Merry Christmas from The Oyster’s Earrings

Run DMCRun-D.M.C. in the video for 'Christmas in Hollis' (1987). Image: www.contactmusic.com

Two Pear-Shaped Pieces

Ren & Stimpy. Image: photobucket.com

This is my response to having just completed the busiest semester of my life. Occupied with Ed Ruscha, Gerhard Richter and Dan Graham for most of the last few months, I haven’t had the brain-space to develop three pieces that have been at the back of my mind for some time. Now that the semester is over, I’m reluctant to start trying to ‘develop’ things again until the New Year has come and gone. Here, then, are two of these three pear-shaped pieces, served up in compressed form. Not wishing to spoil you, I’ll save the third for a later date.

1.  ’From IOB to BwO: Animating deterritorialization in the Nicktoons golden era’

That was an (only semi-serious) essay title  I came up with after noticing that the acronym used to describe Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘the Body without Organs’ looked a bit like the acronym used to refer to ‘Inside-Out Boy’, a character featured in a 5 shorts made for Nicktoons in their early ’90s heyday. Actually, reading Deleuze’s account of the ‘BwO’ for the first time (in his book on Francis Bacon, ‘The Logic of Sensation’) a few days earlier had transported me back to some vague recollection of this strange dysmorphic boy, whose catchphrases I distinctly remember parroting (“Guts!”; “Where are my pants?!”).

The more I started to comb back over Nicktoons’s output at the time (especially the work of animator John Kricfalusi, whose Spümcø studio made ‘Ren & Stimpy’), the more impressed I was by the fruitful connections that can perhaps be drawn between their obsessively re-iterated interest in bodily deconstruction and distortion, and the revolutionary ideas surrounding somatic composition in Deleuze’s writings. I would write that essay if only I could understand Deleuze’s arguments in a bit more detail, but for the moment it will suffice to watch this episode of Ren & Stimpy alongside this beautiful, enigmatic passage from ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, in which Deleuze and his writing partner Félix Guattari give a recipe for ‘building’ a Body without Organs:

This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.

2. Live In Dreams 

I’ve been playing Wild Nothing’s 2010 album ‘Gemini’ almost none-stop since I first acquired it in late August. This has almost nothing to do with having seen them live that same month, as part of this year’s Green Man Festival. On record, Wild Nothing (a project name for Virginia native Jack Tatum) create a compelling soundscape, one that plays out as if heard in a dream, or at least on the cusp of sleeping and waking (my understanding is here enslaved to the reading of ‘Hypnagogic Pop’ advanced by Simon Reynolds among others, but it’s a convincing argument that these critics put forward). As a result, it is profoundly intimate music  whose effect is well and truly lost in a live setting, where pedals and speaker stacks fail to replicate the warm studio fug that makes this music feel so ‘hypnagogic’. As musical production, at least at the hipper end of the scale, moves increasingly into the bedroom and into the solipsistic realms of solo acts with band-type names, I’m intrigued by the idea that we might be left with a whole generation of artists who prove out of their depth in anything beyond a one-to-one listening experience (aren’t we supposed to be entering the era when concert ticket sales are everything?!). Take this Primavera Sound set by another solo act with a band-type name, Ducktails (AKA Alex Phelan): it’s not as bad as it sounded the first time I listened to it, but it’s nowhere near the heights of a song like ‘Apple Walk’:

An afterthought: I know that a number of people who’ll read these articles will have promised/responded somewhat favourably to overwhelming pressure to write an article for me. Now is the the time, people!

by Luke Healey

Going to seed

Scotland captain Darren Fletcher. Image: i.eurosport.com

Next month will see the close of another round of qualification for a major international football tournament, as the final participants for Euro 2012 are decided. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re Czech), Scotland failed to qualify for their seventh major tournament in a row. This being a blog whose topics are, for the most part, based in Scotland, I thought I’d explore why Scotland struggle so much to qualify for major tournaments these days. A generous  appraisal might be that the problem is with the qualification system, as opposed to the Scotland team. Could it be that the UEFA qualification system is unfair?

Taking Scotland as a case-study, since failing to qualify for Euro 2000, the national team has been in something of a rut. Qualification groups are drawn up based on seeding which is configured by contemporary world ranking, and for Scotland, this has meant something of a cycle of failure. Since failing to qualify in 2000, Scotland’s FIFA world ranking tumbled, and as a result, at the next qualification tournament, for the 2002 World Cup, Scotland were no longer considered a top seed team, subsequently facing a tougher task in qualification. Faced with a tougher qualification group, Scotland again failed to qualify, and again suffered a fall in their world ranking. This cycle repeated in 2004, following which, Scotland slumped to their lowest ranking in their history, to 88th in 2005.

It was in the midst of this cycle that Scotland played some of their best football ever. Placed in a qualification group for Euro 2008 which featured Italy and France – the reigning World Cup champions and defeated finalists respectively – Scotland pushed both teams to their limit, beating France twice and seriously challenging Italy at their second meeting. Scotland would have required a minor miracle to qualify for the tournament from that group, and though they nearly achieved that feat, it is not surprising that they didn’t. The deck was most certainly stacked against not only them, but the other lower ranked teams in that group who were given a near impossible qualification task for no other reason than that qualification groups are drawn in such a way to ensure the safe passage of the elite teams.

Scotland are not the only team to have fallen victim to this cycle. Like Scotland, Austria were a part of the World Cup in 1998 but failed to qualify for Euro 2000 and were punished by a dramatic plummet in the FIFA rankings. At their historical high in 1999, at 17, they slipped up in 2000 and fell to 44. Again like Scotland, they have not since qualified (at least not on merit) for a major tournament, and hit an all-time low ranking of 105 in 2008. Going in to the qualification campaign for the 2014 World Cup, Austria have the deck stacked against them once more, having to tackle Germany, Sweden and Ireland to reach the tournament or contest a playoff birth. They have been put in a group designed to not allow them to qualify.

UEFA Euro 2012 qualifying draw. Image: static.guim.co.uk

An obvious retort to this complaint is that in order to qualify for the World Cup, you have to be good enough to do so, and that Austria clearly are not. But the fact is that, because of the structure of qualification, based on seeded tiers of world rankings, certain teams who, objectively, are skilled enough to play in the World Cup will have to face an inordinately difficult task to qualify. There will be 31 teams besides hosts Brazil in the 2014 World Cup, but in order to qualify these teams will not have to prove they are one of the 31 best teams in the world. In Austria’s case, since they are guaranteed to face an elite team in their qualification campaign, they will instead have to prove they are the third best team in the world to qualify, by taking good results from their matches against Germany, who currently hold that position in the FIFA world rankings. This wouldn’t be an issue if Austria were drawn against Germany by sheer chance. That would be the luck of an unlucky draw. The problem is that Austria, and teams like them, are guaranteed to face one of the best teams in the world at every qualification attempt.

