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Showing posts with label susan beattie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label susan beattie. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
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I've had a kickin' year in art. Over the last 12 months I've performed in the Victoria & Albert Museum, at Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin and, my favourite, at Hackney WickED festival, where I made a political statement by being pelted with 150 eggs as a political statement. That was the best artistic thing I did this year but it feels somehow egotistical to award myself top prize in my own contest. So here's the tastiest fruits I discovered while out and about in London in 2014:
Honourable Mentions:
Live In Your Dreams!', The Crypt of St Pancras Church, 26th February 2014
I am not a difficult man to please. Give me a subterranean labyrinth to wander about and I'm yours. Even better if it's a spooky church crypt. Even even better if it's jampacked full of interesting art. I saw some great work by Central St. Martin's students this year, including some ace works by artists like Boris Raux, whose molecular art exploits damn near every sense; Charlotte Wendy Law, who reconfigures objects in fascinating new ways, drawing new materials from the ether; and Susan Beattie, who seems to find endless ways to utilise a piece of pig's gut. The sense of atmosphere and occasion here was outstanding, the pieces slotting beautifully into the musty space.
'The Choreography of Things', meeting Choy Ka Fai at arebyte Gallery, 18 January 2014
Give me something new to see or hear and I'll dance a jig of joy. So when I was invited to meet Choy Ka Fai at arebyte Gallery, with the goa of being hooked up to shock pads and plugged into his mind control device I jumped at the chance. He didn't disappoint. As I noted at the time there's something of the mad scientist to him but maybe that's inescapable when you write a programme ominously titled 'Mind Control Interface'. When was hooked up to his device and the juice was flowing through me, the feeling of my arm jumping around and curling up was utterly alien - the experience of someone else's brainwaves manipulating my arm and giving me a taste of some disturbing future. Check out the video.
'Dead Cat Bounce' by Alice Woods at Light Eye Mind, 14th November 2014
Any exhibition that leaves you feeling smarter than when you went in is worth a shake in my book. Alice Woods' Dead Cat Bounce made the complex world of financial chicanery navigable by the layman (me). Despite trying to keep abreast of what the hell is happening in the economy, there seem to be infinitely complex layers of jargon that, if I was a paranoid man, would seem suspiciously like they don't want people to understand it. Woods busted through all that, representing this world with style and visual panache. I particularly dug the chilling deck of cards that listed every part of the state that'd been privatised over the last 20 years, a piece that cements in the observer's mind just how much we've lost.
WINNER:
'Cornershop' by Lucy Sparrow, 26th August 2014
Having been running this site for a couple of years now, it's been deeply satisfying to meet artists contributing to group shows, being invited by them to see what they've been up to and finally see them gain some modicum of attention from the wider world. After meeting Lucy in 2013 at the Whitecross Street festival, where she was exhibiting a felt portrait of Rose West (to mixed reactions from the public), I resolved to keep an eye on what she was heading towards
The pinnacle of these was Cornershop: an entire shop constructed from felt situated in the East End of London. It was an eye-catching work, gaining attention from around the world and being featured in all major newspapers, on loads of art sites and all over social media. It's weird to see something you like being praised by The Daily Mail of all places, but, importantly, in gaining attention from the mainsteam media Lucy didn't sell out. Lurking just beneath soft felt is razor-sharp satire and a keenly political eye.
I dug Cornershop so much a felt tube of K.Y. Jelly now sits proudly on top of my mantlepiece. Can't wait to see what she does next.
23rd December: Gigs
29th December: Best films
Friday, October 3, 2014
Friday, October 3, 2014
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There's a pleasing harmony in venturing down a great big hole to view works by female artists – especially when you discover a gigantic sugary clit nestled within. Brunel's shaft, a hop, skip and jump from Rotherhithe overground station, throbs with a weirdly compelling electricity, as if you're uncovering secrets just by being there. Clambering down on hands and knees through a claustrophobic doorway, you emerge at the top of a neon-lit scaffolding staircase. Below you lies a perfect circle of stained brick and rough concrete, the walls bisected by 150 year old pipes that rise like veins to the ceiling, swollen with rust and blackened by time. As you gingerly make your way down to the floor level you feel the gentle vibration and *whoosh* of the Overground passing just below you.
All things considered it's a neat place to be – frankly I'd be having a good time down here even if there wasn't art about. But there is, and fortunately the artists exhibiting, Charlotte Wendy Law, Susan Beattie and Kristina Pulejkova, fit the space like a glove. All three are exhibiting work caught in moments of a transition, objects that look as if they've been startled during the process of their creation, frozen like a deer in the headlights.
