Sluice magazine - Spring 2017

9 772398 839005

ISSN 2398-8398

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Sluice ArtistRun Projects celebrates art and not the modish baubles offered up to the super-rich for their cultural absolution.

Sluice ArtistRun Projects is not interested in the art market and its many obsequious lackeys who parade like high priests around our great museums and art galleries, whilst uncritically serving the cupidinous desires of mammon and its many self-appointed pallbearers.

Pia Rönicke The Pages of Day and Night (detail) 2015 Photogravure 10 x 16 inches Courtesy of the artist and gb agency Paris

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Sluice Artist-Run Projects is not going to be yet another cultural project that launders the dirty proceeds of Capitalism and its many ‘service’ industries through the strategic support of an arts project.

1 What Happened To Friend’s Brother? Part I Let Me Feel Your Finger First

8 Supernormal: Braziers Park 15 Where Are We Going?

And What Are We Doing?

Michael Keenan

19 Interview: Supernormal 24 To Marcia Tucker Nicole Sansone

28 3 137: Athens 32 Eddie The Eagle Museum: Amsterdam 46 apexart: New York Charlie Levine and Karl England

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qwerty:

Odense 56 Disorientating History

Yvette Greslé

58 Raumlabor: Berlin

Publishing Directors Karl England Gordon Shrigley Editors Rosanna van Mierlo rosie@sluice.info Tash Kahn tash@sluice.info Associate Editor Ben Street Photo Editor Charlie Levine charlie@sluice.info Artist-Run Projects Editor Kendall Rang Artists’ Books and Film Editor Laura Palookaville Publisher Sluice www.sluice.info

Marmalade Publishers of Visual Theory, London www.filmarmalade.co.uk Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters Harrison Dew info@chkdesign.com www.chkdesign.com Lettering All fonts by Colophon www.colophon-foundry.org Cover Zach Jansen Eddie the Eagle Museum Rostrum Camera Ferdy Carabott Distribution Central Books www.centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info www.sluice.info Unsolicited material cannot be returned, though all correspondence will be passed on to the editor The views expressed in Sluice are not necessarily those of the publishers ©2017 ISSN 2398-8398 EAN 9772398839005 Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, of this magazine is prohibited Subscriptions subscribe online at www.sluice.info Contributors Markus Bader Aukje Dekker Karl England Kendall Rang Alistair Gentry Yvette Grisle James Horgan Pil & Galia Kollectiv Charlie Levine Rosanna van Mierlo Stephen Pritchard Nicole Sansone QWERTY Keran James Bernadette Moloney Gill Ord Sam Francis Gordon Shrigley TSA Michael Keenan Let Me Feel Your Finger First

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Sluice Artist-Run Projects welcomes disruption, openness, diy, anarchy and permanent cultural revolution.

62 Touching Blue

Sluice Artist-Run Projects hails Gustave Metzger!

Rosanna van Mierlo

70 Extracting new cultural value from urban regeneration: The intangible rise of the social capital artist Stephen Pritchard

72 Tiger Asteroid Strikes: New York – Philadephia – Chicago – Los Angeles 80 The Dunning–Kruger Supremacy Alistair Gentry

82 Waiting James Horgan

84 Richard Gere Leaves Me Breathless Reviewed by Gordon Shrigley 72

94 Artist Run Index 96 What Happened To Friend’s Brother? Part II Let Me Feel Your Finger First 7

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Photo by Florian Herzberg

Supernormal Festival, 2013

Supernormal

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Supernormal creates an environment in which experimental and exploratory creative work can flourish. Uniting disparate art forms and dissolving boundaries, opportunities are ...

... provided for emerging artists across a range of disciplines from sound, music and performance to visual, participatory and discursive arts, supporting and foregrounding innovative and challenging artistic practice.

Following and expanding upon a progressive lineage that extends from the ideology of Braziers Park School of Social Integrative Research through Braziers International Artists Workshop (biaw) their activities explore alternative approaches to creating, experiencing, living and learning.

The 2017 festival will bring artists and audiences together to experience an ambitious and uncompromising programme of performances and projects, activities and discussion.

Moreover, the artistic vision of Supernormal now extends beyond the festival itself, taking in a residency in which selected artists are free to respond to the location of Braziers Park and will unite to form part of an ongoing continuum of work that will continue with the Cities Tour project later in the year, transposing the vision of the festival across the uk.

Thriving on intuition and unpredictability, Supernormal is a constantly evolving mission to transcend what a festival can be capable of, where the only limits are the otherworldly imaginations of artists and audience alike.

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All photographs Jordan McKenzie S.O.R.R.O.W

Where Are We Going?

And What Are We Doing?

—John Cage

Michael Keenan

‘To explore the dynamics of people living in groups, to develop better methods of interpersonal communication and to find new ways of combining knowledge to make it more meaningful.’ (From the constitution of the Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire.) Not in any way an outline for an art project, but not a bad one to deflect in that direction. The meaningful, in art, being something we can always be grateful for. ‘people living in groups...’ The SISR was in fact an experiment in communal living that grew out of, for one thing, the Common Wealth party, a political reaction to the perceived lack of discussion-based democracy in the Labour Party of the day. (Though it did also include a set of idiosyncratic psychiatric theories and a weird forced-labour attitude to welfare.) By 1950 it wanted a permanent home to put its experiment into practice, and found Braziers Park, a ramshackle Oxfordshire mansion with numerous bedrooms, a refectory, plenty of land attached, and a scattering of disused outbuildings. (‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte’: the reaction of the 18th century wit Mme du Deffand to the story of the miraculous trek made by the early Christian martyr St Denis, picking up his decapitated head and carrying it on an eight-mile walk. ‘It’s really just the first step that matters’.)

For those of us in the art world (international citizens, as we need to start defining ourselves) the physical context is easy. Putting on a show right here

is something we can do. (Better make that ‘could have done’.) All you need(ed) was space, or a space, somewhere to show things. Harder now, for affording-rent reasons. Which makes it crucial to hang on to a ‘here’ once you’ve got one. ‘better methods...’ After the first step, the obvious thing is to follow in the trodden path (the rut, in other words). So what if the models are wrong for you? If you question ‘residencies’, if you are tired of ‘festivals’, suspicious of prizes and antithetical to art fairs, how do you operate? Alternatives can define themselves only up to a point by the models they oppose, and sooner or later the element that’s truly new will need to be devised. ‘Tradition ist Schlamperei’ (G Mahler).

Tradition is sloppiness.

‘Ways of combining knowledge...’ international art fairs are, most obviously, a dazzlingly glamorous shop window; beyond that, a way of extending awareness of art to the public at large. But mostly an opportunity to display your wares in the shortest possible time to the largest possible accumulation of buyers. Thriving commercial galleries are said to make a massive percentage of their annual sales not at home in Clerkenwell or Hackney or Peckham, but in Miami, Basel and Regent’s Park.

Alternatives to that system set out on a determinedly anti-commercial route, intentionally testing art world models by being open, approachable, affordable and undogmatic.

‘True originality consists in trying to be like everyone else, and failing’ (possibly Raymond Radiguet).

Putting on the show right here starts with a major advantage, if there’s already a ‘here’. ‘Let’s find somewhere to put on a show’ has a far less snappy feel. Maybe the International Artists’ Workshop could only have happened when and where it did: at Braziers Park, at that particular moment when the three young artists - two of whom were also involved later in setting up studio1.1 - met the young artist who had grown up there. There was plenty of room, and rooms, fields, disused smallholding buildings, from greenhouses up to a large and leaky barn, plenty of small sheds with bucolically romantic names. The whole of it, by the mid nineties, in a state of some disrepair, just the right state to be overrun by a temporary population of international artists.

And the resident community was sympathetic, up to a point, countercultural from its own particular period, with one of its leading members the father of not just a young artist, but also of a notorious pop star (or in -a more truthful though sexist term, a major super-groupie). blaw’s particular purpose was clear enough, and probably revolutionary: initially with no funding, driven by dissatisfaction with other residencies the originators had experienced, it was to take the 15

fact that thirty strangers were housed together for a fortnight in an unfamiliar setting, and to make a conscious effort to bind them together into a temporary community. Where other residencies might offer accommodation and studio facilities and leave it at that, biaw gave a personal experience, with co-ordinators who involved themselves completely. There were games, crits, discussions, shared meals, and a final open day with guided tours for visitors, who sometimes in their hundreds came to spend a day in the country looking at art. After that a disco and a barbeque for the artists, followed by a day of often genuinely difficult partings. For this to have lasted and thrived for the fifteen years (1995–2009) suggests a huge amount of commitment and perseverance on the part of the three main co-ordinators. And above all, some considerable self-sacrifice. By 2010, the workshop changing with the world changing around it, they recognised the workshop had exhausted itself and them, developing in a direction they found increasingly uncongenial.

But the ‘here’ still offered itself, too good to abandon - though as it happens, the resident community was itself changing, for reasons of internal politics reassessing its purpose in ways that made it considerably less open to visitors, not to say hostile.

Again, another story. But here was a chance for another battle, another beginning...

‘Let’s do the show...’ In 1950 Braziers Park had been available for the School of Integrative Social Research to buy, to house a small partially selfsustaining community, and then eventually for biaw to hire for its three weeks in the summer. That’s the house and the outbuildings and farmland.

Also among its grounds is a huge field with enough space for stages, food stands, tents, camping...

