Texts
BAR VUG GUM
A review of Mark Pearson's exhibition at Moot - by Bruce Asbestos
Logic and Process
A brief synopsis of the work of Tom Godfrey - by Bruce Asbestos
An Almost Silent Room
Reflections on Lisa Cheung's performance at the Chinese Art Centre - by Bruce Asbestos
BAR VUG GUM
Aside from being a clever way to enliven the standard press release, these prodding, funny, provoking terms are meant to lead us astray - assigning these negative sounding words to the artist's practice is intended to wake up an audience regularly blinded by masses of tedious press. More importantly, it enables the bar-cum-installation 'BAR VUG GUM' to engage directly with its most simple observation head on: it is very male.
Essentially functioning as a bizarre disclaimer, the press release proclaims a perceived machoness of Pearson's work upfront. This permits the work to be more masculine, allowing the artist a larger creative scope, whilst avoiding the work being read as accidentally macho. It is also a statement that accepts the limits of such an enquiry; we can't look masculinity in the eye anymore, not directly and not without a wry smile. We look through the eyes of Richard Prince, mockingly, self deprecatingly, and aware.
'BAR VUG GUM's smiling, gleaming, wonky aesthetic is the nearest we can get to masculinity; the direct route through Feminism is too difficult to navigate, and so we end up in an ironic cul-de-sac where masculinity is signified by excessive drinking, kebabs, and rock and roll. These things are re-formed from a residue of strength and aggressiveness play-acted out in previous eras by the likes of Jackson Pollock or Sid Vicious, of which contemporary versions fall into self-parody.
Actual aggression is ugly. Arty aggression is steeped in irony, and at the very most is slightly boisterous naughtiness. This aggression is perhaps another way of trying to convey 'newness': we are far enough away from a particular way of thinking that old conventions can be embraced without heavy repercussions. (See the tag-line for Nestl''s Yorkie chocolate bar: "It's not for girls".) These things can therefore be used to mark out an artwork's difference from history and its contemporary counterparts; this sculpture is different from those sculptures and the sculptures before them.
Not that Pearson's work really wants to sensibly describe masculinity with any certainty, or at all. The words 'macho', 'male', 'chauvinist' and 'brutalist' form a contextual shell, which can describe a collection of highly aesthetical things that sit neatly and pleasingly within a particular idea of art. At two points in the installation the work seems deadly familiar; a home made DIY aesthetic with gloopy, messy paint on it, and a bar within a gallery.
Picnics, bars, boat trips, tea parties, meetings and the like are pretty standard fare within galleries to the point in which the term 'relational' can be used euphemistically, to describe hackneyed artistic customs.
Once we come out of the gallery, and put these work into the larger context of the last ten years, the big boldness displayed within the gallery is deflated.
Even so, in the main the works are not phlegmatic, but buzzy and entertaining; kitsch Bavarian steins hang uncomfortably on hooks that are too small, a kind of ideal sculpture for Pearson: oversized, eccentric, and playfully referential; literally and metaphorically unstable.
Pearson's rock-amp-guitar-karaoke-booth-thing-with-horns Knack Kraft, 2008, has a similarity to S Mark Gubb's I'm Alive, 2005, (which featured in 'Gordon Dalton vs S Mark Gubb' in 2006, at the Moot's old gallery space on Dakeyne Street). Gubb's work is composed of a Ramones album played through an old Marshall amp stack, edited so that the only thing left playing is the "one, two, three, four!" at the start of each track. The work is both surprising and romantic. Pearson's Knack Kraft, uses the same surprising shouty-silent technique to invigorate the gallery space. A dark pleasure is derived from seeing visitors in the gallery flinching when, without warning, Pearson's sculpture blasts out a barrage of rough guitar sounds. This joy is of course the outcome of having been subjected to this unforgiving prank oneself, providing the initiated with a smug, satisfying knowledge of what's in store for fellow visitors.
