painting in scotland

prince's drawing school trip to lybster, scotland
july 2013

painting attempts
oil paint, varnish, pencil and medium on paper

this is tomorrow review: Ditch Plains

Loretta Fahrenholz: Ditch Plains
Project Native Informant
5 September – 12 October 2013
Review by Kathryn Lloyd

Loretta Fahrenholz is a Berlin-based filmmaker and curator. Her latest film, ‘Ditch Plains’ (currently on show at Project Native Informant), is 31 minutes in length and, at the artist’s request, is screened when a viewer enters the gallery. The gallery itself is far from a white cube space, but instead resembles a claustrophobic, inky black garage. This environment, with its cold stone interior, is perfectly suited to Fahrenholz’s abstruse apocalyptic film.

The exhibition press release begins with an ominous supposition: ‘Something terrible has befallen New York: a natural disaster, a cyber attack, a mass-possession of souls?’ While this is ostensibly vague, the differentiation between these notions becomes redundant as the film progresses; the origin of the terror is unclear and irrelevant. Instead, Fahrenholz investigates the primitive manner in which terror manifests, and its post-hoc representation and subsequent consumption.

Fahrenholz’s opening scenes consciously mirror those now standardised by ‘The Apocalypse Movie’; the dead litter the streets in the guise of those still sleeping; the camera lingers on the significant absence of human presence. Amidst this quiet chaos, dancers Ringmasters Corey, Jay Donn and Marty McFly improvise scenes which suggest digital death matches, stop-and-frisk situations and dictatorial confrontations. They move together, often with clear indications of violence, but they never touch, their bodies always millimetres apart. They are differentiated by neon tubing; some wear it like tribal makeup. The dead are without. This is the closest one gets to classification between two sides; the division of ‘the others’ and ‘us’.

‘Ditch Plains’ employs a voice-over narrative which further subscribes to the disaster movie prototype. However, it often verges on the indecipherable. Snippets of speech rise from a sea of pixelated noise: ‘I want to wake up with a smile on my face and be able to say I love what I do ... Whoever the fuck you are ... I just want to say I love you. I love you and goodbye ... Was it a political act?’ Beyond these fragments, wherever the narrative feels like it is garnering importance, it becomes obfuscated – not overtly, but the words bleed into one another, evading any categorical understanding.

Throughout the film, the dancers’ beautifully choreographed barbarity is inter-spliced with documentary shots of Far Rockaway, depicting the city’s attempt to manage the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Fahrenholz’s blurring of distinction between real-life disaster and abstract terror emphasises the way in which one understands the notion of ‘The Apocalypse’. Through our curious obsession with dystopian fantasies of destruction, ‘The Apocalyptic’ has transcended specificity, and come to exist as an abstract notion ripe for media consumption. The reality of terror is now experienced through a frame provided by Hollywood spectacle.

Set in the night-time streets, hotel hallways and posh apartments of New York, ‘Ditch Plains’ is a knowing and unsettling film. Farhenholz adopts the disaster movie paradigm, but deliberately eschews fundamental elements, forcing attention on the way in which terror is consumed as spectacle before it is acknowledged as reality.

Published on this is tomorrow: this is tomorrow

this is tomorrow review: BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT

Florian Auer: BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT:
Cell Project Space
25 May – 14 July 2013
Review by Kathryn Lloyd 

‘BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT’ is the first UK solo exhibition from Berlin-based artist Florian Auer. In this series of works, commissioned and exhibited by Cell Project Space, Auer continues his investigations into productivity-yielding vocations and their aesthetic tropes. In his previous work, Auer has displayed a deep-seated fascination for post-industrial aesthetics, which stem from the late eighties banking world and the changing environment of business culture. Here, the artist again adopts materials and objects closely associated with consumer desire, and inherent aspiration in the slick, corporate world. 

The gallery space has been lined with an electric blue carpet, and the Cell Project Space office clock has been hijacked and now rests benignly on the gallery wall. While the installation works are contingent upon this office-style encasing created by Auer, they also rally against it; creating a tense dichotomy between work and play. A plastic football is rooted to the floor, with the office clock brooding above it; a red and white punch bag hangs heavily from a chain in the ceiling, resembling a monstrous joint of meat. Two parallel wooden trestles are dusted with chalk, while nearby a suit jacket on a neon coat-hanger shows a post-workout chalky handprint on its pocket. These objects are ones of play; a serious play associated with the driven and ruthless corporate industries. 

