Videos //////////

7th April / 29th May

PV: Thursday 8th April / 6.30-8.30

SEVENTEEN

This exhibition brings together a selection of short video works produced by Forcefield between 1996 and 2002. Now on an indefinite hiatus (currently holidaying in the Bermuda Triangle), this is the first solo gallery exhibition of Forcefield’s work to be held in London.

Forcefield were an artistic collective working out of Providence, Rhode Island. Operating under the pseudonyms “PLobe”, “Meerk Puffy”, “Gorgon Radeo” and “Le Geef”, the four members mashed low-fi fuzzy energies with tribalist signals across a broad aesthetic programme of music, costume, communal actions, performance, installation, textiles, printmaking and video.

In the late 90s and early 00s, alongside noise duo Lightning Bolt, Forcefield galvanized a burgeoning cross-disciplinary alternative scene in Providence. Fort Thunder, a now destroyed warehouse on the second floor of a pre-Civil War former textile factory in the Olneyville district of the town, was its epicentre. Home to three out of four Forcefield members as well as Lightning Bolt (LB’s Brian Chippendale was a starter member of the community), Fort Thunder also regularly hosted gigs, craft fairs, cookie bake-offs, Halloween mazes, indoor firework displays – even costumed wrestling events over its 9,000 square feet of space.

Forcefield were firmly situated within the disparate and hermetic sphere of creation and display that was Fort Thunder. Accordingly, when viewed now, their work demonstrates a vibrant disregard for disciplinary as well as institutional boundaries.

In a November 2002 text for Artforum, Steve Lafreniere wrote that Forcefields videos…

… are their most narrative works. They star the members of the group, concealed in kookily glamorous all over body stockings. These are knit on industrial looms by Gorgon and look like the unisex clothing of a multisex species. On video their ice-cream-colored zigzag patterns take on a pixelated buzz, which obscures any nuance of the wearer's body language until just silhouette and broad gesture remain. Thus the characters have an alien-/Other-ness to them, even if their onscreen lives appear terribly humdrum. We see them playing clunky video games, chasing after small runaway creatures, or holding forth in gibberish from behind colossal laminated desks. If these are broadcasts from another green world, it's obvious that the aliens' televisions serve the same purpose as our own. But wait, here's their Discovery Channel: Forcefield figures dancing in slow motion around a tall, willowy knit pyramid, clapping their hands in a ritual of ... pacification? Worship? But soon this exotica looks familiar, too, and the thought begins to creep in that these aren't extraterrestrials at all but ourselves at an inane remove.

Forcefield's art work has been exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London; the Daniel Reich Gallery, New York; Space 1026, Philadelphia; Art Basel Miami; Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Britain; and the 2002 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other venues.

Forcefield: Videos is the ninth exhibition in an ongoing programme curated for Seventeen’s basement space by Paul Pieroni. The exhibition will run concurrently with Abigail Reynolds’ solo exhibition in the main space.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS | MAR/APR

2010-03-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

/////////

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| MARCH/APRIL
///////

Preview: Thursday 18th March 6pm-9pm

/////

Exhibitions run from the 19th March to 17th April

///

Line Up:

GALLERY: Nick Laessing

ANNEXE: Neu! Adam Thomas

LIBRARY: Guestroom

FOYER: Ben Woodeson

Featuring a new solo show by Berlin based Nick Laessing, a NEU! platform exhibition by Adam Thomas, a special project for our independent publications library by Guestroom and finally a Foyer space intervention by Ben Woodeson.

////////

GALLERY /// Nick Laessing: LIGHT | READING

Nick Laessing’s work revisits the utopian aspirations of scientific rebels, autodidacts and amateur experimenters.

For LIGHT | READING, Laessing will explore the ‘free-energy’ movement, producing a new body of work based around experiments with the machine Prototype II (after US patent 6545444 B2 by John Bedini).
The free energy movement follows claims and inventions made primarily by the scientist Nikola Tesla at the beginning of 20th century. He thought it possible to harvest free or radiant energy from the atmosphere or aether. Since then a number of inventors have worked on his theories and more recently the isolated work of a few individuals has found a wide following through the internet.

Laessing’s reconstruction of a radiant energiser first built by USA inventor John Bedini will attempt to be the source of power for lighting and sound equipment used to present found radio interviews and research conducted by the artist during his recent PERMACULTURES residency at SPACE. The main gallery will thus become a framework for entering the tacit world of these experimenters.

Nick Laessing was born in London. Following BA studies at Kingston University he gained a PGD from the Royal Academy of Art in 1999. Recent solo exhibitions include “Nick Laessing” Arcade, London (2009), “Nick Laessing”, Arquebuse, Geneva (2007), “Nick Laessing”, Mary Mary, Glasgow (2005).

///////////

ANNEXE /// Adam Thomas: colourless green ideas sleep furiously

Characteristically condensing around the visual dimension of language, Adam Thomas’ practice suggests new and intuitive models for rendering the art/language binary.

The idea of ‘making’ language – translating it into physical forms coterminous with the plastic arts – is a central theme throughout colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Handled by Thomas, language becomes an object: a thing in the world that demands not only linguistic, but also phenomenological, aesthetical, historical, art canonical, mythical and personal consideration.

Adam Thomas was born in Swansea in 1984. He gained his BA Fine Art from Kingston University, London, in 2006. Recent exhibitions include Young Adam Thomas, Associates, London (2007), All Cut Up (group), Roebling Hall, New York (2008), Paper Show (group), David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen (2009) and The Little Shop on Hoxton Street (group), Limoncello, London, (2009).

colourless green ideas sleep furiously is the third NEU! exhibition at SPACE. Previous exhibitions were; PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER by Richard John Jones (September 2009) and What I Believe (a Polemical Collection) by Ruth Beale (November 2009). NEU! is an ongoing cycle of solo exhibitions by emerging artists at SPACE.

/////////////

LIBRARY /// The Librarians: A Guestroom Project

Installed by Guestroom in SPACE’s own independent publication library, The Librarians is a series of eight video portraits concerned with personal libraries and collections.

Each film looks at one person’s selection processes and by extension the design of their environment in relation to their wider practice and ideas. Within the series we encounter both intentional collections and more organic yet highly specific selections within an ordinary bookshelf. As a sequence, the portraits become part of a complex constellation as relationships and connections develop between individuals and their ideas.

The Librarians are Tom McCarthy, Michael Leslie, Lorenza Boisi, Shaun Pubis, Pablo Bronstein, Rebecca Bligh, Isabel Waidner and Adam Sutherland.

Guestroom is a collaborative project by artists Maria Benjamin (born Broxburn, 1972, lives in London) and Ruth Höflich (born Munich, 1976, lives in London).

For more information visit: http://www.guest-room.net/

///////////////

FOYER: Ben Woodeson

Ben Woodeson creates works that aim to tease and unsettle the viewer and the exhibiting institution.
Since the start of 2009 Woodeson has been making and exhibiting the Health & Safety Violation Series of deliberately dangerous sculptures. To date, these have included 33,000 ball bearings on the floor, automatic trip wires, suffocation devices, electric fences, spinning metal weights, twisting ropes and steel garrotting cables.