Devising a festival was the falling-off-a-log part.

What kind of festival was a question that answered itself, at least in outline. Bands, of course, that’s what a festival is, but art too, since the originators are artists. Colouring in the outline has proved more problematic. Supernormal has become successful, established itself on the overflowing festival circuit. Its first year was exemplary, and also unrepeatable. It’s not hard, to put it mildly, to find an artist who’s also occasionally in a band, and that first year the music was mainly drawn from friends and friends of friends, and people the friends had heard of. Including, proving the rule, hugely famous German stars Faust, playing just for expenses.

Precisely because one of their current line-up was a London artist, a friend of a friend. Supernormal as a riotous one-off (and yes, equipment was damaged, offence was given and taken, permission was almost withdrawn for it to return for a second year).

A festival for appearing at, rather than attending,

for figuring on the guest-list rather than forking out for a ticket. From the second year the professionals began to appear, paid-for bands and record company nominees with, one could hope, some ticket-buying following. A sustainable model, a route to ticket sales, a means of carrying on. Leaving the interesting question largely unanswered. What about the art?

How here to present art/ make art/ recontextualise art (or even decontextualise art).

How do we evaluate performance? Or, how relational can you get?

The exciting challenge to devise new forms of art in the setting of a three-day festival, alongside administering the festival itself, is a tough one, and so far the verdict could be that the excitement is still pending. Three-day sculptures and installations are three-day art, however you look at them (or you don’t). Art that can make Supernormal truly an Art and Music festival just isn’t there. However.

Significantly, there have been two definite successes in the art arena, neither of them planned as hits, both of them add-on ideas, introduced to bulk out the programme, not what a festival audience is normally offered, and some distance from what it would be expected to enjoy. They are discussion groups and life-drawing classes. Life-drawing. Practical, basic, getting on with it, participatory. Discussion: open, unprescriptive, exploratory, unpredictable. Not very new, and not exactly, to be judgementally taxonomic about it, considered forms of Fine Art at all.

Or?

Or? 16

In the very last year of the workshop, also the first year of Supernormal, there was a different approach to the residency. For the first time, artists were chosen with the stipulation that they would be expected to collaborate with each other. With the festival to launch, the co-ordinators would draw back from their normal role and leave the artists quite a lot to themselves. There are two very different angles from which to judge what happened next. Broadly speaking, the residency artists were at a loss, adrift in a strange place and needing direction (in every conceivable definition of the word). They found it difficult to form plans and make any art, and retreated into a series of worried and indecisive meetings. Twist the kaleidoscope: they bonded over their perceived abandonment, debated at length and formed lasting attachments. For a workshop always premised on process and not the creation of product, exactly the intended and regular outcome.

There’s a Don’t-let’s-ask-for the-moon,-we-havethe-stars aspect to the dissatisfaction we might feel about the art at Supernormal. But If it became just one festival among many, camping, kebabs, beer and bands with a bit of art on the side, a major opportunity would be missed. The temporary art shown on the biaw open day is one thing, the spirit of the fortnight made visible, ephemeral sculptures, installations in the woods, quick-change performance. Maybe the festival, growing out of the workshop, owing at least something to the School of Social Research - the name Supernormal is taken from its psychiatric underpinning - could delve back through those roots and surprise us all. Something that will have come almost from nothing, but not from nowhere. As it has done with all of us, creative projects begun from a position of dissent and struggling on with an entirely open remit, hoping to bring change to - well, to no less than everything.

John Cage writes ‘Here we are,’ (yes, ‘here’).

‘Let us say Yes to our presence together...’

Actually he goes on ‘in Chaos’.

Or? Sorry.

Supernormal Festival 2015

Or? 17

I NT ER V I E W

Sluice interviews s u p e r n o r m a l founders and directors: Keran James Bernadette Moloney Gill Ord Sam Francis

sluice

Supernormal Festival, 2013 Image by Florian Herzberg

A lineage can be traced for Supernormal – the arts and music festival – back to the 1940’s when Dr John Norman Glaister (Implications of the gregarious habit in man pub. Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research. 1975) petitioned the Common Wealth Party to instigate a ‘Sensory Committee’ as a means to keep the leadership in touch and answerable to the membership. After the war he organised three Summer Schools at Braziers Park, which in 1950 became the Community (Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research bpsisr) that was set up as a practical experiment to explore Glaister’s aims of social living as a means to improve the human condition, and which still occupies Braziers Park today.

In 1995 artists Andy Cohen, Simon Faithfull, Gill Ord and Bernadette Moloney were invited by Braziers to set up the first Braziers International Artists Workshop (biaw). Keran James joined the team a year later. Fifteen years later, they spawned Supernormal.

Talking to the original instigators and the current directors of Supernormal, we first asked if they were aware of the heritage when they created the festival.

BM

From my perspective it was kind of accidental that we ended up at Braziers, and in terms of the workshop it was the place that interested us, the environment, rather than any real knowledge about what it stood for and what the community was all about. But as the workshop developed, we began to understand that much more and to see that what we were trying to do with the workshop fitted very much with what bpsisr was all about.

KJ

We were basically doing the same kind of things that they were trying to do. Finding some way of working within a society, working as a society, as a group, hoping finally to change society...

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GO

sluice

Braziers is a live, organic experiment, it isn’t one person’s idea of utopia.

I think what happened was that when we read more about their thinking it totally chimed with us. The workshop connected very much to that lineage, but in a way we were at odds with the people in the community who – although the theory was there – were actually rather conservative, whereas we saw it much more radically, so we agreed in theory but not approach. In terms of the energy required to make change, Braziers seemed very static to us at the time.

The original Sensory Committee proposal to the Common Wealth party reads very much like it could come straight out of a Momentum document.

Supernormal Festival, 2014 Image by Florian Herzberg

‘The danger is that, having been given the power they need, an Executive will proceed, first to use it in pursuit of policy which, even though formed in the general interest, has not the support of their members, and then to make criticism ineffective or impossible by abuse, or undemocratic amendments, of the constitution[...]

We suggest that the problem of giving effective voice to opinion in the ranks without impeding the Executive’s power to act quickly and decisively when necessary in the interests of the movement as a whole, provides our great task and our great opportunity.’ http://www.braziers.org.uk/pdfs/why_sensory.pdfDocument9 p.3

So the idea that politics is adrift from the will of the public as a theme currently exercising political debate is not new. Braziers, as a living embodiment of the Sensory Committee has a duty to constantly re-evaluate it’s role and it’s connection to and with society. Viewing Supernormal as a loose manifestation of some of these ideas (and as Supernormal operates as a Community Interest Company) how do you feel Supernormal serves society and who is your community?

GO

Originally, one of the main factors [for setting up the workshop] in 1995 was to provide for what we thought artists needed, which was to be able to meet and to talk and exchange ideas. And over the years we realised we wanted to make it international. At that point there was no internet and most artists hadn’t really travelled. The opportunity to meet artists from other places was scarce. By 2010 circumstances had changed, so we were dealing with a very different group of people.

KJ

The workshop had changed by that point, certainly for us, the sort of people that came changed, it was a victim of its own success - people were less willing to risk things. After 10 years of running the workshop, we felt a great need to change its format and do something different.

So in 2009, we decided to take a year off to consider whether we wanted to continue and if we did, what shape that might take.

BM

Once you’ve been involved with braziers for a while they invite you to become associate members, and in 2009 we were there for the agm when Wood Festival on. It got us thinking that we could do something interesting with the festival format and radically change the focus of the workshop. Part of what informed it was funding, there was pressure for there to be more of a public outcome. We’d always held an open day at the end of the workshop anyway as part of the remit for Arts Council funding.

GO

Supernormal Festival Image by David Grenier

And the open day had grown to a point where people would come up from London in coaches and camp over, so as much as we say we pursued radical change, really it was an organic process to some extent.

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KJ

So Supernormal was born as a way to take on the workshop open day and turn it into an event. We didn’t want to run a festival, we just thought the workshop needed to change, or as you say Gill, the world had changed around the workshop.

BM

Well in the end it was a festival that we put on in 2010 and we plunged into it very naively which in a way was its saving grace – if we’d known what we were letting ourselves in for, it probably wouldn’t have happened. We were able to call on people and friends around us to help – people who knew about music, putting on live events, licensing – all this stuff we had no clue about but we did have a vision for how we’d like it to be and luckily other people got it and came on board – like Sam who managed the volunteers for us in the first year.

In the second year of sn we handed the management and organisation of Supernormal to Sam and a number of other people who having loved the first one offered to help. We (Gill, Bernie & Keran) got fully involved again in 2012 but after five years felt – we’ve done that now, we’re all getting older and we don’t have the energy to continue running it any longer. We thought maybe this is the end of Supernormal, but if anybody does want to take it on and continue then they could, so we were quite prepared for it to finish at that point. Sam and the core group who had invested time and energy over the previous four years decided they wanted to continue.

Supernormal Festival, 2015 Image by Sylwia Jarzynka sluice

What ensures it continues on the path you set out for it?

Is it important it does?

BM

Since becoming a separate entity Supernormal have constituted themselves as a cic and that puts all kinds of other pressures on you, in terms of how it’s run and on outcomes. Supernormal received a quite large grant from the Arts Council, and that alone changes the nature of the thing. Instead of it being a group of people all taking decisions collectively you now have a situation where the people writing the funding applications are making decisions on the future direction of Supernormal based on the demands of the funding. So this is something they’re addressing at the moment, how to maintain the collectivist ethos.