At the other side of the spectrum, the elite teams never face this problem. Of course their talent means that most teams they face will be weaker than them, but when it comes to qualification, top seeds never have to prove themselves in the same way; because of systematic bias, they are never asked to defeat the very best teams in the world in order to qualify. While Austria will have to beat the third best team in the world, Germany will only have to beat teams ranging from 25 at the highest to 132 at the lowest. Indeed, intentional or not, the current qualification system offered by UEFA is favourable to the top seeded, or elite teams. They are caught in the opposite cycle; a cycle of success. Because they are guaranteed groupings with weaker teams, they are protected from any real challenge in their campaign, and so almost guaranteed a safe passage to the finals.

 So far, this appears to be just a systemic problem, but could there be a more human bias in play? Controversy surrounded the qualification playoffs for the 2010 World Cup when FIFA made a last-minute decision to seed the teams in contesting the playoff matches, despite indicating at the start of the tournament that seeding wouldn’t be a factor. Some higher ranked teams like France, Portugal, Russia and Greece, who had played below their potential, were seeded higher than Ireland, Ukraine, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Slovenia, in spite of the fact that Ukraine and Slovenia had achieved more group points than some of the higher seeded teams. After the decision was made to add seeding to the process, Ireland goalkeeper Shay Given spoke out against FIFA’s move:

“We deserved to finish second, Russia and Portugal deserved to finish second,  so I do not see how it should be different for them and for us. You would just like to think it would be fair for everyone. Why should these teams get preferential treatment?”

 Given obviously has a vested interest here, but his point is fair. The teams were divided at the start of the tournament according to rankings, giving the higher ranked teams an advantage, and the teams were again divided at the playoff stage to again give the advantage to the elite teams. All the teams which finished second in the group stages achieved the same thing, so why were the lower ranked teams deliberately given a harder draw? Could it be a case of all teams being equal, but some being more equal than others? There were certainly claims that FIFA were protecting world football’s big names while wanting to keep them in their high-profile tournaments. Of course the World Cup should be an exhibition of the best football the world has to offer, but if a top seeded team doesn’t perform well enough to qualify, they don’t deserve to be part of that exhibition. Not only that, but the tournament can definitely ‘survive’ not having an elite team or two there; in fact, it would surely only help to add more unique character to that particular tournament.

Thierry Henry's handball in France's World Cup 2010 qualifying match against Ireland. This indignity was heaped upon the original indignity of FIFA's rush decision to make the qualifying play-offs seeded. Image: newsimg.bbc.co.uk

Though this article is focused mainly on UEFA, almost every other continental confederation employs seeded tiers in their qualification processes. The only example of a confederation that pays no heed to world ranking is found in South America.  CONMEBOL confederation uses a truly fair system. Because only ten teams contest qualification, every team can play each other twice, in a round-robin system, without necessitating too many games. World ranking means nothing here and so each team has the exact same opportunity, with the top four teams gaining automatic qualification and a fifth entering the CONMEBOL/CONCACAF playoff for another spot. It wouldn’t be feasible for every team in Europe to enter in to one big round-robin tournament, simply because, logistically, the 53 teams involved would have to play 104 games. But there is no reason why the UEFA qualification groups can’t be drawn without world ranking playing a part. Instead of groups being drawn tier by tier and consisting of teams from each of the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth tiers of quality (an inexact science in itself), any team should be drawn from the same pool, and have an equal chance of being drawn with every other team in Europe. No systematic bias, just qualification based on the luck of the draw and the subsequent performance; and if that breaks the footballing status quo, so be it.

In all likelihood, these changes would make little difference to the teams that qualify for major tournaments, or at least to whether or not the top teams qualify. What they would achieve is a feeling that these nations qualified from an even playing-field, and not one which already favours them. The top seeds deserve to play in major tournaments, and should be able to qualify no matter what group they are assigned. If proving this is not the point of qualification, I am not sure what is. To purposefully protect elite nations from challenges makes a mockery of FIFA’s tournaments, and of the ranking their success stories have earned.

by David Jackson

Comedy=Time+Twitter

@DianainHeaven. Image: motherlondon.com

The process of building a following on twitter has been of interest to me for some time. I had come to the conclusion that twitter consisted, rather strictly, of ordinary people following influential brands, be they corporations or celebrities. Recently however, I have uncovered and increasing raft of comedy accounts that are not only completely original, but invert and undermine my original assumption.

The most prevalent form of these is the spoof account. Often surreal, often satirical, these accounts capitalise on the very public images of their subjects. Be it burlesque treatment of a straight-laced persona, or an all-too-honest exaggeration of a persona or corporation with distasteful opinions or policies, when done with considered characterisation that relates to the subject (rather than being superfluous with over-the-top content, these can quickly become ‘must-follow) accounts. Here are some of my favourite spoof accounts:

@DianaInHeaven: In opposition to the overly-romantic and obsessive treatment of the former ‘Queen of Hearts’, especially in the British tabloids, the foul-mouthed Diana in Heaven rails on those that pore over her memory, from heaven. Her place in heaven also puts her in a position to explain what the dead do once they reach the freedom of the promised land.

Favourite tweets: “The members of the 27 Club are all wearing matching personalised T-shirts today. Like the weirdest stag party you’ve ever seen.”
“I’m actually having to sit on Harry Nilsson’s face so he can’t get to the remote and put his show back on again.”

@DMReporter: The ubiquitous tabloid hack ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ has been the anonymous scourge of truth and justice in journalism for some time now. Daily Mail Reporter’s articles tend to be the most unsubstantiated and alarmist published by even the Daily Mail; it would be funny if it wasn’t true. This is what the @DMReporter feed provides: it parodies the sort of ridiculous and offensive opinions forwarded by the Mail, without the sad truth that someone actually believes them.

Favourite tweets: “This week’s Daily Mail Cancer List: Mon) Enzymes Tue) Crop circles Wed) Aries Thu) Beef Fri) Apathy Sat) Tulips Sun) The gay gene.”
“SOCIETY: “aspire to be middle class or risk losing benefits” – Cameron’s stark warning to scrounging poor.”

@BPCares: British Petroleum have probably never been a very sympathetic company, but when one of their oil drilling rigs leaked in to the Gulf Coast last year, and the company and its chief executive seemed aloof and slow to clean up the devastation it created, they became arguably the most hated company in the world. This feed satirises the public relations efforts by BP and similar oil companies that attempt to varnish their activities with a painfully thin veneer of ‘caring’ about the environment and their customers.