His work for the Foyer Space will comprise of a new site-specific intervention and a video documenting a cycle of recently developed works.

Ben Woodeson studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and Glasgow School of Art. He has exhibited throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. He has a studio in SPACE’s Triangle building in East London.

The Foyer Space platform showcases the work of a SPACE studio artist in conjunction with the main exhibition cycles.

/////////

New Display Strategies

2010-02-26T15:29:00.000-08:00

Details on the latest exhibition in my curated programme for SEVENTEEN:

///////////

New Display Strategies present What's in it for me?, an alternative history of exhibitions, artefacts, artists, their public and the few that buy things.

New Display Strategies is a think-tank formed in 2008 to generate creative strategies for exhibiting cultural artefacts in an age of academic and corporate collaboration. NDS pride themselves on dislocating a culture via its representative artefacts and their means of display. NDS's charge is to re-edit history from their position of pantheistic ornate excess; in doing so producing rich masterplans that can sustain complex and successful institutions.*

What's in it for me? is part of NDS's ongoing historical reading of the decorative arts over the past 5000 years. NDS will map out their alternative history for artists and craftspeople marked by a sustained examination of their interaction with social, intellectual and divine elites. The pyramid, both a symbol of society and as a space ship/celestial vehicle, is a dominant motif in their research. Via pyramidal projection, the viewer will be transported from ancient Egypt to the literati of the enlightenment, making a brief stop with the doomed l'honnete hommes of the French aristocracy, before finishing amidst the brouhaha of post-modern furniture design.

What's in it for me? celebrates a longstanding cross-cultural heritage of exploitation in the creation of public culture and decorative art, exploring how power has shaped and determined artistic production throughout history and how this age-old tradition of cultural exploitation is painstakingly maintained to this day. As Marshall McLuhan once said: good taste is the refuge for the witless.

From the sans-culottes to the sans-papier, New Display Strategies takes a sans limites approach to the roles of the haves and have-nots in cultural production.

____________

*The title of a collaboratively authored text produced by New Display Strategies in 2008. The text can be downloaded as a pdf here

hype williams: white powder truth sessions

2010-02-13T12:14:00.000-08:00

Concluding the programme of events for Destroy All Monsters: Hungry For Death, London based band/collective hype williams presented the white powder truth sessions: a two-day residency in the second gallery at SPACE. Proceedings reached a peak at the end of the first day with a four hour Khat fueled melt down by Bo Khat Family Band.

hype williams feat. yung goatmen - untitled (2008)

Freek Summit

2010-01-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

As part of Destroy All Monsters: Hungry For Death, on Saturday January 23rd SPACE hosted FREEK SUMMIT. A gathering and discussion, the event featured poet and radical John Sinclair (manager of the MC5 / leader of the White Panther Party), Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) and Cary Loren (Destroy All Monsters).

FREEK SUMMIT was moderated by Stewart Home and included a image presentation by Cary Loren.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| JAN/FEB

2010-01-21T06:34:00.000-08:00

//////////

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| JAN/FEB
/////////
Preview: Thursday 21st Jan 6pm - 9pm (with afterparty)
/////////
Exhibitions run from the 22nd Jan - 20th Feb 2010
/////////

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS: HUNGRY FOR DEATH

JIM SHAW / MIKE KELLEY / CARY LOREN / NIAGARA / + more

Formed at a house party in 1973, Destroy All Monsters played their first gig at a comic book convention (they were asked to leave after ten minutes) using prepared guitars, a drum machine, tape loops, and various other instruments to create an unorthodox sound of suburban dystopian psyche music that was equal parts Stooges, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Velvet Underground, and Sci-Fi B-movie shtick.

Operating in this capacity until 1976, the band's music was accompanied by performances and films as well as a magazine of the same name (which Loren edited up until 1979), consisting mostly of collages and prints inspired by sci-fi movies, underground music, political subcultures, and iconic elements of 60s counterculture as it had filtered through to the collective's hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. After the departure of Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw in 1976, Ron Asheton (The Stooges) and Michael Davis (MC5) joined the band and Destroy All Monsters entered a second, punk phase that met with popular success with singles such as “Bored / You’re Gonna Die.”

Hungry For Death celebrates the vision of Destroy All Monsters through an exhibition that showcases posters, flyers, photographs, blueprints, drawings, banners, magazines, records, and various other ephemera culled from the collective's archive. Hungry for Death emphasizes material produced in the 70s and following the original collective's reunion in 1996.

As an accompaniment to Hungry For Death, on Saturday January 23rd, SPACE will host “FREEK SUMMIT”: a gathering and discussion featuring poet and radical John Sinclair, Savage Pencil, Cary Loren and other guests.

Destroy All Monsters: Hungry for Death is curated by James Hoff and Cary Loren

A series of events accompanies the exhibition:

“FREEK SUMMIT” - Saturday January 23rd (1-4pm)

A gathering and discussion featuring poet and radical John Sinclair, Savage Pencil, Cary Loren and other guests. Places are limited so please contact me (paul@spacestudios.org) to make a reservation.

Hype Williams – White Powder Truth Session

Friday 12th and Saturday 13th February (all day)
London based group Hype Williams will stage a two day residency in the main gallery including open invitation improvisation sessions, performances, screenings and motivational talks.

///

REAL TALK - Seth Price / Aleksandra Domanovic / Marjolijn Dijkman / Samuel Beckett

2010-01-14T06:45:00.000-08:00

REAL TALK

A riff on the themes explored in his solo exhibition Versions, as much as a show of 'influences', Oliver Laric presents REAL TALK - a basement space group show featuring works by Seth Price, Aleksandra Domanovic, Marjolijn Dijkman and Samuel Beckett.

...

Seth Price's Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance (2003) is a composition of visual and audio elements purportedly abandoned by the artist during the production of other works. Sound and voice-over are interlaced with images culled from advertising, corporate reels, amateur home pages and video games. Via this method Price explores a concatenation of themes ranging from the history of experimental cinema to the social naturalisation of violence. Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance operates as an indexical challenge to artistic discrimination (where the difference between that which is cut and that which is used in a work is temporarily inversed). Equally, by centralising the idea of 'importance', Price raises the question of coherence between the disparate elements that make up his film.

In Aleksandra Domanovic's Anhedonia* the audio content from Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) (a film with next to no incidental music) is superimposed onto stock still and moving images from the Getty Images archive. On a semantic level, the fixed score or code of Annie Hall (as a well known and appreciated movie) is reordered. Using the original soundtrack of the film as a script, Domanovic swaps one layer of visual information with another. In doing so she produces a new object, one that oscillates between literal sense and allegory (while on occasions also being totally obtuse). In essence the possibility of Domanovic's re-ordering is facilitated by the existence of such a thing as the Getty archive; an imposing glut of information (with over 70 million still images and 30,000 hours of stock footage) that is indicative not only of an ultimate excess at the level of the contemporary image, but also of the capacity of those such images to stand in as 'over-interpretations' of any given situation (here Annie Hall).

