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Female Human Animal

Female Human Animal which was made whilst writer Chloe Aridjis was co-curating a show at Liverpool Tate is honestly such a baffling experiment in film and documentary/fiction. It reminded me of Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess in several ways, but most significantly in the way that it crafted this air of casualness through the use of ropey non-actors and obviously low-budget (but still aesthetically effective) cameras and cinematography, but as the film moves forward the level of detail and consideration into the overall work gradually reveals itself. The use of VHS was a pretty bold move, but made for some incredibly beautiful moments, and the casting of Aridjis as herself in the main role made the crossover between the real and the staged even harder to pick apart, and her emotional progression even more genuine feeling. It’s quite a hackneyed reference but there were even parallels to David Lynch in the film, especially in the presentation of character, the German/Austrian guy who shows up had such an uncanny way of speaking and behaving which seemed to genuinely throw Aridjis in moments that flitted between improvisation and scripted, but without losing a sense of humour, aspects of the film were incredibly funny. The moments which seemed to parody the world of culture and art felt quite low-key piercing and again managed to be funny and simultaneously kind of nightmarish.

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Mike Pratt

The two best things about this talk were that Mike showed us a lot of stuff from his degree-level practice, stuff which didn’t strictly fit in with how he works today as well as his massively prolific output. Starting with fairly traditional (but massively large) paintings he moved to incorporate objects into the paintings before moving towards almost a purely sculptural practice. Some of the works really resonated with me, like the biker jacket sculpture and some of the objects towards the end (the torso exhibition was great), whilst others felt clunky and ugly. I’d say the success of the works that I enjoyed was down to how seriously (or not) the works seemed to take themselves, as well as the use of colour, I’m not massively a fan of colourful artwork in general and some of it came across as cartoonish and sickly sweet, looking like a pick and mix, whilst some of the works using only white and green (leaves) had a kind of smooth purity which parodied religious stuff or Greek sculpture in a way that was both beautiful and funny. I’d say he’s someone who’s practice is pretty clearly defined and whilst he’s not entirely treading water, any changes he does make are very incremental and I’d maybe say not hugely experimental. He does go for quite a childlike style in most of his work, it’s style which I think is almost too easy to lean on, childish drawings, crude shapes and bright colours are almost always guaranteed to please. For me, the concept of nostalgia in art is quite a weird one (not saying that Mike fell for this loads, but at points he did), people seem to assume it’s quite a complicated emotion to conjure up in viewers, that it’s somehow elusive and hard to pin down, but in many ways it seems to me incredibly simple to instil, and as a result I’m kind of sceptical of its use, the easiest feelings to create are usually the least satisfying. However on the whole I’d say that he does create accessible but still pretty fascinating objects and paintings, maybe in order to create such a huge output with several crowded shows of work a year you need to be fairly confident and dedicated to a given style which you might have carved out for yourself.

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James Gardner - Frutta Gallery

Both the talk and the Q&A were extremely useful in understanding the economy and politics of a smaller scale commercial gallery, but one which still attempts to curate interesting shows for public audiences. I have to say I’d barely considered how a smaller scale gallery like Frutta would keep itself afloat if it’s not doing so through arts council funding or similar streams. In fact, it feels like a while since I’ve even thought of art being bought and sold in any way outside of massive auction houses. The whole smaller scale art economy of collectors and buyers supporting galleries they like through the regular buying of work is obviously interesting to know about but comes across as slightly depressing.

But, as James pointed out, you can’t really achieve the same level of autonomy when you rely on funding from a government body, who require tons of inclusion and educational activities alongside the art itself to justify the money. It comes back to this idea of art as a political or common good, whilst a gallery like Frutta may be enlightening or useful or uplifting to have around, it’s probably not in a way that’s quantifiable or can be put on a form. So I guess the stress of the business being slightly precarious at times is the price you pay for being much more self selecting about the kinds of art you can put on and the kinds of curators you can hire to help do so.