Snake Eyes, Super Balls, 2009, is a two metre by two and a half metre monster of a poster that carves out a strong idiosyncratic niche within the world of art posters. Each word occupies a different edge, in the font of Bob Holness' Blockbusters logo. We are well into Pearson territory here; this is the part of the exhibition where the work seems most at ease, most original, and most exciting. Pearson's Snake Eyes, Super Balls references and looks out, whereas his sculptures, in this exhibition at least, look inwards to a dwindling number of conventional sculptural options. By Bruce Asbestos
First published: a-n Magazine February 2010, www.a-n.co.uk Download as a PDF here
Logic and Process
The artwork 'Beans' switches between two images of a Heinz Baked Beans can on a black background. One of the images is the correct way round; the other has been flipped so the words on the label appear in reverse. When the animation is played, the central 'i' in Heinz and the 'a' in Beans stay in the same position due to the symmetry of the label's design.
Shaking and vibrating like the last buzzing convolutions of a trapped wasp, the familiar Heinz logo becomes difficult to read. The solidity of the gold and white border and the wobblingly abstracted word shapes allow the formal elements of the crest-like design to come to the fore.
Occasionally, this glitchy twitching pauses to reveal the label as we expect it to look, or in reverse - in either case, recognisable and functioning as the familiar, robust, trademarked design. This stillness only lasts for a fraction of a second, in which it loses its sense of abstraction and artful appropriation, and regains a comparative energy given to it by the label's original purpose: to provide product recognition for a can of Phaseolus Vulgaris.
To read this work (and perhaps any work) we, as thoughtful audiences, have to make assumptions about the intentions of the artist. We are not, I assume, supposed to think of the social, artistic, or historical importance of beans, or of Heinz. We are not, I assume, supposed to think of Warhol's soup cans, or student culinary delights, or to marvel at the wonder of what computer animation can achieve. We are, I assume, supposed to enjoy the simple discovery that some of the letters in the symmetrical Heinz Baked Beans design stay in the same place when you reverse the label.
Although 'Beans' can be understood and misunderstood independently, we cannot help but try to make logical links to the artist's other works to inform a narrative around an artist's practice.
'The Dominoed' is helpful in shaping this narrative, because it again misuses abundant and pre-existing content, building the shape in which Godfrey's practice takes and underlining the significant parts of his investigation: that of poaching the aesthetics of obscure, forgettable or disregarded things. Images in Godfrey's 'The Dominoed' are sourced from 'Rate me' porn websites, in which individuals post images of themselves in the nude to get 'rated' by other site visitors. The ones that make it into the archive have been modified by their owners to block out their faces with a view to hiding their identity.
Although the images hold on to their original function as home-made porn, within the context this purpose is superseded by Godfrey's artistic intention to point out the accidental, amateur, dare I say it, 'creative', inventiveness on the part of the exhibitionists; what could I use to block out my face? Do I go for a black bar, Photoshop swirl, or a rave-like smiley? The focus has shifted from the subject of porn to the form of the edited images.
These works create the situation in which mass-produced items (even home-made porn) have sculptural, aesthetic, comic, or poetic potential, way beyond their original purpose. The disjointed relationship that the object or image has to its own history is really where the work gains its momentum.
Although the work is fixated on mass-produced, synthetic things, as a collection we are not drawn into a critique of consumerism. The work is not directed towards an academic or illustrative end. The work's aims are much subtler than this.
A spatial, sculptural form created from a bicycle chain, for example, probably has its origins in the small discovery that if a chain is twisted in the right way, it becomes rigid and (almost) accidentally aesthetic, and gains the ability to hold itself upright and carve out shapes in the air. Although it keeps some of the aesthetics generated by its previous occupation, it becomes redundant as a chain, loosing its energy-transferring properties.
Through the presentation of this and other works, Godfrey seeks to create a situation in which a viewer can have a similar sense of discovery as the artist. We are directed towards having an aesthetic or poetic experience of some sort, and away from considering the work as a conceptual, political, or theoretical statement. Although, of course, the act of creating artwork is born out of social constructions and values and is therefore inevitably a conceptual, political and theoretical statement.
The artist has, provisionally at least, set the scene for the work; an almost text-less environment in the hope that we can come to the work 'as-is', or at least come to the work prepared with the idea that we should look at the work, 'as-is'.