Marjolijn Dijkman's Wandering through the Future (2007) is an hour-long compilation of cinematic depictions of the future. On route through time we encounter a multitude of projected scenarios involving natural disasters, utopian/dystopian cities, viruses and clones. The result is a film that is as much a confrontation with the possible destiny of the human race as it is a derive through the apocryphal imagination of science-fiction cinema.
Quad (1981) is a movement play described simply by its author Samuel Beckett as 'a piece for four players, light and percussion'. Quad follows a strict geometric code - four individuals shifting around a defined area according to a set pattern and accompanied by percussion. A sort of geometrical mime, Quad evokes a world of emotionless ritual and repetition where people go through prescribed movements that are, in effect, meaningless.

*In psychoanalysis, anhedonia is determined as an inability to experience satisfaction from normally pleasurable life events. Allen had intended it to be the original title of Annie Hall, before realising how difficult marketing a film with that title would be.

Oliver Laric at SEVENTEEN

2010-01-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

Oliver Laric's long awaited second show:

Versions
Wednesday 13th Jan - Saturday 13th Feb 2010

At the level of the image, the determinations of the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648), as in so many other incidents of iconoclastic 'image-breaking' leading up to the present day, were predicated on a clear-cut Manichean sense of difference. During this period, statues and images of a religious order were subjected to sustained physical attack. Those that did not square with the heterodox self-understanding of the Reformation (as an exemplary monotheistic motion) were deemed false - in other words 'idolatrous' and worthy of destruction.

Versions, Oliver Laric's second solo show at Seventeen, circulates around both historical and contemporary ideas relating to image hierarchies. Central to the exhibition is a suite of polyurethane sculptures. In collaboration with 3D modellers, Laric has translated a reformation damaged icon from St Martin's Cathedral, Utrecht, into a silicone mould from which a number of casts have been made. Each is identical in size and form, distinction coming only from their varied pigmentation. For Laric, these sculptures, their multiplicity, reflects a viable productive principle in iconoclasm. After the conceptual event of iconoclasm, after the physical inscription of that event as damage on the very surface of these icons, the formal hierarchy between the original and its modification is fundamentally undermined. Instead there is equipoise; no single truth, no original; no derivative; just versions...*

In related speculation framed by a documentary video installation that forms the second and final element of the exhibition (also titled 'Versions'), Laric suggests that in the contemporary age certain creative protocols are, in a more general sense, similarly challenging the hierarchy between 'auratic original' images and those determined to be derivative (and therefore of secondary importance).

Commencing with a digitally doctored image released by the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2008, the documentary suggests a new mandate for image making, one which Laric identifies as finding its zenith in our networked internet age where bootlegs, copies and remixes increasingly take precedent over 'originals' in cultural production. Emphasising this plurality, Laric presents four equivalent 'versions' of the film in total. In each version, the same cycle of images is re-authored by a different narrator - respectively Momus, Guthrie Lonergan, Dani Admiss and Laric himself.

* That is, 'versions' amongst other possible 'versions'.

Text: Paul Pieroni

...
Complementing Versions, Laric curates a group show of influences in the basement space at Seventeen. Participating artists include Seth Price, Marjolijn Dijkman, Samuel Beckett and Aleksandra Domanovic.

WIKI READER

2009-12-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

I have contributed to David Horvitz' 2009 Wikipedia Reader. Details below:

A Wikipedia Reader

48 pages (24 loose sheets), black and white, 50 lb bright white newsprint

The Wikipedia reader was commissioned by the Art Libraries Society of New York for the Contemporary Artists Books Conference at Printed Matter's 2009 NY Art Book Fair. It was organized through David Senior at the Museum of Modern Art Library. Each contributor was asked to submit a series of linking Wikipedia articles

Contributions by:
Paul Branca, Dexter Sinister, Barbara Ess, Fillip, Rob Giampietro, Marc Handelman, Zach Houston, Adam Katz and Julia Sherman, Brian Kennon/ 2nd Cannons Publications, Chosil Kil, Alex Klein, Marisa Olson, Paul Pieroni, Laurel Ptak, Eileen Quinlan, Michael Smoler, Jamie Stewart, Oraib Toukan, Lia Trinka-Browner, Jen Delos Reyes, Rafael Rozendaal, Ryan Waller, Amy Yao

My contribution linked the following pages:

Faces of Death
San Francisco
BBC
Greg Dyke
Roland Rat
Commodore 64
Ford Model T
Prohibition in the United_States
Autobiography of Malcolm_X
Russian Roulette

Jamie's Video Nasties / Video Club # 2 at [space]

2009-11-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

On the evening of November 18th, Jamie Shovlin presented two further screenings of banned ‘video nasty’ films (on VHS of course) at [space]

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Dir. Lucio Fulci, 87 mins.

Night Warning (1983)

Dir. William Asher, 96 mins.

Sixpenny Book Group at [space]

2009-11-10T08:23:00.000-08:00

As part of her NEU! exhibition, Ruth Beale will be hosting a series of intimate book groups. These groups will occur on successive Tuesdays during the run of the exhibition and will respectively concern five pamphlets published by The Hogarth Press in 1939. These pamphlets gave voice to well-known authors and journalists of the time and aimed to ‘provide thinking people with the means to consider fundamental problems in art, literature, taste and morals’.

Schedule:

Tuesday 10 November, 7pm
WHAT I BELIEVE
By E.M. Forste r
An outline of Forster’s humanist attitude: a pertinent reminder of humane and individualistic values in the face of totalitarian onslaught.

Tuesday 17 November, 7pm
THE NEW REALISM: A DISCUSSION
By Stephen Spender
Spender’s essay expresses a disgust with radical politics – following time in Spain reporting and observing for the Communist Party of Great Britain – and calls for the artist’s ‘duty’ to be re-defined.

Tuesday 24 November, 7pm
ANTIQUARIAN PREJUDICE
By John Betjeman
A revolt against the purely antiquarian approach to buildings and the selective preservation of buildings we might now associate with the heritage industry.

Tuesday 1 December, 7pm
REVIEWING
By Virginia Woolf, with a note by Leonard Woolf
A satirical essay that labels the reviewer as ‘a louse... a distracted tag on the tail of the political kite’ and offers a new model where published reviews would be abolished.

Tuesday 8 December, 7pm
THE ARTIST AND HIS PUBLIC
By Graham Bell
Bell attributes a loss of artistic craft to the decadence of capitalist society, and appeals for a revival of technical skill in which the ‘honest craftsman’ is contrasted with the ‘deliberate fraudulence’ and ‘self-deception’ of the modernists.

To join the book group please email: news@spacestudios.org.uk with BOOK GROUP as the subject line. To simply read each pamphlet, click on the titles above.

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| NOV/DEC

2009-10-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

//////////

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| NOV/DEC
/////////
Preview: Thursday 5th Nov 6pm - 9pm (with afterparty)
/////////
Exhibitions run from the 6th Nov - 19th Dec 2010
/////////
LINE UP:

GALLERY: NEU! RUTH BEALE
ANNEXE: WIGAN CASINO
LIBRARY: NEW STOCK
FOYER: DAFNA TALMOR

////////

GALLERY /// RUTH BEALE: WHAT I BELIEVE (a Polemical Collection)

The second NEU! emerging artist profile exhibition, WHAT I BELIEVE (a Polemical Collection) is based around Beale's Pamphlet Library: an ongoing collection of political/ideological pamphlets. Each one a polemical address, the pamphlets included in the library exemplify the pressing issues and opinions of their time in a format now nostalgically attractive in its antiquarianism.