In terms of the work at the gallery, I could see clearly the visual connections between most of the artists directly working with the gallery, my favourite was probably Yonatan Vinitsky who’s figurative stuff is really funny and his use of elastic to make kind of dot-to-dot pictures is great. Overall the art isn’t fully my kind of thing, lacking the video angle is understandable as it’s such a saturated thing at the moment but it’s still probably the thing I keep my eyes out for the most. There’s quite a vivid brightness to a lot of the work, feeling almost childlike and quite cartoony at points, in a sense the appeal seems to stem from seeing this kind of quite often goofy (in a mostly good way) stuff in such a clean white walled space? It’s not really my place to criticise the work itself as that’s not what was being talked about, and there’s something to be said about James picking works and artists that he’s personally fond of which makes the whole operation feel really coherent, which is positive.

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David Thomas Broughton at The Golden Lion, Todmorden (13/4)

David Thomas Broughton (DTB) has become kind of a one man institution in my sphere, recording his masterpiece album in the community hall where I went to nursery, and hailing from Otley which is like 20 minutes down the road from where I live in Leeds, also the home of my Grandparents and other close friends. He’s one of the few artists I have some tenuous links with, which partially fuels this admiration for his work and style of performance art, his references to bus routes and shops that I know well asserts the power of shared experiences within at least some of the art you consume.

I think this must be about my 6th time seeing him, only this time though did I feel able to fully unpick my appreciation for what he attempts to do. If I were to list some of my favourite current strands within artmaking it’s amazing how well he manages to align himself with them; built in mistake-making (both intended and genuinely unplanned), humour (with my mantra being ‘funny without being a joke’) and genuine experimentation/ambiguity, i.e not consenting fully to the media or ‘genre’ you’re working within (linking in with the mistake idea, experiments and mistakes share a pretty close relationship). A lot of artmaking develops from the foundations that the artist themselves lay down, a kind of ‘stagemaking’ process which, explicitly or not lays down the kind of tone, medium, style, duration or context that the following work will grow from. At this point in time the term ‘experimental’ in regards to music tends to denote genre or style rather than an artistic approach or philosophy, whilst making challenging music is great true experimentation can’t occur without live and often embarrassing mistakes. It seems to be a problem that a majority of performing musicians are unable to accept this, so whilst their live sets might be exciting or interesting in some ways, there’s a constant feeling that a majority of improvisers are improvising within their well outlined comfort zones. In the case of DTB there’s a conscious effort to break out of this zone (or to not awknowledge it from the outset?), and from my experience of seeing him over several years, this consistently leads to a more beautiful, funny and perplexing live show than almost all others I’ve seen.

           There seems to be an effort for him to both build signature traits, whilst also keeping himself on his toes, playing live and unrehearsed, Damo Suzuki style with hoards of local musicians, using extremely unreliable ipad apps and seemingly intentionally poorly connected mics to generate sounds, and placing objects awkwardly around the stage and tangling himself up in clothes to create physical Matthew Barney-esqe physical restraints between himself and essential tools. Despite the chaotic sound of all this, it manages almost always to exist elegantly and with gorgeous and earnestly fresh sounding results. Looping and layering these delectate folky lines and his operatic almost Scott Walker baritone with abrasive generated tones and found audio, but never to a point of ear numbing cacophony, the kind of sound many loop pedal users are guilty of producing.

His distinct wide-eyed, silent film looking stage persona feels like something to draw on or play with, but more recently it feels like he’s more able to perform as himself, making his presence feel less like a once-removed ‘I’m playing a character’ type of show. Whether it’s through a growing confidence or conscious artistic shift, the closing of the gap between DTB on stage and off feels like a growth in terms of the quality of output and performance.

The main point for me is that concept of ‘stagemaking’ that we as artists go through probably most in the early stages of artistic production. Almost regardless of the themes that are explored, setting the right kind of tone and consciously shaping the ‘space’ that we allow ourselves to create, perform and exhibit in is crucial in how we come across. When (as I attempt to do) mistakes, humour and a sense of perplexing what-the-fuckness are constantly present during the thinking, making and final stages of work (to differing degrees) you set a precedent for artworks which allow for all these things to occur consistently. As contemporary artists there’s obviously a move away from being practitioners of a single skill or media, and yet a consistent overall style is still more often than not as desirable as ever, the ability to lay out one’s own nonthemes to refer back to as touchstones in artistic practice seems at least one good way to achieve this.  

