Lately, lacking inspiration I found myself looking at a Google search bar armed with the momentum to explore, but missing the “Why.What.Who.” I submitted ‘bored’[1] and ‘lost’[2] simply to fill the blank and kick start something… Anything. I soon realise that it isn’t advisable to go looking for knowledge for its own sake and maybe it would be more advisable to start with an initial topic and expanded from it, spiralling endlessly towards further inquiry and uncharted territories – becoming the foundations of research and the never-ending pursuit of knowledge production. (An instant divergence in my thought process leads me toward a search ‘knowledge production’ resulting in an interesting Youtube[3] link. In less than a minute into the lecture, after reflecting on the self imposed 1000 word count, I also found the answer to ‘How long is a novel?’[4]). These digressions prove my current inability to keep on topic and evidence that in an age of twitter[5] I have a tendency to mediate snippets of facts, most of which are forgotten even before they are posted. Do these hourly detours and Wiki searches[6] mean anything? How much of this endless one-dimensional investigation can I recall, especially when it is so widely and immediately available on live media? Is any of this useful? Or indeed, research?

 

When, in a similar unimaginative place over a year ago, I satisfied my desire to pursue further erudition by setting myself a reading list project. This manifested itself as an ongoing bespoke index of books created with the help of curators and artists who shared knowledge through lending a selection of three books they owned, which were returned when read. I liked the personal element to borrowing a book and the urgency to read and restore it to its owner. I enjoy the private interaction between the borrower and myself, and how that interaction translates the book in front of me, bridging the gap between what is published (the expert/knowledge giver) and me (the apprentice/receiver). Pencilled comments in the margins or a forgotten receipts left in the crease of a page add another serendipitous emphasis to a page which otherwise might have gone unnoticed. Through questioning why a corner was folded over or why a section is underlined I reread sections with newfound rigour. I seek the collection of personal experience and memories surrounding this encounter, which can intimately connect the content to the owner of the book and a relevance to their own practices or investigations.

 

Realising this text has taken a slightly tangential turn, I hibernate the technology, source a pen and paper and think of an alternative place for information – The Library; A space where a want for knowledge can be satisfied in a clear linier manner; the place of calm quiet focus – assuming again that you have a starting point.  Housed in The Study at Nottingham Contemporary is The Bookmark Project, where artist Yelena Popova has invited eleven Nottingham based artists to create interventions inside books within the permanent collection. Each artist accentuates a specific selection of a pre-existing text with a constructed/readymade marker. The bookmarks themselves are conscientiously constructed, some complimenting whilst others disrupting their reference points: yet each bringing a moment of delight and surprise to the tranquil surroundings. To catalogue the work would undermine the treasure hunt and the subsequent singular experience between the artist, the author and myself. Yet, I can reveal that the project sated my need for inspiration, providing a short and zesty introduction to some of those texts I-should-have-read-by-now-but-never-really-got-around-to and highlighted others, which only recommendations could ever reveal.

The Study itself is approachable, current and growing, like the organisation that nurtures it. These books reflect not only the exhibiting artist and curatorial concepts but are also an insight into the personalities behind the creation of what Nottingham Contemporary has and is achieving. The Bookmark Project adds another dimension to this conversation, providing a deeper context of the artists which have been integral contributors to the surrounding art-scene, who have contributed and supported the past, present and future of the city’s establishing international contemporary art gallery – all of whom have unknowingly contributed to my personal reading list collection.

 

 

The Bookmark Project

15 April 2011 – 26 June 2011

Bookmarks created by 11 Nottingham-based artists, inserted in The Study book collection

Curated by Yelena Popova

 

Participating artists: Wayne Burrows, Mik Godley, Candice Jacobs, Aaron Juneau, Geoff Diego Litherland, Samuel Mercer, Yelena Popova, Simon Raven, Niki Russell, Rob Van Beek and Thomas M. Wright

 

 