GO

The workshop had those same pressures, we would make these applications to the Arts Council and were very successful, but each year we went back - because we weren’t a regularly funded organisation – we had to almost reinvent ourselves, to keep adding on new things, such as longer term residencies within the uk, so once we got an artist here, with the airfare, visa etc it made sense to keep them. So we’d run all these residencies after the workshop with partner organisations.

Then because we were getting money from international organisations we started running residencies in Mexico, Latvia, Palestine, China… but what that did was increase our workload, and the benefits for us as artists ourselves were pretty minimal.

Sluice BM

It seems this is something supernormal will also now have to navigate?

The Arts Council funding was critical and absolutely brilliant, but the ironic thing is that often artists in our position end up working for nothing in order to make something bigger happen. So when we were partnering up with these organisations we would do all the work getting international artists here for their benefit but these people were being paid to run their organisation whereas we weren’t.

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The dream was that people would come not knowing what bands are on, not knowing what artists are there even - they come for this curious thing called supernormal Supernormal Festival, 2014 Image by Rosa Lux

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Supernormal Festival Image by David Grenier

GO

In the early days we were all on the same level – the participating artists and us the organising artists - and people would be astonished at our generosity, but our success meant that in time people came assuming we were there as organisers – not artists in our own right who used our own time to make this happen around each other’s kitchen tables. Some artists came just to have a good time but artists that really got it would go back, taking inspiration from what we were doing to set up similar initiatives in their home countries.

KJ

The very first year when the workshop ran parallel to SN the artists that came to the workshop were openly told we’re working towards a festival and that the art you produce will be a part of that festival, they were all keen but when it came down to it they were all intimidated by the festival and so decided to do anti-festival art, minimal interventions in the landscape, which no one saw and was for me, I must admit, a huge disappointment, a failure of nerve.

GO

Actually I thought it was great, I thought it was a big success. It was a rebellion. The problem was that we presented them with something that was impossible. So what they did was just talk, because essentially their response was ‘what the fuck are we meant to do’ so for them it was a success because they had amazing discussions.

The problem is, what is festival art? Is it a huge sculpture in the middle of a field or is it something much more subtle, it can be both but creating a balance is tricky with subtle visual art.

sluice

All photos courtesy the artists an Supernormal

Every artist must confront this and decide if they want to compete with the spectacle or react against it, but a reactive response needn’t be minimal or invisible, participatory or relational art can be highly visible.

SF

In the invite to the artists the participatory aspect is raised, within the confines of doing something outside there are lots of limitations in terms of the display of visual art, and that’s a challenge. What’s interesting for visual artists, is how to present work in a particular context.

GO

And the crossover of artists that work with sound, they operate as a link between the two.

SF

All the workshops and activities are artist-led — the things we programme most via open submission are the activities.

BM

In a way, the music will never not dominate, because on a small site you are pretty much constantly aware of it, whereas most of the art requires a much more one-on-one active interaction

SF

I do feel it’s too easy to say that the music dominates everything - it’s really determined by what you concentrate on.

KJ

I think it’s difficult to know what art works or fits best, or even whether it should fit at all, our desire is for there to be no barriers or division between art and music, performer and audience. We try to give artists an entirely open remit.

SF

We want people to be experimental but without being too directive, so it becomes how we frame it.

KJ

The dream was that people would come not knowing what bands are on, not knowing what artists are there even - they come for this curious thing called supernormal.

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Dear Marcia

Nicole Sansone

When I was asked to present on a work that was influential to me, I was immediately sure I would write about Marcia Tucker’s memoirs a short life of trouble: forty years in the new york artworld. But when I started to prepare, I became unsure if what I found influential to my work was precisely Marcia Tucker the person, or a book by Marcia Tucker. Was it Marcia and her work that I admired?

Or was it Marcia’s generosity as a writer that I was responding to her willingness to share her experiences, her embarrassments, her strengths and her flaws?

This is a tension common to all literature. Do we fall in love with characters, or do we fall in love with the author’s writing that gives us these characters? Instead of resolving this tension I decided to reproduce it.

For my presentation, I wrote a letter to Marcia Tucker that I read out loud, in front of my audience.

During my presentation, I had kept my letter invisible to my audience. Now, my letter is being printed here, and it is the audience who is kept invisible to me. and so it goes...

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Ground Floor 33 s.m.

Mezzanine 17 s.m.

Mezzanine 17 s.m.

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Ground Floor 3 137 gallery floor plans

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3 137 is an artist-run project space based in Athens initiated

by Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Kosmas Nikolaou and Paky Vlassopoulou. The space operates as an independent initiative run by artists, having as its aim to create a meeting point for the exchange of ideas and a space for encouraging discussion. Its projects emphasise artistic production, collaboration and hospitality, as well as having a strong interest in institutional critic and hybrid forms of being together. The space was founded in 2012, when the artistic landscape in Athens was very much indifferent.

In the case of artist/curator-run spaces, Athens has seen a long tradition of pop-up events but few in-house, artist-run projects. Contrastingly, nowadays more and more people are initiating their own spaces, whether that be in their studio, apartments or even in their family houses. At the same time, the appearance of private institutions in the city is changing.

Only few years ago, foundations such as neon, Stavros Niarchos and the Onasis Cultural Foundation started to present big shows, screenings, and public events, sometimes offering grand programmes for small organisations and groups. In the public cultural sector, things have taken a turn for the worse in tandem with the larger national economic situation - with the only difference that in Greece, contemporary art was never actually supported by the state.

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After the explosion… you hear the light, a project about Greek 70’s, 2016 Photo by Ilias Seferlis-Frantzis

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In the last five years the presence of artist-run/curatorial spaces has spread in many neighbourhoods and with the help of private funding institutions and grant programmes, it has grown increasingly visible to the wider audience, becoming increasingly vibrant. The variation and frequency of artist-run practices, from small scale to big-scale shows, from independent to institutional, from experimental to mainstream, has increased. Of course, Documenta 14 added to all this and, because of the displacement of its institution, Athens became extremely attractive for the art world.

3 137 is now in its 5th year of operation and opening itself up, for the first time, to an open call for proposals, to be realised in our space, which will take part in the very beginning of June. At the same time 3 137 will be continuing a project started in Autumn 2016, in collaboration with the curator and art historian Klea Charitou a series of events about the Greek art scene of the 70’s. We’re currently working on the catalogue of the project in collaboration with Paraguay Press (Publishing House of Castillo/Corrales artistrun space in Paris) and hope to launch early this summer.

The artists, spaces, initiatives and theorists that 3 137 has collaborated with are, among others, Dimitris Antoniou, Poppy Bowers, Michelangelo Corsaro, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Cevdet Erek, Galini Notti, Panos Papadopoulos, Dan Perjovschi, Myrto Xanthopoulou, Athens Biennale, Kunsthalle Lisabon, Locus Athens and State of Concept.

Babylon Radio, an ephemeral internet radio station, 2014

You can find more information here: http://www.3137.gr/en/ https://www.facebook.com /3137artistrunspace https://www.instagram.com/ 3_137_artist_run_space/

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Eddie The Eagle Museum

Michael Edwards (1963), better known as Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, was a British skier who was the first competitor to represent Great Britain in Olympic ski jumping. He came last at the Calgary Olympics in 1988. But years later he became a symbol for the art of trying.

Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards was an anti-hero, a man with unprecedented courage, an adventurer with an excessive nature.

These qualities represent the fundamental ideas for a museum where people have the space to just like Eddie, take an uncontrolled leap into the (cultural) deep. It’s a place in Amsterdam with a slope for known and unknown talent, where art won’t be judged on appearances. An ode to the unconventional, a tribute to the one who dares to fail.

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charlie levine They say never meet your idols. But what if you don’t

Charlie Levine & Karl England meet Steven Rand

idolise a person, but an idea, a concept, a space? Whilst in New York for the Exchange Rates expo Karl England and I went to meet Steven Rand, Director of apexart in Lower Manhattan. apexart is a gallery that inspired me through my ma back in 2005/6, and in 2007 a friend returned from a trip to New York with a book, Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating edited by the gallery, and I have never looked back. apexart, in downtown Manhattan, has been innovating the art scene since 1994 through fellowships, publications, exhibitions, unsolicited proposals and one off franchises. Steven Rand says he started the gallery “much like someone would open a bar or pub with the idea they were making the place they would like to go to.”

And this is something I have always done in curating, and Sluice have certainly used this as an ethos since its inception. Steven said that apexart wasn’t about challenging the art world and the way it works (a significant portion of the art world is happy with it as it is), but that rather it offers an alternative for those that want it. This is a distinction of priorities and focus; apexart contributes through legacy and example, it doesn’t want to please everybody, it doesn’t necessarily want to please you or me, and that’s its strength.

“We’ve done great shows at apexart and some ‘less great’ shows but our greatest ability has been to create compelling juxtaposition.

The more vexing the better…Google and directed content sends you more of what they think you want, we send you what we hope is worth thinking about. We’re agonists.”

Steven was an unusual person to meet, generous and warm.

Our chat over a cup of tea on the sidewalk outside his gallery began with us finding out about him but slowly morphed into a critique of Sluice. What is our output, why, for whom? Rand is direct, these are not rhetorical questions to mull over. Rand wants answers.