Auer’s practice oscillates between technological references and the materiality of hand crafted matter, ease and labour and remorselessness and romance. The exhibition text, written by the artist’s close friend in the financial industry, Maximilian Biswanger, claims that the installations on display “seek to offer an auratic midnight manual for the late hour alchemy inherent to contemporary working settings - in which the bright rather open than close the positions at dusk.” Biswanger’s words, while oblique, soften and idolise an elitist world which is alien to the majority of society. 

The extreme ‘work hard/play hard’ environment which Auer is so intrigued by is one which is often abstracted by the media and represented by its material counterparts: the ‘playboy’ lifestyle, wealth and the objects it accumulates. It is a reality many understand through its luxury items. However, Auer’s perspective appears to come from somewhere else; he stands simultaneously within and without. There is an almost pathetic humaneness to the gym-related objects he displays; a monument to blind and relentless ambition. But there is also an impish, yet critical, humour in his employment of industrial materials such as lead, neon, wood, leather and his references to trade and ticker tape - one of the earliest electronic communication mediums used to circulate stock prices. 

Additionally, the allusions in ‘BABIES ARE BORN AT NIGHT’ to orthodox working/living performance routines, such as fundamental day/night constructions within the office place, further discussed by Biswanger, give the exhibition a clandestine, sinister atmosphere. There is a general sense of film-noir; the remnants of an indulgent, unrelenting lifestyle littered like clues, left to be discovered in the morning.

Published on this is tomorrow: this is tomorrow

this is tomorrow review: Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship

Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship
(A group exhibition stolen by Eva and Franco Mattes)
Carroll/Fletcher, London
23 April – 11 May 2013
Review by Kathryn Lloyd

Everything about this exhibition has been stolen: the concept, the curatorial conceit, the press release, and a proportion of the chosen artists. The original ‘Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship’ was curated by artist Artie Vierkant at Higher Pictures gallery in New York in July 2012. The 2013 reincarnation at Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London, curated by so-called hacktivist duo Eva and Franco Mattes, mirrors all aspects of the original concept and process, using a different location, and a slightly different accumulation of artworks.

Each exhibiting artist was asked to produce an object using a custom printing or fabrication service. In both cases, the show was commissioned and the press release drafted before a single work had been seen. These now omnipresent custom printing services are ostensibly platforms for creativity and self-expression within the realm of commonplace goods. While the tools for image creation and dissemination have become increasingly democratised, such services are expanding this domain into the realm of objects.

However, the inherently remote nature of ordering a customised mug, t-shirt or phone-case, with a digitally rendered image, inevitably usurps the notion of individual creativity and, instead, transforms a plethora of authors into a mass of commodities. Utilising digital customisation, objects are intractably opposed to Walter Benjamin’s infamous notion of aura. Although, it is nothing new that the loss of aura has become more pronounced in proportion to technological advancement, ‘Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship’ offers a playful and intelligent perspective on the consumer/creator relationship, and the progressive collapse of hierarchy between the two.

The “self-expression” that custom printing and fabrication services provide supposes, at its naivest level, that an exhibition comprised entirely of objects which utilise them would be one replete with character - albeit a distanced one. However, it is strikingly devoid of character; a room full of impenetrable objects. Objects such as flip-flops, key rings, seat-belts, toilet paper, vinyl images and clothing. It is their very object-hood – their inability to remove themselves from their own function – that creates a barrier between thing and image.

Daniel Temkin’s ‘Dither Study #40 Flip Flops’ is a spattering of flip flops, covered in green and pink pixels. Temkin’s ‘Dither Series’ (begun in 2011) is a “collaboration with Photoshop”, in which he gives the programme an impossible task, “to draw a solid colour or gradient with a palette of incompatible colours, thus exposing the dithering algorithm’s complex, seemingly irrational patterns.” These are then exhibited as large-scale prints, on screen, or, in this case, on a pile of flip-flops. Here, Temkin’s decision to print his dithering pattern onto a flip-flop exposes an entirely arbitrary link between object and image - one which is purposefully apparent throughout the show.