Castle and Elephant launched with the intention of opening for one month and continued a programme of exhibitions, screenings and discussions in Coventry from autumn 2009 until winter 2010. Tom Godfrey inaugurated the year-long series of events with an ambitious solo exhibition titled The Three Day Week. The heading drew parallels between the opening hours of the gallery and the infamous Tory strategy to conserve energy usage by restricting industries to only operating for three days a week in 1974. Wider implications of this title relate to the context of the gallery in a shop unit, surrounded by empty and redundant commercial lettings: thus additionally pertinent in relation to the then current financial downturn. Due to the temporary nature of the space, unique limitations were placed on the creation of work. There was a need to create interventions which were transferable to new locations should the need arise.  The production of new works such as the 4:3 single screen projection Balloon, (2009) acted as a projected image screen and freestanding dividing wall within the space, allowing for the presentation of works such as the sculptural publications Black Marbled Reams, (2009), alongside the imposing light installation Architectures of Resistance, (2007/ongoing).

 

Peripatetic unit Annexinema developed a site-specific screening for the second element of the programme. Selected from a range of contemporary and historic films, Annexinema responded to the gallery’s location in the poleaxed modernism of the City Arcade, loosely flitting between themes such as urban environments, architecture, travel and consumerism. Their extensive and in depth show-reel included experimental films from George Barber: Shouting Match / Mischa Leinkauf + Matthias Wermke: Zwischenzeit / Rob Kennedy: Eden / David Blandy: From the Underground / Matt McCormick: The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal / Ron Tran: The Peckers / Emily Richardson: Block / Mike Stubbs: Cultural Quarter / Romain Sein: The Man from Albacete / Woody Vasulka: C-Trend / Andrew Kötting: Jaunt.

 

Shortly after relocating to a new space in the City Arcade, the group exhibition Rumiko Hagiwara – Dillan Marsh – Elizabeth Rowe brought together three artists whose work encapsulated notions of distraction, futility and perseverance. Working with the aesthetics of mass media, Elizabeth Rowe’s practice merged images from printed material to regain an element of control over an overwhelming accumulation of information. In preparation for exhibition, Rowe produced F—k reason (2009) which singularly featured on the front image of the exhibition flyer. In line with ideas of ineffectuality, four new works were commissioned and intended for inclusion in The Coventry Telegraph. When the commissions were denied printing due to the ambiguous non-commercial content, an enlightening conversation between Rowe and the editor discussing ideas about the ephemeral in art, formed an integral part of the show. Displayed within the window frontage, the protagonist in Rumiko Hagiwara’s film Escalator (2003) performs a subtle passive aggressive act by walking the opposite way, on a downward flowing escalator. By drawing attention to the use of the public space, Hagiwara suggests that the viewer rediscover trivial elements around them. This was shown in conjunction with Dillan Marsh’s work Multiple Failures (2008), which documents futile attempts to inflate a self-constructed air-balloon. Marsh strives to realise a fantasy of escape, but the end result is a catalogue of short-lived unsuccessful endeavours.

 

Damir Ocko subsequently presented two new works titled The Age of Happiness (2009) and The Moon shall never take my Voice, (2010). Situated on both levels of the gallery, the two films evidence a shift in Ocko’s subject matter, from filmic landscapes towards a theatrical musing on history and the attributes of sound.  Ocko developed a spectrum of references when making these productions. A strong component of The Age of Happiness is his research into Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s incomplete work Mysterium.  Scarabin’s unrealised durational performance was to be located in the Himalayas, and his intentions were that “there will be no spectators, all will become participants”. One of the proposed effects of this piece was to transform participants into higher human beings. Through the realisation of The Age of Happiness, Ocko highlights this unachievable utopian vision as comparable to the shortcomings of today’s society.

 

Occupying the upper gallery was Ocko’s most recent film The Moon shall never take my Voice. The film observed a woman performing several acts in sign language, revealing a distinctive, ulterior form of music. The imaginative composition of both sound and noise alters conventional conceptions of hearing as the narrator gradually reveals a story about Gustav Mahler, John Cage and Neil Armstrong. Through this experimental tonal structuring the artist composes and transforms all the silent gestures into a new narrative logic and synthesis of images. A transcription of the script used for the performer in The Moon shall never take my Voice illustrated the complex poetics of language and text, emphasised the role of the visual and silence in the creation of sound.