Although the work has this potential to be open-ended in that it doesn't directly try to create meaning in some pedagogic way, the correct response to the work is, paradoxically, to gather a sense of openness, simplicity, and ambiguity, which are instructions gleaned from the context and style in which the work is created.
For instance, 'Cord', 'Beans', and 'Chain' all do what they say on the tin, so to speak. Other titles such as 'From the Outside', 'Born Again and Again', and 'Cloth Cameras' are more exuberant, but avoid directly explaining or contextualising the work, and seek to direct attention away from a single didactic message.
Essays and extended descriptions or explanations are not presented or referenced on the artist's website, a location where an artist has substantial control over the presentation of his artwork.
Within the bounds of the website, he has control over which artworks appear (and which are forgotten), in which order the artworks are shown, and which contextual devices are used in tandem with the work - images, texts, other websites, other projects, other artists' works, and so on.
Images of works presented on the website are in a sort of stasis, they do not develop, fall over, or become another work; they do not crumble, rust, or get stolen. The audience cannot see the work from the wrong angle, in the wrong light, or with a can of beer balanced on it at the end of an enthusiastic private view.
In the future Godfrey's work will be mediated, by text and images produced by other people, beyond his control and beyond the strict confines of an artist website. But for now, titles, images, website, and other contextual information confirms - or appears to confirm - a consistent angle on how the work should be read, which will be a ongoing concern for works which pride themselves in their evasiveness.
Bruce Asbestos
Curator of Trade Gallery
www.tradegallery.org
Tom Godfrey's exhibition The Three Day Week is currently on at Castle & Elephant
The installation/performance by Lisa Cheung was intended as a meditation on the deaths of the Chinese Cockle pickers on Morecambe Bay in 2004.
Some of the small rotating light shades in the installation projected wave like patterns on to the walls of the gallery; others projected sentences like "The tide is coming up," and "Tell my family to pray for me," which were taken from the final text messages sent by the Cockle Pickers. The actions of the trigger-happy cameraman were, in all likelihood, just the result of an oversight on the part of the cameraman, artist, or organisers. However, this situation created an acute awareness that we were experiencing both the creation of artwork and the creation of mediation. In this instance (or my experience of it), the creation of art-as-mediation trumped the art-as-experience.
Documentation is infinitely reproducible and without a time limit, and therefore there are infinite opportunities for new audiences to experience the work through it. The audience's experience in the installation is, by contrast, specific and limited - 25 or so individuals at the Chinese Art Centre experiencing an hour long performance.
Documentation images which feature an audience serve to demonstrate that the initial experience is substantial (or perhaps subtle) enough to require a live experience, and shouldn't be experienced primarily through images. The audience is also a tool with which the work can locate itself within a collection of commonly understood ideas, which together can loosely describe 'performance'.
The undocumented performance doesn't manage to avoid this reliance on audiences. Instead it carves out a negative position: the performance does not remain simply as an undocumented event, without an audience. The absent camera and the act of not documenting becomes a statement which becomes part of the narrative of the work. By not documenting work we do not find ourselves outside the discussion of documentation, but perversely further into it, as this approach relies on the audience's ability to create discussions, articles, and non-visual mediation for its virus-like survival.
Like a child asking old Aunty Jean to recall who attended the wedding after a few sherries, the artist cannot always rely on other people to provide such sticky, powerful narratives needed to transfer ideas to other, new audiences.
And so we create images to back up - and as references for - our multifarious, changing, collective memories, but also out of institutional custom (much like the wedding photograph), in which the creation of mediational images and narratives are vital for providing references and proof, for the artist - and the institution - to both acquire legitimacy, and survive.
Bruce Asbestos
Curator of Trade Gallery
www.tradegallery.org
Published by http://www.yh485press.org/
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_institutionalism
New institutionalism: a social theory that focuses on developing a sociological view of institutions - the way they interact and the way they affect society and how institutions shape the behaviour of individual members.
Andrew Mitchelson, International Live Artists of Chinese Descent, published by Chinese Arts Centre
Image Credit: James Champion, Photography Vital 2006, Chinese Arts Centre.
Lisa Cheung's installation/performance was part of VITAL 06: International Chinese Art Festival at the Chinese Art Centre, Manchester 2nd - 4th November 2006.