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Level 5&6 at The Bridewell

After students from my year had curated a show at this same venue a few months past, it was great to see how the space could be totally reconfigured to host a whole new set of works. There was so much that I saw on top of a load of performances that I sadly missed, even more than the previous show all the rooms were well used. Whilst I’m fairly sceptical of artworks being outside, in an almost festival context, the stuff was well placed, with larger interactive stuff (participatory chalk drawings) and sound works which were engaging but didn’t prevent people chatting and doing their own thing, which is what they were aiming for I suppose. The performance by Ella and Ashleigh slightly jarred with the chaos of the outdoor area, the film (from their previous show) is excellent though.

I’d say the cell area was underused, but there was an excellent film projected onto the wall which featured all kinds of balloon torture, but the actual image quality was stunning, the combination of the micro-projector it was shown on and the processing of the original looked almost like 16mm stock. Someone’s piece was the collection and display of hundreds of small gas canisters which were placed all over the site, I felt like the configurations were trying too hard to justify themselves as artworks when something more straightforward would maybe have been more effective in making us doubt whether these were a work or not. The objects themselves are fairly ugly so I think the attempt to arrange them like a flower or in neat rows kind of turns them from ‘loaded object’ to just an art material, kind of stripping the meaning of the work and making it feel more heavy-handed than it could have.  

The room downstairs where there was a show reel of films being screened was not effective, the space was set up to look like a living room with a sofa, fake food and a clothed mannequin. It all felt a bit zany and cluttered, the films weren’t projected onto a flat surface which just distracted away from their content completely, again, a way more simple setup would have been miles better. The sound in that room however was incredible and one film which had archive footage from a gig sounded awesome, really droney and deep.  

The main performance room had works on the wall which I couldn’t really see because of all the people and low lighting. The performance I saw was the usual stuff by Articulated Noise and Two Welsh Girls, neither of which I have to say I’m hugely into, the sound quality of the ART-NO electronics is usually not amazing (played through a guitar amp) which I think really damages the impact of the compositions. Their use of samples feels way too obvious to me and the noise itself doesn’t feel well justified in an art context (I’m generally unsure about the overlap between art and music, their aims seem in conflict?). In terms of the TWG spoken work I think it tries to come across as candid and casual but in such a self conscious way that I find it quite hard to watch, the deliberate colloquialisms in the script feel clunky and awkward when they’ve clearly just been learned off a piece of paper. The way they incorporate drawing and a kind of dance into the performance (movements as mark-making) just feels tacked on and I don’t understand how it’s supposed to make an audience feel, it doesn’t seem aesthetically considered or conceptually thought through (at least from my perspective). On entering and exiting the space you had to push through printed hanging fabrics, other works by the same artist also appeared upstairs, I find this kind of forced engagement with the work kind of unappealing and the prints themselves came across as fairly cutesy illustration which didn’t make me feel anything particularly.

I think the festival vibe of the show worked well and the works were almost all really well suited to this, they were interactive, graphic, fun and loud. I’m still unsure about the crossover between visual art and a more musical performance style show, I think keeping them more separate would benefit both kinds of work?

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Interfaces

Josh asked me to be part of his exhibition off the back of a film I showed at the group crit this semester, he told me that the theme was ‘Interfaces’ i.e. how we would perceive when two things collide. I wanted to expand on the film but somehow to actualise it in a way that was completely different to the original. Initially the idea was around getting somebody to interpret the film, through drawings or text or speech, but I couldn’t think of ‘the person’ who would provide a neat enough conceptual link with the film itself. Since the idea revolved around people interacting with one another in a deliberately broken/glitchy way, it seemed appropriate that I could get a digital interface to respond to the film. Through some IBM software I fed the film one image at a time (an image taken every second) and placed the computer’s interpretations one after another to form a poem of sorts. The misinterpretation of the work interested me, some of the readings made sense and others completely did not, it revealed the types of images that the programme had ‘learned’ from, there was relentless references to men in suits and ties, and heterosexual romantic encounters.

The text was framed behind the video, the shadow of the TV almost obscuring them. My work is quite monochromatic, with a fairly bleak/discreet use of colour. This contrasted with Josh’s vibrant and quite playful artworks, which were highly interactive, whilst mine deliberately place barriers between the audience and the work (or rather, don’t allow for a clean reading). The actual setup of the show was something I was happy with, lit from one end with two extremely powerful lights, which created silhouettes and were fairly blinding once you walked in, in other shows I’d seen in the same space, the lack of creativity with the lighting had left the room feeling pretty flat cold and office like.  

