Issue.06 April / May 2006
ÂŁ1.00
place
She’s gone off on another
tangent
creating a small, independent art ‘zine.
tangent is a bi-monthly publication produced with the intention of informing and amusing in bite-size chunks. Quick ‘n Dirty, Black ‘n White, each issue contains contributions by and features on artists as well as arts listings in the South London area and beyond. To get the skinny on how to submit writing and/or artwork check out the website or contact: Karen D’Amico via email: tangent.mail@mac.com
Stockists In London: Clapham Art Gallery ICA Bookshop Studio Voltaire The Residence The Flea Pit Transition Gallery In Nottingham: Moot Gallery Further Afield: FluxFactory, New York Sticky, Melbourne Zeke’s Gallery, Montreal Events News etc., etc. available on the website:
www.tangent.org.uk all content © karen d’amico 2006 unless otherwise noted. all contributing artists’ work in the form of text and /or images is used by permission and is copyright by the artist. no stealing allowed; hey, make up your own ideas FFS! after all, we have.
Place “Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” - Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)
inside
(in no particular order)
[contributors]
Thurle Wright ‘Mapping Nunhead’
The ‘Dear You’ Project
Samuel Roy-Bois ‘Shallow Island’
Ettie Spencer ‘disPLACE’
www.thurle.com
London (UK)
Melbourne (AU)
anonymous www.macm.org/en/expositions/23.html
New York City (USA)
www.crossingtheline.org.uk
East Lothian (UK)
Russell Herron ‘tangent, Issue 6, April 2006, Page 4’
www.russellherron.com
Lars Vilhelmsen Hiding Place
www.larsvilhelmsen.org
Karen D’Amico ‘Then and Now’
www.karendamico.com
London (UK)
Vodskov (DK)
London (UK)
[reflect]
Thoughts on a Grey Day.
[inform] Arts Listings Cover image: Samuel Roy-Bois; Ghetto 2006 Wood, Fiber glass, plexiglass and objects; 80” x 58” x 56”
Fun Facts to know and tell The oldest word in the English language is “town” A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral. The only word in the English language with all five vowels in reverse order is “subcontinental.” Canada is an Indian word meaning “Big Village”. There is a city called Rome on every continent. The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with, e.g. Asia, Europe, etc. If the world’s total land area was divided equally among the world’s people, each person would get 8.5 acres.
ettie spencer www.crossingtheline.org.uk
Above and right: Ettie Spencer disPLACE Installation, Edinburgh, March 2005
A Place Both Real and Imagined Mount Shasta at 30,000 feet (two points of view)
out the aeroplane window
on the aeroplane map
lars vilhelmsen www.larsvilhelmsen.org
Hiding Strategies 1. the annoying git 2. the tactical one 3. the coward
Above: Hiding Place - strategies on a psychology matter “The Psychology Behind Being a Hidden Child�, 2006; c-print,100 x 70
asked & answered Samuel Roy-Bois www.macm.org/en/expositions/23.html
when did you first know you wanted to be an artist? I expressed the wish to be an artist at a very young age. Something like 5 years old. I would say to my mother that I would like to become a “painturer”. The thought of being something else always freaked me out. I did study to become an anthropologist for a while, just to become absolutely conscious of what I really wanted to do later.
favourite material or medium? I would say “the right one”. My ideas and projects dictate my choice of materials. As I build a lot of “rooms” I end up using a lot of wood and drywall. I like drywall quite a bit. It’s such an arid material. I learned to love it.
favourite place? Where I’m going next.
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Any heroes or villains? Hero: Joseph Beuys. Vilain: Joseph Beuys
Can you remember your first piece of work? I was probably 5 or 6. It was actually a small wooden box that I secretly made out of left-overs found in my basement. I remember the love and care that I put in the work. I remember using pieces of paper attached to a stick to paint it because I did not wanted to soil my dad paint brushes.
Smartest thing you ever did in terms of your art practice? Stopping making art for a while when finished grad school.