Favourite tweets: “We don’t respect you. We care for you. There’s a big difference. #bpcares”
“We care that gas is a limited resource, which is why we encourage higher gas prices for lower consumption. #bpcares”

These are undoubtedly original ideas, but they also feed off entities from the ‘real’ world. More novel are the brand new characters that can be seen in growing numbers on twitter. This is a completely unique form of comedy where the points of reference for the reader isn’t the character’s real-life counterpart, but the up-front characterisation entailed in profile pictures and twitter bios. To create a successful comedy twitter character, without being a well-known name, is no mean feat, and here are a few of my favourites:

Brian Gittins. Image: twitter.com/#!/briangittins1

@BRIANGITTINS1: Brian Gittins is essentially a masked suburban creep who spends his time making strange songs and documenting his every move to create a darkly surreal chain-of-consciousness. He once spent a whole day describing an absurd series of events which saw him getting stuck in a chimney, coming face to face with pigeons therein and steadily moving up and down in an inept attempt to escape. Almost child-like, Gittins’s tweets are somewhat reminiscent of Harry Hill, in their domestically-set surrealism.
Favourite tweets: “Bloody hell, that’s the fifth pissed up helicopter pilot to fly over the village in the last 24hrs”
“I sold my doormat to the man that runs ‘The West Wittering Helter Skelter Experience’ yesterday.”

@YourAuntDiane: Our Aunt Diane is a stereotypically embarrassing sexually-adventurous family member-come-hippy. Her flimsy spiritual eroticism works brilliantly when delivered in this calm, straight way, and the way the character plays upon old-fashioned views of new-agism without descending in to sarcasm makes her a wonderfully considered and well realised comedy character.

Favourite Tweets: “At #burningman theres a saying that you havent lived until youve defecated with 100 naked strangers. Well, Ive lived enough for 7 lifetimes!”
“Terrified and aroused thinking about my tantric mammogram later today.”

@ericasfish: A rare tweeter, but worth the wait in between tweets. Erica’s fish provides a constant commentary on its life from inside the goldfish bowl . Describing its relationship with ‘the human’ (Erica) and ‘the cat’, Erica’s fish is not only fantastically surreal, but also charmingly poetic.
Favourite tweets: “The cat is asleep with a paw on her face. She is a heap of dumbness, mesmerizing and beautiful.”
“Pure stress in this house: the feeble chatter about dinner and taxes, the meowing, the prancing about of uncoordinated limbs.”

Usually, being limited to 140 characters would be a hindrance to any comedy short of antiquated gags, but on twitter it lends itself to composite characterisation which makes for strong, well drawn characters with a continually evolving comedic depth rare in all but the longest-running sitcoms. The best, and most unique, thing about twitter comedy characters, however, is the feeling that these characters are living entities. This is the benefit of twitter generally, which emphasises ‘timely’ comments about ‘what’s happening around the world’. Whereas most comedy characters can’t be placed in a specific time in relation to the ‘real’ world, twitter comedy characters can and are, affording them an air of authenticity that most comedy characters lack. At the time of writing, the twitter character may be a little-known form of modern comedy, but the trend is growing, and it is the first genuinely new comedic form to be forged in recent memory.

by David Jackson

While researching this piece, David created his own spoof account, @LibertyStat

 

Must try harder

Haegue Yang, installation for Korean Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2009. Image: cdnimg.visualizeus.com

On Tuesday night I saw Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘The Skin I Live In‘, for which I would struggle to find an equal out of the admittedly limited selection of films I have seen in all my 22 years. The next day I payed a visit to the Haegue Yang exhibition at Bristol’s Arnolfini and was left wondering: why are some visual artists so afraid of trying to be really good?

It’s a crass question, undoubtedly. And I didn’t even have a particularly bad experience at ‘The Sea Wall‘, which also features several “inclusions” by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Yang’s work is moving when it is realised in a slick, professional manner that confirms its conceptual depth and at the same time belies its vulnerable affective qualities. Take the series of sculptures that make up Yang’s coded tribute to the writer, filmmaker and political activist Marguerite Duras (’5, Rue Saint-Benoit’, 2008): cold, industrial-looking steel frames supporting light bulbs and brightly-painted Venetian blinds, their dimensions determined by various appliances from Yang’s own house – boiler, stove, radiator, etc. Not to put too zen a point on it, but the sculptures are both empty and full: contentless frames with an immediate visual impact and a communicative, conceptual weight. They speak lucidly of the oblique tactics sometimes required to convey an affinity.

I appreciate that communicativity is not a given in a contemporary art practice: rather, it is one of the many issues at stake when choosing how to give form to an idea. Failure, misdirection, vulnerability and sometimes sheer crapness are all part of the modern creator’s toolkit. But sometimes you encounter a work that, while employing some such devices, makes you wish it had just been done well. ‘The Story of a Bear-Lady in a Sand Cave’ (2010-11) is one such work. Yang’s work is based on a fascinating Korean myth about the birth of that nation:

‘According to the legend, a tiger and a bear were instructed to eat only garlic and the herb mugwort, and remain out of sunlight for 100 days in a cave. The tiger gave up after about twenty days and left the cave. The bear remained and was transformed into a woman, later marrying the son of the lord of heaven and giving birth to Dangun, the forefather of Koreans.’

Modern Korean religious painting depicting Founding King Dang-gun. Image: www.san-shin.org

Filtering this narrative through Kōbō Abe‘s novel ‘The Woman in the Dunes’, Yang has concocted a yarn in which the fabular Bear-lady is transported to a sand-cave, out of which she must continuously bail sand to prevent her home from collapsing, an act which is unbeknown to her all the while creating a ‘beautiful and seductive sand wave’. On paper, this sounds like a compelling and lyrical story. However, as a work ‘The Story of a Bear-Lady in a Sand Cave’ was not designed for paper, but for audio-narration. And here is the problem: with the best will in the world, one Tsukasa Yamamoto’s execution of this task is perfunctory at best. The fault is not Yamamoto’s. It is Yang’s. An internationally-renowned and successful artist, whose works filled the Korean pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale no less, Yang has nevertheless chosen to put into this work few if any of the rare and estimable resources open to her at this stage in her career. The result is practically unlistenable, at least to myself and the other visitors to ‘The Sea Wall’ who walked into the 2nd floor gallery, heard a badly produced and confusing tangle of monotonous, broken English and promptly left. The right to strength through vulnerability should be sacrosanct in a world where artists can no longer pretend to be superheroes, but sometimes a bit of  Almodóvar-style directorial genius wouldn’t go amiss.

Karla Black, 'What to ask of others', 2011. Image: www.spikeisland.org.uk

Or perhaps a modicum of compositional flair. This struck me later in the afternoon, at Spike Island, the Bristol venue currently hosting the Arts Council touring show ‘Structure and Material‘, with works by Claire Barclay, Karla Black and Becky Beasley (whose contribution to the British Art Show had got severely lost in the mix, but whose talent really sang here). All three are masters of that somewhat underappreciated skill. If you want a demonstration of the residual virtue of composition, try accidentally bumping into a Karla Black sculpture – in my case it was the pink polythene-and-plaster-powder assemblage that is ‘What to ask of others’ (2011). Its sheer ephemerality when rattled comes as a shock – even if you’re familiar with the artist and her repeated emphasis on sheer ephemerality – when considered alongside the overwhelming ‘rightness’ of her formal handling of these materials. If this sounds like intuitivist hokum, then you may be right. But one thing’s for sure – the surplus value of an object designated as ‘art’ is no guarantee of a compelling or even noteworthy whole. The process is a lot more mysterious than that.