Sean Raspet’s offering – a stack of printed mugs, some snugly sat in their polystyrene packaging boxes, others piled precariously on top – similarly indicates a discretionary relationship between object and image imposed upon it. His designs layer photographs: elbows and legs caught in passing on the street, the arms of empty chairs and glimpses of shoes are superimposed on top of one another, producing a graphic that is at once voyeuristic and empty. This work is entitled ‘2Registration::(“Untz’tled (Police Incident (5[b])))5, (((2007-2012) 2007-2011.”)2012)’, indicating the images reference a specific, potentially violent event. It is through the lack of any comprehensible reasoning for printing these images onto white mugs, that the mutable nature of digital imagery is acknowledged. As the number of images and the speed of their transmission increase, fewer images tend to dominate, resulting in the calcification of any “iconic” image. It is progressively rare to witness a single, still image. Raspet’s superimpositions reference the increasing need for images to correlate; to create meaning collectively, rather than solitarily.

The curation of this exhibition rests somewhere between haphazard and extensively considered. Initially it seems sparse, but there are images everywhere – vinyl works are plastered into the upper and lower gallery corners, large images are stuck on the floor and objects are suspended from the ceiling. Justin Kemp’s large-scale photograph ‘Homeless Person Sleeping’ is on the wall as you immediately enter the gallery, forcing you to walk past it before fully acknowledging its presence; an uncomfortable parallel of these circumstances in reality. Similarly, the use of images in corners mimics the way in which we encounter graphics on our computer screens – in different windows, thumbnails, cursors or pop ups.

Andrew Norman Wilson’s ‘The Rainbow Girl-9’, an inkjet print on an adhesive fabric poster, is lurid pink, and stretches over a plug socket on the wall. The image is taken from a series in which Wilson collects anomalies from Google books, such as software distortions, or the hands of Google employees as they are scanning. ‘The Rainbow Girl-9’ shows the hand of an employee wearing a pink “finger condom” as “she” holds something in place for scanning. The series highlights the complex nature of digitising information; the labour involved does not necessarily require any cognitive interaction with its content. Meanwhile we, as consumers, are oblivious to the anonymous workers, whom Wilson references as ScanOps, as the information spontaneously manifests and joins the infinite digital archive.

Central to this exhibition is a playful investigation into the democratisation of images. Additionally, it offers an insight into a world where authors and artists verge on redundancy. With the majority of these objects being ordered online and posted directly to the gallery, one has to acknowledge the lack of the artist’s hand. There is a general aversion to responsibility. However, where does responsibility lie in a realm where creativity inherently manifests as commodity?

‘Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship’ could never have been a unique exhibition; it was calling out to be stolen. The original show set out to challenge traditional ideas of object production and material constraint. Eva and Franco Mattes have augmented this idea, challenging not only object and image production, but also any form of authorship itself.

Published on this is tomorrow: this is tomorrow

golden fable: crossfire digital release

www.goldenfable.com

rsa new contemporaries 2013

Photo: Georgina Bolton

Review: Everything was Moving

(Exhibition Review) Barbican Centre. 13 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

Everything was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s at the Barbican Centre, is a major survey of photographers and photography itself. The exhibition purports to tell ‘a history of photography, through the photography of history.’ The symbiotic nature of history and photography is investigated by 12 photographers from across the globe - Japan, Russia, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Germany, Mali, America - all detailing the varying social and political realities of the 60s and 70s.

With over 400 works, and the examination of so many different socio-political situations, the show is inevitably overwhelming. In a half-hearted attempt to combat this, the works of each photographer are split into chapter-like sections. Chapter One is the black and white imagery of David Goldblatt. The life-long preoccupation of Goldbatt has been the country of his birth: South Africa. Over five decades he has made a series of critical explorations of South African society, which cumulatively form a tableau of life during and after the apartheid. Goldblatt is a considered voyeur; careful to create a balance between the critical and judgmental, detachment and involvement. In this sense, there is an anguished absence in his images; the carefulness with which he manoeuvres the impartiality of photography, and its inability to act, is felt like a weight as heavy as the situations he captures. His images are caught up in their own futility.