Susan Beatties' Baba wants what Baba dreams sculptures rise from piles of soil on the floor, blossoming into life as if she's more gardener than artist. The roughly person-size sculptures combine biological material (fur, intestines and a familiar looking piece of cow gut) with compacted earth pressed onto wooden sculptures. These rough-hewn shapes remind me of neolithic sacrificial sculptures; I can imagine ancient artist coaxing objects like this into existence and tossing them underground to appease some kind of bog god.
The most eye-catching is a 5 foot tall vulva with lips rendered in hundreds and thousands and pink icing. There's a pleasingly frank sexuality at play, genitals divorced from prudish morality and presented as objects of delicious veneration. That they look as if they've spontaneously sprouted from the concrete floor only underlines the effect, like the very earth under our feet has thrown them up from our collective subconscious.
More artificial, yet no less organic are Charlotte Wendy Law's Experiments in E. These sculptures are chaotic tangles of detritus. Bits of burnt piano, distorted balloons and random trash collide to create weird, purposeless objects. It's as if a particularly artistically minded hurricane has swept through a junkyard, mashing stuff together in a kaleidoscopic tangle.
I had a chat to Charlotte at the beginning of the exhibition, who explained that the pieces were influenced by the early Victorian psychic Helene Smith, who had become a minor celebrity on the back of claiming to be from Mars. To back up her claim she spoke Martian as a party act (unfortunately no recordings survive). Slightly puzzled, I went back to the works and tried my best to frame them with this in mind.
What I came up with was that just as Helen Smith had invented her own grammar and syntax, so Charlotte has created a grammar and syntax of objects. These kludged together sculptures, reminiscent of s possess a weird cargo-cult logic, suffused with directionless purpose. Every little junky fragment appears to be in the 'right place', yet there is no 'right place'.
To close off the evening Charlotte gave us a demonstration of her creative process. To an avant-garde musical accompaniment by sound artist Artur Vidal she showed us creation and destruction. Throughout the night a space blanket has been lying in the centre of the room like some gigantic metal grub. Wearing a crimson boiler suit Charlotte peels it open to reveal a tangle of junk. She picks up burnt, smashed up bits of wood, planks with nails jutting out of them and a broken balloons and begins to assemble them into a sculpture. Though she's freewheelin', there's a sense of purposefulness, like she's putting together a jigsaw.
After about twenty minutes her creation towers above her, a teetering, ramshackle, nail-studded sort of thing that looks like a health and safety nightmare. A tension builds in the crowd as it wobbles with each additional piece like a particularly modish game of Buckaroo. Then, with a creak, a bit falls off, bashing the rest on the way down. The structure is suddenly imbalanced and collapses into a mashed up tangle of planks and nails – from objet d'art to yesterdays trash in about 3 seconds flat.
There's a punky sort of satire in this performance. We've spent the evening admiring Charlotte's sculptures, enjoying their complexity and trying to work out what they're trying to communicate. But here, like Helene Smiths's meaningless Martian gobbledegook the grammar behind it is revealed as pure nonsense, a blizzard of phonemes that functions at as a simulacrum of language.
Also on display was Kristina Pulejkova's O, a short, looped film projected high onto the curved wall of the shaft. This continuec the communication theme, the footage showing us mouths apparently moving in morse code, saying “hello”. Once more the art appears to emerge from deep within the earth, the projectioned image appearing as a ghostly apparition on top of the old bricks.
To the side of the scaffolding was an artist's impression of the shaft at the height of its popularity. In its day it was quite the tourist attraction; curious and elegantly dressed Victorians driven here to experience the novelty of being underneath the River Thames. This novelty was not to last and soon the dank, gas-lit tunnels became famed for their population of prostitutes and low-lives rather than for Brunel's architectural ingenuity – so were walled off and confined to industrial use.
It's interesting to compare their present, semi-decrepit state to their opulent opening. You can still see the marks on the walls where Brunel's spiral staircase was attached and imagine excited people processing down into the depths. Exhibitions like Hello Ape Eyes keep these amazing places alive, a sort of time travelling game of whispers between the was and the now.
So I had a great time. Honestly, drag me to any mysterious hole in the ground and I'm yours. All hail subterranea!
Hello Ape Eyes is at the Brunel Tunnel Shaft, next to the Brunel Museum, SE16 4LF from the 3-5 October. 12-6pm.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
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When someone asks you if you want to wear a mask made of human hair and stalk around a crypt distributing pomegranate seeds to people there's really only one answer - YES! This is how I wound up spending my Wednesday night; sequestered in a brick-line, corpse-vacated vault, spookily tip-toeing about, shoving a plate piled high with sticky chunks of redness under innocent noses and demanding they have a gobble. All this was in service of Live In Your Dreams!, an exhibition that aims to reimagine this crypt as a "collective dream", an underworld where subconscious symbols can frolic in the moody subterranean halflight.