Complementing the Library – which will be fully accessible throughout the show – Beale has developed a number of new three-dimensional and print works in relation to a set of Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets published by the Hogarth Press in 1939 to “provide thinking people with the means to consider fundamental problems in art, literature, taste and morals”*. Additionally, a weekly book club and the commissioning of five new texts by contemporary writers will revive arguments made in these pamphlets by E.M. Forster, Stephen Spender, John Betjeman, Virginia Woolf and Graham Bell.

Ruth Beale lives and works in London. Her practice takes the form of action-research into social and historical discourses through collections, plays, salons and performances. She is currently undertaking an MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths.

///////////

ANNEXE /// WIGAN CASINO (Dir: Tony Palmer, 1977)

Wigan Casino (1977) is British filmmaker Tony Palmer’s paean to the Northern Soul club scene of late 70s Britain.

Wigan Casino was a nightclub in Wigan, Lancashire. Home to all night, alcohol free dance parties, it was the primary venue to hear black American soul music during its time. Much sampled (notably in Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)), Wigan Casino documents an idiosyncratic scene based around the weekly club night that ran from 1973 to 1981. From elegant slow motion dance shots to fervent scenes of vinyl swapping, Palmer precisely captures the bustle and energy, as well as the overarching sub cultural strangeness, of the Northern Soul phenomenon.

Tony Palmer is one of Britain’s premier music documentary makers. His work includes over 100 films, ranging from early works with The Beatles, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa (200 Motels), to his classical portraits which include profiles of Maria Callas, Margot Fonteyn, John Osborne, Igor Stravinsky, and Richard Wagner.

/////////

LIBRARY /// NEW STOCK

SPACE's independent publication and periodical library continues with new stock arrivals.

/////////

FOYER /// DAFNA TALMOR

Dafna Talmor continues the new rotation of work presented in the gallery reception area with a piece of her photographic work.

///////

Fillip at [space]

2009-10-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

In the first event to take place in the new Library at [space], Antonia Hirsch, artist and Associate Editor of Fillip magazine, presented Fillip’s publishing programme within the context of Vancouver’s critical communities.

Jamie's Video Nasties / Video Club # 1 at [space]

2009-09-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

In the first of a two-part Video Club project at [space], artist Jamie Shovlin, explored the particularities of British ‘video nasty’ culture via two screenings...

Don’t Go In The House (1980).
Dir. Joseph Ellison, 82 Mins.

Fight For Your Life (1977).
Dir. Robert A. Endelson, 82 Mins.

... and a lecture, during which Shovlin delineated the particularly British phenomenon of the video nasty and its relation to the Video Club's stated remit.

Part two of Jamie’s Video Nasties will take place on Wednesday 18th November 2009.

Art in America / Eduardo Paolozzi

2009-09-21T08:43:00.000-07:00

On the Eduardo Paolozzi/Ambit show at Raven Row. Read here

Video Club

2009-09-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

Video Club is a new platform I'm developing in order to explore the recent cultural history of VHS.

Focusing on the VHS to Digital shift (DVD, Blu-ray, flash stream, You tube, avi, torrent, etc.), a broad range of individuals will be invited to select, present and screen a VHS (or a number of tapes) of their choice on . The only criteria is that the selected videos are on the VHS format and that they are not widely available on digital formats

VHS has a half life of 12.5 years. Fairly soon a huge swathe of titles – those deemed unsuitable for digital upgrade - will simply erase themselves from our cultural imagination. Video Club events will remind people of this fact , as well as establishing a more general platform (potentially for talks and non-film based events) for the consideration of how culture, in general, renews itself via certain dialectical predicates...

Now this all sounds very serious. The reality is that the sort of content auto-generated by this concept will most likely be anything but serious. As an example, I myself hope to mount a screening of my collection of early 90s tennis videos: in particular my hackneyed copy of “Becker and Graf: The Rise of German Tennis” (a video, it seems, destined never to be restituted from its native VHS).

In essence the content rules for the platform should unearth some interestingly 'unimportant' material. The mass of productivity on VHS that simply does not appeal to anyone and has no gate keepers.

(That said, the first two events by Jamie Shovlin sort of contradict these rules (which are in fact, less like rules, more like guidelines) - see here).

David Markey: WE GOT POWER

2009-09-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

I have recently curated a micro-retrospect of brilliant Southern Californian independent filmmaker, David Markey. The programme ran like this (over September at SEVENTEEN):

9th - 12th Citizen Tania (with Raymond Pettibon) (1989) + short films & music videos

16th - 19th 1991: The Year That Punk Broke (1992) + short films & music videos

23rd - 26th Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984) + short films & music videos

30th - 3rd The Slog Movie (1982) + short films & music videos

Full press release below + a clip from Citizen Tania.

The work of independent filmmaker David Markey (b. 1963) is defined by an indefatigable DIY attitude. Self taught, he produced his first film in 1974 with his fathers hand-wound 8mm Brownie camera (a horror film titled The Devil's Exorcist). In 1980 he discovered the burgeoning Southern Californian punk scene via bands such as Black Flag, Redd Kross and X. The formation of his own band (Sin 34) followed in 1981, alongside the launch of his own We Got Power fanzine and, crucially, the production of his first Super-8 film documents.

These films were distributed underground and critically well received, putting Markey on the Cinematic Punk map as one of its key visual diarists before he was of legal age. Accordingly his films feature an impressive roll call of cast members and collaborators; including Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Spike Jonze and Raymond Pettibon, amongst many others. Markey continues to be a resilient and resourceful filmmaker who has sustained a truly independent career in the shadow of Hollywood and against the backdrop of corporate America for over two and a half decades.

WE GOT POWER focuses on Markey's output between 1974 and the present day and includes Super-8 shorts, music videos, feature films and documentaries.

Central to the exhibition will be a selection of short films and music videos. These will accompany a weekly rotation of feature length works beginning with Citizen Tania, a parody of the kidnap and subsequent indoctrination of newspaper heiress Patti Hearst by the urban guerrilla group The Symbionese Liberation Army (made in collaboration with Raymond Pettibon in 1989).

Following this, key feature length documents such as 1991: The Year That Punk Broke (1992), Desperate Teenage Love Dolls (1984) and The Slog Movie (1982) will be shown in weekly succession. Further works, including later films by Markey and a number of other collaborative efforts will be screened in a series of events to be announced.

Connected with the exhibition, on Friday the 25th of September Hype Williams will perform in the gallery basement from 7pm onwards.

More about the work of David Markey can be found here: www.wegotpowerfilms.com

SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| SEP/OCT

2009-07-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

/////////
SPACE EXHIBITIONS ||| SEP/OCT

///////

Preview: Thursday 3rd Sep 6-9pm

/////

Exhibitions run from the 4th Sep - 17th Oct 2009

///

Line Up:

GALLERY: TOM ELLIS

ANNEXE: NEU! RICHARD JOHN JONES

LIBRARY: OPENING!

