Under Cinema. Wu Tsang @ FACT, Liverpool

I’ve not been to FACT for a while. The last thing I remember enjoying seeing was Lucy Beech’s film which formed part of 2016 Liverpool Biennial. Having course to be in Liverpool for an afternoon, I check the FACT website to see what’s on. What I read there doesn’t really fill me with a great desire to see it.

There’s a little paragraph about how the current exhibition Under Cinema by Wu Tsang is based around a essay from a set of essays. It’s hardly inspiring stuff, it makes going to see the exhibition might be very hard work.

Anyway, despite any reservations, I’m in FACT watching, mesmerised even by Wu Tsang's film “We Hold Where Study”. Sat in front of the cinema sized screen, actual cinema sized like the screens they use for Marvel blockbusters.

Watching two overlapping locations (one exterior, one interior) two overlapping sets of dancers, fall and roll. Occupying there space, occupying the screen, occupying my space. We as audience are granted access to this space through the camera. The camera is performer, through its performance it allows us as viewer an unique level of intimacy and connection with our performers.

Often when I see performance presented as film, I feel that I’d rather experience that performance live. This is the exception, here the sense of the performers physicality is powerful. The camera also gives you access to this physicality where in the real world you’d be ejected from the performance.

If this where live and you approached the performers as the camera does. You be violating the rules of performer and viewer. It’s not the presence of the camera that allows this presence into the performers space. It is a result of a melding of action, locations, lighting (both real and artificial) and music. Which collide perfectly to create a heightened experience.

At the heart of this experience is the notion of motion as identity. That these two elements share the same fluid properties. That both are malleable, shifting and adjusting. Conforming and reaction to the environment and the individuals that occupy it.

Its how you hold yourself at a bus stop, how that apparently simple act can uncover you. Exposing a version of yourself to the world. Until you become aware of the perception of others.

Wherein you adjust yourself to the architecture of others. This space is sometimes comfortable and familiar, often it is not.

All these ideas seem to spring directly from watching the film. Who’s 19 minute run time flies past. Which is not always the case when watching film installations. I even consider staying to watch the whole thing again. But I have constraints on my time. Once I leave the gallery I’m slightly resentful of he outside world’s encroachment into this experience.

But as my identity merges with the dances of others, I know I have had this experience.

I’ll just add that this in one of two films by Wu Tsang presented at FACT. The second is “Under Cinema”. A kind of documentary following the pop star Kelela. Throughout she speaks thoughtfully and elegantly about her music, her identity as a singer and the use of black identity in the music industry. It’s an involving portrait of Kelela and the difficulties of expressing your identity as an artist while negotiating the needs of the music industry.

What stops this being just a promo film is that was as you watch the film. A film of Kelela watches you. Again asking questions about who identity is formed by the gaze of another.

Some stuff

The New Observatory, FACT
Trying to formulate what I thought about this exhibition. I can’t really. It felt too much going on, too many audio elements mixing together, too much to read. A head scratcher and not in a good way. More like reading a complex instruction manual while waiting for the penny to drop.

Which has me wondering “has contemporary art stopped being intuitive?”

Coming Out, The Walker
This exhibition featuring art from the art councils collection which explores sex, gender and identity. Has familiarity working for it and against it. To a degree, being work taken from a single collection you’re bound to have seen some of the work, somewhere before. It never hurts to see it again.

For me the highlight was Steve McQueen’s film Bear. Projected in what appeared to be a infinite raven, two naked male figures grapple. There movements go from aggressive to tender in a mesmerising fashion. It is something to behold. If you don’t mind the giggling at willies.

Abacus, The Bluecoat
Those sculptures look fun, but I’m too big for them. Same for the little barrister wigs.
Though this is exhibition aimed for children it doesn’t mean it can’t be approached like any other exhibition. One thing that strikes me, especially when looking over a mini courtroom, is how many playsets are steeped in historical references.
We probably overlook this, perhaps due a certain ubiquity or just to the idea that it’s all 'just for kids'.