Networks done three ways

Kate Rich, Feral Trade couscous from Morocco, Luton Airport, 2009. Image: avfestival.co.uk

I originally wrote this article for Line Magazine‘s online edition. I reproduce it here partly for the sake of self-promotion and partly to say that Line’s ‘Alternative Strategies’ issue is available now, and their Edinburgh Art Festival issue is coming soon.

The network is one of the most fruitful concepts pertaining to contemporary artistic discourse, broaching as it does ideas of design, social intervention and institutional polemic. The questions asked by network-based projects highlight a number of dialectical struggles central to our understanding of current art practices: between the tangible and the intangible, the embedded and the reflexive, between site and sprawl.

Luke Healey opens up the debate with four British-based artists known for their experiments with business, transport and telephony. In a nod towards interconnectedness, answers from each interview were used to set questions for others.

1. Kate Rich; Feral Trade Network

 The Feral Trade Network, a grocery import-export business in which goods are moved by means of the excess luggage allowance of artist Kate Rich’s artworld contacts, has now been in operation for around 8 years. Using the ingredients sourced via these peregrinations, Rich has set up a number of temporary cafés, the most recent of which was installed at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery. 

How did you come to a network based approach?

It was motivated by the changes that I encountered in the coming of the digital age, predominately the way e-mail changed communication networks…I was looking at a way to test those e-mail based social networks: can you use them to run freight? What is their load-bearing capacity? I was also working at Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema, stocking the bar, and trying to find a legitimate source of coffee. I was looking at Fair Trade and had a lot of problems with the aesthetics of it and the stories behind it. At the time, a friend brought me back some coffee from El Salvador, where she had been working, and I began to think about the possibility of sourcing coffee by using e-mail based social networks. Also, from the start, I saw it as a way of rendering social networks visible, without making them harvestable – in opposition to the way something like Facebook works, which gathers and then takes away information, selling it to third parties. The Feral Trade database, on the contrary, articulates the relationships that circulate around me – my personal and professional relationships – in a way that can’t be chopped up and sold.

What is your problem with Fair Trade?

A classic Fair Trade item is a package of coffee featuring a picture of a farmer – usually called José – holding up the coffee and smiling, and there’s a testimonial saying something like “Thanks to Fair Trade I’ve been able to pay for my kids’ education.” José probably didn’t grow those actual beans. Why should he be smiling for you? You can see him, but he can’t see you. Why are you being invited to make a moral judgement on what he does with his money? Also, he’s got no chance of finding out where your money came from, so he can’t make the same moral judgement about you. It’s an insult to call this process “fair” or “equal exchange”. It’s colonising a word in a really presumptuous way.

I’m colonising the word “feral”: “fair-all”. With my database, you get a picture of the farmer (the real farmer) with the courier and hopefully the receiver holding up the product and smiling like an idiot too. With the Fair Trade coffee pack, it’s like the farmer exists in a vacuum – what about the people they do business with, the freight service? My system puts equal attention on all these hidden aspects of the trade network.

How do the cafés fit into the way you perceive your practice?

I’ve done four cafés in total, but I’m still unsure of the café as a medium. With the main project, the Trade Network, there are no spectators – you’re either buying, selling or carrying. There’s no need to explain the concept, it’s just action. In the cafés, people will walk in and ask ‘what’s this about?’, and I’m a little uncomfortable about that. They come close to being consumers, which is a word I never like to use. The buyers of products in the Trade Network generally have to labour as well, which dispenses with the idea that you can be involved with something just by paying your way into it. The cafés maybe lose that aspect.

Is it important to you that your practice also has a strong visual identity?

Yeah, because that’s how the project will work on people. The maps I produce to illustrate the history of the Trade Network’s activity are something that everyone can access and understand: Kate Gray’s 10-year old son was looking at them and commenting on the number of coffee shipments that had taken place. They’ve got a long way to go, but if a ten-year old can read them then they’ve got potential. The database has been sucking up data for 8 years, and we’re just starting to recognise how it can be visualised in really interesting ways that I’m not yet technically able to do. At the moment the limitation of my project is that it really works best when I’m there talking to people, so it’s sort of all about me. If I can get the visualisation, I’ve got a way that it can communicate quickly and effectively without me there.

Does the Feral Trade Network have any affiliations to the slow food movement?

It’s interesting. As I understand it, it’s all about eating what’s produced within a certain perimeter of you. While I endorse that to an extent – I don’t buy vegetables out of season, I shop at farmers’ markets – I find it really problematic. We’re in a networked world. We’re breathing and poisoning the same air as everyone else on the planet, and we cannot unlock now. Those in power are trading poisons and arms with their peers around the world, so for us as thinking individuals to decide to only eat what’s grown within a twenty-mile perimeter is regrettable. We need to stay in the international realm and assert our politics, rather than retreating, refusing to fly, refusing to drink coffee because they don’t grow it in Britain. We’ve been trained to act as consumers, and we need to respond by acting in a spirit of critical engagement. One of the other things with my network is that it’s almost impossible to see this bag of coffee as yours when you know all the details of its shipment and what proportion of it you actually purchased. It’ll be on the maps, it’ll be on the database – it brings out the collectivity in consumption.

Worcester Foregate Street station with entrance to MOVEMENT gallery. Image: initiativeandinstitution.net

2. Nina Coulson & Alex Johnson, MOVEMENT

 MOVEMENT gallery is a vital addition to the cultural life of Worcester, a city greatly affected by a diminishing arts budgets even before the latest round of cut-backs. Having worked together for years under the rubric Yoke & Zoom, Nina Coulson and Alex Johnson last year opened a gallery in a disused space on platform 2 of Worcester’s Foregate Street station. They have since shown work by Jacob Feige and Marcus Coates, and plan to move their project out onto the railways proper. 

The British rail network seems like a great untapped resource for curatorial projects.

Nina: We’re still in the process of realising how great it is because we’ve been in discussion with the rail companies for 5 years. As soon as we approached them they were really up for working with us. We’ve had to take it one step at a time; work on renovations of the space we were given. Marcus Coates’ talk in the waiting room was our first move out of the space and into the station. But taking our work out of the station and onto the trains is an idea with massive potential.

How do you plan to carry that out?