I idolised apexart from afar and had the fortune last year to hear about it direct from the source. It did not disappoint, neither did it shock and awe. It was, as it should be, accessible, interesting, ‘normal’. An art world we inhabit in the form of Sluice, but also one that inspires us to go further. For Sluice this means to challenge partners, participants, audiences and ourselves more. Steven lives by his philosophy and inspires others “It is very important to try new things, go to new places, spend time alone, and even cause a little trouble doing the unexpected. Acting out is important. Learn new skills that are interesting... Poverty is not good for creativity and you never know where inspiration and new ideas will come from.”

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Joscelyn Gardner Aristolochia bilobala Nimine 2010 From the series Creole Portraits III 2009–2011 Hand colored lithograph on frosted mylar 36 x 24 inches courtesy apexart

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Joscelyn Gardner Mimosa pudica Yabba 2009 From the series Creole Portraits III 2009–2011 Lithograph 36 x 24 inches courtesy apexart

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Alberto Baraya, Herb ario de plantas ar tificales Ex p e dición Nueva Zelandia, Pla te 03, Objecto encontrado y dibujo sobre cartón, 64 x 48 x 10cms 2009

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Pia Rönicke The Pages of Day and Night (detail) 2015 Photogravure 10 x 16 inches Courtesy of the artist and gb agency Paris

karl england In Playing by the Rules (published by apexart) there is an essay titled ‘Tributary or Source?’ It argues that in the 1970’s alternative spaces served a crucial role in providing a platform for non-traditional art forms (performance, video etc) that the commercial and institutional platforms were not yet catering to.

But that today art once considered too conceptual or unwieldy has a place in the market so the raison d’etre of the alternative scene has thereby been removed.

The narrative runs like this: the anti-establishment avant garde becomes commodified, and as the artists enter the market, many of the artist-run spaces morph into commercial spaces themselves, thus rendering the anti-establishment tamed. This is undoubtedly true of many diy initiatives. However, this strikes me as a partial reading of why alternative spaces exist in the first place. Although it’s true (to an extent) that medium is no longer a barrier to the market, validity must still be acquired somewhere, and if no one will validate your ticket, or if you reject the primacy of the designated validator - you assume the role yourself and you look to your peers for affirmation.

So is apexart (and the like) a tributary to the mainstream? If you believe the market is a reliable arbiter of value then the ‘alternative’ must be a tributary to be cleared as soon as possible. But for spaces like apexart the alternative represents something more fundamental, not necessarily an opposition, but rather a viable ‘other’. This is what gives the alternative art scene agency today.

Art is instrumentalist by the market, and value is prescribed by the market, but only if we acquiesce.

Every artist and arts organisor must navigate their own response to the museum-curator-collector-complex, as each of us hold different stances in regards to institutionalism, state and corporate funding, instrumentilisation etc but on the overriding driver of the contemporary art-world there are plenty of artists, projects, galleries and other platforms that do not acquiesce to the market-driven, and to many of these - apexart is a lodestar.

It is very important to try new things, go to new places, spend time alone, and even cause a little trouble doing the unexpected.

Install photo courtesy of apexart

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qwerty consists of 7 artists

who have worked together the past 7 years with different kinds of exhibitions.

One of our main goals, is to meet people with art, instead of the more passive way, of just hanging stuff on the wall.

Members: Jens Andersen, Anders Qvist Nielsen, Indigo Richards, John Krogh, Camilla Gaugler, Mikkel Larris and Morten Tillitz

QWE 52

RTY 55

Yvette Greslé

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NOTES 1. Yvette Greslé, 2015.

Precarious video: historical events, trauma and memory in South African video art (Jo Ractliffe, Penny Siopis, Berni Searle and Minnette Vári).

PhD diss., University College London.

2. Interviews (Penny Siopis and Yvette Greslé), Cape Town, 1 and 3 November 2011.

3. William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 (Second Edition), p.146.

4. Adams, Zuleiga, Demitrios Tsafendas : Race, Madness and the Archive, a dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of the Western Cape, December 2011, p.34.

5. Interviews (Penny Siopis and Yvette Greslé), Cape Town, 1 and 3 November 2011.

6. Griselda Pollock, Afteraffects/After-Images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

7. Ibid. p.7.

A few years ago, I began working on South African video art for my PhD.1 I focused on the ways in which South African women artists encounter historical events through the moving image. In retrospect, the choice of videos happened quite intuitively. There was something about them that touched me emotionally. Although at that time I hadn’t really thought about what this sense of emotion meant or what it might mean as a politics and as an ethics. The work that made a deep impression on me and that represents a pivotal moment for me as someone who writes about art, is by Penny Siopis.

Siopis is of Greek heritage and was born in South Africa in 1953. Before exploring the moving image she worked with painting and found objects and materials. Her videos, constructed from home movies and found footage, have a very similar quality to her paintings and object-based installations.

Quake, a portrait of a weeping female subject has been exhibited with Obscure White Messenger: its layered, translucent surface and obscured background, invoke the material properties of found film, the effects of light and time and marks, such as those across the figure’s arms, resemble burned film encountered in the video work Anonymous people perform and speak to the cameras but they cannot be heard. The sounds of moving cars, of crowds at public events and ceremonies, of market places, streets and what appear to be heritage and tourist sites are inaudible. What is heard is the music soundtrack that Siopis constructed from a personal collection of Turkish folk music. The pace of the soundtrack and film sequences oscillate, time speeds up and slows down, music is melancholic then jarring.

Siopis’ Obscure White Messenger is 15 minutes, 7 seconds in length. It is constructed entirely from found footage discovered, often serendipitously, in markets and second-hand shops in Greece and South Africa. The found footage, which she refers to as ‘found domestic footage’, is composed of 8mm film used for home movies in the 1950s and 1960s.2 A cable car makes its way down a mountain: ‘when I got here’, I read, unable to determine the location of the ‘here’, ‘I got an inferiority complex’. Now the landscape is recognisable: Signal Hill in Cape Town. A mountain is obscured by clouds.

The mountain could be anywhere: “I wanted to be blonde with blue eyes”.

Penny Siopis, Obscure White Messenger, 2010, 8mm film transferred to DVD, sound, colour.

Copy of the video courtesy the artist and the Stevenson Gallery (Johannesburg and Cape Town).

I experience Siopis’ video as murky, disorientating and opaque. When I first watched it I was so affected by it emotionally that I couldn’t put words to it. I couldn’t detach from the emotions it produced in me and I struggled to write about it within the parameters of a scholarly text. It is characterised by a certain impenetrability, a refusal to tell me what it is about in any didactic and definitive sense. It draws me into an awareness of my own subjectivity, of my own psychic projections, and of what it is I subjectively ‘feel’ as I encounter the visual, sonic, and textual registers of an artwork that moves. I encounter histories of apartheid as a subject classified white, and an ambiguous subject in particular instances. I am not detached from this history and the fact of my birth means that I am embedded within it as much as I might try to untangle myself. The textual authority suggested by a film subtitle is destabilised by Siopis’s ambiguous re-casting of sources. We are uncertain whose voice it is we are reading, it may even be our own. It is only in closing that the event to which the video refers is narrated to us: In 1966 Demitrios Tsafendas stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd, the Prime Minister of South Africa, to death in parliament. This was considered an act of madness rather than a political assassination. He was imprisoned on death row at Pretoria Central prison for a quarter of a century before being moved to an insane asylum at Sterkfontein in 1994. He died there in 1999.

Verwoerd remains an omnipresent figure in the history of apartheid and the historian William Beinart argues that ‘in its broader conception [apartheid is increasingly] associated with [him]’.3 The story of Tsafendas is extremely complex. For example, the question of his race, nationality and citizenship presented a conundrum for the apartheid state, and archival material demonstrates the minutiae of its obsessive preoccupation with racial types and categories.

As the historian Zuleiga Adams notes: “A man who could be Greek, Portuguese, Mozambican or Arabic, was difficult to pin down in the Verwoerdian racial lexicon.”4 One of the most ubiquitous and sensationalised aspects of the Tsafendas case is the story of the tapeworm: Tsafendas believed himself to be inhabited by a tapeworm, which led him to stab Verwoerd. In interviews, Siopis draws connections between the sequences of the octopus swimming in its tank and the tapeworm: “It’s not a worm but we read it as the worm – the tapeworm or the monster (the monster of apartheid) or the vulnerable creature in a tank.”5 Sequences of the octopus appear a number of times: at the start and close of the film, and towards its ending. Potentially labyrinthine systems of signification are deployed in Obscure White Messenger, which function within the territories of affect and poetic modes of association and meaning.

The film appears to embody ‘something’, to invoke Griselda Pollock, of the affective-temporal sense of the encounter with historical trauma.6 Pollock writes of art that has this capacity to ‘aesthetically affect’; to ‘perform more than representation’.7 Its visual-sonic-textual language of emotion, affect and opacity speak to me of a history from which I am neither detached nor impartial. It speaks to me of what it means to know, ethically and politically, that anything is now possible. How it is we look, how it is we listen and how it is we read is political.

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Open ground plan, overlapping archways, accessible rooftop: a space for urban play.

raumlaborberlin The Fountain House Montreal 2014

The Fountain House

Yes we do love the great ideas of the 60’s 70’s and the optimism which is inherent in changing the world at the stroke of a pen to the better.