Maybe we forget that play is a remix of the systems that control and are controlled by 'grown ups'. This naturally includes history. Whether directly or indirectly. Every child at some point creates a microcosm of historical events. How many times have I lived out the Second World War, with pillows become pillboxes or foxholes?
The idea of building a gift or a den, or even inhabiting the space behind the sofa, is about the child creating a world in which they have control. To experiment with ways of navigating the wider world. Or to have a space apart from that other world where a different set of rules apply.

Do we actually abandon these ideas when we enter adulthood? Or do we merely encase them in ideas call architecture, home ownership, money. You can only speculate what the world would be like if left these concepts behind and began to play again.

Franko B, Milk and Blood - The Bluecoat

if I’m honest I’m not excited about this. Not as excited as you might think, seeing as one of the major figures of performance art has come to Liverpool. Franko B, is here to premier his Milk and Blood piece.  So far everything around the event feels low key. Not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe this lack of hype is feeding into my sense of underwhelment, a suspicion that somehow where not getting the 'real deal’.

As they say the proof is in the pudding or the performance.

It feels subdued as we are let into the performance space, where we are greeted by a ring formed out of chairs. Within the centre of this arena hangs a punching bag. Golden it glistens in the dark of the performance space.

Once we are all seated, we wait, in tense silence. It’s a small space, dim but light enough to see the other members of the audience. We wait, as does the punching bag. Are we expecting violence to break the silence?

Soon Franko B appears, with his second who places a golden stool into the arena. Franko, dripping in gold, his vest his shirts, boxing gloves shine like the sky in a painting of a saint. He takes his place in front of the punching bag. That sense of expectation again.

A cold metallic bell rings out. Franko B stands and sets about the punching bag. As he does so the bag begins to swing, threatening to invade the audiences space. Drag them into the arena. Where close to Franko B, as he clobbers the bag and milk begins to leak from the bottom of the bag.

All along he gasps out sayings like “Artists, insignificant” or “love, significant”
.
the sound of the bell, means the first round is over. Franko returns to the stool. In this pause the bag swings. Which makes me think about that law of Newtonian physics.
Every action has an equal and positive reaction.
The bag swings because of the actions of Franko. I also consider Franko's words, throughout the the piece he chants, speaks, mumbles phrases. They cover everything fro war to love, family and art. They are massive subjects, insurmountable subjects. Yet passive, like the punching bag.

It would be impossible to pinpoint which punch had an effect on the bag. Like trying to quantify your effect on the whole of humanity.  Leaving you to ponder how helpless you feel in the face of everything.

Yet you still keep punching, still you resist.

Like that Newtonian law, things can only happen if you act. Perhaps this is the ‘moral’ of the piece. To do, to act in the face of the immoveable, in the face of a huge and indifferent Universe. Maybe that’s why at the end Franko takes a lap around the audience. Taking stock, perhaps, as he looks into the faces of the people gathered here it would seem as he is offering a challenge.

“what about you? What will you do?”

Franko B leaves. A new tension builds broken by the first to leave the performance space.

What I’ve written here probably doesn’t reflect the actual intent of Franko B. But what he has given up, here tonight. Though the relatively simple action of punching a punch bag, has enabled me to consider ideas. Released me from, the day to day and pushed me to consider something beyond myself.

Which is the mark of great performance art and art in general. I leave with whatever gauge misgivings I had hours ago, quashed.

Katie Paterson SYZYGY - The Lowry, Manchester

Time is a factor.

That is time as a measurement, time as a way of arranging, time as a way of shaping meaning.

This that is also interwoven with space, the time it takes to walk from there to here. To travel from town to city. The time it takes to arrive from the impossible destinations of the Universe.

The time who’s functional ubiquity provides a unique paradox, that keeping it is simultaneously mundane and yet offers up a infinity of beautiful opportunities.