The seating setup which was off-centred from the TV showing my film faced the room and the screen equally. People felt like they could sit and talk there whilst also watching the film or watching the room, that small detail seemed to open up the potential of the seating in a great way which put people at ease. Both my work and Josh’s had elements of humour to them, in very different ways but I think it was another small detail which made them work well alongside one another.

The final detail that I really loved was his recording of several different audio tours, without being ironic or trying to subvert the concept of the audio tour. This opened up the work to people and made the whole show a lot more accessible, the casualness of the recording style also felt relaxed and unpretentious. For someone who really hates the social nature of an exhibition opening this was a perfect way to avoid speaking and looking busy!

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Spoken word at The Jacaranda

I’ve rarely been interested in performed poetry, but there were at least a handful of performers here who managed to sidestep some of the worst tropes usually associated with the genre. Like with art in general, those performers which were most successful also came across as the most genuine, even if they were performing work which felt bound to the conventions of the genre (subtle things like the types of words/structures/rhythms/delivery) there was the feeling that they were trying stuff out in a safe and welcoming environment. The constant local references (to places, bus routes, shops) does achieve something that imported artwork is unable to, people’s reactions are strong in a way that only art sprung from and shared within a community can strive for. Moments which are genuinely funny were frequently rooted in these same home-cooked references to nearby teams and communities; almost irrelevant of quality there’s something about this togetherness (which I’m only fractionally experiencing) which can genuinely empower. Whilst access to global streams of visual, text and spoken art exist constantly within our reach, the ability to engage with a nearby scene is not only artistically refreshing but also much more of a political statement, offering solidarity to those who need to vent, speak or make others laugh. It’s impossible not to notice demographic spreads at any gatherings at the moment, and this one managed to spread pretty wide; seeing so many honest and largely unfiltered experiences from such a range of backgrounds and classes was incredible and something which the arts as a whole should see as a clear, achievable and necessary goal to reach. There’s obviously something to be said to maintaining a critical stance when viewing all art, this is still an aesthetic experience and should still be regarded as such. Whilst there were several of the performers I found unengaging, annoying, cliched or whatever, on the whole I felt that the performers had considered not just what they were saying but how they were saying it, in a way which was far more advanced that the majority of the spoken word I’ve seen in the past. 

One poem especially which imagined rows of houses as a long buildings cut up was extremely beautiful, hypothesising with a sci-fi complexity about the nature of the buildings we live and exist in, their pasts and futures; their existences as both private spaces of capital generation and simultaneously locations for collective joy and deeply human interaction. Gold from level 4 also performed a small handful of her writing, which I found amazingly engaging, intricately composed without being overwritten and vivid to the point where I’m still catching mental images of some of the pictures she built up. I’m very excited to hear more from both Gold and some of the other performers in the future. 

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Bridewell Show

I only joined this project pretty late, providing graphics for the show, but it was one of the first experiences I’d had working on an exhibition install working alongside other artists. The show was titled ‘Territory’ and was done so partly as a result of our inability to find clear links/threads throughout the works which would tie them together, my contribution attempted to link everyone’s works up even if this was in the most tenuous way, it also referenced a kind of business aesthetic which I’ve been interested in in the past. One sheet had a huge Venn diagram with all the artist’s names and themes, chaotically combining them all, the other had each person’s name with a separate diagram. I was interested in this role of mine which was both as artist and technician/designer, my piece wasn’t exactly an artwork and it was at the same time, it wasn’t just signage in that it stated the name of the show and the artists present, it attempted to parody the concept of the show whilst also being somehow useful to visitors.

I’d say the show as a whole was solid, all the works didn’t exactly function well alongside one another but the space itself allowed for a good distance between different kinds of works, by stairs, rooms, separate buildings. It would potentially have benefitted from one student taking on the role of curator in a more serious way, directing the layout of the works and ensuring consistency with the signs, lighting, displays etc.

