This is a series of photographs, paintings, posters and writing based on my two months of living on job seekers allowance and finishing two months of my free studio space after I left university in Liverpool (I m still in Liverpool.) I am writing this on the 25th January 2013 at 1:26am, wanting someone else to be writing this, as some people have been right in communicating what I want in the last month, compared to say, the rest of my life. Thank fuck for that. Some of the writing is extracts from being in the studio, being around my bedroom, re-looking and re-thinking some of the art theory that has influenced me in the last four years and various bits of music and conversations I ve had with people over the last couple of months. I don t have InDesign so this will look shit, but all my publications I have collaborated on has been specifically and unintentionally different in all the work I am hoping to give up one day: focusing on the way painting can be re-used as a social intervention in spaces or the art world not just as a object but as a re-animated object. im aware that a lot of people I have met whether they are interested in art, music, writing seriously or casually or just working and having fun, I am aware that these are the structures that hold some glue together as a social allrounder in life and I am always worried that if I use this as propaganda in my work it will just flip and split those parts into shreds that can t be made up again. In no way am I saying this doesn t happen anyway, it does, but I m charged and at the same time unsettled by what sociality can do to a person and art. So this is probably about structures and how do you re-define them in 2013, or as I was trying to figure out with other people and myself how do you define them all the time? I can name a few structures that have influenced me, bands like I am kloot, or film makers as artists like sarah morris or writers like Ian McEwens book Saturday because 9/11 can have some psychoanalysis in life on saturday . But these are all people I don t know. Some people that have influenced me are the visitor assistants at tate Liverpool who I would never want a full time job with or the people who work behind the desks at the job centre in 2013 and the people who don t work behind desks who don t all look like Jeremy Kyles love-children. So I guess this is a mixture of work trying to split open some of these issues. I can t seem to separate all these actions that have influenced splits, but it is the radically hardest to fit them back together as a show, or exhibition or as a studio series of work or in your head in a pub or cafĂŠ trying to fix them all. I hope that it can be explained a long the way instead of explaining so much of it now.
Serenity of music against the flatness of flats baring a demolition for demographics to be made on Photoshop for a top in Topshop WE CAN BE HEROES (JUST FOR ONE DAY) Photographed outside National Museum Gallery London 2011
So Monday 11th February 12:48am (does this time thing matter?) I think I’m going fucking nuts right now listening to Sigur Ros and Tycho (both albums on Youtube) but more so from this last week from being in Manchester and being involved in northern ex-catholic madness and NHS madness, I don’t know which is worse? A lot of alcohol? I’ve realized that sociality is also intrinsically linked to paintings culture. So how can a contemporary painting practice work under pressure from social history or the cultural explosion in today’s world? I don’t think i can pull this off in my studio. Recently from my own drawings using the images, language and networking of blogs, specifically the Mancunian Wave set up by Chrissy Brand: http:// mancunianwave.blogspot.co.uk/ Refering to Jerry Saltz (2005) introduces the Richter resolution expressing that photography and painting have become unadventurous in structures. RUNZ YA BASTARD RUNZ AWAY!!!!
!"This
is also intrinsic to understanding the huge fixation of postmodern philosophy of the flat surface partly through mediums like photography. As stated by Jacque Ranciere (2006) in The politics of the aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible: ‘In opposition to the Platonic degradation of mimesis…classical poets of representation
wanted to endow the ‘flat surface’ with speech of a ‘scene of life.’