 

Within the unique elephant shaped architectural extension of Coventry Sports Centre, Castle and Elephant temporarily presented a short film by Shanghai based artist Song Tao. My Beautiful Zhang Jiang, (2006) is a poetic portrait of the artist’s own generation, who are living amongst the rush and calm of Shanghai’s developing landscape. The film opens in an office; a sleeping girl is picked up from her desk by a co-worker and gradually transported through the vast city in the embrace of strangers. Asserting a rambling narrative, the film uses Zhang Jiang as a prop to perambulate the metropolis. These bodies, negotiating the city, reflected Tao’s deep interest in both documenting and creating atmospheres that are rooted within his own life. Positioned within the eclectic architecture of Coventry city centre the work highlights the changing face of post war urban planning and communal navigation through the city.

 

Verisimilitude:: meeting room / screening / discussion was the final instalment of the programme presenting Night Mail (1936), Scared Straight!(1978) and Shoah (1985) over several one day events in meeting rooms within the CV1 postcode. This programme was a means to create discussion points to consider journalistic techniques and the changing aesthetics strategies used in documentary making.

 

The first screening and discussion was situated in the archaic Britannia Hotel. Produced by the groundbreaking collaborative GPO Film collective Night Mail was a creative portrayal of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train. One of the first films to cast ‘real people’ as actors it was acclaimed for its experimental use of sound, visual style, narrative and editing technique. The film centres on issues of national communication and representations of the regional environment. Unable to film in transit, elaborate recording sets were constructed, to re-enacted the workings of a then hidden element of English communication, plotting the changing social anthropology across the length of Britain.

 

Featuring within the aptly styled IKEA facilities at the Broadgate Travel Lodge, was Arnold Shapiro documentary Scared Straight! The subject of the documentary is a group of young offenders and the attempts to make them end their criminal ways by introducing them to actual convicts. The leading nature of the author combined with the narration by Peter Falk –most known for his role as investigating detective Columbo- blurred the relationship between the assertion of objectivity and fiction.

 

Finally, on the 50^th anniversary of its first release, Castle and Elephant screened Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour film Shoah investigating the holocaust. Shown in its entirety at the Ramada Hotel, Lanzmann’s style of interviewing, and his selection of interview footage divides his witnesses into three distinct archetypes: survivor, bystander and perpetrator.  The inability to truly represent all sides and every angle was highlighted by the impenetrability of the content and timescale of the screening.

 

The pluralistic functions of these conference spaces was initially seen as a neutral space for dialogue and thinking, but like the screened documentaries, the historical and social framework added new resonance to the reading of the films.

 

This document culminates vestiges of events initiated by Castle and Elephant and was created in 2011 after the programme was completed.  The programme drew from many different cultural and historical references: it sought not to literally respond to the city, but to invited artists to create comparisons with other ways of seeing. Organically, the platform developed an interest in moving image and experimental film, tending to draw upon fictional narratives and changing landscapes. Drawing parallels to the uniqueness of the Coventry and its dense history Castle and Elephant chose to invite an outsider view. These alternative viewpoints were fleeting and transient: like the projects themselves.

 

Castle and Elephant was curated by Hannah Conroy 2009 – 2011

 

Note: Castle and Elephant drew its name from the two figurative elements of Coventry’s city coat of arms, which can be dated back to the 16^th century.

www.castleandelephant.co.uk

 

 

In October last year, in lieu of it’s much anticipated reopening in late 2011, the Temporary Stedelijk, Amsterdam opened its doors for long-awaited interim programme. The exhibition ‘Taking Place’ was the first instalment of the programme that intended to reintroduce the Stedelijk Museum. By addressing its history, the spatial and temporal conditions of the unfinished building and the ways in which artists use, occupy and animate museum spaces, the exhibition aimed to highlight the historical, functional and architectural conditions of the museum.  Surprisingly, ‘Taking place’ did not fill space; whole rooms were left free of work, whilst others where punctuated with one subtle intervention with the architecture. The shear amount of space between and around works allowed for mis/reinterpretation of what was ‘building’ and what was ‘exhibition’. A perfect example of this was the almost indiscernible Ger van Elk’s The Well Polished Floor Sculpture, 1969-1980, 2010, which was as restrained as Martin Creeds NO. 227 at the Tate. The direct relationship between the current state of flux of the build was accentuate by Mario Garcia Torres’s Preliminary Sketches from the Past and for the Future (Stedelijk Museum), 2007 which sees individuals running, cycling around a soon-to-be-refurbished museum, measuring the space with body parts and testing the possibilities of the shell of an institution. The documentation of these activities pointed to the vast level of research and creative experimentation that has been invested into the new construction, emphasising the fact that the renovation is still in process.