There were too many works to go into detail about them all but noteworthy were Nicole’s igloo which was amazingly crafted and exhibited, loads of attention to detail and care for the final presentation, people seemed to really respond to it, but without it feeling like an easy crowd-pleaser (i.e. there was literally rotting food inside). Cheryl’s light up painting was really great, the entire wooden structure functioning as a button to switch on and off; the garish neon of the lights worked surprisingly well with the painted wood, snaking between each other in a way that felt both organic and extremely crafted. Phoebe’s large painting also looked fantastic in the space, she’s taken great care over the quality of the lighting and the positioning in the room, although that kind of work isn’t my usual sort of thing at all she really pulled it off, considering it was her first work of that type. Nat’s voice recording was disarming in how honest it was in such a public space, that contrast between the ultra-private and the public worked really well, a brave work to show.

Some works functioned less well in the space, I’d say Ellie’s stuff whilst it’s got a lot going on visually and conceptually didn’t shine through despite appearing in two rooms and on the staircase, something about the density of the content made it incredibly hard to approach in any meaningful way. Similar was Dan’s work, his indoor piece with the books is really well crafted and functioned well, but the outside foam one slightly disappeared into the wall despite its size. The use of foam in that specific work doesn’t quite work for me, his stuff feels quite old school (not in a bad way), with dusty books, barbed wire, charcoal, so the use of expanding foam and spray paint jarred with the overall visual, maybe it’s a case of not understanding its use in terms of the context or concept. Kirsty’s work was hung really well and her ability to get to grips with the projection mapping stuff was really impressive, but I’d say the music only detracts from the work and the actual visuals she’s projecting come across a bit like a screensaver or as a poor quality nightclub projection, technically great but maybe more consideration into what she’s actually presenting would make this a lot stronger?

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Politics and Aesthetics

Reading some of the phenomenal cultural criticism by Mark Fisher from his K-Punk blog as well as hearing a recent interview with science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson really brings this relationship between politics and aesthetics/optics back into my head. The quote by Ranciere that ‘‘politics has its aesthetics and aesthetics has its politics” strikes me, whilst we often think about the politics which underscore artwork, film and music in their own separate political exosystems (‘the art world’, ‘the film industry’, ‘the music business’) there’s often a failure to link it back to politics at large, both in the ways in which ideology (*Žižek voice*) is outwardly pushed by these forms as well as the concrete ways in which they alter the courses of our beings. But I think what the real failure is (in my staggeringly limited experience) is the ability to consider the aesthetics of politics, media presentation and activism.

I spend time participating in forms of political activism, but what frustrates me about the way in which these activities are carried out is not the concrete political or factual foundations on which it is built but the way in which these ideas are represented. This most basic of aesthetic consideration is not carried out, and the activism done generally sticks to an old hat approach of shouting through distorted speakers and flashing Arial-Bold placards on aging fold away tables, which builds up the optic subtlety of a maniac street preacher. Equally, the tactics can remain solely online, which is problematic for a whole host of reasons, not least as it is forced through privately owned information streams, where the threat of deletion or information being passed to authorities is constantly imminent. These online methods either manifest as a text based equivalent of the obnoxious street shouting or through slick videos with a high sharability factor, which borrow all the visual tropes from commercialised advertisement to the point where the lines between radical and reactionary are totally blurred.

The optics of all things political should be considered: the narratives we tell through entertainment, the ways we distribute fact and the ways we protest. Not that this involves policing of the visuals which make up these things, but at least a reassurance that how things are read and processed matters. The blind belief that the truth will out seems no longer to apply, and how we can distribute truths and to who becomes increasingly more important.

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Tom Railton

Definitely a lecture where the Q&A was much more engaging than the talk itself, I think it’s a shame but understandable that people change so much and act in such a specific way when speaking in a lecture hall versus in a seminar room just a few minutes afterwards. Doing things like:

-Dropping in their influences constantly (It’s almost irrelevant especially if they’re being drawn from the same fairly small art pool as everyone else)

-Only showing their most polished final work (I always see rougher, more interesting looking stuff on artists instagrams or websites that they don’t touch on)

-Reading extensively from articles/books/texts (again, it’s kind of irrelevant and almost impossible to follow in that context)