Nina: For each exhibition that we put on, we want to do artist talks on the trains. We’re taking our next project, an archive of work produced by Ida Baird on trips from Paris to Zagreb as part of her ‘Galerie des locataires’ project on the train to Venice, using hand-held projectors. I’ve been researching spaces on trains – there’s always little parts of trains that are unused and accessible – bars, compartments and so on. European trains have more domestic spaces in the form of the couchettes – you can literally have your own private gallery space.

Alex: We’re also interested in using the advertising screens that new British trains have. I like the idea of someone using one for a talk – they’re hardly used at the moment. And the restaurant cars are ideal for discussions and things. I like the idea that you can’t preempt or be prescriptive over who uses them.

What was your motivation for starting the project? Do you see it as a way of furthering your careers and connecting the practices of others?

Nina: What really motivated us when creating this space was that we were sick of these big art centres, top-down institutions that cost massive amounts of money to construct. An organisation called The Association of Community Rail Partnerships (ACoRP) helped us set up, and their idea was simply to use as many empty rooms in stations as possible for non-profit making purposes. We really liked the idea that you could have, say, 30 or 40 art spaces across the rail network, and those artists could be communicating through the network physically, by meeting up and working together, and then you’ve got these many micro-spaces, as opposed to these vast palaces…

Alex: It wasn’t necessarily a tool for us, we were just seeing it as a means of questioning what art could do – as a way of dealing with certain challenges in ways that other forms of business can’t. We’re interested in the ideals of British Rail – the period when the railways were state-run. We’re moving ever more towards a socialist idea of railways; that trains are for everyone. Accordingly, a lot of the activities we run are free, it’s just about being in the right place at the right time.

Nina: We’re looking at the idea of the artist-led through a slightly different lens. A lot of artist-led projects take place in out-of-the-way locations, and unless you’re really involved in art, they’re not actually all that open to the public, however “open” the project is in the vision of its creators. When we’re open, we’ve got the door right open onto the platform and people wander in from the station. We hope that if this idea catches on we can make these sorts of small spaces more normal for people, more a part of the everyday fabric.

The idea of the rail network seems like a powerful metaphor for the democratisation of the arts, and it’s also an important figure in how people understand the economic make-up of the society they live in…

Nina: The way that the railways are run is something that nobody’s happy with. Through our dealings, we have a really interesting position in which we see the politics of the whole operation – the way that one organisation passes the buck onto the other. Also, a lot of people involved in running the railways are actively supportive of the original ethos of network rail, and want it to move, away from privatisation, back to being a public company.

Alex: Drivers and ticket collectors often come into the gallery too, and it’s always really interesting to get their perspective on things. People ultimately get what we’re driving at, and in return we try to make it as bread-and-butter as possible. We’re becoming increasingly part of the furniture at the station and in Worcester, which really helps when you’re trying to encourage people to come in and have a look.

Nina: We’ve asked guards to distribute leaflets on trains for past shows. They are getting increasingly to know about our work, and we’re seeing their own networks more and more. It’s interesting to move away from just communicating with the bosses to actually see the grass-roots workers and how they work. And we’re building up a bit of a mythology in this community as well: train people know who we are.

Harwood, Wright, Yokoji, 'Tantalum Memorial', 2009. Image: asquare.org

3. Richard Wright; Harwood, Wright, Yokoji

 Since 2005, Harwood, Wright, Yokoji have worked in the medium of what they call “social telephony”, utilising telephone networks in order to explore and intervene in ‘the aesthetics of communication.’ Telephone Trottoir, realised in 2006, is their most ambitious telephony project to date.  

What exactly was the Telephone Trottoir project and how did it come about?

Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji did a telephone based project in 2005 called ‘Aroundhead’ which had as its premise ‘the head of Oliver Cromwell trapped in a telephone system.’ We developed a technique to allow staff based at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital to pass phone calls around, in this case messages from Oliver Cromwell’s head. It was quite a speculative project and most staff found it very amusing. Then we decided we wanted to expand it and try it on the public telephone system. We knew the Nostalgie Ya Mboka group who ran Congolese radio programmes on Resonance FM and thought they might be interested in trying it on their audience. I discovered that the Congolese had a practice called “radio trottoire” or “pavement radio” where they passed information around on street corners to avoid state censorship and the unreliable media infrastructure. We realised that this could be the basis of a good fit between technique and culture and called the project ‘Telephone Trottoire.’

Briefly, ‘Trottoire’ is a computer that phones up Congolese participants and plays them topical messages in Lingala. They then have the option to leave a comment and pass the message on to a friend by entering their phone number. In this way the network expands. We ran two versions and they were very successful, in 7 or 8 months growing from 100 to 1,800 users and recording 1,300 comments on everything from child witches to unemployment benefit to eating goats testicles. I think it worked so well partly because of the association with “radio trottoire,” partly because central Africans have adopted the mobile phone as their chief communication platform and partly because of the need for Congolese migrants and political refugees to have an anonymous mouthpiece.

How do you view your interventions in “social telephony” in terms of their relation to a given audience? 

Whenever we ran this project with a different audience we got very different patterns of usage. Some London school students passed the calls but didn’t make comments. Some young people from Southend made comments but didn’t pass them. Many people now using mobiles don’t know their friends’ phone numbers by memory so can’t enter them. So the “actions” engendered by these sorts of media art projects varies widely according to the participants. And there is hopefully enough flexibility in these systems to allow people to make their own use of it, rather than it being very focused as you might find in a commercially run service.

How do you see your network-based work in relation to the context of public or institutional display? Is it important to you to put out a legible visible product?

One problem we faced was that even though ‘Trottoire’ was so successful there was no easy way for people outside of the Congolese community to take part or appreciate it. Our solution was to create a gallery presence called ‘Tantalum Memorial.’ ‘Tantalum Memorial’ is an installation of old Strowger electro-magnetic telephone switches invented in 1889 which are triggered by the phone calls from ‘Telephone Trottoire.’

I would probably describe ‘Trottoire’ as an arts project and ‘Tantalum Memorial’ as an artwork. It is also important to remember that ‘Trottoire’ was built using free open source telephony software and basic computer hardware, not by using any fancy mobile phone apps, interfaces or gadgets. This technology allowed us to redesign a simple phone call into a form that hadn’t been tried before. I think this shows that even media that we think we know very well and believe is exhausted can actually still be transformed into a new media, and often using cheap, simple techniques.

‘Tantalum Memorial’ as an artwork is more authored and focused towards certain thematics (in the above sense, not in the sense of presenting a final point of view). I think they are two companion pieces which benefit from being connected together as different but related forms of media – not connected functionally or narratively or metaphorically but as a media system that can take the viewer through a series of structures, relations, traffics, conflicts, dependencies and ultimately ideas.

Where is the ‘political’ content of the ‘Telephone Trottoir’ project located?