The essence of earth’s  revolving around the Sun and of the moon’s encircling of us under the dictates of gravity. Despite this having been going on for eons upon eons, it still generates an amount of imagination. Whether that be poetic of a desperate need to measure, to calculate, to observe.

Is this need inherent within the human race? As products of nature we have existed in the rhythms of a turning world. Responded to the growth of the world. Was it a increase in satisfaction of the methods we used in response to natural patterns that prompted us to name and differentiate in indiferentiate?

To place import into ephemeral things, to give meaning to spontaneous events that occur around us. Then is this just in order to create a level of comfort or to convince ourselves we understand the world.

All these thoughts come from my experience of Katie Paterson’s Lowry show SYZYGY and in particular her Totality piece. This is a mirrored ball which has images of past eclipses. Watching these points of light run from my hand and then fly down the wall I think about spending more time here. Spending my time in this exhibition. Then it occurs to me the similarity of looking at the stars and looking at art.

You don’t have to spend hours gazing upon the night sky in order to gain to understanding of it. Your appreciation of it can flash across your mind, allowing you the sensation of understanding, setting of a cascade of associations.

A sensation of being at once separate and a part of a great whole. A sensation of the sublime, not the sublime that will overwhelm and consume you, rather a sublime that forms part of you. That your presence is adding to it.

The is evident through out Paterson’s work. Be it a recording of the space between stars, a direct line to a melting glacier. Or the letters written to mark the death of stars which have a beauty of their own and also disprove cLOUDDEAD there is a search party for stars gone dim.

I find something affirming in Paterson’s work, even if it’s a solipsistic idea, that this is your time to exist and your time to witness the Universe.

Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival 2: The Return

This is my return to Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival using the excuse of the ‘Encounters’ live art/performance event. On arriving on or near the location of the event looking for a indication of what’s happening. I spot a figure laying leafs along the edge of the Golden Square covered market thing.

“Would you like to turn over a new leaf?”

Ask the chirpy invigilator, I do, is that it? Well kind of I ask the in invigilator who informs my that many of the artists have pulled out due to illness or in response to the weather. Hmmmm, at least it gives me the chance to look at the stuff that was unavailable to me on my first visit.

Starting with the Birmingham Pavilion and the Shaun Ryder Beer Mat Show. Which I don’t know what to make of, I try to enter the spirit of the thing. Which I think is fun, though as the majority of the beermats are locked on the other side of a cashier counter.

Next is the Middlesbrough/Newcastle Pavilion. Which maybe my favourite. After meeting another cheery invigilator I head up to the third floor. Where I’m greeted by a grid of White squares. In the centre of each square is the guts of a electronic clock, the hands of these clocks have been transformed into a different kind of measurement device.

This is Nick Kennedy’s Timecaster from each hand hangs pieces of graphite which make marks on the white squares, a record of the passage of the hands and graphite. There’s a strange hypnotic satisfaction in watching these clocks undertake their measurements. In seeing the process and the result in one go.
On the floor below there is the work of three artists, though it took me a few moments to figure the out, the artist being Narbi Price, Michael Mulvihill and Alison Unsworth.

Price presents us with painted images of memorial flowers on barriers and empty spaces. Similar to the work of George Shaw. They touch on a certain sense of entropy the difference between the experience of the now and the knowledge of the passage of time. With these paintings there are also the drawings of Michael Mulvihill they are sketches of mushroom clouds, philosophers and cosmonauts. Thumbnail sketches of places all look like a attempt to come to terms with the 20th century in purely visual terms.

As if the act of physical, artist reproduction will render history a sense of tangibility.

The third artist on the floor is Alison Unsworth, who is showing drawings and ‘sculptures’. The sculptures are in fact those Pudding Lane ornaments, only they have appeared to have suffered some kind of cultural apocalypse. Developers have moved in a stripped and sheared everything away the only evidence of life are a skip or a cordoned off monument.