FOYER: CAMILLA LYON

COURTYARD: DEAN BALDWIN

//////

GALLERY /// TOM ELLIS: "GET ME A SHOW IN CHINA"

Q Talk to me about heresy. Is a heretic disposition – as embodied in your own work and

that of those who you respect – more enchanting to you than a revolutionary one?

A Yes! Yes! Yes!

Q Do objects exist independently of you?

A Yes! Yes! Yes!

Q How would you react to the classification of your work as ‘non-art’? By this

classification I don’t mean ‘anti-art’ (or an equivalently antagonistic reproach), but specifically

‘non art’: a use of art that remains constitutively foreign to the norms and aims governing the

properly artistic practice of art?

A Yes! Yes! Yes!

Q In line with some of the leading thinkers in contemporary realist philosophy, do you

concur that Nihilism, far from being some form of existential quandary, is in fact something of

a speculative opportunity?

A Yes! Yes! Yes!

///////

ANNEXE /// NEU! RICHARD JOHN JONES: ‘PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER’ Part II

Launching the NEU! young artist exhibition platform and following on from a performance and live film shoot held at Auto Italia South East in early August, Richard John Jones presents the second instalment of his project PROH-SOH' PA-PEER.

PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER* is a sustained exploration of the representational logic of the mainstream media – in particular, the role the media has in shaping the ideological predicates of contemporary political, activist and libidinal (in particular queer) subject positions.

* The exhibition’s title is a phonetic play on the word ‘prosopopoeia’: a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to an audience by speaking as another person or object.

//////

THE LIBRARY /// NEW!

Ongoing independent publication library, installed and curated by Kris Latocha of Paperback Magazine. Launch night TBC

////

FOYER /// CAMILLA LYON

Camilla Lyon inaugurates a new rotation of works presented in the gallery reception area with 'Rorschach' (2009).

////

COURTYARD /// DEAN BALDWIN: MINI-BAR

Dean Baldwin, fresh participating in Canada's contribution to the Venice Biennial, presents his “Mini-Bar”: a fully functional dive bar installed in the courtyard space.

///

[space]

2009-07-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

I have recently been appointed as the Curator of [space]. A position I will take on in addition to my role as Associate Director / co-Curator at SEVENTEEN.

A new website is in the process of being built, but in the mean time you can visit the current one here

PUZZLE: DIETER ROTH

2009-06-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

Puzzle: Dieter Roth, a film by Hilmar Oddsson, is the sixth exhibition in an ongoing series of shows I'm curating for the basement space at SEVENTEEN.

The show opens on Thursday July 9th and runs until the 1st of August, 2009. Blurb below:

........

In 1957 a young and unknown Swiss artist by the name of Dieter Roth boarded a ship to Iceland in the pursuit of love. After seven years in a small society unable to contain his talent, he left, leaving behind his life partner and three children to become on one of the most influential artists of the 20th century...

Directors Note:

'I knew Dieter from early childhood, he was my aunt's husband and his eldest son became my first and closest friend. Although I knew him best as a child he touched my life in many ways and he still does, a number of years after his death.

I wanted to make this film to find out where Dieter came from and what shaped him as a person and as an artist. How did Karl Dietrich Roth become Dieter Roth? What was his real connection to Iceland? How did it influence his artistic work and vice versa? What set him apart as an artist?

To find answers to these questions I visited his house in Snaefellsnes, a remote place in Iceland where he used to spend time on his own to immerse himself in his writings. I also travelled to Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Britain and the US, as well as around Iceland, to talk to his family and to his many friends and colleagues.

What emerged from these travels were stories about his childhood, adolescence and young adulthood in Europe; the war and the move to Denmark, where he found the love that brought him to Iceland. His life there, providing for a growing family, his impact on the local art scene, how he finally left to pursue a life as an artist. I learnt how his recognition as such grew but with it also his discontent. How depression and alcoholism shaped his life to the end - an early end which came in 1998 in Basel at the age of sixty-eight.

This film is narrated by the people who shared Dieter's life, for better or worse, and whose lives were shaped by his. It is tragic and happy in turns, the story of an exceptional person who has been celebrated as one of the most singular and important artists of the second half of the 20th century.'

Hilmar Oddsson, 2008

About Hilmar Oddsson:

Oddsson was born in 1957, in Reykjavik, Iceland. Music was his first love and he trained as a cellist before studying film direction at the Feature Film department of the MÃ¼nchen Hochschule fur Fernsehen und Film, graduating in 1985. Oddsson has worked independently as a television director on documentaries, TV dramas and short films and been instrumental in various film and production initiatives in Iceland. He has taught at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Film Academy of Iceland and written extensively on film. From 1996-2006 he was on the board of directors of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

The Earth Not a Globe

2009-06-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

I have contributed a catalogue text for The Earth Not a Globe curated at Rokeby, London, by Dani Admiss and Dave Charlesworth. You can read it here.

BROWN RICE

2009-06-17T18:30:00.001-07:00

I recently organised an event (all day on the 24th of June) as part of a series of happenings organised by the BACCC at Central St Martins.

The event - comprising a screening room, interpretation space and talk - was the first manifestation of a multi-faceted research and exhibition project I've inaugurated called Brown Rice*. The initial incarnation of Brown Rice, titled “Be Grouped”, took the explosion in cultural cooperation and collectivity in 70s London as its starting point.

How did groups, rather than individuals come to define the creative milieu of this era? What were the economic, social and political conditions underpinning radical collective cultural production in the 70s? And what, above all, might we begin to learn about our contemporary moment from these elapsed examples?

The event additionally served as a platform for considering a few of the alternative curatorial strategies suggested by the Brown Rice project. These included: historical excavation as a curatorial strategy / parochialism vs. globalism / ad hoc research solutions / lecture as exhibition space / anti-didacticism (or how to free your head) / how to un-curate.

* Future Brown Rice projects will resonate from this initial event in order to consider in greater detail distinct moments from the history of radical cultural production in 70s London and further afield

(above image: the living room of 1 Carol St, Camden - Scritti Politti's HQ and home. From the cover of their album "4 A sides" (1979))

DEFINE YOUR TERMS (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show)

2009-05-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

Here it is. Finally. Paul B. Davis' [BEIGE] second solo show at SEVENTEEN. Been working on this one for a while. Should be good. Press release + links below. You can also check out Paul's own take on the show here.

......

DEFINE YOUR TERMS (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show)

Paul B. Davis [BEIGE]

Wednesday 27th May - Saturday 4th July, 2009

Private View - Thursday May 28th, 6.30 - 8.30

Paul B. Davis' contemplative second solo show at SEVENTEEN represents a bold step forward for the artist...though not necessarily one he expected to take. It was instigated by a semi-voluntary rejection of a practice that, until very recently, was central to his creative output and figured prominently in his debut exhibition at the gallery - Intentional Computing (2007). A curious turn of events led to this unforeseen repudiation and redefinition of practice:

'I woke up one morning in March to a flood of emails telling me to look at some video on YouTube. Seconds later saw I Kanye West strutting around in a field of digital glitches that looked exactly like my work. It fucked my show up...the very language I was using to critique pop content from the outside was now itself a mainstream cultural reference.'