‘Classical poets established a relationship of correspondence at a distance between speech and painting…It is this relationship that is at stake in supposed distinction between two dimensional and three-dimensional space as ‘specific’ to a particular form of art. To a large extent, the ground was laid for painting’s ‘anti-representative revolution’ by the flat surface of page, in the change in how literatures ‘images’ function or what the change is in the discourse on painting, but also in the ways in which typography, posters and the decorative arts became interlaced.’ (Ranciere 2006, p.16)"
Miss U Less See You More
Motivation
Why do you want to volunteer and why have you chosen ThePrinceʼsTrust?Please tell us about any relevant experience you have for the role you are interested in (please consider the role description and person specification when answering – it is not sufficient to simply copy the person specification). 500 words limit. I visited the PrincesTrustcentreonRenshawStreetinLiverpool to have a chat with one of the guys working there. He explained about the Fairbridge programme working with 16-25 year olds as the outreach and development volunteer programme. I am passionately interested in volunteering with the PrincesTrus n Liverpool as it relates to my personal and social experiences with friends or people I have met from my own home background, when I have travelled or moving away from home to live and study at John Moores University. I have also met people and had many friends from a diverse range of backgrounds who have been subjected to homelessness, drugs, and a number of social/personal difficulties in life that they needed support for… I feel Iʼve always had a genuine interest and want to understand how support networks can work for people, as I have sought out these support networks when I have needed it – such as counselling, volunteering, education and employment.
This relates to the organizations and collaborative groups I have been involved with over the ast four years and as a practicing artist. These spaces and growing communities have taught me that its crucial to understand what it means to be actively involved– not just an arts community but what you can bring to it, how you can radically re-think ʻcommunityʼ and share your experiences, and help people to share their experiences back with you.
This was a response to Lucy Somers ‘Ideas from Autonomy school’ for her Fine Art Masters at Liverpool John Moores… and I can’t help but notice this was also for her own social and present understanding of her painting practice in a space at the art and design academy. Getting the train to Manchester was the right time to be responding to this. Now it seems predictable that shit happens. I’m thinking of structures and understanding what ‘post’ was designed for. There seems to be a generation of post-art theory artists inspired massively by the situationists, Foucault, llyotard where now post art school history coarsing through, as lucy somers described it as ‘conjunctive’ systems from Franco Biradi ____ If this generation of students, artists, writers, post-philanthropists are being subjected to a conjunction of social art history or presence in notion, then how does anyone filter this without vauge references to ‘post’s’ presence through buildings, music or art schools, arts presense in todays society? Or perhaps I am reading this in post-academic systems ( i.e from a Liverpool John Moores MA Fine Art student in 2013, I’m not saying that is bad!) Anyway this is now a post-bit-of-writing. So I’ll get my head out of its conjunctive system to watch this cat out my window. So how can Lucy Somers painting practice contribute towards autonomy? And how to define theory to make it legit? Or in some more distorted way, legalize it whilst understanding illegalization. It seems to become increasingly difficult, base don my experience so far in these systems to describe, or communicate a personal social representation in art. Whether this is research into trade, music, art theory, film, the social history of tie wearing? I don’t know, the latter might help in this case. I remembered Michel Foucault’s writing at the end of Of other spaces (1986) ‘Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.’ My point is above writing, publications, blogs and websites – the real conjunction also happens in ‘crits’ or ‘tutorials.’ So I mentioned before the structures holding every day life together; jobs, meeting up with people, collectives, etc. I wrote a piece recently for the burling contemporary art prize (it was another response to an exhibtion in the last 10 years… so why not go for it.) however I think I wrote the response to filter through a lot of theory from paintings culture that had been recommended to me, and that was on my mind from my recent struggle with filtering and attacking systems/strucutres that I had already been exposed to. The first writing was what do buildings see? a response to jane and louise Wilsons show at the whitworth gallery Manchester but it was more to start a conversation with myself about the use of close-up in painting and film (RESPONSE TO WHAT JANE AND LOUISE PIECE?) and how important it has been in the present of contemporary painting, or post-post-post impressionism punk culture or as the Simpsons described it ‘PO-MO….weird for the sake of being weird’