These are funny depictions of the English attitude to landscape and architecture. Somewhere in the remains of these signs of a unremembered England there is something about the fallacy of the idea that are culture is forever.

The mistaken belief that another generation won’t smash your buildings down or mark a monument with graffiti. The only real sense of eternity comes from the cycle of life as presented in her Pedestal drawing featuring a Seagull using a lamppost as stage and toilet. The biological winning over the cultural.

Then onto the second Leeds Pavilion, situated in Hatter’s Row a strange collection of shops and salons mostly empty now used by artists.

I lot of the stuff in there I find difficult to like. In the first room I find a disembodied head on the floor from which spews out what sounds like free jazz, this is surrounded by large banners featuring arrow heads.

On the second floor there are more artists whose work I find hard to decode or to different one artist from another. The artists use materials, images in a way that doesn’t quite solidify into something. I can speculate that it is something about the relationship between material, form and experience.
I have to speculate as there’s no further imagination of how to navigate my way through these pieces.

While I was in the space of Hatter’s Row I wondered why it hadn’t been used as a alternative venue or main venue for the performance event. Or why the other spaces hadn’t been employed or fully exploited.

Which is how I feel about the WCAF in general. In this form it feels like its not truly taking advantage of the North West art scene or the locations it’s secured. The festival feels like it’s not aware of its potential. Or where it fits in, whether it is a extra to the Liverpool and Manchester or its equal. This will become clear as the festival grows in confidence and scale.

Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival Part 1?

I would like to offer you a review of the Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival but I can't not really. As when I got there I discovered that most of the pavilions where shut.

Which is disappointing, having made a admittedly short journey to see it. Still.

Anyway I can tell you about what I did see. Which was some quite difficult work that left me feeling like a dog being shown the plans to CERN.

For example the Manchester Pavilion, where the work is presented without context. Nor with any information regarding which art is which or who is taking credit for it. Nothing about their process or why should I care at all.

Similar for the Leeds Pavilion, though I was able to see that is was some form of residency. Maybe I was in a bad mood but it felt like the research that should have been done before getting to Warrington.

Though I was attracted to the two model buildings by the window.

Then there is the 'blockbuster' exhibition of the festival at the Warrington Museum & Art Gallery. A group show based around the ubiquitous and sinister presence of IKEA. Basically a touring exhibition it is interesting, smart and funny.

To damn it with faint praise it has works by Ryan Gander I don't hate. Though within its location in the gallery to felt odd to be there. As if it was straining against its physical restrictions.

This might be an metaphor for the WCAF in general in its current form. That its ambitions are constricted by itself, by being able to take full advantage of its locations. Or knowing exactly what it is and who its for.

Given that this festival is still relatively young (5 years?) it still needs to develop a identy. Still I don't know if it's worth spending another £5.20 on another visit.

Ripe (With Decay)

I used to have this friend who argued that we (in the UK) used the wrong name for autumn. Preferring the Americanism Fall, because that described the great falling of leaves. Fair enough but I’ll stick with Autumn which for me is the better, more poetic, more enigmatic name. I don’t know the exact meaning of the word, what I do know it’s a word that somehow covers the feelings that get stirred up as summer ends and winter comes.

That sense of change in the air and the shift of the Earth’s axis. It’s a season which throws up complex associations between life and death, given that this is the season which nature gives us a fruitful bounty  before essentially dying. I have, maybe pretentiously and before this privately called this time of year as the glorious suicide of nature.

No surprise then this season of mellow fruitfulness attracts artistic interests with its unique mix of beauty and melancholia. Autumn is at the heart of this current Art Assembly’s Saisonscape tour which has stopped at the Kazimier. Subtitled DECAY it promises the exploration through sonic arts of the ideas of death and rebirth conjured by this time of year. Headlining this event is the prime exponent of these ethereal notions the composer William Basinski.