Contentiously dubbed 'datamoshing', (or 'compression aesthetics', as Davis prefers to describe it), this practice ultimately emerged out of artefacts inherent in the compression algorithms of digitally distributed media. Davis seized upon the glitchy pixellation that is often present while viewing YouTube clips or Digital TV, and repurposed it as a tool of cultural rupture. Alongside other artists such as Paper Rad, Sven Konig and Takeshi Murata, he engaged this effect as a tool for aestheticized intervention, a fresh framework for analysis, and a new visual language.

In contemporary culture, mainstream media pilfering of independent artistic production is expected. Moreover, it's a generative force - renegade practice and/or methodology is forced into evolution by the appropriation of its pioneering techniques. But for Davis this perhaps inevitable incorporation by Kanye West, the self proclaimed 'voice of this generation', served as a trigger to directly engage his growing concern that current artistic methods for grappling with digital culture - hacks, remixes, and 'mash-ups' among them - are ill-equipped for sustaining serious and self-reflexive critical examination. As Davis has commented, 'These methods generate riffs...restatements or celebrations of existing cultural behaviours, and artists who use them are seemingly unable to either offer incisive alternatives or generate new cultural forms. I was one of these artists, making these riffs, and I'd come to realize their limitations.'

Define Your Terms (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show) concerns Davis' attempt to understand, react to, and depart from this crossroads. The works in the exhibition, many of which disavow his previous modes of hacking or mashing-up existing digital artefacts, have all been produced in the past two months, and will instead propose some alternate strategies for provocatively getting under the skin of Civilisation 2.0.

In Codec (2009), Davis' created his own proprietary video compression/decompression algorithm, free of now-standardized templating and presets. This algorithm is - defiantly - unavailable for commercial use. With Critical Space Headgear (2009) a head-mounted video camera is fed to a head-mounted display, the resolution of camera output and viewed input being reduced to 320x200 pixels thereby creating a self-mediated 'reality' that's flattened in real-time to the same dimensions as YouTube. In The Symbol Grounding Problem (2009) Davis simultaneously ingests a bacon sandwich while defecating in a perspex box as philosopher Luciano Floridi narrates the viewer through what they see onscreen as the interaction of dynamic informational entities. Floridi asserts that as we move closer towards the singularity - the future point in which human consciousness merges with the consciousness of our machinic progeny - our own experiential trajectory in the physical world will become secondary to the interaction of informationally-modeled simulacrum. This inevitable futurity is reinforced while experiencing the most base, mundane of bodily functions - simply taking a poo.

In this way, the works in this show are built. They are constructed out of whole cloth. There are no naive uses of technology here as they turn away from seemingly arbitrary, uninterrogated appropriation of digi-cultural artefacts and seek to offer alternative strategies for taking on the protocols of new media. In essence, Define Your Terms (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show) is an exhibition about Davis breaking free from his own creative paradigm and setting forth a revivified agenda. Through radical reevaluation of his process, Davis has offered some new approaches for tackling the hovering questions that are relentlessly generated by this - our age of over-caffeinated cultural cycles, empty signifiers, and supreme technological oversaturation.

........

Welcome to Heartbreak - Kanye West, 2009

........

Compression Study #1 (Untitled data mashup) by Paul B. Davis [BEIGE] and Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad), 2007

........

Compression Study #4 (barney) by Paul B. Davis [BEIGE], 2007:

...........

BIO

Paul B. Davis Lives and works in London, UK. Founded the BEIGE Programming Ensemble with Joe Beuckman, Cory Arcangel and Joseph Bonn. While still in college in the late 90s Davis pioneered the use of hacked video game cartridges as an art practice. His Nintendo work was premiered in 2000 and subsequently BEIGE members used hacked NES systems to create a distinct body of work that has been shown internationally. Davis created The BEIGE Cassette Jockey Championships, the world's only cassette tape-based performance competition, and performing as 'DJ Spin-Laden' is the only DJ to ever get thrown off stage at the Technics/DMC World DJ Championships. Recent projects include solo exhibitions in Milan and Chicago, performing music and wizardy in a duo with DJ LeDeuce [Thrill Jockey] known as The Potions, and DJ'ing in the elevator of the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. Currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, working on his Ph.D, and producing beats for St. Louis rapper 'Wonton'.

NERO MAGAZINE

2009-04-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Been thinking about shit a lot recently.

Particularly in reference to a painter called Mary Barnes – who used to paint with her own shit. I have written an article for the latest issue of Italian magazine NERO about Mary's coprophiliac persuasions . I will be curating a show about the relationship between Mary Barnes and her guru (of sorts) R.D. Laing some time next year, so this text serves as a little intro...

You can read the whole magazine on the NERO website: http://neromagazine.it/n/

Or download the article here

THE LIVE! SHOW

2009-04-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

My latest curatorial project centers around The Live! Show, a New York based cable access avant-garde TV show run by Jaime Davidovich between 1979 and 1984.

Press release below + a taster clip...

.....

THE LIVE! SHOW
Jaime Davidovich

29th April / 23rd May, 2009
SEVENTEEN

'It was the beginning of cable television and as such probably the first opportunity, and maybe the last, to be able to participate in the whole cultural process. It would give us a little window to the outside world which enabled us to show our work, not just my own, but the work of everybody, and to create a truly alternative television. The timing was perfect.'

- Jaime Davidovich

Pitched as a television variety show of the avant-garde - hosted by real and invented personalities and jam packed with interviews, vox pops, home-shopping segments, art performances, live call-ins, art lessons and 'much more' - The Live! Show debuted on Manhattan cable station Channel J on December 21st, 1979.

Though a manic collage of playful ideas, The Live! Show also operated as a polemical artwork for its creator Jaime Davidovich. Davidovich had a long-standing interest in television as a platform for artistic production and intervention and The Live! Show allowed him to critically explore - albeit gnomically - this interest while engaging directly with the conditions of television culture itself.

Davidovich, as the show's host, editorialist, and chief ideologue, wanted people to be aware of their own behaviour in relation to television and the place that television occupied in their daily lives as a transmitter of ideas and cultural values. Davidovich, usually assuming his favoured character role of 'Dr. Videovich' (described by New York Times television critic John J. Connor as 'a persona somewhere between Bela Lugosi and Andy Kaufmann'), would invite artists such as Laurie Anderson, Les Levine and Robert Longo onto The Live! Show to perform and make work. Davidovich also took advantage of his airtime to do a little selling, inaugurating a segment called 'The Video Shop', selling things like Winky Dinky sets, Dukes of Hazzard bedtrays and other objects he'd made especially for sale on the show.

Finally after five years The Live! Show was retired - leaving for history a unique experiment in art television; one that was intensely personal, slightly self-indulgent, often original and definitely entertaining.

.......

For this exhibition episodes and excerpts from The Live! Show will be screened alongside archive materials, printed matter and original photographs drawn from The Live! Show's run between 1979 and 1984. The work of Jaime Davidovich (American, Born 1936, Argentina, lives and works in New York) is featured in prominent public collections including MOMA New York and The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Recent exhibitions include 40 Years / 40 Projects, White Columns New York (2009) and 'Jaime Davidovich', MAMBA, Buenos Aires (2005).