 I’m not saying that Tom did this more or less than anybody else but it’s a trend. Especially when he came across so much more insightful and interesting when speaking more candidly about his work process, especially in relation to curation and working in and around certain art and non art spaces. I think often what happens is that the main lecture talks are a lot about their work, so in this case I struggled to be engaged by a lot of the material-loving sculptural aspects of the talk, whereas the discussions afterwards reveal more about their artistic philosophies which in Tom’s case were largely extremely interesting. His approach to social engagement was great, and he seemed to find a good balance between working with other (non-artist) groups whilst still managing to maintain some degree of authorship over the outcome, whether it’s during the sessions or in how he responds to them after the fact. The other thing I was struck by was his approach to revealing the processes within his work, as in, peeling back the layers of process in regards to how the works are thought about and constructed, and how much of this content ends up in the presentation of the work itself (or on websites, social media, texts etc etc)

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Kannan Arunasalam: The Tent & Rasheed Araeen: For Oluwale at The Tetley

I shamefully haven’t visited The Tetley in Leeds for ages, despite it being a consistently fascinating place to see work. The main exhibition by Kannan Arunasalam was made up of almost 20 video works, almost all of which were short (sub 5 minute) portraits of different people within a community within Sri Lanka where the artist originates from. Alongside these was a longer dual-screen work, The Tent, which was commissioned for the exhibition itself, about life in protest camp set up to demand answers from the government about the thousands of ethnic Tamils who went missing after the war. The presentation of all the work was fantastic, with small clusters of three and four screens in circular formations around the gallery and a larger room which housed The Tent itself. The shorter films were made up of short video clips but mostly images, accompanied by voiceover from the individual who inspired each one, from mechanics to actors to gravediggers, each one furthered the feeling of interdependence and coexistence within the society. Whist I did appreciate the volume of work, I didn’t feel able to watch everything as the visual makeup of each one was largely the same, and the tone sometimes failed to be diverse enough to engage each and every time. The Tent was a slight departure from the other works in terms of duration and the use of multiple screen channels, the contrast between extremely emotional and visceral protests on the street and the day to day calm of running the camp was extremely well realised, and the persistence and commitment to the cause by (what seemed to be mostly) the older women in the community was moving.

The link to politics (a link which could be applied to most things in honesty) is probably the easiest segue into the other work in the gallery, an archive which details the events leading towards the murder of David Oluwale in Leeds in 1971. Over several tables and wall displays of newspaper clippings, interviews, images and factual accounts, the narrative of Oluwale’s life and untimely death is built up vividly. There was, I believe, only one image of him which was constantly repeated throughout the work, a picture with soft eyes and brows raised, which takes on a haunting quality when seen over and over again. The work also outlines the creation of a memorial garden, a play, and several books which have been written in memory of Oluwale. Despite the shocking corruption of justice leading to the racist murder, Oluwale has left behind a cultural legacy, encompassing the kind of coordinated and passionate activism which we saw in Arunasalam’s film in the first exhibition.

 This exhibition left me with some thoughts about the relationship between arts and politics, something which I’ve been trying to consider more fully recently. Whilst Arunasalam’s work does deal with the work of activists it would be impossible to claim that the films are not works of art, for there are clearly massive creative decisions being made in the creation of both The Tent and the other works. For Oluwale doesn’t feel like a work of art in the same way, it’s an assemblage and representation of an archive, one which clearly provides a hugely educational and intensely emotional experience. Yet, it sits in an art gallery? My thought would be that the cultural responsibility of an institution like The Tetley almost implores them to exhibit work like this, and rightly so, a gallery can be a vehicle to provide educational experiences beyond just the sphere of art.  When so many art institutions fail to provide outcomes so much of the time, for this gallery to do its part in bucking the trend and pushing for these spaces to offer more for a greater number of people is great to see. 

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Dana Munro

From Dana’s presentation I struggled to get a good shape of her work as a whole, she showed us maybe three projects and opted instead to speak more in depth about her influences and the context within which the work was made. I don’t feel like there’s anything particularly wrong with that kind of approach, but in this instance it made her seem unsure of her work, there was no space for the art to exist outside the list of (not particularly interesting or unexplored) artworks which she used to situate each piece.