This is what I’m waiting for in the gold tinged blue of the dying light, a chill clinging to my skin. Myself and the handful of people hanging around are let in, where we suffer the curse of the punctual. That is being greeted by a empty place. Soon others will arrive the atmosphere will change, though I was hoping something more immersive.

Anyway I get a drink, get a table and subdue the urge to shout AMIBENT YEAH! While making a devil horn salute. Instead I turn my attention to the stage and the collection of equipment on it. You have laptops, things that have cables sprouting from them and reel to reel tape machines. There’s even magnetic tape stretched from the stage to the Kazimier's mezzanine.

That tape is soon to be set into motion by Howlround. Whose reel to reel machines are his instruments, from them he produces strangely familiar sounds. You have the sound of a locomotives whistle making a connection to musiqe concrete. Also you have noises that sound like the howl of the ID created by Louis and Bebe Barron for Forbidden Planet. There is a hint of Sci-Fi within the whole set, at times there are Radiophonic sweeps and wooshes. While the bass sounds make me think of the Ray Bradbury story The Foghorn.

After Howlround has finished he is swiftly replaced by Kepla. If Howlround is a direct connection to the history of contemporary music, then Kepla is a connection to its current forms. Whereas Howlround is manipulation of the physical Kepla is the manipulation of the digital. The difference or similarities between hard and software. His improvisational set produces sounds which are like the crunching and crashing of a hundred PlayStation games.

Comparing the two performances you could see in them something about the issues people have about transitioning from analogue to digital, the fear of working of loss. Interesting to note that Kepla is occasionally accompanied by textured videos, which made me recall artist Russell Mill's collaborations with Nine Inch Nails. Whether these films are there to provide a ‘bridge’ between two worlds or add a sense of unease and sense that technology itself is as equally open to decay as the organic. Soon Kepla finishes and disappears into the dark.

After a fifteen minute break, its headliner time. Basinski takes to the stage in a jovial manner, springing on the stage promising to start once he sets up his ‘girls’ (his tape machines). During this time there’s a problem with the mixer which sees Basinski break out into a rendition of If I Didn’t Care by The Ink Spots??
This is not what I expect from a contemporary composer.
Though it’s welcome.

The set begins proper and he begins to play The Deluge. It opens with a piano refine, one that is nearly familiar but soon it is lost in watery echoes like a dream on waking. Through subtle control of mixer and laptop the sound recycles, repeats, grows like organic matter.

If there is some kind of truth in Basinski's music it is that it reflects the part of nature which is about the transformation of one form to another. To become part of a ongoing cycle, and our place within it. From our human perspective the ongoing natural changes the world goes through are embedded with our ideas of beauty.

It’s a way of describing our relationship with the sublime, in a very human way. Like knowing that the green leaves will turn yellow, fall then rot, in a beautiful process.

Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp, The Harris, Preston

Often when writing I attempt to frame my interpretation of the event or exhibition within a context. Whether that is the journey to or the actual venue itself, sometimes it can be an element of the conceptual underpinnings. In this case I wonder if any of that is relevant as I’m purposely heading to the Harris Museum and Art Gallery to review Oculist Witnesses: According to Duchamp.

Already I’m mentally there, it is my focus today. To the point there is a strange sense of surprise to see that the larger of the spaces used to display contemporary art is given over to Lucy Beech’s video installations. I quickly pass the large white box after spotting a liquid black surface jutting out from behind an open doorway.

One standing on the threshold, picking up an info sheet which feels like card, I see that the exhibition is scarce. That despite the presence of Sovay Berriman’s sculpture ‘Entertainment Suite’ there feels like there’s a lot of space, even in this relatively small gallery space.

This space might be a result to the conceptual aspects of the exhibition. Given the subtitle is According to Duchamp that indicates that there is more to what meets the eye. I’m assuming you are aware of Duchamp (I know we weren’t all taught art by a Duchamp obsessive like I was) and that you know that he wanted to rearrange not only the language of art, but the perception of it.