Before I was discussing the post-art theory of the 21st century on objects and the difficulty of what to say. Forget that. When lucy somers discusses the ‘depolyment of culture should be conjunctive rather than connective.’ – this makes me question lucy somers role in this short essay she has written and also the place she is studying in as little as knowing her from the three years on the BA fine art. What does the deployment of culture mean to her? This secondary source is only dictating the structure of writing about art theory and this can also be a deployment in culture. When I think of culture, my experiences of functioning and reemploying functions in sub cultures of cities and spaces – gig halls, art shool, where they relink to a Warhol-discourse of culture. Well what about employment and unemployment? Are these not parts of the extradisplinary that esche is talking about? So how to define, re-fine, re-animated and excited in a deployment of culture? There is a certain boundary of bordering on the vaguely mad due to the conjunctive of general philosophy and art theory if it comes to defining your own work. If this is to do with the specific locations of communication how do you then define-re-fine-re-animate and excited in a deployment of culture? But I see this happening in general distributional areas that have been involved in a employment of culture – books, publications.. so how does the employment of effects these areas? Or deployment… ? from the early history of publishing and design? This essay could be connected to Lucy Somers experiencing a conjunction in her work, where the lack of excitement has been before. Infact this seems to be a reaction through a lack of engagement outside her own practice and inside the anxiety of space. why sympathise with the elements of painting and installation because when we are told by the same thing that can conjunctivise painting – i.e sculpture or western space , this could be radically illegalizing strategies already thought up through the 20th century and continue to stop the progress of conjunctivisation outside of the___ hopefully this doesn’t dictate the notion that ‘artists’ means you have to slowly cook yourself to death by revealing your whole discourse of life – when you were unemployed in a unemployable society, or when you were employed when society was also employable. Or how you felt about the first time you got involved with a duck fight? All these details that make up politics of your life
What do buildings see? In a recent interview with Jane and Louise Wilson for the Guardian, Adrian Searle asked them ‘You don’t see your work as a kind of activism do you?’ Jane Wilson replies ‘No, these are nature abhors a vacuum, it’s not based on scientific knowledge.’1 I first came across Jane and Louise Wilson in the book Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts it was under Modernist ruins, filmic archaeologies Jane and Louise Wilson a free and anonymous monument2 – all these words hitting spots: FREE, MONUMENT, ANONYMOUS, MODERN, FILM, RUINS… their recent exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery has no show title but shows a series of film, instillation and photography.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Face Scripting: What Did the Building See? 2011 | Single screen projection, surround sound, gauze box, 2 mirrors, HD projector, CCTV monitor showing footage from YouTube.
How we experience space and architecture seems key to the Wilsons so it’s important to guide you through a little about the placement of the exhibition in the space at the Whitworth Gallery. It expands from the first floor to the second floor where you can see the Whitworth’s modern development in the space that was built into the original architecture in the 1950’s into the 1960’s. The first floor starts with the Wilsons Altogether (2010) a construction of yardsticks, these are tools used for engineering and measuring. Here the Wilsons reference the Russian soviet artist Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions in 1918-19213. Next there was Face scripting: What did the building see? (2011) that I will focus on later. To the left is the series of large scale photographs Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum), 2010. On the second floor is the Wilsons new film The Toxic Camera, 2012 4and behind the large-scale cage that the film is projected in is a small television where the film Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (1986) produced by Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko is playing. When you come out of this space, you are then in the midst of the rest of the Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) large photographic
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This interview guides you through some of the exhibition and also gives you more of a background to Jane and Louise Wilsons work, see the short interview with the on the Guardian website http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2012/nov/05/jane-louise-wilson-video-interview
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For more see: Bruno. G and Vidler. A Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture) ‒ p.4387.
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To view images of Spatial Constructions see the blog website http://russianavantgarde.tumblr.com/ this also has more of a direct look at the influences of architectural, mathematical and design structures produced at the time. Also see MoMA: http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81043
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Jane and Louise Wilson met the remaining members of 1986 film crew who helped inspire the new film Toxic Camera. The Chernobyl: A chronicle of difficult weeks by Vladimir Shevchenko (1986) is available online YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOJLLZR-_sk !