‘Tantalum Memorial’ is described as a memorial to the 4 million Congolese who have died as a result of the Coltan Wars: civil wars in the Congo region which are fuelled by money filtered from the trade in Coltan – an ore used to extract tantalum metal which is used to manufacture mobile phones and other modern media devices. It is this war which is one of the reasons why so many Congolese people have left the country, the irony being that their need to keep their ties and communications strong by buying mobile phones also feeds into the conflict which created this situation in the first place. In this way we began to place ‘Trottoire’ within a set of complex and contradictory connections that included history of technology, politics of communication and migration. This is an attempt to use art to tackle complicated subjects like globalisation but not in the way in which a museum exhibition would approach it by presenting the audience with a fixed viewpoint or solution. Instead, it maintains more of a sense of the intense, unresolvable forces that feed back into each other.

Close encounters

Tino Sehgal, 'Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things' (2000) at the Muzeum Sztuki (unofficial performance documentation). Image: artnet.com

I’ve been seeing a lot of shows this summer, and it seemed pertinent to present a couple of little diary entries here on the blog, especially since most of the shows that really stood out can be more or less grouped under two headings: those exploring ideas of performance; and those exploring what I think can be called the ‘barabarous’.

First things first: in May I went to Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery, where Tino Sehgal had ‘installed’ a single work, a re-iteration of a piece that had been realised on numerous occasions previously, entitled ‘Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things’. Merely, the work consists of a single individual rolling around the gallery floor, only in truth there’s no ‘merely’ to it. Either Sehgal is chooses collaborates with a talented choreographer, because the movements of the ‘dancer’ that I saw performing (she was, I later found out, a professional, and the performers rotate in two-hourly cycles) were fascinatingly executed – suggesting crude puppetry or malfunctional animatronics, but realised with a magnetic and subtle artistry (it’s all in the hips) that lent the work a thrilling tension.

This was not the only source of tension, however. It is reputed that on a number of occasions, viewers of Sehgal’s work failed to realise the theatrical nature of the scene before them and took to helping the performer to her feet. Intriguing as this would have been to watch, it’s fairly evident that this is the most perfectly natural reaction one could have to Sehgal’s work, and that to engage with the work in a detached manner, ‘as the artist intended’, is to behave in a way that is shot through with shady ambivalence and intimations of aberrance. Faced with a work like Sehgal’s, one can’t help but feel a vague sense of unease at the post-human decadence it suggests. For want of a better analogy, it conjures up satirical take-downs of exploitation-chic like the rabbits hanging from harnesses in ‘m’, the yuppified revamp of Moe’s Tavern in the 2001  episode of ‘The Simpsons’, ‘Homer the Moe’.

Pablo Bronstein, 'Tragic Stage', 2011. Image: static.guim.co.uk

The same sense haunted me at Pablo Bronstein’s fantastic solo show at the ICA, ‘Sketches of Regency Living’, where an ballet dancer flitted elegantly across Bronstein’s purpose-built ‘Tragic Stage’ before a body of viewers that was too sparse, mobile and disaffected to really be considered an ‘audience’. It haunted me even more at ’12 Rooms’, the Manchester City Art Gallery’s group show for this year’s International Festival, where numerous works – including one by Sehgal – reflected wonderfully on the problematic conditions of audience engagement in performance work, but none more powerfully than Marina Abramovic’s re-iteration of her 1997 work ‘Luminosity’. In this piece, a naked model (the piece was originally conceived for the artist’s own body) is suspended several feet in the air against a blank, bright patch of light. It had the appearance of a great, memorable, uncanny work of art, as filled-to-the-brim with inner radiance as any Velazquez painting. And yet these feelings of awe mingled uncomfortable with feelings of uncanny guilt – this was a real person after all, a person who was no doubt suffering to some lesser or greater extent. It came as a relief to learn that the models, as in Sehgal’s work for Transmission, rotate on a fairly regular basis.

Performance art is by no means a new phenomenom, but it’s rare to see works such as these performed for the casual viewer – in mainstream spaces, during normal opening hours, and for free. So it’s fascinating and eye-opening to witness three such pieces in such close conjunction. It’s works like these – works which invite feelings of aesthetic admiration as much as they invite feelings of human compassion and guilt – that can truly make individuals stop and think about the ethics of being a member of the audience.

Marina Abramovic, ‘Luminosity’, 1997/2011. Image: artnet.com

by Luke Healey

Perfunctory titles

'Horrible Bosses' poster. Image: iwatchstuff.com

It’s hardly a ‘blockbuster’ announcement that the films churned out of Hollywood often lack imagination both in terms of setting and plot, but what is of note is that this process has become something that the writers and distributors don’t even deign to mask anymore. The franchise series including Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie and more poke fun at the generic nature of creaking genre pieces, albeit as part of a meta-genre that in itself is so generic that the formula has been seamlessly repeated for countless stock types of movie. Two recent releases, however, have been given titles almost as laughably generic as the above parodies, but unfortunately, without the rudimentary hint of satire that they contain.

Bad Teacher and Horrible Bosses are examples of recent movie titles that expose the sheer lack of imagination behind the projects themselves. It may very well be the case that either film contains funny moments, as you would expect from writers being paid vast sums to churn out jokes, but it is clear that these jokes are merely an inevitable consequence of the Hollywood production line; a means to the end of fulfilling a movie to be sold. It is clear because the titles of the movies expose the amount of thought and ambition behind the projects – they describe settings, not content. Indeed, it is painfully obvious that the makers of these films just came to the conclusion that people would like to see a film about a bad teacher or dislikeable bosses, and have filled out a movie from there.

Marcel Duchamp famously opined that “the title of a painting is another colour on the artist’s palette”, that the title of a work is more than just a label, but something that can and should add something wholly of its own. The makers of Bad Teacher and Horrible Bosses lose out by lazily neglecting to exploit this: the films are about bad teachers and horrible bosses, so why bother thinking up titles that describe the films beyond their stick settings?

Fortunately, not all movies are based on such shaky foundations, and there are great examples of wonderful movies with ingenious and fantastic titles to match: Apocolypse Now is an eye-catching title for a movie saturated in ironic deployments of biblical language in the propaganda surrounding the war in Vietnam, and more widely against Communism, while also referencing, again ironically, the contemporary insistent chant of the anti-war movement, ‘Peace Now’. Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a fantastically absurd title that speaks to the central black humour of the picture; the absurdity of the reality that two superpowers were pointing nuclear weapons at each other, while pointing to the ironic truth that the fear of nuclear warfare led to an obsession with the bomb that hog-tied foreign policy for generations.

More recently, Chris Morris’s Four Lions provided a great example of an evocative title loaded with subtle signifiers. It hints at the genuine camaraderie and sense of identity among the bravely drawn characters, but also at the confused nature of their beliefs that lead them to a bomb plot against the nation they, as the ‘four lions’,  also identify with.