The discipline of photojournalism is one that is central to this exhibition; the ways in which it is acknowledged, negated, deviated from, deconstructed and, in some cases, completely obliterated, is perhaps the most interesting element of the show. Goldblatt’s viewpoint allies him with photojournalism’s original intent to document and inform. Similarly, Ernest Cole’s didactic photography aims to describe every dimension of the ‘quality of repression.’ After somehow persuading the Race Classification Board in South Africa that he was not ‘black’ but ‘coloured’, Cole started work as a journalist. Cole’s images are sparse, but rich in understanding. The titles attributed to the images are, however, the most enlightening. For example, an image of several black men leaping on to an apparently moving train at a station, is dramatic but meaningless until expanded by a text describing that ‘Black trains’ were given no signs or numbers; no indication of direction, and thus became a lottery of destinations.

The photographs of Golblatt and Cole are inevitably compared; both work in black and white, focus on the apartheid in South Africa and understand the importance of photographic captions. However, Cole was black and Golblatt is white. Cole died in poverty in 1990, his negatives given away, supposedly, in lieu of an unpaid hotel bill. Goldblatt is over 80, represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery and has exhibited his images all over the world. Is there any difference in the veracity of the images they took? Photography is, ostensibly, an objective medium but whether it always real, and necessary; and whether whomever saw it, captured it and rendered it indelible is a pertinent question of photojournalism.

Comparatively, the work of William Eggleston is devoid of journalism. His work was originally criticised for its lack of subject matter and political agenda. In contrast to the four surrounding rooms, entirely comprised of black and white imagery, the colours of Eggleston’s photographs are undeniably seductive. According to curator Kate Bush, one of the key questions the show raises is whether we are prepared to erase the distinction between art and documentary photography? In this context, the decision to include Eggleston in the exhibition suddenly seems contrived and antagonistic. Nevertheless, the gulf between his images of near hallucinatory perception of everyday scenes in Southern America and the unflinching shots of Goldblatt, while it does not lessen, does become less significant.

Adrian Searle, in his review of the exhibition for The Guardian, asks: ‘Is there a connection between a jukebox on a wall in Los Alamos, shot by Eggleston, and a soldier’s helmet to which the skull has fused, in a photograph by [Shomei] Tomatsu? If there is, it has nothing to do with photography, though it might have something to do with Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed, and Nagasaki, where it was dropped.’ However, isn’t it surely the point that it has everything to do with photography, and nothing else? Photography collapses everything it captures into image; where everything exists on the same plane. To deny the unifying link that photography affords such varying situations, seems to evade the crux of this particular exhibition. Photography is its own world; it simply reflects our own.

Further pushing this blurring of distinction between art and documentary are artist/photographers Boris Mikhailov and Sigmar Polke. Mikhailov, constrained by Soviet domination of the Ukraine, developed a unique photographic approach in order to evade censorship and satirise the political occupation. His series Yesterday’s Sandwich/Superimpositionsinvolves two slide transparencies; a banal image, such as a sandwich, superimposed onto forbidden subjects such as politics, religion and nudity. The results are somewhere between the grotesque and the beautiful and are complex, witty explorations into life under the Soviet regime. 

Polke, similarly, employs a confused/confusing aesthetic with a sequence of images entitled Der Bärenkampf (The Bear Fight), which have been obscured by a printing process, leaving random chemical marks across the surface. These manipulated photographs have been interpreted as a pre-figuration of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 - four years after the series was created. By obfuscating the image detail and the unity of the photographic plane, Polke has created a series of images that divert the viewer from a wholly ‘documentary’ reading, focusing instead on the intended symbolism.

The works of Mikhailov and Polke, through their use of encryption and obscuration, make it clearer than most the possibilities, and impossibilities of photography. Their work highlights the complicated nature of a viewer’s relationship to images; that photography is as complex as the subjects it captures. In this respect, the title for this exhibition, Everything was Moving, could not have been more suited; vague and ethereal, it contrasts with what it ostensibly a direct show. However, it mirrors photography’s ability to be fixed and unstable; to encompass everything, to seem concrete, while be constantly moving. 

Kathryn Lloyd

First published on the Line Magazine blog

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