I didn’t have particularly strong feelings towards the art or her approach, but there are a few things which it threw up which I think are worth thinking about. Firstly the sound quality as she presented the clips was terrible, this is almost certainly not her fault but it totally prevents you from engaging in any meaningful way, the thin high end tininess makes every clip feel like an attack rather than an attempt to illustrate or further a point. When the presentation is so heavily relying on video and sound, it makes it impossible to take anything much away from the talk as a whole.

Secondly, the use of animals within her work, especially one piece where she used many tens of birds and was filming in a small room which she claims got extremely hot and uncomfortable (she said this in relation to herself and the human crew, without the birds themselves in mind). During the Q&A I was keen to question her on this, it seems that we should be moving past the arbitrary use of animals within artwork, but equally to point this out in the form of a question or statement would have seemed kind of ‘cheap’ or beside the point of her being there somehow. I’m not sure fully how to expand on this thought but I think it was a shame that this point wasn’t bought to her, and ethical as well as conceptual or aesthetic questions are all extremely important to discuss.

I think the overall takeaway point from the talk and Q&A was her approach to making art which is, in turn, so related to the art world and pre-existing works. On one hand I found the concept of having a practice dedicated to creating add-ons or embellishments to the artwork of other people to be quite interesting, however in practice I found her actual output to be mostly pretty boring, with the work being suited exclusively to those with previous knowledge of certain artists/art, a way of working which comes across as a little problematic to me. Whilst I expected her work to come across as funny or as a way to further the ideas which artists might initially be exploring, it struck me that she seemed to be occupying quite insecure ground, where she seemed to constantly need to coolly present herself as not being bothered about being original or being someone making art for the many. But it didn’t feel genuine, in the Q&A she spoke for 10-15 minutes about John Knight, someone she clearly admires but to the point where her own personality and artistic interest was overshadowed. I’m sure she’s done a lot of work which I would engage with better, but the actual content of what she chose to present in the three hours didn’t feel like it presented the full scope of her or her practice.

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gif experiment

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Stills from Old Friends, New Friends 2 

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Old Friends, New Friends: Thicker Than Blood 

Film sequel to project in first term. 

Using the same actors I was keen to expand out some of the ideas which formed in the original Old Friends, New Friends photoseries and film. I felt that the images as stills captured some visually interesting moments between the men who became tangled when acting in conflict, but that the verbal side captured in the video and sound recording was ultimately uninteresting. In this film I wanted to expand on some of the ideas contained in the first project whilst bringing dialogue and aesthetics together into something more holistic which would function as a film without any external materials. 

After filming delays and setbacks eventually I got round to it, and whilst I am happy with some aspects of the film I’m glad that it’s not my sole output for the first two months of the year. I think that in the process of making this I realised the importance of having a diverse art practice, things which you can pick up and drop, work on and think about all at once, in several mediums. When planning this film it was all I was working on but as a result of delays I had to pick up other projects alongside continuing work on this, whilst working on other things I found myself more inspired to continue working on this, and the process became less head banging on desk and more productive. 

As a film itself I think bits of it work, there’s some shots which I’m very happy with (and have screenshotted to develop further) and some of the dialogue works well. Thanks to the amazing acting by the guys (physically and verbally!) some of the stuff I was trying to get across came to the surface really well. This kind of very subtle dystopia and breakdown of individual characters, or bodies short circuited came out well. The structure works, with a kind of artificial tension existing throughout which boils over in the final fight sequence, which feels almost like the ‘characters’ going through motions. There were moments I personally find funny, and also aspects which strike me as pretty sad/melancholy. In regards to the improvised aspect of the dialogue, they relied more heavily on the script than I expected, but the lines which they did conjure up fitted it really well with the overall aesthetic, and despite my not explaining the concept of the film to them really at all, they seemed to grasp what I was going for either consciously or otherwise.   

Personally, watching it, the film still feels very students, the shots are obviously grasped as quickly and the look is unplanned. Despite this it feels visually unlike a ‘genuine’ film (film art or cinema), partly down to unprofessional tech aspects like lighting and camera/lens, but also down to how I’ve chosen the shots, I can’t imagine seeing this in any kind of art or film context. Compared to works I admire, it still looks like a cheap imitation or a student attempt at making video (which obviously it is but that’s not exactly desirable.) 