We strongly believe that complexity is real and good and our society today does need a more substantial approach.

Therefore our spatial proposals are small scale and deeply rooted in the local condition….

Bye Bye Utopia!

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The Fountain House, with it’s open ground plan, overlapping archways for entering and accessible rooftop offers a space for various kinds of public use. It creates a new centre of attraction, a place to be around, to be in, to discover.

This node structures the space and still allows surrounding programmes.

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Markus Bader, Clair Mothais, Lille Unger and Winnie Westerlund with Chantal Dumas, Cécile Martin, Erin Sexton, Magali Babin, Chris Salter and Giséle Trudel

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Touching Blue

A furred reading of Carol Mavor’s Black and Blue

“To make the fur fly” My research investigates contemporary feminist art practices that, in reaction to the political merger of feminist ethics with animal rights activism in the 70’s, make use of animal “bio-matter” – fur, blood, bone and other extended practices of taxidermy - as a way to extend or transform the female body. This can be articulated as a subversive strategy to reject normative gender and species politics by re-imagining ‘furriness’ as the texture of otherness, intimacy and queer erotics, rather than pin-up glamour sexuality. In colloquial British usage, to “fur up” is to coat or to clog with a deposit. “To make the fur fly” is to cause serious, perhaps violent trouble. My research focuses on female artists that take up a certain form of ‘furriness’ as a disruption of the connective visual and social strata. Examples are Bharti Parmar, Birgit Jürgenssen, Rebecca Horn, Meret Oppenheimer, Roni Horn and the controversial Dutch artist Tinkebell.

Berardi conjunction – connection In the same way that recognisable animal bodies are rendered into anonymous product at meat packing plants, processed through the production lines of Fordist desensitisation and fragmentisation, social history has seen a dramatic incline towards the ‘smooth’ and fabricated body as a favourable aesthetic, representing physical health and sexual normality while promoting restrictive and subordinate laws of social and sexual conduct, especially for women. In Precarious Rhapsody, Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post Alpha Generation1 Bifo Berardi claims this change as distinctly ‘digital’ in nature: […] sexual imagination is overwhelmed by the hairless smoothness of the digital image. The perception of the real body of the other in daily life is becoming obnoxious: hard to touch, hard to feel, hard to enjoy. According to Berardi, society’s decline in empathy is directly related to the increasing smoothness of our world, a world in which conjunction (the existence and entanglement of different patterns) has been overtaken by connection (computerized ones and zeros that are made to fit). He connects societies’ ‘emotional atrophy’ to the decline of semantic meaning and language, leading to a disconnection between language and sexuality.

Black and Blue Black and Blue2 is a book written by Carol Mavor, professor in Visual Studies at Manchester University, that I ran into while researching materials on the relationship between fur and fetishism two years ago.

Black and Blue is a poetic investigation into the affective powers and politics of colour in three works: one book and three films.

They are Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, La Jetee and Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, and Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais.

Black and Blue is about many things. It is about memory, longing, love, time, distance, race, film, photography, intimacy, violence, and loss. Or as Mavor says: “I find black and blue everywhere. It abstractly brushes and stains me in the black and blue paint of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. It figures in Francis Bacon. It sings to me in the voice of Louis Armstrong in his recording, in 1929, of ‘What Did I Do To be So Black And Blue?’.”

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Memory-prints The subjects of Mavor’s book are each trapped in a tragedy of their own. Loneliness, racial inequality, memory and war disrupt people’s lives and their ability to feel connected. This problem of connection relates back to the inaccessibility of the visual media their stories take place in. Mavor sees her protagonists’ ‘blueness’ as originating as a bruise, a disruption of perfect skin that works itself into the soul as a permanent memory-print.

Similarly, her text shimmers with a desire for access, for grip, expressing a longing to make the smooth, shiny, impenetrable material that forms the essence of photographic and cinematic film – or the unknown ‘other’ somehow more touchable. The black and blue bruise provides an access point that allows Mavor to explore the ways in which the works are folded in melancholy (the blue) and erotics (the black), conditions that are both inextricably linked to being touched.

“Black is the colour of the darkroom, of desire […] of cinema,[…] of bad-luck cats, of the velvet dress of John Singer Sargeant’s Madame X, of the mourning coat, lined in fur, with matching skull cap, worn by Hans Holbein’s Christina of Denmark […] Blue is the colour of the blues, “the ink that I use is the blue blood of the swan” , of the sea, of the cyanotype, of memory […]”

What I am trying to figure out is how the book presents itself – between the lines - as a ‘furred’ piece of work: “causing some serious, perhaps violent, trouble.” A furred work disrupts normative patterns, gets too close without asking, and carries the smells of a living creature. It is both alive and decaying at its core, attractive and off-putting.

The Breathless Zoo Mavor’s text is lined with subtle references to animals, pelts, fabrics, woven materials, sensuous and irregular surfaces, and with ‘pricking and cutting’: attempts to stitch a fabric of affective moments together, simultaneously presenting the ‘feminine’ labour of embroidery as a form of analysis. Figures of cats, fur coats, butterflies, taxidermy specimens, swans and scallops dominate the scenes, bringing a metaphysical quality to the text. She describes the stillness of the celluloid image in La Jetee as equivalent to the stillness of the taxidermy animals it depicts.

“La Jetee is almost as immobile as the taxidermied, unblinking animals that the couple visits in the gallery of zoology.” They are but ‘outer shells’ of life, neither living nor dead.

The role of taxidermy in her work is really interesting to me. It is something that is hard to avoid when dealing with furred bodies; each furred body, however beautifully preserved or reworked, is in essence a dead relic.

Fur always carries with it the lingering stench of decay. As a conjunctive presence, the taxidermied body is both magical and repulsive at the same time; our desire for it is impossibly conflicting. They are neither alive nor dead, but something in between, something that has often been said about both cinema and photography.

In The Breathless Zoo3 Rachel Poliquin describes the taxidermy artist’s chief motivation as a desire for closeness. Taxidermy is a way to bring the world closer, to simulate an experience we could otherwise not have.

As such, the taxidermy animals in La Jetee bring to the scene a feeling of erotic possibility, which enables its protagonists to briefly entertain their temporary fairytale as reality, before they lose it all. Violent trouble, indeed.

Taxidermy is a state of suspended promise, a state of almost touching, in other words: a state of conjunction. The subtle, interwoven mentions of animals and animal textures in Mavor’s text could be a way to invoke a feeling of proximity and possibility, by bringing onto the scene the affective properties of animal biomatter; skin, fur and blood.

In Lynn Hunt’s book Eroticism and the Body Politic4 taxidermy is theorised as a defining aspect of female fetishism, ultimately motivated by feelings of melancholia, desire and loss.

In fetishism, the psyche constructs a simulacrum as a way to negotiate an unwanted reality, replacing the lost object of desire with “souvenirs;” pieces of hair, scented fabrics or personal effects. Biomatter gives a visual ‘grip’ for the psyche to hold on to, creating a tangible replacement for lost children, lovers, parents and others. In this light, Mavor’s focus on images of hair, fur or animal bodies offers us (and possibly her, too) something to cling onto. For example, her images of women’s hair (pinned up, coiled, blonde) in La Jetee and Vertigo, become a way of feeling close – physically and symbolically – to an experience of reality through fetishised texture.

Fur (or a furred textures) provide a way of getting ‘stuck’ in the smooth surfaces of film, the way you would when running your hands through it. The coiled bun of hair on the back of Kim Novak in Vertigo becomes vertigo in itself, spinning on and on, drawing the viewer in. I am reminded of an inside-out, negative parallel to Roni Horn’s Birds series, replacing the face with animal textures to create a more oblique, relational affect of proximity. In both cases, it is less about knowing the other, and more about feeling close by becoming fixated on the surface.

Notes 1. Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the PostAlpha Generation (New York: Autonomedia, 2010).

2. Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

3. Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

4. Lynn Avery Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

Rosanna van Mierlo

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Extracting New Cultural Value from Urban Regeneration: Stephen Pritchard

The Intangible Rise of the Social Capital Artist

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Artists and arts organisations have always skirted the edges of gentrification. Like pretty moths, they have happily fluttered around the naked flame of accumulation by dispossession, quietly spinning intricate little cocoons in decrepit capitalist disinvestment. Precision migrants, they move on the favourable wind of financial investment, astutely drawn by the tiny new bright lights of frontier navigation beacons. Intention is everything in this cyclical and cynical gentrification dance, and artists can no longer play the role of innocent victim. They nibble away the decaying fabric of working-class community; part of a complex, multiscalar global infrastructural web spun from the fine silk of state investment by transnational agents: property developers, investors, banks, big brand retailers, managed wealth funds, NGOs and the Creative Industries. But, whilst there are few strings attached for corporate regeneration ‘partners’, the Creative Industries willingly trade state funding and cultural status in exchange for increased state instrumentalisation, partial privatisation and new civic responsibilities. And, cajoled by the state into ever-deepening relationships with the private sector, arts organisations and artists discovered new value in the intangible worlds of ‘community development’ and ‘community engagement’.