 

Related directly the physicality of the space and the passing of time, Willem de Rooij, Route Along 18 Corners, 1993/2010, plotted a map of 18 corners across several vacant rooms. The comically monotonous comparisons between the 1993 documentation photographs and today’s actual museum pinpoint the physical changing facade of the gallery, but also emphasises the fluctuations of hidden structures like the process of developing requisitions. Sculptural works like William Leavitt California Patio, 1972, or Germaine Kruip Daytime, 2004, emphasise the dividing point between interior and exterior realities. On Kawara, One Million Years (Past), 1970-1971 On Kawara (26 August 2010: 28,369 days) was continuously read out in the grand stairwell: each unit of time being a reminder of the insignificance of everything in relation to time itself. For White is the Color, 2002, Diana Thater projects images of white clouds onto the walls of the darkened space while fluorescent tubes placed in the room emit a brilliant white/blue light to dissolve the edges of the projection. Though the floating clouds may evoke a transcendent sky in landscape painting so typified by Dutch masters, they are actually huge billowing clouds of smoke in the skies over Los Angeles from the record-setting wildfires of 2001. Here Thater emphasizes the actual time and place that the viewer occupies by projecting an image of an ephemeral event onto the classic architecture of the gallery.

 

It was a rare and pleasurable experience to have rooms of clear space in between work, which in some cases allowed for works to be seen in isolation and create a gap for reflection. The sound work by Louise Lawler Birdcalls, 1972/1981 was somewhat reminiscent of the tweets that can be heard when in transit at Schipol Airport.  But on closer inquiry it is apparent that the exotic soundtrack is more than a simple ambient noise. Careful attentiveness to a parrot call reveals “Vito Acconci!”, or another exotic squark “[Daniel] Buren!” (who incidentally features as part of  the Stedelijk permanent collection) and this realisation continues, “[Julian] Schnabel!” [Lawrence] Weiner: all Lawlers contemporaries during the 1970s and 80s.  In the context of museums loaded historical relationship with male dominated collections, these subverted echoes can be seen as a warning call, or maybe even in a mild antagonistic verbal assault. Yet, this work is not simply a critique of male dominated market; Lawler also inserts a female presence into a history dominated by men. She defines art as “part and parcel of a cumulative and collective enterprise”, which only through building on the past can there be a future.

 

Another work that benefited from the tranquil atmosphere was Ruth Drawing Picasso, 2009 by Rinake Gijksta. The single screen projection observes a uniformed young girl gazing intently beyond the frame. Filmed using a single static camera angle, the scene resembles a photographic portrait. Like Dijkstra’s earlier photographic and video work, Ruth Drawing Picasso concerns itself with the photographic subject, encouraging us to observe closely the pose and gestures of the young girl. She sits on the floor sketching. Intense moments of looking are punctuated with the protagonist creating a gestural line, or a period of shading.  In essence this video reflects the ongoing voyeuristic view of innocence and insecurity; reflected on the position of the viewer; of observer of art being observed; and the importance of the audience to complete the art experience.

 

The other half of the Temporary Stedelijk programme was ‘Monumentalism—History and National Identity in Contemporary Art Proposal for Municipal Art Acquisitions 2010’ which addressed concepts of history and identity, whilst offering an overview of recent developments in arts in the Nederland’s.