When movies are named perfunctorily, based simply on their central premise, it is an indicator that the content of the work could be equally lazy and forgettable. Take comfort, though, in the knowledge that while you may not be able to judge a book by its cover, or a movie by its title, if you see a movie, or anything else, with an intriguing, loaded title, you might well be treated to a work which intrigues you just as much!

by David Jackson

 

World Unite!

WU LYF. Image: 3.bp.blogspot.com

I had originally intended to make this a piece about WU LYF, the Mancunian hipster darlings known first and foremost for their “carefully designed anonymity”. Specifically, I was interested in the self-directed video for ‘Dirt’, the first single from their debut album ‘Go Tell Fire to the Mountain’, which was released last month. The song is nice enough, but it was the way that music blog ABEANO framed the video that really got me thinking:

“WU LYF get riotous in the video for ‘Dirt’ soundtracking footage of the recent London protests with mounting tension and extra helpings of dissatisfaction lacing Ellery’s vocal. Handily, they’ve also included the lyrics so you can start a singalong next time anarchists start smashing up banks.”

All of which warrants some pretty close scrutiny. Yes, I know it’s the prerogative of hipsters to be flippant about more or less everything, but I can imagine this blurb pissing a lot of people off. It seems, at first glance, to turn the spirit of youthful rebellion against the genuine aims of politicised youth by converting the whole sad affair into a kind of apocalypctic mood-lighting, complemented neatly by the persistent appearance of WU LYF’s cultic logo. Wasn’t one of the problems encountered by the anti-cuts movement around the time of Millbank the manner in which the cause became all too readily bound up with classical vocabulary of insurrection rather than a living one? Didn’t images of the calibre reworked by WU LYF – one thinks immediately of the image below, which featured on numerous front pages on the 11th of November -  have a tendency to steal the show a bit? Weren’t they guilty of, while explosively revealing the current of anger running through society at many levels, simultaneously drastically undermining the focus and specificity of a truly vital and wide-reaching movement by commodifying it? (I’m thinking here of a quote I read from the San Francisco Diggers, who accused the luminaries of 1960s psychedelic counterculture for creating ‘bags for the identity-hungry to climb into).  WU LYF’s case is not helped by the fact their brand came not out of the aesthetics of an underground scene so much as out of the commercial creative agency four23: the founder of this agency, Warren Bramley, is also the band’s manager.

Protester at Millbank, 10/11/10. Image: polizeros.com

It then struck me that – 1. It’s unquestionably more complicated than this and 2. I don’t know enough about the anti-cuts movement, besides a few local points of interest, to really hold court on a discussion of this magnitude. I was in Cardiff when the Edinburgh march took place, in Edinburgh when the Cardiff march took place, and either too overdrawn or too lazy to go to London. I want someone who was there to write this piece, then, because I think it is a crucially important issue of our shared historical moment, which I reckon can be summed up thus: what are the politics that arise when direct action, rebellion and counter-culture become an issue for aesthetics?

In the meantime, I return to Cardiff’s Chapter for a second post in a row.  ‘A Fire in the Master’s House is Set’, which opened yesterday and which features the work of such luminaries as Adam Chodzko, Ruth Ewan and Melanie Counsell, presents an aspect of the conundrum detailed above which I can more readily engage with. Upon reading the show’s press release I immediately recognised the extent to which its concerns overlapped with mine about WU LYF, as succinctly expressed in the second paragraph:

“A Fire in the Master’s House is Set suggests a somewhat contradictory space — a space where ideas of political, social or youthful resistance are invoked but simultaneously overlaid with the idea of the latent or the mute. It sets out to create a proposition where ideas of opposition, social defiance, protest, hedonism — so often the social language of music culture — are distanced or enfolded within abstracted forms.”

As well as getting to meet Chodzko, who featured prominently in my MA dissertation (which I will upload here in reviewed and digested form in due course) and who I hope to work with on something for this blog (he had a lot of very interesting things to say about playlists and mixes), I was lucky enough to get 15 minutes on opening night with the show’s curator, Simon Morrissey. Our discussion was interrupted before it had time to properly develop, but Morrissey’s answers offer the beginnings of a method for properly measuring and assessing artefacts like the video for ‘Dirt’, as well as a nice insight into the show (to which I can heartily recommend a visit).

Ruth Ewan, 'Squeezebox Jukebox', 2009, performance documentation. Image: frieze.com (Gallery assistants were enlisted to play a repertoire of protest songs collected by Ewan on this giant Castelfidardo-manufactured accordion throughout the 2009 Tate Triennial, 'Altermodern').

LH: I thought I’d had all my ideas made up about what this show was going to be from the press release, but it’s more enigmatic than I was expecting…

SM:  That was important for me. When I first starting thinking about the show – Hannah [Firth, Chapter curator] has an early proposal from me – it was about protest and politics, then that bled into music culture in some way, but when I put things together it was too…direct? Something that was there at the very beginning of my thinking was this space between the desire to express yourself politically, by going on protest marches and so on, and the fact that although that feels very exciting and everyone gets really involved, very little changes afterwards; how there’s this disconnect between people being drawn towards political action, and simultaneously that sense we all get that nothing will change because of it…I was thinking about this disenchantment with a direct idea of protest, and how a lot of the artists that I like present work that isn’t immediately digestible, that seems a little enigmatic or mysterious.

 I suppose it asks ethical questions about the role of the artwork…It seems that when you follow questions of political efficacy to a logical conclusion in reference to artists, the only stuff that really works is that which is more lateral, which takes a step back…

I was trying to bring together a group of works – I wrote this in the guide for the Chapter staff – where an idea has been folded in and in and in on itself, like origami, where it’s become this dense thing that is also very encoded. Similar to when you’re really into music or some other sort of subculture when you’re growing up: there’s a language that is understood, and a set of codes, ways of acting, that’s completely understood within that group but to outsiders appears nonsensical. I wanted to use the work in the show in a similar way – maybe the rhetoric around the work would present it in a certain way but then when you encountered it, it would appear more beautiful or more quiet or more abstract than you were expecting…To some degree I borrow from an idea that Adam [Chodzko] talks about a lot, that idea of bringing different ideas, different materials together as if making some kind of spell. I really like that idea of there being this connection of seemingly ordinary things, that when combined in a particular way, if they’re thought about and inhabited in a particular way, may achieve this unusual process.

Adam Chodzko, 'Plan for a Spell', 2001, still. Image: adamchodzko.com

It reworks this idea of art’s aura, in a way…This idea took on negative connotations in criticisms of capitalism, through Walter Benjamin and associated figures, but I feel there’s something beneficial to be had through a concept of the aura that can be reimagined and reinscribed in the wake of these criticisms…

For me it’s important to separate the theoretical hierarchies you mention from those encounters you have with cultural material – especially when you’re younger, when you encounter a certain artwork for the first time, or when you hear certain music for the first time, or when you read a novel by x and are completely blown away…That genuinely revealing moment you can have with a piece of art, anything from a rock song through to a Rothko painting…It’s not about the aura in the way that Benjamin talks about it so much as a very personalised connectivity, which is dependent on the person, the object, time, all these concentric rings of context that can exist around a particular thing.

