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Issue
26
Cory Arcangel (beige) Request for comments at Max Wigram Ridley Road;
Guy Ben-Ner at Gimpel Fils;
Isobar at Fieldgate Gallery;
Postcard from North Korea
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Cory
Arcangel (beige) Request for comments at Max Wigram
Ridley Road
Address:
2nd floor, 51- 63 Ridley Road, E8 2NP
Dates: 6 October
- 16 December
Times: Saturday - Sunday 12 - 6pm,
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There's an echoing bombardment of fireworks outside, lighting up the horizontal window slots of the Max Wigram Gallery. For a moment, it's like being in one of those wartime bunkers that dot the Atlantic coast. Within, nearly drowned out by a looped guitar riff somewhere in the background, a familiar, intermittent, tone. One that's universally awaited, that usually quickens the heart.
'Permanent vacation', is a mess of computer gear and, projected large, two Outlook Express inboxes side by side. Phyllis's receives Craig's out of office reply and mails one back, etc. Their failed relationship is slowly, symmetrically perpetuated. How long, though, before the Viagra merchants intervene?
In the past, Cory Arcangel has put his hacking skills to customising outmoded game programmes. He is still concerned with the tyranny of hi-tech corporations over modern life, and how creative technology subjugates those that use it, from the ubiquity of its stylistic impositions to the built-in obsolescence that ensures the redundancy of the work that has been created on it. This time he professes to have conceded defeat to the enemy, but there's a cheeky twinkle in his eye. On the face of it this show rubs our faces in a series of factory settings and defaults: all style and no content, except, in some cases, there's no content or style. 'Structural Film' uses the i-movie scratch application, designed to make home videos look like aging celluloid. He hasn't added any images though. It's been transferred to film, which loops endlessly through a projector. The sequence became corrupted somewhere along the line; stray pixels dance around the screen, the digital equivalent of hairs in the gate. The effect is a reminder of Harmony Korinne's use of digital zoom to add grain to his footage. The little gremlins were a lucky mistake, Arcangel claims. Whatever, they neatly complete the piece.
'Monochrome' features more technology that's been short circuited. The artist has scratched the glass of a computer scanner, and painted the screen blue. The resulting scan has been blown up enormously, a mottled print that is difficult to make out in the gloom of the gallery. On the floor, the abused scanner sits on its packaging. The punch line of the piece is explained by the enthusiastic invigilator. The paint is a designer brand with a ridiculous moniker. 'New York Loft', or something.
'Plasma Screen Burn' is a cautionary tale for those who record Countdown, forgetting they've still paused it when they pop out to the petrol station for some chocolate. When they return from the four day drinking bender with the old friend they bumped into on the way they'll find FAJWESXOP and the ghostly silhouette of Carol Vorderman irreparably etched upon the inside.
Rock provides the show's subplot. The repeated guitar riff, rather annoying by now, belongs to Guns'n'Roses. This is the most conventional piece in the show, and its link with the other pieces seems rather tenuous, but does provide more chuckles. It consists of two identical loops of video, one slightly shorter than the other, that drift in and out of synch in a 17 minute cycle. The sequence itself is very short, taken from a band promo. Its brevity reduces Slash's rock posturing to hammy preposterousness.
A stack of CDs in a tower just about steers the rock element back to the main premise of the show. Arcangel has recorded Bruce Springsteen tracks on them, with a glockenspiel accompaniment. He hopes they will spread through something napster-like and end up somewhere interesting where they shouldn't be. You can watch the artist, sporting a Metallica T shirt, plinkyplinking along to one of the tracks live but rather less masterfully on YouTube, where examples of his video game hybrids can also be found.
Four readymades are the embodiment of Arcangel's mission statement. Great splurges of primary colouration evidently dragged straight off the programme. The word 'photoshop' has been squeezed out of a virtual toothpaste tube. Yuk. 'But that's just the point', to misquote the statement. If the theory is sound, they will one day be design classics. Until then, snigger at the thought of them on a wall in a New York Loft painted in 'New York Loft'.
PH
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Guy
Ben-Ner at Gimpel Fils
Address: 30 Davis Street, W1K 4NB
Dates: 10 October - 17 November
Times: Monday
- Friday 10am - 5.30pm, Saturday 11am - 4 pm, free |
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Ikea might be cheap but they don't like to give it away. Their press pack contains seven sheets of A4 paper yet we are told on the back of the envelope that it cost £5 to produce. You would think that with the amount of catalogues they must run off they would be able to get their printing costs down a bit. You can imagine how grumpy they must have got catching Guy Ben-Ner making his film in their example kitchens with out permission.
Adapting the products/spaces of big corporations to make work continues to be a medium for artists; whether they are using the soldiers in the computer game 'Halo' to discuss philosophical issues or re-editing films to their own ends. The subversion necessary for Ben-Ner's piece is obvious yet it succeeds in rising above 'wow isn't that clever' and becoming something all the more sublime.