From community arts to creative placemaking, some artists and arts organisations coalesced under socially engaged art’s catch-all, falsely ‘homespun’ banner. Quickly and quietly depoliticised, they became, I argue, Social Capital Artists: specialists in artwashing. These pioneering foot soldiers of gentrification use pretty bunting as camouflage, face paints and old lifestyle magazines as their weapons of choice. Their ‘meanwhile spaces’ operate as ‘enterprising’ pop-up façades for venture capitalism; shared precarity loyally performed with smiling faces and colourful workshop games. Social Capital Artists are specifically employed to carry out artwashing by (at least in the case of urban regeneration) unholy neoliberal alliances of local councils and property developers. For them, artwashing functions as a cheap, preliminary form of community pacification by indiscriminately ‘harvesting’ the social capital of soon-to-be-displaced people whilst simultaneously offering good pr, photo opportunities and even a piecemeal ‘community archive’, ready-sanitised for future museumification. This new wave of social capital art silently turns the benign into the terrible; interpersonal relationships and dynamics into global statistics and generic standards; people reduced to little contributions to the financial bottom line and pretty pins on simulated maps.

Social capital is an insidious term. It turns community bonds and ties - immeasurable relationships, personal and interpersonal narratives and memories, family histories and more - into intangible economic value; into assets. Social capital monetises our lives, our most sacrosanct forms of being and living. It converts people and communities into free market economics, instilling the divisive spectre of neoliberalism into our very hearts and minds. In their rush to pray at the font of social capital (underpinned, of course, by financial capital), socially engaged artists become its missionaries. Anointed by capital, they transform into clapping harbingers of redundancy, displacement, social cleansing, colonialism and racism. Their aesthetic and participatory practices celebrate the empty and falsely unifying notions of ‘culture’, ‘people,’ ‘place’, ‘community’, ‘the public’, ‘the civic’. Their feigned participatory democracy and dialogues are nothing but apparitions. Their workshops administer free doses of culture as depoliticising functionalism exactly as prescribed by the vested interests of corporate, financial and state power.

Like socially engaged (or social capital) artists, ‘creative placemakers’, I suggest, peddle the ideology of domination ‘creatively’ played out in ‘public spaces’ to neutralise existing people and communities before excluding them: a conceit that ignores Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that space is necessarily socially produced, contested and conflictual. Creative placemaking works to replace socially produced experiences of the city and home with a homogeneous, compliant and falsely neutral notion of place as a middle-class ideal – the urban pastoral. Creative placemaking is the institutionalised Creative City one-coat gloss that repaints utopian hopes for democratic community building with the hip retro colour scheme of gentrification and impending regeneration-by-socialcleansing. And yet what gives anyone the right to think that ‘we’ might want to (re)‘make’ a place for ‘them’?

Don’t places already exist; already have communities?

Who are ‘we’ (as artists) to become embroiled in the sinister depths of urban planning?

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All images courtesy Pil and Galia Kollectiv

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Artists and arts organisations working in the service of the state must forgo autonomy and must never engage with the big political issues of the day.

Instrumentalism dressed as ‘participation’ lies at the hearts of socially engaged art and creative placemaking but it extends way beyond this into almost every form of funded arts project in the UK today. From Creative People and Places to Education, Learning and Outreach teams sprouting from almost every arts and cultural institution across England, the race is on to engage as many people as possible in the arts - not just as audiences but also as participants (although audiences can frequently be participants and participants are often audiences). Attempts to engage new people in new places or new people in old places can be spectacular (good for attracting large numbers of people); often masquerading as ‘grassroots’. These initiatives dream of ‘democratising culture’ – existing state-approved culture. They want to encourage more people in more places to take part in existing state-funded art. But they also want (as part of the drive to derive as much social capital as possible) to turn participants (people) into numbers, state-sanctioned categories – data for evaluations and reports that ‘evidence’ success at every opportunity.

Initiated by the state via the (not very) arms-length quango Arts Council England, initiatives like Creative People and Places and the other institutional outreach activities are funder-initiated. The terms of engagement are determined many miles away from the places where people don’t take part in the state’s authorised arts and cultural offer; in ivory towers that always reinforce class ceilings, by people who see, for deeply ideological reasons, the under-participating masses as in dire need of a good dose of ‘civilisation’. Power in the hands of the few. Not institutions who must, per funding criteria, tick boxes. Not uncomfortable ‘new’ partnerships tasked with delivering art to new people in new places. Not artists often paid less than recommended rates to carefully comply with increasingly prescriptive project briefs and outcomes

that perpetuate division of labour and precarity. Not people - the ‘participants’ – who have no power other than to choose whether to participate in a ‘trickle-down’ offer of what amounts to little more than the scraps from the table of our long-standing oligarchy, the English cultural elite.

This is, I argue, an attempt to colonise people and places. Another gilded Trojan Horse harbouring cultural agents armed with state-sanctioned wellbeing, inclusion, diversity and employability – creative ‘salvation’ disguising the sanitisation of the ‘masses’ with our nation’s soft power weapon of choice: Art. In the service of instrumentalised arts and culture, arts professionals become middlemen and artists become the state’s missionaries or mercenaries. Their claims of ‘empowerment’ mask homogeneity, universality and technocracy. Cultural value is the state’s cultural values; their agendas; their ideology. Artists and arts organisations working in the service of the state must forgo autonomy and must never engage with the big political issues of the day. State-sanctioned art is entrenched within existing and new citadels and complex infrastructures. It has also expanded into almost every aspect of life; not the everyday life of the radical avant-garde but rather public, civic and corporate life – controlled life. The institutions of art use outreach, education and participation to attempt to broaden their audiences and satisfy the state’s need for ‘evidence-based’1 outputs and outcomes based on state social inclusion and wellbeing agendas that can exclude people. The same organisations, along with increasing legions of precarious freelance artists, have also expanded their ‘partnerships’ to include swathes of activities from community engagement and empowerment to large-scale public-corporate regeneration schemes.

Independent, individual and collective autonomous and political art practices have been virtually (although not completely) eradicated in recent years; swept away by the incessant drone of the Creative Industries; increasingly wedded to an art market of billionaires and their pet hedge funds. This is not a funding issue. It is ideological: a product of the division of artistic labour engineered to bring the arts in line with an all-pervasive neoliberal free market hegemony. UK arts and culture are now almost completely one-dimensional - totally administered - unless self-organised and self-funded.

The crude appropriation of the dystopian concept of the culture industry presaged by Max Horkheimer an Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (1964), Erich Fromm in The Sane Society (1955), and other critical theorists such as Douglas Kellner in Media Culture (1995), reflects a knowing post-modern irony on behalf of the state’s cultural administrators and their coterie of economists, policymakers, universities and businesses.

Arts and culture offers ‘investment opportunities’… for some; for those fluent in Creative Industries Newspeak.

They are building new citadels whilst reinforcing long70

Notes 1. The validity of much of art’s ‘evidence base’ is deeply questionable.

held bastions of the elitism and privilege endemic within Art. Cultural institutions now frequently make Faustian pacts with ‘philanthropic sponsors’ for whom a small ‘investment’ in culture reaps big returns in the forms of enhanced perceptions of corporate responsibility and free pr. Exchanging culture and community for capital is a deeply ideological act: cuts to state funding replaced by ‘benevolent’ capitalist surplus – derivatives of the division, oppression and exploitation of people and nature.

Artwashing, creative placemaking, the Creative People and Places programme and, indeed, much of the state-funded system of art and culture, increasingly shores up the bastions of a truly one-dimensional and totally administered uk official culture, reinforcing culture’s centuries-old role at the heart of a political system built upon elitism, privilege, subjugation and colonialism. Categories, rules, policy and financial investment leads to compliance. Compliance kills creativity. Economic value. Social value. Cultural value.

Social Return on Investment. Impact. Innovation.

Evaluation. Matrices. Big data. Wellbeing. Happiness.

Resilience. Adaptive resilience. Sustainability.

Philanthropy. Leadership. Quality. Great art. Excellence.

Placemaking. Creative placemaking. Money. Money.

Money! compliance. Social capital voraciously feasts on all these things, carving up our most intimate acts, feelings, meanings; neatly shrink-wrapping them as money.

Artwashing often receives its funding from private sources – it is the work of mercenaries. But the state encourages arts organisations to hoover up funding with their all-boxes-ticked approach and ‘fun’ appeal.

State funding lights thousands of little candles and, like moths to the flame, artists and arts organisations are drawn towards them. Their scent is not sweet. They reek of instrumentalism. Many hold their noses, mesmerised; quickly acclimatising themselves to the state’s new rules. The effect is to (intentionally) further exclude truly autonomous art and community work, marginalising professional arts practices and many community groups and local people already deemed peripheral by the state, its quangos (like Arts Council England), and the ngos and philanthropic foundations who are increasingly employed by and aligned with the state. In their place are the investment-friendly yet false, limited and middle-class notions of ‘fun’, ‘diversity’, ‘community’, ‘art’, ‘culture’, ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ and ‘place’.

Dangerous façades that mask close compliance to state (read Tory) agendas. This is all part of an attempt to destroy autonomous, dangerous, critical and challenging art and community work. Their intention is deliberate. Socially engaged art burns enticingly. It’s fun workshops and happy outcomes should fool no one.

This is state instrumentalism delivered, kumbaya-style, to a small, willing and malleable section of a certain element of certain communities (the ‘least engaged’, the ‘social housing tenants’, the ‘homeless’, etc.). No critique allowed. No political position other than some

Third Way ideological centrism underpinned by the false hope of Habermassian deliberative democracy.