Worst mistake in terms of your art practice? Grad school
Best / worst bit about being an artist? The best thing for me is to have complete authority over what is happening, over what I do. The worst thing is definitly having to deal alone with the consequences of all the decisions I’m making.
What inspires? Looking at people enjoying what they do.
What shows have you seen recently? I just saw Wolfgang Tilmans two hours ago at PS1 in New York City. Quite a good show. It’s so enjoyable to see an artist taking advantage of art, going where he feels like going with genuine freedom. It felt like art belonged to him. It’s the same attitude Thelenious Monk had towards Jazz. He made what he wanted out of it.
Any words of wisdom for emerging artists? Don’t forget where you are coming from. Don’t forget where you are going to. Wash hands frequently.
Left: I heard a noise, I ran away 2003 Drywall, plaster, wood paint, lighting system; 16’ x 12’ x 8’
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noplace
out of place
replace
first place
hiding place know your place
favourite place anyplace misplace
well placed everyplace take place
a sense of place
everything in its place
displace
your place
final resting place
a clean, well lighted place
place value
THE place my place
put them in their place
going places someplace
our
imaginary place
last place 12
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Then and Now “We are here and it is now. Further to that, all human knowledge is moonshine.” - H L Mencken
Seeking a sense of place, a sense of the familiar, of belonging and connection is often wrapped up in that deep, melancholic yearning to excavate one’s heritage and somehow connect it with life the present. Then and Now is a photographic installation that was spawned out of that desire. The idea began to emerge when I received a box of slides from my Father, some of which had been shot in the 1960’s on a visit to his hometown of Stavanger, Norway. Though I was a small child at the time, I have lingering, though fragmented, memories of that trip and to this day can conjur smells, sounds and visual snapshots in my mind’s eye: the whiff of bread baking in Tananger - then a tiny fishing village, now a bustling, prosperous community, my cousin humming a song, the spider in my grandfather’s loo and so on. It’s funny what you remember as well as how memories awaken the senses, forging immediate connections with a forgotten sense of place. 14
In viewing the slides in my studio, I was immediately drawn to the marks and stains on them. Little traces of age in the form of dust and fading colour, their residue felt like a form of evidence, bearing witness to the passage of time. In 2005 I re-visited Stavanger in order to re-photograph the locations from these slides and juxtapose them in an attempt to somehow collapse the distance between time and memory, as well as apprehend and understand what is still, to me, a somewhat unknowable, unreachable piece of my heritage: my sense of place in terms of my ‘Norwegian-ness’. Though I had been there since that first trip, it was an interesting exercise to look at the landscape through the eyes of these old slides and really comprehend just how much the landscape had changed over a 40 year timespan. Most places were immediately recognisable to me though the passage of time was of course unmistakable. Setting up the shots was challenging and there were instances when it was physically impossible to recapture a location. At one point we were trying in vain to match the angle of the slide with what we were actually looking at. My uncle suddenly said in his matter-of-fact Scandinavian way, ‘Oh, yes, it’s because they moved the statue.” In re-tracing my father’s footsteps, and to some extent, my own, I was cognizant of the fact that my own sense of place with regard to where I belong in this landscape of my Norwegian-ness is elusive, impossible to capture, just as the time that’s elapsed between the two images is. As imaginary as it is real, my heritage is infused by my own perceptions, memories and the histories I am told. It resides somewhere between memory and imagination and yet it exists, like so many places. Opposite and following two pages: Karen D’Amico Then and Now (two from a series) Re - printed slide and c-type photograph, size variable
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samuel roy-bois www.macm.org/en/expositions/23.html
Architecture is a terrifying thing. It’s all about shaping people’s life and directing one’s behaviour. Architects are fancy dictators. What makes the whole thing bearable is the fact that there are as many dictatorships as there are buildings. One gets to choose.
