Taking work to the gallery.

Hello everyone.

For those of you who make work in London - a van has been hired on Friday June 11 to pick your work up. You may not need your work picking up, please let me know. Those living outside London, you'll have to make it on your own, I'm afraid. Imperial's budget doesn't stretch that far, unfortunately.

Its a great invite! well done Chris. Really strong visually, and clever..... and funny. I like it.

On the other (date and time etc) side of the card, do you think it would be a good idea to have a map of where the gallery is? Once you get into Imperial its a labarynthine and quite hard to find Blyth (if you've got any where near as bad a sense of direction as I have anyway!).

Claudia

(never done a blog entry before so hoping this is going to go through) 30th March 2010

Postcard

(Update) Well, this is what I've come up with. Based on John Berger's Ways of Seeing - it's a postcard within a postcard. There are many references to the Waste Land without ever mentioning it. It's very playful, partly nonsense... perhaps like the Waste Land... I think it strikes the right note. Please feel free to disagree, although I will defend it!! :) Check out the original design of Ways of Seeing below to compare. (I spotted a grammatical error so have updated. There are probably loads but that never stopped a particular Margate lass!)

Hi Chris,

I love the nod to John Berger. Very witty and beautifully crafted.

Carolyn, Anna and Aline - if you could send me any background to your work in the form of text or images, plus an idea of what you plan to exhibit, that would be great! My email is james.cahill@hotmail.com

Speak to you all soon,

James

Re. Chris's comments

I can't seem to get this to upload as a comment on 'Amanda's Work' post. i've tried a hundred times!!! so i'll have to place it here. if anyone has any thoughts on what i might be doing wrong, please let me know, and i can remove it and post it as a comment - anyway on response to Chris's comments....

i love the comments you made, you couldn't never off piste! there is no such place! It is your reading of the work, but in any case, it is spot on... I love the thought of all time and labour captured and used, without care for importance, this i think is really true. All activity for me is part of the work! Re. grey matter, I have been thinking about this for the paper i am writing, particularly in relation in the pursuit of an elusive image, the dream photograph i have been trying to make in Dust Passing, which was inspired by Robert Shapazian writing on Man Ray's Dust Breeding, the long exposure of settled dust on Duchamp's The Large Glass, in which he describes how the came about. Whilst I was reading the text, I envisioned a kind of anti-photograph. Almost everything that a well-made photograph isn’t. Instead of an image made from various tones of grey. It is a thick fog, a magical, amorphous haze of grey grain on the photo paper. And within which one can imagine any and every image… You also talked of grey matter, in relation to the works in your show, on the phone as well. Is there anything you have been reading about grey, dust, the imagination, the sublime, boredom and generation? I have found some references in some essays about Benjamin by Teresa Stoppani, e.g. Dust Projects: on Walter Benjamin’s Passengen-Werk (have a photocopy of if you want me to send by smail mail?)
and also i need to find Andrew Benjamin ‘Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity’ in ‘Walter Benjamin and History’ (London, Continuum, 2006)

Tate article about failure

Tate article about failure - http://tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue18/failure.htm

Publicity/postcard/invite

14/03.... I really like the look of this layout and design. I like the way the book starts on the cover. Been thinking more about it. Almost contrary to what I said before..I think it should be simple and direct. Home-made. A bit old-fashioned but I think the title should be on the front along with a list of the contributors. Nothing enigmatic, no metaphors etc. Just allow it to be a postcard/invite. No smart-arsed antics. No over-the-top cut and paste, punky aesthetics either. Anyway, shall post it when it's made.

Hello all,

Well, it's about 12 weeks to go until we install our work at Blyth; 12 weeks in which to pull together and attempt to make it work as a group project. The first creative obstacle is the invite/postcard which has to be ready for the end of March.

I am not really interested in the postcard containing a snapshot of one of our works, or even an abstract close-up. It's too illustrative and not interactive enough.