Ben-Ner, his wife and two children wander casually into IKEA, put down the camera and act out the scenes necessary for his film. They work their way through the script until a member of staff catches on and asks them to leave. They filmed at two IKEAs in Israel, one in Germany and one in America and over a good few months if hair-length is anything to go by. Continuity isn't an issue here; in fact it is a running joke. Clothing changes, rooms, price tags and languages; the only constants are the oblivious shoppers (bar the couple pointing at the camera) and the IKEA bags.
At 18 minutes long, 'Stealing Beauty' has a similar running time to a standard sit-com and a similar format, lots of sitting around the living room table or relaxing on the sofa à la 'Friends'. There are some fun visual gags using the sets with a long, slow pan from son washing up in one kitchen to washing up in a different kitchen set-up on the other side. There are a surprising number of dressing gown and pyjama shots and dad even appears without a shirt on at one point (so that'll be the end of another days filming then).
The plot is well-written, and reverberates well within the 'stolen' setting. Youngest son is caught stealing from a classmate and is sent home with a note. The family then discuss and compare ownership, property, worth and love. In one homely scene Dad charges for a bedtime story and is disappointed with his earnings. There is also a sub-plot about dad masturbating in the shower - with hilarious results.
It is a fun blend of slapstick, TV comedy, hidden camera shows and earnest, education programme but not totally without faults. The manifesto at the end is a bit heavy-handed and some of the acting may be a little wooden, but that's hardly surprising under the circumstances. It is probably the slickness of the set up that encourages us to make unfair comparisons, mind you, the littlest boy is very good and worth looking out for in future productions until he goes off the rails.
AL
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Isobar
at Fieldgate Gallery
Address:
14 Fieldgate Street, E1 1ES
Dates: 20 October - 11 November
Times: Friday - Sunday 1 - 6pm, free |
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In the introduction to the catalogue for this exhibition, curator and artist Gaia Persico describes Isobar as 'a temporary and variable line'. This meteorological definition articulates very neatly the ephemerality and fluidity of contemporary drawing practice which is the focus of the current show at Fieldgate Gallery. The notion of drawing as a process involving the making of marks on a two-dimensional surface has been exploded over recent decades, and the range of media that artists use are now more diverse than they have ever been before. Of the forty works on show here, for example, only a handful incorporate graphite. In its place, fruit, computer components, dust and 8mm film.
Natural and organic processes feature prominently among the first group of pieces on display. Finlay Taylor's snail-eaten books have instant appeal, both for the relic-like quality of the objects presented and the humour in the idea of employing armies of small animals to assist in the process of making. For one piece, East Dulwich Library, Taylor left a dictionary in the earth for 6 months to be worked on by slugs, snails, worms and woodlice. The resulting object appears as a kind of mummified rarity, the fabric of the hardback cover like muslin wrapped around skin. This is surely a remnant of an extinct civilisation. Perhaps a comment on the fragile status of the hard copy in our age of digitilisation. Alongside Taylor is one of Tonico Lemos Auad's trademark banana bunches. The British-born Brazilian uses pins to score the surface of the skin which, after several days, turns black. Skeleton forms appear. Eventually the black turns to white as the fruit deteriorates further creating a negative of the original image.
In contrast to these artist's fascination with nature Jools Johnson addresses man-made technology. His constructions using redundant computer parts stand as monuments to his own mixed feelings about the act of staring at pixelated screens for hours on end. With an incredible economy he creates sublime forms with perhaps just three or four components. There is a touch of George Lucas in the aesthetic of these pieces though this is apparently not conscious on Johnson's part. These works are fixed to the wall using screws from the same machines he dismantles, which creates a pleasing circularity of process. Another entirely separate piece of work by the same artist appears from a distance as a strip of green Astroturf. It seems that the 'grass' is slightly too long and it is not until we are much closer that it becomes apparent that the carpet is made from wooden golf tees; 12,000 of them in two shades of green. There is something almost religiously ritualistic about the iterative manner in which this piece has come to be.
Sarah Woodfine exhibits what might be considered the most traditional kind of drawing, employing pencil on paper, though it is by no means conventional. Her technique is painstaking and results in extremely seductive surfaces. In one piece Junior, a werewolf stands against a night sky - the blacks as smooth and dark as possible. On the reverse, an orchid. The paper is mounted on card which stands inside a bell jar. In another, Alfred's Story II, a car lies submerged in a lake. We can only make a barely informed guess at the content of the narrative here but the visual strength of this piece is sufficient to hold our attention.
There is so much good work in this exhibition that it seems unfair covering only a few of the artists here. It is clear that a great deal of energy has gone into the curation and every artist makes a significant contribution to the over-arching agenda. Michael Robbs's animation Mistrust of the Image as Representation is a brilliant comment on the discrepancy between truth and reality in the way that we see. In attempting to draw a straight line using Photoshop the magnified results of the various tools highlight their inadequacies to render what is desired of them. But it is probably Claude Heath's computer-generated animation Universe which embodies the spirit of the show more than any other piece. Like a global weather system, particles of what could be pixelated dust swarm around a voided sphere. The 'cloud' appears to be swelling and expanding outwards. Drawing as a discipline has morphed and expanded through its incorporation of so many different methodologies and Heath's Universe somehow seems to express something of this transformation.