Instrumentalised art doesn’t light a way forward; it offers us no hope. It offers only the eternal fiery torment of compliance. It incinerates our creativity.

We are facing today humanitarian crises on a global scale – displacement, oppression and exploitation on every street of every city in every nation. We are facing the fascism of Trump. And all the while property developers (and let’s not forget Trump is a property tycoon) eye their next brownfield targets, social homes plotted as black dots on pretty maps, people’s security and wellbeing cast aside in the rush for profitable gentrification. Our rights and liberties are being eroded at every level, everywhere by states and by statesanctioned capitalism. Art today, like everything, like even our memories, is all about money – capitalism.

Neoliberal governance marketises everything. We do not want it to be this way but we are trapped by the global greed of transnational corporations and powerful nation states. And yet, it is still possible to conceive of art as part of living creatively, as part of everyday life, as local cultural democracy, as artistic autonomy. I see hope collectives such as Platform London, Ultrared, the Rebel Clown armies, Illuminator 99% and many other groups and individuals who challenge the system, often using anti-aesthetic, anti-art and tactical media interventions. In short, activist art based around reimagined radical avant-garde principles. John Roberts’ excellent Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (2015) is a good place to start, as is Gregory Sholette’s Dark Matter (2010). For a shorter read, I suggest there is no alternative: The Future is Self-Organised – Parts 1 (2005) and 2 (2012).

We must resist the system – the neoliberal status quo with all its contradictions and complexities. We must demand alternatives, make our own alternatives, tiny alternatives. It is impossible to be revolutionary if you feed from the crumbs of neoliberalism. The establishment knows this. It is how they kill creativity and restrict our freedom to be individuals, to achieve self-realisation. We must prepare for liberation; imagine a post-capitalist world that we build from the rubble of our present exploitation. We must say no! It is not, I suggest, possible to achieve these ideals via a stateconceived system which reproduces crap new tiers of Kafkaesque arts administration that serve only to further disempower both artists and local people.

The future is self-organised.

And we must self-organise. now!

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Inna Babaeva: It’s the Little Things That Matter TSA New York 2016

Each space is independently operated and focuses on presenting a varied programme of emerging and mid-career artists.

Their goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections and build community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. We seek to further empower the artist’s role beyond that of studio practitioner to include the roles of curator, critic, and community developer; and to act as an alternate model to the conventions of the current commercial art market.

Their exhibitions provide a non-commercial setting to view the artwork of emerging and established artists, providing an alternate context for viewing contemporary artwork for the benefit and education of the public. Their unique structure of having spaces in multiple locations allows them to curate exhibitions that are sensitive to the needs and interests of their respective cities but also provide a structure for bringing new voices in, out, and between their locations, creating a true network of artists and an exchange of ideas between

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Inna Babaeva: It’s the Little Things That Matter TSA New York 2016

cities, enriching the artistic dialogue at each space.

In addition to their exhibition programming they also organize various programmes to further benefit and educate their audience. They have organised poetry readings, book readings, panel discussions, performances, professional development workshops, and artistlectures at their spaces.

They have also organised projects outside of their physical spaces such as interventions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a Philadelphia-wide exchange of artist-run

spaces (Citywide), and organising the critically acclaimed Artist-Run, an art fair of artist-run spaces during Art Basel week in Miami. Their ny location has an annual open call that is open to all working artists. If selected, their work will be shown at their annual flat-file launch exhibition and be available at their ny site for browsing for one year.

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Philadelphia

New York

Founded in Philadelphia, Tiger Strikes Asteroid opened its doors in 2009 as one of the first artistrun spaces in the 319 building, now home to several galleries in the Chinatown district. This artist-run space presents a varied programme with a mission to connect Philadelphia with other artist communities around the US and abroad. The gallery is programmed with artist-initiated exhibitions, projects and curatorial opportunities.

A few noteworthy projects include Citywide, a Tiger Strikes Philadelphia Museum of Art and Community Supported Art Programme. citywide was a collaborative effort between 23 Philadelphia artist-run spaces in which, for the month of November 2013, these spaces curated together to create unique programming and events all celebrating the spirit of artist-run galleries.

For Tiger Strikes Philadelphia Museum of Art, members of the gallery were commissioned to create a collaborative project at the Philadelphia museum of Art. Part curatorial intervention, part performance, part audio guide, the tour included projects by 7 artists, created in response to works on display in the museum’s permanent collection.

Like a Community Supported Agriculture program, Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s Community Supported Art program supported a direct maker-to-buyer relationship between artists and collectors working and living in the Philadelphia region. Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s Community Supported Art was an endeavour to support local art, artists, and collectors. The goal of the project was to cultivate and open, authentic, and deep connections between artists and collectors.

This project was in collaboration with the Philadelphia artist-run space, Grizzly Grizzly.

Once Tiger Strikes Asteroid ny established its core members in 2012, we began to look for a gallery space and needed to decide which neighborhood made the most sense to plant roots in terms of logistics, visibility, and outreach.

Fairly soon we realized that the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn would be best as there was already a rich artist community of studios and galleries founded there.

We made this decision so that, out of the gate, we hoped to generate foot traffic and attention, but also we would be situated with like-minded art-world colleagues that we could learn from, exchange ideas, and in turn, support. The Bushwick art scene is, of course, multifaceted, but it is just one of many micro-environments that constitute the New York art world. To illustrate the breadth and scope of this world, one could conceivably attend receptions every night of the week here and each night you may see an entirely different group of people in each gallery.

The artist-members of tsa ny are all practicing artists (one of the requirements to be a tsa member) and live in New York, which means most of us are working to maintain studios and homes while keeping up with exhibitions, lectures, and art media- which is to say, ordinarily we would have little time to look beyond our close personal networks.

However, as part of tsa’s mission, and because we each take pride in curating, and each have distinct aesthetic and theoretical interests, we are often looking to expand beyond the localised parameters. We also work together, curating in groups, making group decisions on the future of the gallery, developing programming beyond exhibitions, and since we have different viewpoints, there is yet another opportunity of dialogue.

As an artist cooperative, we garner opportunities that would not be permitted to us as singular entities. We are presented with challenges that can only be solved through inter-institutional discussion, collaboration and combining resources. During these moments when we are prompted to think and act beyond our identities as solitary authors, there is an occasion to expand on our knowledge, which in turn provides benefits to the art-making practice in theoretical approach and material exploration, as well as allowing a potential new audience that we can share our work with.

TSA Philadelphia

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Los Angeles

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles (tsa la) has been a meeting ground for artists of both coasts. It’s connected to the lineage of artistrun galleries and the Do-It-Yourself ethos.

Now more than ever, when funding for arts organisations are at risk here in The States, the alternative gallery model gives artists total control. Another amazing aspect of being part of this collective is that the tsa la network has expanded our community. It seemed to start as a place for mostly expat east-coast artists to put on shows and introduce themselves to the Los Angeles community. As the group has grown, more southern Californians have joined, as well as artists who have migrated to Los Angeles from other parts of the country.

As a result, this has been reflected in the shows that we have had over the past year, and even more so, in the programming that we have scheduled for 2017. We love working with the other spaces in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. Instead of going it alone we have 40 heads spread over the nation thinking together on the best way to show thought provoking exhibitions in a space where the market doesn’t compromise what we think is important.

TSA New York

As an artist cooperative, we garner opportunities that would not be permitted to us as singular entities

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TSA Chicago

We have gathered a strong, diverse group of artists who have a reputation for being supportive to other artists, and whom believe in the importance of showcasing the diversity of art and ideas 78

Chicago

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is an example of against-the-grain organising that is at once part of the Chicago tradition of DIY spaces, and part of the current need for share/trade economies.

Cooperative energy surrounds our location in Chicago’s East Garfield Park, a neighborhood which is home to community centers and gardens, artists’ and designer’s studios, and slowly becoming an artist-run gallery district.

Our ‘branch’ consists of artists and curators who are coming together to create a pure platform and market model that allows us as a collective to develop a culture around the artwork that isn’t consistently groomed by the gallerist or overpowered by the likes of art fair or biennial standards.

The idea behind TSA is to showcase emerging and mid-career artists from other cities as to expand the dialogue in other communities.

Our ambition is to make a space for highquality exhibitions and international creative exchange among artists, especially those who are under-represented by exhibition institutions.

Our programming aims to show the diversity of the art and ideas of artists practicing in many places. Each member takes a turn to organise an exhibition of their invention, while the other members share the administrative responsibilities. Our first two exhibitions were group shows showcasing non-member artists from Chicago, LA and Providence RI. Next up will be a solo exhibition of recent University of Chicago graduate Carris Adams; whose large scale paintings and drawings utilises signs and signifiers within landscape that to suggests difference, otherness and value. In addition to rotating exhibitions, we are cultivating a number of international exchanges and salons.

By formalizing a small group of like-mind artists who straddle the art world’s many zones, Tiger Strikes Asteroid helps the art community avoid that which is truly a travesty. We have gathered a strong, diverse group of artists who have a reputation for being supportive to other artists, and whom believe in the importance of showcasing the diversity of art and ideas.