BOURBON JOY

2009-03-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have been organising Mike Harte and Jamie Shovlin's latest project at SEVENTEEN. 'Bourbon Joy'. Press release below:

Occupying the basement exhibition space of SEVENTEEN for seven evenings leading up to the opening night of the exhibition, Mike Harte and Jamie Shovlin will drink their way through seven different branded bottles of bourbon. For each bottle consumed and each evening spent in the basement, Harte, using the very bourbon he and Shovlin are drinking as his medium, will produce a single painting of the word Joy. At the end of the week, and in perfect time for the private view, Harte will have produced a set of seven bourbon Joy paintings, all of which will be displayed in the ground floor gallery space over the duration of the show. These completed works will ascend in size in correspondence with the value of the respective brand of bourbon used to make them. The basement space, which will also be left open over the duration of the show, will remain exactly as Shovlin and Harte leave it following their period of occupation.

---

The relationship shared between Harte and Shovlin is a curious one. And while Bourbon Joy is in a way a fairly straightforward exhibition about friendship, drinking and art making - no part of this triad operates without device or condition.

For a start, Shovlin will assume the role of magnanimous patron to Harte - his old friend and sometime collaborator - throughout the preparatory stages of the project. He will source the bourbon, provide art supplies, organise the framing of the final works and, most importantly, be on hand nightly to feed Harte alcohol - both as his sustenance and medium. While Harte alone will be doing the painting, the project will be fully co-authored; both Harte and Shovlin sharing full credit for the end works and the project as a whole. In this sense the trajectory of Bourbon Joy is proximal to previous projects authored independently by Shovlin in which Harte is tricked or coerced, for reasons of benevolent encouragement or simple exploitation, into making art (for example Mike Harte Make Art (2006) which featured a collection of letters sent by Harte to Shovlin that were never openly or intentionally meant to be art by Harte, their original author).

One might begin to understand the particular conceit of authorship proposed by Bourbon Joy in terms of a certain division of labour that distinguishes the art-productive traits of the exhibitions respective co-authors. Shovlin is in many ways an 'over-producer', an artist whose productivity expands beyond the unitary in order to happily co-habit other identities - be they fictional, real or invisible in their authorial pretence. In stark contrast to this, however, Harte struggles with the very conditions of his own artistic singularity. Historically he has had a problem with the idea of having and maintaining an art practice, leading to him to often refuse the nomenclatural identification of 'artist' when others apply it to him.

And so, Harte and Shovlin's collaboration is an apotheosis of sorts that makes perfect sense in terms of their distinct capacities for artistic production.

And then there is of course the drinking. Bourbon Joy toys with romantic associations between radical artistry and inspired inebriation. The idea of the radical artist as a human being struggling equally with art and alcohol - an idea concocted in both respects out of a greater myth of human failure - finds tragicomic obfuscation in the programme of curiously local relations underpinning Harte and Shovlin's engagement with each other in Bourbon Joy.

---

In the basement space a projection programme will run according to the following schedule:

Wednesday: Seinfeld, Series 7, Disc 3 (Andy Ackerman, 1996)

Thursday: Krapp’s Last Tape (Atom Egoyan, 2000)

Friday: The Witch Who Came From The Sea (Matt Climber, 1976)

Saturday : Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 (Derek Burbidge, 2005)

---

Jamie Shovlin (b. 1978) studied at the Royal College of Art (2001-2003).

Solo exhibitions include In Search of Perfect Harmony, Tate Britain, London (2006), Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-1981, Freight & Volume, New York (2006) and Aggregate, City Gallery Leicester, Artsway, Hampshire, Talbot Rice Art Gallery, Edinburgh and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (2006-7); A Dream Deferred (2007), Haunch of Venison, London; The Ties that Bind, 1/9 unosunove, Rome, Italy (2008); Alchemy, Manchester Museum, Manchester (2008). Group shows include This Much is Certain, RCA, London (2004), Galleon and Other Stories, Saatchi Gallery, London (2004), Becks Futures, ICA, London, CCA, Glasgow, Arnolfini, Bristol (2006); and Elephant Cemetery, Artists Space, New York (2007), Mythologies (2009), Haunch of Venison, London

Mike Harte (born 1979) studied at Loughborough College of Art.

Recent exhibitions include Schneider TM & Lustfaust - Haunch of Venison, Berlin, (2007), What Can a Desert Island Do?, SEVENTEEN, London, (2007), Landscapades: The War on Terra - Under Milk Wood Gallery (2006).

Rhizome / New Museum

2009-03-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

I am on the jury for the 2009/10 Rhizome / New Museum Commissions Programme. The other jurors include:

Monica Narula
artist, Raqs Media Collective

Jason Kottke
blogger, Kottke.org

Henriette Huldisch
Independent Curator; co-curator of 2008 Whitney Biennial

Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator of Design, Museum of Modern Art

To read more visit here

BBC Radio

2009-02-10T11:03:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed recently for BBC Radio's Movie Cafe show on the subject of John Samson's films. You can listen to the interview here

The Guardian

2009-02-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

Jessica Lack at the Guardian has reviewed So Somniloquent: The Surreal World of Dion McGregor.

2009-01-28T12:23:00.000-08:00

I have been interviewed on the subject of SEVENTEEN gallery by Quotation - a Tokyo based magazine.

So Somniloquent: The Surreal World of Dion McGregor

2008-12-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

SO SOMNILOQUENT: THE SURREAL WORLD OF DION MCGREGOR
Thursday 11th Dec - Saturday 24th Jan 2009
SEVENTEEN

Curated by Paul Pieroni

Dion McGregor (1922 - 1994) is the greatest sleeptalker in recorded history. From the early 60s, lasting for around seven years, McGregor's roommate and sometime songwriting partner Michael Barr recorded around 500 of McGregor's fascinating nocturnal utterances. For this exhibition a selection of 'dream tapes' have been gathered together alongside relevant texts and recorded interviews.

While many can claim to have witnessed sleeptalking or been told that they themselves have demonstrated a propensity for dreamy loquacity, what makes McGregor's case so exceptional is the sheer narrative complexity of his somniloquy. McGregor's dreams conjure a truly surreal world. A place where men hunt Griffins and Unicorns, bizarre food rituals involving poisoned chocolate eclairs take place and ethnically diverse balloon rides to the moon are the norm. This is a place of shouts, laughter and screams. A place of both delight and horror. A place, above all, of profound humour.

McGregor himself was an interesting character. A gay bohemian drifter known as an endearing freeloader, having pursued an acting career in Hollywood in the mid-50s he returned to his native New York taking up song writing while settling on the couches and spare rooms of anyone and everyone who offered to take him in. It was during this period of peripatetic living that McGregor's sleeptalking began to attract serious notice. The phenomenon soon caught the attention of Michael Barr, another aspiring songwriter living in the same 1st Avenue apartment block as McGregor. The two became firm friends (McGregor moving onto the spare twin bed in Barr's living room) and began writing songs together including Where is the Wonder, a successful release for Barbra Streisand. During this time, Barr would wake early each morning in order to record the inevitable stream of vocalised dreams emerging from McGregor. In the end the recording became something of an obsession for Barr, hundreds of dream tapes filling the shared apartment by the time McGregor eventually moved out into his own apartment in 1967 - effectively ending the recordings.