This is a mini-labyrinth, a tangle of curved corridors and dusty alcoves. This space once contained the coffins of those notable enough to be bunged underneath a central London church. They've all gone now, dispatched to wherever it is they send the dead when those in charge want to get rid of a load of dusty bones. Tonight they've been replaced with an art pic n' mix; every nook and cranny home to work covering a vast amount of mediums. This was a high quality exhibition, but though I liked damn near everything on display I don't have time to write about every little thing - so here's my personal highlights.
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| Susan Beattie - Loop Curtain |
First up a big pile of guts. Susan Beattie's Loop Curtain lurks just inside the entrance. Composed of sheep's intestine, ox bung and raw sheep's fleece it lies in an organic, slightly nauseating, tangle. The whole thing looks maggotty to me; especially the large ox bung (which I think is a cow's rectum/anus) sitting in the middle. A big old heap of maggots isn't exactly a pleasant sight to come across, but then we're in a place expressly designed to accommodate the process of decomposition. As gross as maggots are they're a direct manifestation of new life from death. It's interesting to look at this place as the home of the evicted dead tenants - and what would the dead have bouncing around their skulls if not maggots?
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| Susie Calvert - Microcosm |
Though a morbid shroud hangs over the crypt there's pinpoints of brightness glimmering in the gloom. Susie Calvert's Microcosm consists of pop-inflected urban environments drawn in crayon on plywood. Using a chunk of masonry as a stage they're a shattered kaleidoscope; an individual's snatched memories of a city able to be assembled in infinite configurations. When we dream of a physical place we assemble it from a jigsaw puzzle of subconscious details. A half-glance at a lamp-post, a broken window that catches our eye, the way the sunlight casts shadows across the frontage of buildings - all of these become recombined in our dreams to form a shade: our individual impression of a location. Purely on an aesthetic level it's a breath of fresh air nestled deep in the dank grey and browns of the crypt.
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| Boris Raux - the space divider - mushrooms version |
Similarly lightening things up is Boris Raux' the space divider - mushrooms version. I met Boris before at the Experimentations show last November; there he had condensed seawater into thousands of squishy spheres, here he's created a smell dispersal device: two tubs of coloured liquid with a fan blowing across the top. A sweet smell wafts around the entire gallery, apparently the smell of cave and psilocybin mushrooms. Boris has just a touch of the mad scientist to him, marrying an idiosyncratic personal alchemy onto new kinds of technology. The piece looks vaguely like a satellite, the two pools of liquid solar panels between them. Physically it's no great shakes; though the liquids glitter and swirl in enjoyable random fractal swirls. But this art doesn't stop at the borders of the installation, it hangs in the atmosphere - tiny molecules of vaguely hallucinogenic liquids suspended in the air, embedding themselves within the noses of all who enter. So Boris has literally succeeded in getting inside his audience's head; impregnating us with his ideas and philosophies.
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| Andy Flett - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me |
In terms of work that creates an immediate physical impression, there's few things in the gallery that stood out as much as Andy Flett's Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. Dreamland can be understood as an infinite land where anything is possible, where all the impulses, fears and desires that lurk within us come out to play without supervision. His piece, a roll of paper containing descriptions of his dreams in ever-decreasing type, is an unfiltered gate between his mind and the paper. His dreams, ranging from the banal to the bizarre, are thrown into one long stream of thought. The dreaming mind has no real concern over whether what it's putting out is fun, normal or pleasant - just spewing the disconnected detritus of what's rolling around in our brains back at us.
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| Mona Choo - Stuck |
The final piece I particularly dug was Mona Choo's Stuck. Here the passages of the crypt become home to small, tangled up doodles of people on twisted up acrylic. They cling to the walls, wrapped around each other with a childlike vulnerability - the plastic rolling up like one of those fortune-telling fish you find inside a Christmas cracker. The figures sway in the drafts that breeze through the tunnels, giving them a strangely quivering sort of life. One pair of tangled up people twirls in the breeze, intertwining in a vaguely Picasso-y way. This felt like the dream of the crypt itself; the spirits of the dead remaining in its memories even though their physical remains have long departed.
If you like exploring subterranean secrets and touching the fabric of the subconscious, then Live in Your Dreams! is easily worth checking out. The work on display complements the space fantastically, breathing some life and imagination into these dusty old bricks. Aside from what I've mentioned there's a tonne of other great stuff there, so pay a visit - you won't regret it!
Live in Your Dreams finishes on the 3rd of March - opening times 12-6pm.
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