Above and right Shallow Island 2005 Wood, styrofoam, objects, paint and air conditioning; 14’ x 11’ x 12’
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Captured whilst waiting for the light to change on Lombard Street in San Francisco a few years back. Weird enough to write ‘Going to Disneyland’ on the windscreen but the best bit by far was that the people in the car looked really pissed off, all huffy-like, both staring straight ahead, lips pursed in a line and arms folded in that ‘I’m not going to discuss it!’ sort of manner. Not sure what they were so unhappy about, being on their way to The Magic Kingdom and all; probably had an argument about his driving or her navigation skills. The contrast of ‘happy families with the promise of Disney Fantasy made me laugh. Clearly, they were in a bad place.
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thurle wright www.thurle.com
Word Worlds (detail) 2004 Pages from Thought and Action by Stuart Hampshire, pins
Map of My World (detail) 2005 Pages from Australian school atlas
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Mapping Nunhead from Memory On 24 March Nunhead Community Centre became the location for a giant community memory map. Conceived and put together by artist Thurle Wright to coincide with Nunhead Arts Week, this one day event was an interactive exploration of place in which the inhabitants of Nunhead were invited to share reollections and impressions of the area both verbally and visually. Thurle asked the question, “What would a ‘map’ of our collective impressions of our area look like?” and then incorporated the oral and visual input supplied by local residents “to create a land and soundscape of the area.” She also invited participants to ‘draw themselves onto the map’. The resulting work was shown at local artist-run space, The Surgury Gallery.
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dear you anonymous, melbourne
I came across this work recently and fell in love with it. Letters, addressed ‘Dear You’, anonymously written by various people sometimes in different languages, are deposited into small bags with YOU stencilled on the outside, along with a random mark, object or trace of some kind. The bags are stapled shut and the letters become partially visible - all the more enticing. There is a voyeuristic quality to this work, it plays with the boundaries that reside between public versus private space; letters are such personal things, and reading these gives one a feeling of crossing a line of some sort, yet it’s clear that they are intended for whomever opens them. They are addressed to ‘you’ but who is that exactly? Is it really you or is it meant for someone
else? In reading the letters there is a sense of knowing-ness and familiarity, as if receiving a letter from an old friend. This draws the reader into an interior space, the sort of place that’s at once intangible and at the same time immediately recognisable.
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Thoughts on a Grey Day The late Edward Said, in his book ‘Out of Place’ talked about his need to bridge the distance in time and place that separated his life ‘now’ and his life ‘then’. According to him, those gaps of time, geography and culture were always present for him in some way, and he wrote tellingly about a sense of longing for a place in which he felt he fit in. In reading that book, I connected with so much of what he had to say, always having felt vaguely out of place myself. I find it interesting to think that Said - eloquent, academic, highly respected in his arena, could seem to have felt that longing still, after all he had experienced and written about. On the other hand, it’s nice to think that someone of his stature was also somewhat fragile in a sense. It was somehow appropriate then, that I was sat in a hotel room in San Francisco back in September 2003, not far from where I had been raised, feeling very disconnected from my surroundings, when I heard the news that he had died. It’s a strange feeling indeed to be ‘home’ yet feel so isolated. The world, indeed, is a small place and increasingly, people are finding themselves flung to the far corners of the earth for a variety of reasons. A sense of dislocation and permanent interruption is now a common experience. The saying, ‘you can never go home’ is certainly true to some extent, as most who have relocated for whatever reason will attest; the physical place may indeed remain but the notion of home and all it implies becomes less a geographical location than it is a constructed space in one’s mind. Someone once said ‘home is where they understand you.’ I’d agree with that. Isn’t a sense of place really no more than a feeling of belonging, and if so, is that not fleeting for us all? 30
catch: Arts Publications
Anxiety Culture [an] magazine Arty Magazine Found Magazine Interlude Magazine Leisure Centre Publish and Be Damned Rant Magazine rifRAG Smoke: a london peculiar
Weblinks
Artangel Artinliverpool Artquest Arts Council England Art South Central Axis Artists Eyebeam Fallon & Rosoff Happy Famous Artists Kollabor8 Newsgrist Re-Title Rhizome Stunned Theory.Org Wooster Collective
Listings
galleries, weblinks, etc.