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The Dunning-Kruger Supremacy

Alistair Gentry

Photo: Gage Skidmore

As an experiment, I’ve been running an important but totally fake curator on Twitter for a while. Though I can’t give you the handle yet, I can reveal that their profile picture has malformed, preposterous hair and wears such titanic spectacle frames you could use them as a weapon to fell a tapir like the apes in 2001, because these traits in no way distinguish them from numerous actual curators or collectors who unselfconsciously rock precisely the same look. This fake curator follows all the people an important art world figure should, and in turn has their own followers. Fake curator posts nothing but semi-literate sycophancy to members of the art world elite, or blurts nonsequitur enthusiasms for random combinations of things like intersectional feminism + potato peelers... while real artists, galleries and collectors eagerly follow and like. It’s impossible to verify the person’s history, or what – if anything – they’ve done because this provenance doesn’t exist. Just saying they’re an international curator is enough for barnacles to start growing on them.

This bit of gonzo sociology supports my hypothesis about artists and curators confidently making all sorts of daft pronouncements on subjects they nothing of, and sagely nodding along when other people do the same; generally speaking, the closer to the elite art world peaks a person is, the more they have that very special combination of chronic status anxiety and an overestimated sense of their own worth inversely proportionate to their actual skills.

In 1999 two researchers called Dunning and Kruger defined scientifically a phenomenon well-known anecdotally for thousands of years: the truly incompetent have no idea how incompetent they really are but blunder on regardless, usually in herds. The original scientific paper puts it like this: “... participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humour, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability.” In other words, as Bertrand Russell put it, “those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect also contextualises what I call the Too Many Artists problem: the hinterland of desperate, incapable and unshowable artists preyed upon by vanity

gallery/representation/residency businesses because the sordid scumbags behind them simulate expertise and offer pandering affirmation that it’s not lack of ability keeping these artists from selling or exhibiting their work. They tell aspiring artists simple, outright lies that force of will and an aspirational self-image (i.e. also telling lies) counts for more than the talent, craft, personal relationships, hard work and practice, rejection, nepotism and sheer blind luck that any artist who is the slightest bit successful relies upon, in their own personal and unique combination.

I once attended a meeting of arts professionals, supposedly to discuss the relationship between organisations and audiences.

A man sitting near me launched the well-it’s-not-really-aquestion-more-an-observation-really you’ll often hear at these things from some fulminating numpty: everybody’s an artist, why do we need all these gatekeepers and people saying what’s good or bad, can’t everyone be an expert now we’ve got Twitter and quack quack quack.

I have a lot of sympathy for the outsider, the self-made and the self-taught, and for demolition of the fetishised and ungainsayable “expert.” Anybody who doesn’t like gatekeepers should stop obsessing about them, go around the back and climb the walls. If you want in, that is. Being inside those walls isn’t appropriate or necessary for everyone, and many artists in there are still no wiser as to how they pleased those gatekeepers, who mostly don’t really know who or what they want until they see it, anyway. Except when they see what they want and decide they don’t want it after all.

I take very serious issue, though, with the terrifyingly widespread simplistic view that expertise and deep knowledge aren’t necessary nowadays because… the internet, or something, facts are annoying, and hey, we’re all artists, telling anybody they’re not talented damages their self-esteem, wah... When anybody can claim to be good at anything or have all the answers or access that other people need and they’re just uncritically hand-waved through because they’re posturing as experts rather than being expert, it poisons the well for those people who actually do know what they’re talking about. Or rather, for those people intelligent and talented enough to have some inkling of how much they don’t know what they’re talking about.

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The artwork that has inspired and informed, even questioned my position is Lucio Fontana’s 1960 Spacial Concept ‘Waiting’.

This work can be found in the Tate. The first time I saw this it was in an art book in my art school’s library, my gateway to avant garde artists, art movements and art practices that had ,until my entrance in 1999, been unknown to me. I lived in a little town in rural Ireland, this was very much before high-speed internet, before mobile phones were exactly that; mobile. Apple was huge, but in size not pr ice. So this was the first time that I saw something outside of what I supposed art was. Seeing this work for the first time opened my eyes to other forms of what was prescribed as art. I knew what art as, or so I thought, I’d always been good at art, in school, friends, family, teachers, art courses that I’d been on had proven it, they said I was good, at painting, drawing, arty stuff, my entry into that art school confirmed it.

Or so I thought. This work threw all my preconceived notions of what art was up in the air, it gave me a different perspective and it challenged my notion of art, my assumption of what art was. Of what it could be, it taught me you don’t have to do what is expected, you can change the game. I found it seductive, destructive, reductive, simple and minimal. My final two ears in that art school in the ceramic department saw me experiment with plaster, creating three dimensional boxes that I would fill with extruded clay to create hidden spaces, I would get rid of the clay and keep and exhibit the plaster, plaster gave way to concrete which I would hand mix and kiln fire, then I would paint and print on it. For my final project I exhibited a piece which comprised of 12 large slab artworks on the wall outside the art school itself. I was almost taking myself out of that space, you see the art school I was in was also the first place I’d experienced an institutional bias against what I did. In my first week during the induction where all first year students were gathered to listen to the head of the year to talk about the coming years structure, the tutors expectations and the course work, we were told that we know that some of you have come in through the lower tiered ceramic points system with the hope of getting into the fine art programme, and it will be our decision to see if you do. Essentially, I was okay but I wasn’t of fine art standard. So I hung my final year project outside of that art school as a form of protest.

Moving forward, the years that followed saw my work continue on this path, to create work that challenged the viewer, that asked them not to merely look at the process but beyond, in 2010 I moved to New Zealand, during this time I created 21 white ceramic panels from a single mould, each flat panel was given a grid with a specific layout of holes and apertures, an equal measured mount of liquid was introduced to each panel creating pools of black ceramic ink. It was minimal, abstract, beautiful, it measured an experience (the liquid), time (the holes) and the effect (the pooling). For me it was the easiest way of dealing with my brother’s suicide four years earlier. I thought okay, lets put this piece into a competition, let’s see what people think. A highly recognised ceramic competition in Australia was being held, so I entered, and I failed, I didn’t even get past the first round of short-listing. I thought, wait, what? How has this happened? I was to find out later that the judge for the ccompetition was a very famous Australian plate decorator, a plate decorator of exotic birds, sunsets and the like, kind of like TV’s Bob Ross. I felt cheated, I felt. Wait how could he judge me, he’s a plate decorator. I was arrogant, I was bringing my assumptions, my bias to my own self aggrandising argument that no one was involved in but me.

I was acting like that art school had, many years ago. As money woes arose during our time in nz I took a job in a commercial gallery, I felt I’d sold out, I was selling other peoples art. My director was showing me the ropes and it was a new perspective, it raised questions for me like why do commercial spaces exist, who runs them and to what end. We stayed in nz for three more years, before moving to London. Upon arriving in London I spent ages looking for work and finally found a gallery willing to take me on. I wanted to stay in the commercial art industry, I had questions I wanted answered, I wanted to gain more experience and I needed the money. But what about art, and what about my practice? What about the work that I could do and that I had done?

Certain questions kept gnawing away at me, what is art, who says so, why is there institutional bias, who gives legitimacy, what drives creativity in the arts, is it the artists, the organisations, funders, patrons, public or private? In the current climate, both domestically and internationally our freedom of expression to create is extremely important. Fontana challenged early 20th century views on what painting and sculpture was. His almost visceral action of taking a razor to the canvas was a truly radical attempt to shake up the art world, to this day it remains one of my favourites.

James Horgan 83

BOOK R EV I E W

Gordon Shrigley

Richard Gere Leaves Me Breathless A reimagined press pack from the 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless starring Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky.

by Richard Bevan and Tamsin Clarke 84

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A4 gloss card folder with inserts including: handmade gloss C-types, digital printed stapled press brochure, photocopied and stapled advertising manual and A5 lobby card. £25.00 Open edition printed in batches of 50. Published

by Setsuko, UK 2016.

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A pretty girl. A bad boy. A revolver. The nice man. The academic. Richard Gere Leaves Me Breathless. Death. The little American. Shall we steal a Cadillac? Reinvention. The future. Phillip Glass. A dead cop. Breathless. The pin-up. The novelist. Las Vegas. The architecture student. The Silver Surfer. Los Angeles. My friend Gaby. New York Herald Tribune. The anarchist. The O’Neill House. An answer machine. Richard Gere Leaves Me Breathless. Robert Venturi. It’s not where you take it from, it’s where you take it. Thunderbird.

Jean-Luc Godard. Tenderness. Adventure. Lies.

Love. 404 South Figueroa Street. Fear. Jean-Paul Belmondo. Richard Gere. Devil in the Flesh.

Jim Mcbride. Elvis. À bout de soufflé. And God created Woman. Jean Seberg. Valérie Kaprisky.

Scarface. Qu’est-ce que c’est “dégueulasse”?

Breathless. I want it all or nothing. The ChampsÉlysées. Richard Gere Leaves Me, those guys are like vampires! Breathless, an artist’s book by Richard Bevan and Tamsin Clarke. Boring as well as interesting. Remember when you turned in your buddy Johnny Godard? Conventional as well as designed. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. Redundant. Vestigial. Iconic. Inconsistent.

Equivocal. The best alt-artists’ book around now.

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Berlin MATHEW SAWYER

London BARBY ASANTE

20 May–17 June 2017 Farbvision Schönhauser Allee 28 10435 Berlin www.farbvision.net

1–11 June 2017 ASC Studios 47c Streatham Hill London SW2 4TS www.dolphprojects.com

info@dolphprojects.com info@farbvision.net

CLOSE-UP CINEMA

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