 Why I say aura is because it was an idea opposed by the conceptualists when they tried to turn everything linguistic, and we’ve come out of the other side of that…

Exactly, we’re in a moment where we’ve digested both of those arguments. The work of somebody like Adam is interesting in that it has clearly digested both viewpoints – it’s deeply conceptual and yet…

 Or Ruth [Ewan]– when you look at her work there’s an immediate affective, aesthetic connection, and yet it also thrives on these layers of textual meaning, she’s having it both ways…

That’s what happens – you have a dominant position set out, and then a reaction, and then often after that head to head what you get is a reassessment. Maybe we’re in a process of accepting that there are valid parts of both situations, and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We’re in an artistic moment that is both less ideologically defined than was the case with previous generations and more complicated, and we have artists producing really interesting work that takes on multiple, supposedly contradictory positions all at once.

 When I was talking to Adam about playlists and mixes, he repeatedly brought up the idea of contradicting or undermining himself, and this is a tendency which can be found in his work as well. I also recall a Frieze round-table discussion in which the artist Seth Price asserted that “I like work which carries within itself conflicts of interest that risk being self-defeating”. Where can this sort of approach lead?

I tried to bring this idea out in the show…The fact that it talks about music and there’s very little music in the show, and so on. I remember when I was younger being drawn to really tight conceptual circles – arguments operating on the principle of 1+1=2. very quickly after that phase it struck me that I never really went back to them…The things that we go back to and go back to over time and the things that we find hard to unpack and describe straight away. If something is contradictory and obtuse and mute or confrontational or hard to understand, often it means that it establishes a self of sense against you as the viewer, and then you have this dialogue where it won’t completely give itself to you, and that’s very important…The idea that you might not be able to walk into a show and say ‘Oh, I get it now’, and walk away, but that things might haunt you or annoy you or frustrate you and you come back and ask ‘ok, why is that Michael Dean poster of the concrete sculpture that’s cut in half with a pound coin underneath it here?’…and you’ll find that there’ll be subtle connections, like how it formally echoes Roger Hiorns’ sculpture for instance.

Michael Dean, 'Untitled', 2009. Image: www.contemporaryartsociety.org

 I like that you use the word ‘haunt’…there’s a lot of work to be done with that word, a lot of exploration…’Hauntology’, the idea that ideas can only really be semi-present in the way that contemporary culture is constructed…

One of the things I’m really interested in is this idea that you might give to a piece of work, through it being complicated enough or unpackaged enough, a sense of self separate to you, so you’re almost having another encounter with another person, a thing that you can’t completely package and own. We’re so completely immersed in a consumer culture, where the dominant ethos is that everything should be immediately and totally digestible, that I feel this is one of the most important oppositional positions that art can occupy.

A Fire in the Master’s House is Set runs at Chapter until 4 September

by Luke Healey

Waving flags

David Mackintosh, from 'The Glade', 10 drawings, hardwood framework and gouache on paper, 2011. Image courtesy Chapter

Congratulations to Chapter for producing one of the most genuinely interesting interpretation sheets I’ve seen in a while. The Cardiff gallery’s material for their recent, commendable David Mackintosh exhibition featured a full essay by Martin Holman, and was a shining example of how to do exposition effectively, by opening up rather than closing down the range of meaning that the given works can be seen to offer. A little way into his discussion, Holman goes out on a limb compare Mackintosh’s work to ‘ships’ semaphore flags and forms of signalling at sea in which actions link up’, before noting,

David Mackintosh, 'The Glade', 10 drawings, hardwood framework and gouache on paper, 2011 (installation view). Image courtesy Chapter

Yet the drawings remain stubbornly mute. Physically close enough to illustration to connect semantically they remain several paces back from the brink of transmission. Why? Because they can!

Flag of Ciudad Bolívar. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Reading this was something of a watershed moment. Although Holman adds the caveat that ‘Mackintosh is not intentionally a maker of emblems’, I nontheless strongly suspect it to be viable, vital even, to read the drawings included in the Chapter show as tightrope-walking on the precipice of emblematics. It has a lot to do with the format and the method of display chosen for Mackintosh’s drawings – consistent, pure, grouped, marked by a steadfast syntax and mutable semantics. His works, in fact, beg the question: what turns an image into a symbol? What are the mechanics that transform a record of observation into a vessel for communication? These thoughts were no doubt prompted in some small way by the fact that a day or two previously myself and a friend had been weighing up the aesthetic merits of the design above, which, with its pared-down atmospherics could almost be a Bryan Winter abstract, but is in actual fact the flag of Ciudad Bolívar, capital of Venezuela’s southeastern Bolívar state (formerly known as Agnostura). It is, in other words, despite certain appearances (the free-floating forms and creamground colour are, as said friend highlighted, unusual in a flag) the sort of image where ‘colour is commonplace, clarity an advantage (but not a necessity) and space an invitation’ (Holman). The relation between appearance and function strains and stretches.

David Mackintosh, from 'The Glade', hardwood framework and 10 drawings, gouache on paper, 2011. Image courtesy Chapter

The process by which line, colour and form is translated from optical experience to emblematic vocabulary is, despite this emphasis on clarity and conventionality, full of mystery, resting on multiple and unpredictable contingencies. Could Mackintosh’s drawings, in spite of their aesthetic tactility and malleability, communicate in the same way that this flag communicates? Evidently, they could. One only needs to consider the evolution of Olympic Pictograms, with which Mackintosh’s images correlate somewhat, albeit in a manner that flags up the uniquely washy identity of fine art illustration when abutted with its commercial or industrial counterpart. The fact that ‘Mackintosh is not intentionally a maker of emblems’ then becomes a key to his work, teetering on the brink of inchoate communication, opening up a set of questions about image and meaning that may require more than a dissertation to resolve (perhaps Tom McCarthy will have some insight when he delivers a talk at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival entitled ‘Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works’). In place of that, I’ll be satisfied with conclude (for now) with a comparison that carries a great deal of weight coming from any Scotland-based writer. The experience of reading a David Mackintosh drawing is akin to the experience of trying to get to grips with those images created by Ian Hamilton Finlay image, which, wrapped up in an arcane and highly personal mythology that belies their explicitly emblematic appearance, frustrate the effort of the viewer to unravel some form of intrinsic hermeneutic value, but in a thrilling, enervating sort of way (at least, that is my experience). Both Mackintosh and Finlay beg a massive question, which is not one that I think can ever be satisfactorily answered: how volatile, how vaporous, is the line between communication and understanding?

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 'Catameringue' (Collaboration with Peter Grant), 1970. Image: tate.org.uk

By Luke Healey