www.anxietyculture.com/ www.a-n.co.uk www.artymagazine.com www.foundmagazine.com www.interludemagazine.co.uk www.leisurecentre.org.uk www.publishandbedamned.org www.rant-magazine.com www.riffrag.org/ www.shink.dircon.co.uk/smoke.htm www.artangel.org.uk www.artinliverpool.com/blog www.artquest.org.uk www.artscouncil.org.uk/ www.artsouthcentral.org.uk www.axisartists.org.uk www.eyebeam.org www.fallonandrosof.com/artblog.html www.happyfamousartists.blogspot.com http://kollabor8.toegristle.com/ www.newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/weblogs/index.html www.re-title.com www.rhizome.org www.stunned.org www.theory.org www.woostercollective.com/
Galleries / Studios / Resources UK 198 Gallery (SE24) 2B1 Bearspace (SE8) Cafe’ Gallery Projects (SE16) Castlefield Gallery (M15) Cell Project Space (E2) Clapham Art Gallery (SW4) Gasworks (SE11) Hayward Gallery (SE1) inIVA (EC2) ICA (SW1) Levack (W1) Moot Gallery (Nottingham NG3) MOT (E8) Photographers Gallery (WC2) Photofusion (SW9) SevenSeven (E8) South London Gallery (SE5) Space Station 65 (SE22) Space Studios (E8) Spectacle (Birmingham B16) Stand Assembly (NG3) Standpoint (N1) Studio Voltaire (SW4) Surface Gallery (Nottingham NG1) Tate Modern (SE1) The Flea Pit (E1) The Residence(E9) The Wyer Gallery (SW11) Transition Gallery (E8) Transmission (Glasgow)
www.198gallery.co.uk www.2b1studio.co.uk www.thebear.tv/bearspace/ www.cafegalleryprojects.com www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk www.cell.org.uk www.claphamartgallery.com www.gasworks.org.uk www.hayward.org.uk www.iniva.org www.ica.org.uk www.levack.co.uk www.mootgallery.org www.motinternational.org www.photonet.org.uk www.photofusion.org www.sevenseven.org.uk/ www.southlondongallery.org www.spacestationsixtyfive.com www.spacestudios.org.uk www.spectacle-gallery.co.uk/ www.standassembly.org www.pauperspublications.com/gallery.html www.studiovoltaire.org www.surfacegallery.org/index.html www.tate.org.uk coming soon... www.residence-gallery.com www.thewyergallery.co.uk www.transitiongallery.co.uk www.transmissiongallery.org/
020 7978 8309 - 020 8691 2085 020 7237 1230 0161 832 8034 020 7241 3600 020 7720 0955 020 7582 6848 020 7921 0813 020 7729 9616 020 7930 3647 020 7539 1911 07786 257213 020 7923 9561 020 7831 1772 020 7738 5774 078 0816 6215 020 7703 6120 020 8693 5995 020 8525 4330 020 7729 5272 020 7622 1294 0115 934 8435 020 7887 8000 020 7033 9986 020 8986 8866 020 7223 8433 020 7254 0045 0141 552 4813
Further Afield Flux Factory (New York) Location 1 (New York) Printed Matter (New York) White Column (New York)
www.fluxfactory.org/ www.location1.org www.printedmatter.org www.whitecolumns.org
1 (718) 707 3362 1 (212) 334 3347 1 (212) 925 0325 1 (212) 924 4214
Platform Artists Group (Sydney) Sticky (Melbourne) The Invisible Inc. (Sydney)
www.platform.org.au www.platform.org.au/sticky.html www.theinvisibleinc.org.au
+61 3 9654 8559 +61 3 9654 8559 -
Torpedo Artbooks (Oslo)
www.torpedobok.no/
+47 48231217
Zeke’s Gallery (Montreal)
www.zekesgallery.blogspot.com
1 (514) 288-2233
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no matter where you go, there you are.