 

Barbara Visser employs an element of mirroring, copying, doubling, repeating, and other forms of symmetry to make comparison of contemporary culture. For East/West (2009), Visser returned to the Nagasaki Holland Village theme park in Japan, where in 2001 she had made a video and photographic series. Here, she further emphasises that the replication of the Dutch city serves as a decor for photographs. Visser used her snapshots from the theme park as an original model to recreate the same setting back in the Netherlands. This usage generates confusion over what is a copy and what is an original. The play on fact or fiction can also be seen Marianne Flotron Fired, 2007. The video begins with a scene of a woman employee being told that she is being fired. The bad news is played down by sophisticated language: “dismissal” becomes “mobility.” At first, reality and play seem indistinguishable, but it becomes apparent that employers are given training sessions in firing their employees. The low camera angle assumes a voyeuristic aspect, which becomes sinister when combined with the detached breakdown of an emotional process.

 

The mediated experience of reality and comparisons in contemporary and historic visual language can be seen in the large photographic montage Dark Trees, 2009. Rob Johannesma layers newspaper representations of an Israeli air-raid attack on Rafah in 2008 with a reproduction of the 15th-century painting John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Geertgen tot Sint Jans. A similar use of perspective and landscape link events which are geographically close, but historically far away. By making noticeable the way that painting’s historical forms are constantly referenced in contemporary photography, documentary and news photography Dark Trees puts into question how these media tools represent “real” events.

 

Similarly, the relationship between the visual, contemporary and history can be seen in Zachary Formwalt’s video essay / documentary In Place of Capital, 2009. The opening line, “I’m not sure you are ever going to capture the ‘movement’ of capital markets, because there is not much to see.’’ is intricately linked with photographs of the Royal Exchange in London, taken in 1845 by photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. At that time, technology was not yet capable of recording sharp images of people or objects in motion; passers-by and vehicles were reduced to vague smudges. Slow comparisons between early photographic failures to capture movement are linked with invisibility of commerce. The historic images were used as a metaphor for the inability of the financial world to anticipate the flow of money, thus relating to the current world wide financial crisis.

 

A timelessness (or ‘of time’) experience of this first chapter of exhibitions at the Temporary Stedelijk reflected on thoughts about architecture, audiences and the role of the Museum. The focus around the renovation of site, and the loaded art history which featured in ‘Taking place’, balanced with the wider global issues of what is ‘now’ shown in ‘Monumentalism’, offered a amuse-bouche of what the Stedelijk has to offer in 2011. In March 2011, the second instalment of exhibitions will concentrate on its famous collection of modern and contemporary art and design, and hints at an innovative adaptation of the climatic conditions inside the museum, and further engaging uses of space.

 

 

 

AGM willingly took on board one of the main characteristics of Manifesta 8: the wish and the will to explore new modes of curating through collective work. Entitled AGM 10:  Collectivus CPS, the exhibition within ‘¿The Rest is History?’ sought to explore the shift of boundaries beyond the authorship of the single curator, and to devise a different way of working. Presented in Spain, within a biennial fully embracing the idea of collectivity, AGM put this process in motion, by using the historical and geographical contexts of Los Molinos  (Museum of water culture). Using the concept of the sedimentation of time as a starting point, the exhibition asked: what is the best way to “act out” rather than just represent such a method of collectivity, to best produce and distribute knowledge? By creating a layering of past and current activity by Chamber of Public Secrets, maybe one can get closer to the “real” thing, instead of simply reporting about it. To research this further, AGM 10, acting as Chamber of Public Secrets’ critical lens, reflected back on the collective’s productions to date and their working processes.

 

What did ‘working together’ imply on a critical and practical level? What was seen in the space was a subjective selection from the vast Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS) archives, along with research extracts and recorded conversations. The audio-visual ‘files’ of previous collaborative works (or ‘transmissions’ to adopt terminology from CPS), are built into an exhibition venue which itself embodies a residual accumulation of knowledge over time as the result of collective working processes.

 

AGM 10 took its starting point from the possible configuration/network of participants, spaces, ideas and ideals that represent any given form of collectivity. It questioned how these are held together and sustain themselves over time, through histories and ever changing ideological frameworks. The latter is crucial for understanding how AGM 10: Collectivus CPS operates within CPS’ project for Manifesta 8. This very space, filled with the residue of previous and ongoing artistic and discursive processes involving CPS, is but a mere tool for highlighting the very mechanisms of collectivity. As such, it presently holds and unravels at close range the seen and unseen concerns that guide collective production. Through this, AGM meant to consider the contingent nature of relationships, the struggle to find or evade consensus, the risk of failure or success at the expense of others, the impossibility of translating meanings, the labour of sustained participation and exchange, the promise of final resolutions or the desire never to reach that point.