Considering these dream tapes and their underlying involuntary nature, it's hard not to think, in artistic terms, of early Surrealism and its fascination with the Freudian unconscious. Freud's psychoanalytic work with free association and dream analysis sparked Surrealism's own deference to automatism. Automatism, as manifest in the Surrealist adoption of the literary technique of automatic writing (e.g. Breton/Soupault Les Champs Magnetiques - 1919), and as latterly central to Breton's definition of Surrealism as 'pure psychic automatism', essentially calls out for a new mode of interaction between the conscious/unconscious. Conscious passivity becomes paramount - how to place the mind in a passive state sufficient to automatically produce (write, talk, paint, draw, etc.) becoming a key concern. Whether Surrealism ever established a consistent methodology of genuinely 'pure' psychic automatism is debatable; the nagging question of conscious mediation always threatening to taint their particular pursuit of automatic purity in artistic production. It is, then, rather refreshing to consider this concern from the view point of Dion McGregor's own particular brand of psychic automatism. With zero mediation guaranteed - the flow of unconscious material entirely bypassing potential contamination by conscious action - and without the intentionality and prescription of other processes of unconscious harvest such as hypnosis or dream-narration, could it be that the recorded legacy left to us by McGregor and Barr is, speculatively, a genuinely outstanding example of Surrealism at its purest?

---------
Acknowledgements: Spoken dreams by Dion McGregor. Original recordings by Michael Barr. Archives and CD productions overseen by Steve Venright and Phil Milstein. The Further Somniolquies of Dion McGregor released by Torpor Vigil Industries (2004). Dion McGregor Dreams Again released by Tzadik (1999)

Special thanks to the fantastic Steve Venright

So Somniloquent: The Surreal World of Dion McGregor is the fifth exhibition at SEVENTEEN's basement exhibition space - curated by Paul Pieroni.

Here's a couple of sample clips of Dion doing what he did best: sleeptalking!

The Food And What To Do With It (mp3)

Dont Break The Mailman (mp3)

Finally you can visit Dion's Wikipedia page here, or his Myspace tribute page here

Dion McGregor (1922-1994)

ARTFORUM

2008-12-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

My recent exhibition John Samson: More Quoted Than Seen has been reviewed by Gilda Williams in the December issue of ARTFORUM.

Dazed Digital Project

2008-11-22T03:51:00.000-08:00

As an addendum to the printed project I produced for Dazed & Confused in October, What We Know of Our Past We Demand of Our Future features video clips taken from the artists featured in the project. You can watch the videos here

For A Brief Time Only

2008-11-15T11:27:00.000-08:00

I'm included in a new project by David Horvitz

For a Brief Time Only is a purchasable exhibition of 24 artists available at a photo developer near you. You can find it at any store that allows file uploading via the internet (including most major US drug-stores). The image files will be sent to the closest location near you, and within minutes you will be able to walk in and pick them up as prints.

This exhibition contains 24 small 4x6 photographic prints contained within the packaging provided by each store. Also included are a contact sheet with all the artists' information, and a letter to the store employee reassuring that there is nothing wrong with the order.

No money is being made by us in this exhibition. You will purchase the show directly from the store (unless you can acquire it another way), which will probably cost around $5. We would like to make it clear that we have no intentions in promoting sales in these places, which will mostly include major US drug-stores. We think of it more as infiltrating these spaces with our games.

So far this show is available throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. If you live elsewhere, and know of a store that meets the necessary requirements, please contact us and we will send the show near you.

You can have a look at the project as a whole here

24 Artists:
Ken Ehrlich, John Sisley, Martin John Callanan, Miranda Lichtenstein, Lucky Dragons, eteam, Jim Skuldt, Mira O’Brien, Joshua Kit Clayton, Matt Keean, Emily Mast, Brian Kennon, Lukas Geronimas, Amy Lam, Paul Pieroni, Moyra Davey, Graham Parker, Paul Branca, Penelope Umbrico, Lucy Raven, Bik Van der Pol, Emilie Halpern, Tim Ridlen, and Vlatka Horvat.

The Art of Participation: Book Review in Art World

2008-11-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

I have reviewed the catalogue for SFMOMA's new exhibition: The Art of Participation. The exhibition looks back nearly 60 years across a wide spectrum of genres and media, examining how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process.

Young Americans

2008-11-11T11:07:00.000-08:00

A feature for Art World Magazine exploring young American Art

John Samson on YouTube

2008-11-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded three clips from films featured in my recent exhibition of the late Scottish filmmakers work.

Dressing for Pleasure (sample only)
1977
25 mins. DVD transfer from film

Tattoo (sample only)
1975
20 mins. DVD transfer from film

Arrows (sample only)
1979
33 mins. DVD transfer from film.

RHIZOME REVIEW: Oliver Laric

2008-10-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

Oliver Laric's show is reviewed on RHIZOME. Read the review here.

Oliver Laric

2008-10-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

Oliver Laric
50 50 2008 ↓ ↑ TOUCH MY BODY
Wednesday 29th Oct - Sunday 30th Nov 2008
SEVENTEEN

Berlin based artist Oliver Laric is adept at subtle restructuring of existing popular media. With gentle emphasis he diverts images, turning them in on themselves to such a degree that they come to reflexively represent their own critique. For this exhibition he presents three new video works.

50 50 2008 (2008) is an entirely new version of an earlier work produced by Laric. The video compiles multiple YouTube clips of amateur acolytes of hip-hop icon 50 cent rapping and performing Karaoke-style over three of his hits - In Da Club, Candy Shop (2003) and How We Do (2004). A few seconds from each clip are sampled then synchronised with further abridged clips to form a continuous musical rendition of all three songs. That 50 50 2008 is a new version of an earlier work produced in exactly the same way by Laric suggests that YouTube is a uniquely plural media platform - a zone where multiple possibilities of the same thought or idea can be maintained simultaneously.

DOWN UP (2008) is a two channel video work in which the hypnotic 'before and after' temporality of Christian baptism is explored. As in 50 50 2008, the multiple segments of video footage that comprise the film have all been taken from YouTube.
The final work in the exhibition, Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008), is a reworking of Maria Carey's music video for the track of the same name. By Masking everything in the video other than Carey's physical form in Chroma Key green screen, Laric created a template over which others were able to edit further new versions of the video. In the final video both Laric's original re-edit and those made subsequently by others who located his green screen version online are shown alongside each other.

Oliver Laric (1981) studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and is - together with Aleksandra Domanovic, Christoph Priglinger and Georg Schnitzer - one of the co-founders of the platform VVORK. Recent exhibitions include 'I love the Horizon', Le Magasin-Centre National d'art Contemporain, Grenoble, 'Montage: Unmonumental Online', New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and 'Becks Fusions', ICA, London.

This will be the fourth exhibition at SEVENTEEN's basement exhibition space - curated by Paul Pieroni.

For more info visit here