Anyone got any ideas?

My initial thoughts are that it should contain the fingerprints of the artists involved made visible using a light coating of dust. I will have to do a few experiments to see whether it has any clout as a piece of visual ephemera but I like the way it draws us together, while apart. Alternatively, the postcard could be white and printed with a special ink which reveals the 'image' under certain conditions, or which perhaps reveals itself over time. I also like the idea of something semi-random. The word: 'Bee' - a social insect, a group worker. How might we each represent it using a biro on paper. The results could form the final design of our publicity... a sort of doodle, if you like. In a time when people are talking about relational aesthetics perhaps it's not too pedantic a concern.

Please feel free to post your own ideas. But please respond soon as this deadline is looming. Also, say if you have any objections to your address being known to the other artists in the show (applicable if we go ahead with my idea, or something similar).

Modernism in contemporary art

Dear all,

I have noticed an article in this month's ArtReview that mentions the predominance of Modernist aesthetics - and arguably methodologies - in contemporary art. The piece makes reference to a (much more insightful) article on the subject by Martin Herbert in Tate Etc. which is pertinent to my planned discussion of your works' parallels with Modernism: http://tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue15/newmodernism.htm

Looking forward to discussing things further,

James

Links

www.amandacouch.co.uk

www.annachapman.co.uk

www.cshaw.co.uk

www.vynerstreetgallery.co.uk

http://www.claudiacarr.com/

Amanda's Work

Hi All,

It was lovely to me you, Claudia and James, yesterday and great to see you again, Chris.

As discussed I am uploading links to things, at this point relating to my work.

Looking forward to see other peoples links, thoughts etc in the near future.

www.amandacouch.co.uk

and more specifically,

http://www.amandacouch.co.uk/#/press/4533599649

http://www.amandacouch.co.uk/#/work-in-progress/4537313414

http://www.amandacouch.co.uk/#/performance/4532200651

is there a way to upload documents?

Exhibition essay & press release

Dear Claudia, Carolyn, Anna, Aline, Amanda and Chris,

Chris has asked me to compose a press release and essay for your group exhibition later this year at the Blyth Gallery. I am interested in building upon his suggested starting point of T.S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land'. The title ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, which was Eliot’s provisional title (drawn from an episode in Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend where Betty Higden praises her son’s ability to read out the newspaper in a variety of voices) proposes an unusually self-reflexive exhibition. The show’s proposed subject is, in effect, its own curatorial open-endedness and visual polyphony.

And so I have in mind an essay that explores the concepts of translation, fragmentation, and plurality of voices (or heteroglossia) that underpin Eliot’s poem, and the way in which the works in this exhibition might be said to reflect and reinterpret them, both individually and collectively. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Tate Triennial last year proposed the arrival of the ‘Altermodern’ era in art – defined by manifold (and sometimes contradictory) questions of transition, discontinuity, internationalism, a sense of contingency, and experimentalism. Bourriaud's conception of a new artistic epoch arguably reaches back to and reinterprets a number of the key tenets of Modernism. I am interested in the possibility of extending and playing out Bourriaud's approach, by considering your works and the exhibition as a whole in terms of Modernism and its legacy.

This is all so far very provisional; obviously it's vital for me to discover as much as possible about your work before I think further about the direction of this essay. If possible, it would be great to hear about what you intend to show in the exhibition. If you have jpegs that you could email to me this would be very useful. Please also direct me towards any websites that contain examples of your work. I realise that Chris proposed 'The Waste Land' as a theoretical starting point rather than as a prescriptive 'theme'; but I’d be interested to know what you think about using the poem to anchor the essay and the exhibition, and how - if at all - your work relates to it.

Please feel free either to respond via the blog or to contact me directly at james.cahill@hotmail.com

I very much look forward to discussing this with you all further!

James

The Exhibits

I'd like this thread to be about what our plans are concerning the materials, scale, scope of our work.