AJL
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Postcard
from North Korea
Dear Artvehicle,
Amidst the tantalising snippets of information about North Korea acquired through news reports, one is hard-pushed to find any commentary on art in the country. Walking through the streets of Pyongyang, however, you are struck by the ubiquity of it. As with all that is on display in the Hermit Kingdom, it serves to promote the government, and far from lending charm to the surroundings, its only achievement (at least for the outsider) is to create a troubling and suffocating atmosphere.
North Korea's socialist realism art style, reminiscent of the propaganda art that sprang up in Russia and then China during the Russian and Cultural revolutions (and no less misleading) shot into existence during the 1940s, when, after decades of struggle against the Japanese occupation, the country was finally liberated. Although in reality this was a side-effect of the US's obliteration of the Japanese naval fleet at the end of the Second World War, the people of North Korea consider their path to freedom to have been beaten out by Kim Il Sung, who subsequently became president of the fledgling republic. The combination of the force of Kim's will and personality and a people decimated by decades of oppression led to the birth of one of the world's most fanatical personality cults.
The moment that the country and its society fell into step behind Kim Il Sung, its creative output followed suit. Some of the only visible signs of North Korea's artistic past lie within the Koryo Fine Arts Museum in Pyongyang, where it is possible to pinpoint the exact moment when the country disowned its cultural heritage. Herons and waterfalls give way to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il's inescapable, benevolent and watchful gaze. Often, they are surrounded by hordes of adoring citizens, whose faces are lit up by the rapture of boundless love and devotion. One is reminded, not a little uncomfortably, of scenes from the New Testament. Indeed, the North Koreans' holy trinity is completed by Kim Jong Suk (wife of Kim Il Sung and mother to Kim Jong Il), whose countenance, although not as omnipresent, is no less divine.
Nestled alongside these portraits are more explicit propaganda paintings, featuring the 'borrowed' hammer and sickle, American soldiers given vampiric makeovers, and countless scenes of the heroic exploits of the Korean People's Army; here, the soldiers are always moving forward, staring determinedly ahead, defiant against the threat.
Back out in the street, the story is much the same. Pyongyang is a shrine to the exploits of the Kims and their subjects; towering monuments extol the virtues of subservience to the state, and breath-taking mosaics and murals of an impossible size provide a constant reminder of the absolute control that the government has over the country and its people. The paintings are brightly coloured and vivid and, despite their overbearing message, manage to inject a cartoonish character into the otherwise monotonous concrete landscape.
One cannot deny the skill involved in the creation of these artworks. Their scale and perfection is uniform throughout the country, and the output staggeringly prolific. However, one cannot escape the fact that they exist solely because of the desires of a crushingly totalitarian political family. They are the result of a system in which human labour has no cost. The fact that these shining, immaculately kept tributes to the Kims are always within eyesight of the crumbling, squalid housing their subjects are forced to live in only highlights the levels of inhumanity that their egomania pushes them to. Ultimately, one's appreciation of the art in North Korea is contingent upon the age-old question: can you truly admire a piece of art for its own sake, in spite of its moral ambiguity?
NR |
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Recommended
Reza
Aramesh You were the dead, their's was the future At Barbican Art
Gallery
Iranian-born artist Reza Aramesh presents his new commission 'You were the dead, their's was the future' a performed still life, retracing the poses of figures in historical paintings and exploring their cultural and historical significance. The title is a quotation from Orwell's '1984', and the piece will explore identity and the relationship between love, desire, aggression and war. Aramesh's practice encompasses performance, video, curating exhibitions and editing the 'Centrefold Scrapbooks'.
Aramesh's performance is part of 'Thursdays ... After Hours' taking place every Thursday at the Barbican for the duration of the excellent 'Seduced: Art & Sex from Antiquity to Now' (on until 27 January). The exhibition is open late and there is a programme of specially curated events featuring artists' commissions, live music, erotic readings and talks with special cocktails and aphrodisiac snacks.
AM
Address:
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Date: 22 November
Time: 6.30-10pm,
performance at 7pm
Tickets: Free to same day ticket holders
(£8/£6)
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My
Still Life As A Personal Object at Alma Enterprises
Andro
Semeiko, Yu-Chen Wang, Nick Goulis, David Blandy, Lakis and Aris
Ionas are all in a show together down at Alma this month. It's going
to be great, there will be films, performance, painting and all manner
of artistic practices and it is all about the use of collecting and
recreating objects in contemporary artists practice.
AL
Address:
1 Vyner Street, E2 9DG
Dates: 9 November - 16 December
Times:
Friday - Sunday 12 - 6pm, free
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Credits
Images
Jools Johnson
God Lives in Detail III, 2007
Recycled computer parts
20.5 x 14.5 x 18cm
Courtesy the artist
Guy Ben-Ner
Stealing Beauty, 2007
Cory Arcangel
Sweet 16
Underground Station, Pyongyang
Photograph: NR
Kim Il Sung Square, Central Pyongyang.
Photograph: NR
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Artvehicle. All rights reserved. |
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