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series. Face scripting: What did the building see? (2011) is an installation including a film and CCTV footage about and of the events leading to the assassination of a Hamas operative Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in room 230, Al Bustan Rotaanna hotel in Dubai, January 2010.1 What did the building see? is a film produced by Jane and Louise Wilson and was projected onto a screen in a large cage with mirrors to the left and right of you, as though you are in a giant lens in the Whitworth gallery. Behind you is the CCTV footage of the assassination on a smaller TV screen fitted high up in the space and felt similar to looking at the arrivals and departures in train stations or airports. The camera movements through the halls and into room 230 were filmed using close-ups of the interior and exterior of the Al Bustan Rotanna hotel. In film, a close-up and extreme close-up shot was designed to focus attention on an actor’s expression, an object or to direct your own attention to other elements in the film. Unlike their film The Toxic Camera (2012) which revisited the town of Pripyat after the 1986 explosion, their film What did the building see? (2011) was not necessarily a conventional historical event. What did the building see? (2011) reminded me of films focusing on a political journey in fictional and factual destructive landscapes such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987) or Children Of Men (2006,) war, politics, re-generation, landscape or ruins. This suggested to me that there have always been other spaces to use close-ups as a way of detailing these issues away from the saturation of the cinema.
National Archives [Capital], 2002, Sarah Morris 214 x 214 cm Courtesy of: http://sarah-morris.info/?/Paintings/Capital/
The short film Points on a line (2010) by American artist Sarah Morris, painter, writer and film-producer ‘…documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context2’ This project focused on the details of the architecture at the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. You!
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To view this short film go to: http://www.303gallery.com/artists/jane_and_louise_wilson/index.php?iid=12165&exhid=76&p=img
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You can see short snippets of her films here: http://vimeo.com/user4010809 Points on a line is originally 36 minutes long but can be found on Vimeo with a short 4 minutes 55 seconds clip. Points in a line: part a project Modern views: A project to benefit Farnsworth House and the Glass House. Two houses built in Illinois and Connecticut, America by architects Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. To find out more about the project see: http://philipjohnsonglasshouse.org/history/modernviews/
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can see a short clip on her Vimeo website where she shoots extreme close-ups of keys dangling in the door and next a close up of a Mies van der Rohe chair (I’ve no idea about furniture design, let alone German designers…) however we can see these designs everywhere when America became the playing fields for 20th century architects and designers from Europe. After this you can see a close up of a window cleaner washing the glass exterior. Morris’s paintings can also be viewed as closeups where substructures of banks, hotels, agencies, and famous locations such as Las Vegas in 2001, Beijing during the Olympics in 20081 become even more relevant outside of film. These close-ups are important to the way structures have always existed socially as well as architecturally with the ambitions of the time - in groups, unions, societies and trusts.2 In Morris’s series of paintings, films and book Capital 1999, Isabelle Graw (2001) in her article All that glitters sums up a close-up of Morris’s work: ‘Power and glory feed into each other. People with power- politicians, pop stars – exude a ‘glossy’ radiance and the glass facades of powerful conglomerates also seem to be bathed in lustrous gloss. Power is evidently an indispensible condition of a certain type of ‘impressive’ aura. The gloss power is also a salient feature of Sarah Morris’s paintings. Ordinary household gloss lends them their glossy appearance. Their surfaces are so glossy that they prevent us from seeing into them. Its hard to tell whether this is their way of laying claim to power or whether, conversely, the traces of a ‘powerful’ position are inherent in them.’3 I’m trying not to end this as some kind of a depressing poem. The Wilsons suggested that the yardsticks for measuring and engineering are not always going to build utopians for us and that the town of Pripyat that was in ruins and now presently uninhabitable in a short period of time is the reality of future ruins. My original question was ‘What do buildings see?’ could possibly be answered with a simple ‘us,’ but today in 2013 what does it mean to be FREE, MONUMENT, ANONYMOUS, FILM, RUINS…?
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Visit Sarah Morris s website brilliant website, as it structures around the installation view in galleries, exterior spaces and also gives you a chance to view some close-up photography of film stills: http://sarah-morris.info/
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Jacobs Oud 1890-1963, Dutch architect also apart of the group De Stijl 1917-1931 see: Jaffe, C.L.H, De Stijl 19171931 p.70-71 De Stijl from De Stijl manifesto, I, p.25.
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This was the article written by Graw, I published by München: Kunstverlag Goetz, 2001. This can be viewed as PDF online http://sarah-morris.info/ also Capital published by Oktagon Verlagsgesellschaft mbH 1999 and produced by Morris, S 1999.
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