I think I’m not judging it as harshly as I normally would because I feel that it’s still a work in progress, and whilst it exists as its own thing (or as a chapter at least) I’m aware that I could always continue the thought further and expand it out or pick moments and extrapolate them. I wish I could be more smart in how I do that. I think I’ve gone from not knowing what concepts within art were, to relying on them maybe too much, to now dismissing them altogether, and I’d kind of like to bring more concept driven stuff back into the fold. I think art which I admire often creates it’s own narrative, and as challenges arise the art has to work around or beyond them, becoming part of the overall thing, if I were to add another chapter to this, I think it would have to be a significant gear shift in how it looks, how it’s performed, how it works, or how it’s formed (length, medium etc.) 

[jgoffart2]

DANST

DANST was a one night only pop up exhibition which assembled five digital artists to exhibit films, sound and performance.

Packed into one of the smallish workshop areas at the Royal Standard, the space was densely packed with work by the Liverpool based artists: Bibi Agu, Georgina Tyson, Ashleigh Sands, Ella Crabtree and Dan Waine.

At the opposite end of the wall was the film by Ashleigh Sands and Ella Crabtree which explored the background and bizarre fetishisation of the unknown woman, who’s death mask became a so-called ‘erotic ideal’ of the early 20th century. A face which subsequently became dubbed ‘the most kissed face in the world’ after its use as the head of many CPR dolls since the 1960s.  The decision to explore this piece of extremely tactile history though such digital means allowed this fairly familiar story to take on a new meaning in the post-internet age, where faces and identities are severed from their bodies and all kinds of meaning and speculation is free to be thrust upon them. It isn’t just the images of celebrities which are widely spread (as in newsprint or through traditional photography), but, like the unknown woman, it is anyone’s outward appearance which can be poured over or sexualised whilst the actuality of the person is free to become irrelevant. The decision to dwell on the headline which coined the phrase “The Most Kissed Face in The World” was also interesting, before knowing the context I assumed it was a recent news story about a person living their 15 minutes of fame, it’s a saying which taps into our obsession with superlatives, for things to be ‘biggest’, ‘greatest’, ‘most liked/disliked”, which constantly filters into contemporary populist political vernacular regardless of inherent truth.  

The video on the left wall used a similarly concrete subject matter, food and the physical body. The low-res web cam aesthetic and the gross-out visuals of corned beef and a woman wiping herself onto a plate of baked beans was genuinely hard to look at. The audio of up close lip-smacking was equally unsettling, but in a way which felt more like a shortcut to grotesqueness which I felt the video as a whole didn’t even require, with the imagery being gross enough to stand on its own.

The film against the back left wall felt much more subtle alongside the close quarter aesthetic attacks of the previous two films. The low key screen recorded melancholy of Georgina’s film did far less with its use of sound, aside the clicking of a mouse and some vocal snippets which I think worked, and suited the ethereal coloured tint of the image. It presented another side of cyberspace, away from the sexualisation and grotesquery, toward the boredom and crushing isolation, the dragging and dropping. The music by Dan Waine was equally subtle with a kind of reversed signal sound and drone which felt like it removed you from the space, fairly hypnotic and calming. For a room so small it managed to pack into it both visceral sound and images, noisy and cluttered as well as much more toned down dreamy works without there being a clash or them stepping on each other’s toes.  

[jgoffart2]

Jasmir Creed

The actual work presented by Jasmir was actually not too bad, I’m not usually a fan of this kind of work but aesthetically it was well executed, the crowd scenes were really detailed whilst feeling like a ‘hive’, and the experimentation with perspective and size was fairly disorienting. That said, the presentation itself reached new heights of dull. Being an artist doesn’t de facto mean you have a whole lot to say or that you have the speaking skills needed to do so. So a talk like this was just reeling off artists and philosophical ideas which have been influences in a way that made the whole thing come off a little like an A-level student presenting research. People talking about stuff like being a Flaneur, or referencing painters from 50 years ago without matching them in terms of conceptual or technical depth does kind of irritate me, like that stuff has been done, it’s been explored, we’re living in an era where things have accelerated more than any other generation and you’re unable to find fresh ideas or influence, or even to develop those from over 50 years ago. Not everyone who makes art will be breaking ground, and that’s fine but being an exhibiting artist with such redundant influences doesn’t really inspire me at all.