Becoming the Year Zero of all what people love and hate about contemporary art. Though he isn’t technically represented by one of his own works. At least not directly. He is here in the form of a piece of work by Richard Hamilton, which provides the exhibition with its title and serves as a reference point, a point of focus.

Physically the piece is a screenprint on glass of a number of graphically pleasing circular and radiating lines. It sits there fetishisticly displayed like a relic within a plastic box.  It does resonate a certain mystic power or at least a knowingness about its own place within art history. For this is detail created during Hamilton’s recreation of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s, Even (also known as The Large Glass).

The Large Glass is full of religious and sexual symbols came with body of notes intended to be read in conjunction with its viewing. Though Duchamp and his interest in perception knew that due to the transparent nature of the piece it would ‘resist interpretation’.  That the conditions in which it were viewed would effect that interpretation and the interpretation of the works that surrounded it.

Something which was exploited by artists like Hannah Wilke
It feels like I’ve moved away from the actually exhibition itself, there is a weight of art history contained in that sparse gallery space. Despite the presence of Berriman and the Hamilton piece it does feel strangely empty. There are other works in the exhibition but the main dialogue appears to be between Berriman and Hamilton/Duchamp.

These pieces appear to be conversation, this maybe be a simplistic connection between geometric shapes. Spending some time in that space it does occur to me that the sculpture is reacting in some way to the Oculist Witnesses in a sense trying to mimic them. Entertainment Suite appears to be in state of flux, angles and surfaces stick out at different angles. The whole thing feels like a scale model, perhaps of a broken stealth bomber, though whether it is being scaled up or down is unclear.

Both screenprint and sculpture suggest movement, The Oculist Witnesses spin while Entertainment Suite grows like a crystal.
In comparison the other works seem static almost not part of the exhibition. Flanking the Oculist Witnesses are two gloppy paintings of forlorn, jaded people. These are paintings by Lindsey Bull one Statues (2015) sees two figures stare mournfully into the middle distance. While in Bow Tie (2015) the single figure has its eyes closed refusing to bear witness. They radiate a sense of misplacement almost to the point of being embarrassed in being here.

Nearby are a number of postcards which have been manipulated by Ruth Caxton. The postcards that appear to depict religious(ish) imagery seem to have been affected by some form of mediumship. Lines etched within the cards flow to and fro into the eyes of an identical image, or form a cage of psychic energy around the heads of two piano playing ladies. It might be that these images are more connected to Oculist Witnesses did I first think.

Within them perhaps we can see the idea of artist as medium held by Duchamp. Of channelling the pre-existing elements of the world into the production of art.

As a whole what do I make of this exhibition? This room of art. Underpinned by not one but two curatorial concepts, the first being the relationship between the works, the second being the broader and overarching ideas of the Dance First, Think Later programme, delivers exhibitions and programmes which are ambitious in their curatorial scope.

That might lead to you questioning whether such exhibitions with such heavy conceptually underpinnings run the risk of a more casual art audience. Well possibly, but there is still a pleasure to be had in Berriman’s sculpture, Caxton’s curious postcards and even Bull’s painting has a certain seedy charisma. Along with the chance to see work by a ‘name’.

There is also the sense of these being a test, of pushing the boundaries of what is expected from our ‘provisional’ museums and galleries and in turn what is expected from the visitors to places like the Harris. That sounds a little patronising, but Oculist Witnesses, is part of a drive which seems to offer a challenge not only to the viewer but to other galleries.

 http://www.harrismuseum.org.uk/exhibitions

Mad Max: Story Time

As you may of noticed Mad Max: Fury Road has been released. Ending thirty years of toil and expectation. Released is a apt term as since the film hit the screens, it seems to have gain a momentum of its own.