Questions and concerns

I'd just like to create a thread about concerns and questions you might have about the show. The exhibition begins in June, so we ought to start the ball rolling.

Gillian Lowndes

I've just seen this beautiful work (well, not this one but one equally as exquisite) by Gillian Lowndes at Bury art gallery in a show called Deviants. Gillian uses ceramic, porcelain slip, egyptian paste, stainless steel, everyday materials in her work. I have asked Bury art Gallery for this artist's email. I'd love her to be involved. I know I shouldn't upload until I have something definite, but I just had to share it with you.

http://british-poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/ts_eliots_the_waste_land

Quite useful

Group Show

Hi everyone. Thanks for being involved in this project. You are (in alphabetical order):

Aline von der Assen
Amanda Couch
Anna Chapman
Carolyn Flood
Chris Shaw
Claudia Carr
James Cahill

James has just got involved I am very pleased to announce. He will write our press release/accompanying essay.

I am hoping we can all meet very soon at Blyth. I am aware Aline and Anna do not live in London but Aline is due to pay the capital a visit early January, so perhaps then?

When Mindy asked me to curate an exhibition at Blyth, my immediate reaction was that it was an impossible task. I thought this because it is enough of a trauma trying to organise my own thoughts and ideas into presentable artworks without having to consider others. The only way I was going to agree to it was if I could build it around dissonance and even failure, albeit an artful and self-conscious failure. I have asked each of you to be in it because I saw something skewed, knotty, broken, veiled in your work - as well as unity and cohesion.

Linking our works' shards, fragments, glimpses up with the poem seemed logical. The poem is at once unified and broken. It has certainly struck a chord although its exact meaning is up for debate. Its mysterious Holy Grail-like quality is deeply appealing to me. Embodying elements of romantic, especially Grail, literature it seems painfully conscious that us 'moderns' have entered a new era of a crisis of faith. We're bewildered, lost among the 'stony rubbish'. Everything is dry and barren in the waste land. Its sense of mystery is perhaps ironic as it leaves us under no illusion of the shallowness of modern living. Sex is mechanical. Faith is put in tarot cards. It's bleak - there is no mystery anymore, although part 5 seems to suggest a rumbling of hope, the coming of rain. It's been like this before, Eliot seems to say - life goes in cycles and we just happen to be alive in a period of lack. You don't need to uncover the poem's secrets line by line but some understanding of the context it was written in might help (English language poetry written in the decades before The Waste Land had slipped into nostalgia and sentimentality for the most part and was no longer suitable for a world ravaged by world war) aswell as a knowledge of its formal layout (some argue the clue to its content is all in its form. Form which echoes the frenzied pace of modernity - I personally don't believe in the separation between form and content) will be very helpful in sharpening your focus on what's important for this project. Knowing your work, having seen it, I think we all have an intrinsic feel for what this poem is about. The bottom line is Eliot splices voices: everyday speech sits next to biblical references; the coarse and the throwaway bleeds seamlessly and also jarringly into language of extraordinary and concentrated richness. It could be argued we're still fundamentally in Eliot's epoch, so let's remind people of this revolutionary poem.

To me there is something vulgar about a group show that doesn't, in some way, acknowledge the difficulty of putting on a group show. As I see it: an artist is one entity but even the artist him/herself cannot know everything about him/herself or about his/her practice. A curator comes along and sees even less of what the artist sees in his/her work. Perhaps the curator sees something entirely different but equally valid. Throwing that artist in the mix with other artists and inviting visitors to draw parallels between the artists dilutes and distorts the artist's initial vision even further. Therein lies the problem but also the beauty of the group show.

Thanks for being involved. I hope you'll get something out of it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20090226.shtml

This is a very interesting radio programme about the poem.

http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

The poem with Eliot's notes which don't necessarily provide a greater understanding. I just uploaded the first site I came across. If there's a better one. Please upload and I'll delete this.