 

AGM Conversation series was a tool which was used in the lead up to Manifesta 8, where participating artist were asked to examine their projects in the lead up to the final exhibition. The main conditions of the Conversation Series events were to bring together, in different configurations and venues, artists, curators, thinkers and contributors variously involved in processes of production via art, media, research or other forms of critical dialogue. Adopting AGM’s itinerant format, these sessions sought not only to assess the “state-of-play” at various moments in the lead up to the exhibition or research process in which they are involved at that time, but to continue discussions around thematic that are central to their approach and productions.

 

Three conversations were orchestrated pre-opening: a significant feature of these was that they took place in semi formal settings, requiring no audience but the camera and the amassed group of participants. They sit somewhere between the formal setting of the commonly used artists talk /seminar format and the informal nature of social/networked conversations between arts practitioners and producers. The sessions provide an open forum for sharing and exchange with no underlying pretext but to consider the current state of affairs. The first conference “On Translation’[1] raised issues around language and translation barriers which arise when working within an international context, and especially relevant to the process of creation of Spanish material for distribution in local mainstream media;  “On Space” [2] focussed on mediation in documentary and the genre of prisons. The final conversation was recorded the day before the opening,  “On Ethics”[3]; and discussed aesthetics, systems of production and representation.

 

So how is it possible to connect these conversations to the archive or works such as Comrade Alfredo Neri, 2006 -2010, a piece that brings to the fore the moving image’s power to affect our emotions and shape our options; or a handheld, almost clandestine, recording of a Walid Raad’s performance at the 2005 edition of Homeworks; or the reflective video essay about Orson Welles called Errorphobia; or Raed Yassin’s lighthearted social commentary about Lebanese record making? When looked at these documents, parallels can be drawn between the content of the subject matter, and the emphasis of CPS’s prolonged confrontation with the geopolitical, their engagement with systems of knowledge production or their questioning of the subjects and objects of recorded histories and narratives. There were shared experiences or perspectives that have brought together the collective and it’s contributors. Yet, AGM sought to move beyond this. It proposed that its subjective archive embodies the collective condition not only as material output of collective labour, but also as an evocation of a particular position that it believes must be ever present in any form of working together. This, for AGM, is a position that is able to direct the critical gaze both within and beyond the frame, one that is conscious of it’s own subjectivity and positioning when it acts in tandem or against other agents and structures. So when AGM brings to the fore the “current state of affairs”, it does so in countenance to the presumed distance often attributed to criticality.

 

Consequently, in bringing this archive together under the aegis of Manifesta 8, AGM sought not to showcase the individual works, but present them as tools with which CPS and others can begin to critically assess their collective productions and approach. Importantly, this space is not an attempt to short circuit or reduce to specific moments the due process of critical questioning that pre/pro-ceeds any collective endeavour, but rather points to its urgency at all stages.

 

Following on from AGM 10:Collectivus CPS, AGM coordinated ‘On Dialogue’ [4], which specifically sought social and geo-political topics relevant to the Mediterranean region. Having recently examined the nature of collective production and collaboration as part of Chamber of Public Secrets’ contribution to Manifesta 8, AGM wished to expand on this to address the term “dialogue”, especially in relation to the problematic subtitle of the biennale. If, as in the realm of cultural diplomacy, dialogue is to be understood as a reciprocal act and as a prelude to collaboration/cultural understanding, then the session asked: who sets the terms of dialogue, where is it enacted, how does it function and what are its inherent asymmetries? More specifically, it aimed to delve into the realm of questioning the instrumentalisation of “dialogue” in contemporary art and institutional practices as well as on the geo-political scale. This conversation is still in process, and a longer two-day symposium ‘On Distance’ will be presented later this year at Sharjah Museum; which will focus on the peripheral within global discourses.

 

All Conversations can be seen online at agmculture.org. AGM is collectively curated by Hannah Conroy, Alfredo Cramerotti, Iben Bentzen and Yesomi Umulo.

agmculture.org