Fury Road smashed into people's imaginations with many people going to repeat viewings. Its also generated many articles about the production and the nature of the film. Many of them concentrated on Fury Road's feminist subtext.

A lot of articles focus on the creativity gone into the film and we've been treated to great images from nearly thirty years of conceptual art. Including work from the films co-writier Brendan McCarthy a stalwart of 2000 AD.

This comic book element may of fuelled the creation of drawings from contemporary comic artists. Often of the films central character Furiosa. Add to this reproductions of the cast as cats and the recreation of the insane vehicles in Lego, it would appear we have a car welded into another car sized phenomena here.

Why? Is there anything within the film that could explain way Fury Road have supercharged creative juices.

If it has done or is it another case of the ehco chamber of social media. Many of the people I follow are creative types. Most of them can nearly remember a world before The Road Warrior and probably saw it at an age were it would of lodged in there forming mind.

There is a element of child like fascination in the imagination which has gone into the overall look of the film. Often the film feels like drawings animated. Not surprising given the involvement of McCarthy who like other 2000 AD artists (Kevin O'Neil, Brett Ewins,) brings a certain frantic senseability. These artists were adapt at creating a detailed world full of energy, something you wanted to examine and recreate.

Still how does this relate to Fury Road? Well there is the appeal of the visual, the stories that can be spun from the forms of the vehicles and characters that inhabit the stark and dusty land of Fury Road.

Again this may be stateing the obvious given that with the Mad Max series George Milliar uses to a choreography of stunts and editing to tell the story in purely visual terms. Giving a direct link to the early days of cinema. Its a pretty simple story of "Run Away!"

Well that's the bare bones of it, the skeleton that can be fleshed out. Does a simple story allow the viewer to read multiple meanings into that story? Is the villian of the piece, Immortan Joe, a representation of the 1% the super rich male in control living high above the plebs.

Are his 'War Boys' a critic on the nature of fanaticism, after all they are presented as a group of youths looking for a father figure, hopped up on the promise of Valhalla and a glance from Joe himself.

The 'War Boys' reminded me of a Armies need to recruit under 21's who are the most reckless and fearless. This then lead me to think about the images of soilders captured by Tim Herthetington.

Of course an element which has generated much attention is the character of Furiosa. The feminist heart of the film who assists The Wives to free themselves of the objectivity and captivity of Joe. The idea that the presence of Furiosa emasculates Max is nonsense, as it is plain that they enable Max. They help him change from feral survivor to human being. In fact it is the other men who emasculates Max, as they're the ones who want him only for his body.

Note also that this is the first Mad Max film were Max isn't left a broken shell.

Anyway this is Furiosa's story which is the universal story of the hero leaving the village gaining experience then SPOILER ALERT! returning to the village to impart that experience. This could be the reason why Fury Road has lodged in peoples imaginations, storytelling.

This is the generation of myths or mythopoeia, the creation of a world that parallels our own. A good story will organically allow the listener, viewer to become part of the story. To want to pass on that story in any form.

This is why Fury Road has gotten into many a persons head, as they want retell the story. It's a modern version of a ancient human activity.

Surreal Landscapes - Carrington & Wilkes

There is a word, Mythopoeia

It’s a word that relates to the idea of myth making, of creating alternative worlds. Ones that often echo pre-existing myths, or myths that echo the world that they are generated in.

It naturally prevails in the worlds of fantasy and sci-fi, think the Mad Max movie. The word itself was invented by the ultimate in fantasy writers Tolkien and despite depicting a world of fantastical creatures it can be argued that Middle Earth is a description of the changes that befell England during and after the Second World War.

Within this word we see are natural desire to make things up, to tell stories in order to explain our world. It happens on many scales for example the simple telling of a personal event becoming imbued with great import.

A certain type of mythopoeia appears to be central to the work of Lenora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Here paintings and drawings are filled with images drawn from a collective mythological world. The figures that inhabit her work seem familiar but in the way that déjà vu is familiar.

Her paintings present a kind of parallel myth, one born of a parallel history.

This is more pronounced in her large tapestries with their strange symbols and animals definitely give the impression of belonging to another history. While her sketches and statues would seem to belong to some forgotten book of lore or book of monsters.

There is a sense of magic in these paintings and I associate then with the ‘rule of name’ a tenet of magic wherein if you have the real name of a thing or person you can have real control over them. That there is a fundamental reality under the one we can see.

Like the wizards in Ursula K leGuin’s Earthsea saga.

Perhaps within this idea of a true name of a fundamental truth we can see or read Carrington’s work as an attempt to find that name. That the adaptation of myths will somehow create a way to discover something new about the world or some basic truth.

Myth making doesn’t solely apply to an otherworld it can also be applied to the world of the mundane. To the objects we gather around us and brush with a light fetish.

Heirlooms can sit on shelves and produce of soft mythology, a contemporary and active archology. This is present in the work of Cathy Wilkes who has a parallel exhibition with Carrington.

The moving between exhibitions provides an unusual sensation as if you are stepping into some kind of mirror world. Of stepping into a landscape like Carrington’s and yet not being wholly present within that world.

This is a landscape inhabited by figures that refuse to acknowledge your presence. As if we, the visitors, were sprits gliding through this world. Things aren’t concrete here some figures melt into the floor filling the space with a sinister dream like quality.

The people that inhabit Wilkes landscape stare blankly or intensely (its difficult to tell) at recognisable objects. They stare in a way that is alien they stare at comics; ceramics wallpaper as if looking at an unknowable past. Pieces of furniture wrecked and broken broadcast a strange worth.

This is a surreal landscape.

Though everything is recognisable it becomes alien. Like walking in a familiar place in thick fog. It disconcerting.

If there is myth here it is one that stems from the present, a present whose flitting nature nudges us into attempt to create meaning from the places and object, which we inhabit and use. The production of experience into memory calls for the need for mythology.

To sure up fragile memories and to keep us telling stories.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/leonora-carrington

Social Behaviors

When the video camera become available and fell into the hands of artists. Some of the first things they did was to record relatively simple actions. Snapping tree branches, mooching around their studios and so on.

These actions carried on and the camera became smaller and cheaper and the camcorder became the means for artists to record things like trekking through their bedroom (Lucy Gunning) dancing in the street (Gillian Wearing) or autobiographies (Tracey Emin.)

What the camcorder seemed to offer was a certain type of freedom, allowing artists to catch phenomena or actions. A new spontaneity was offered, have camera will art.

Didn’t it?

Trying to think of recent video works which didn’t show either documentation of actions or wasn’t plonked down and let run. Maybe I need to see better video work.

This thinking was trigged by seeing the work of Li Binyuan at the CFCCA Manchester. His exhibition Social Behaviours features a number of performative actions captured by smartphone.

Simple actions simply captured.  

While I understand everything is more complex then it appears. Some of the actions presented, cartwheeling across a bridge, jumping in time to the rhythm of a passing train, flicking a lighter, remind me of those early video works. Press record and go.

It’s probably a falsehood but I can’t help but imagine Binyuan reaching into his pocket. Pulling out his phone putting it on a steady surface and getting on with it. I guess it appeals to the sense that art is a spontaneous reaction to the world.

Also it’s not just the videos, it is also how the videos have been curated. The videos are displayed in ways which complement the actions within them. For example Signal where the artist attempts to light a lighter in time with the flashing lights of a tower block is projected across two screens. Thereby creating a sense of distance. Similarly in Exercise 47mins featuring the artist apparently making trees sway by blowing on them, this is partly projected on a cloth which itself sways in sympathetic motion.

It’s a sympathetic curation which allows the themes and playfulness of the videos to come through.

It’s what the videos show and the way that they have been curated that prompted these thoughts on video art. That a certain expectation of what video art is and how it could be shown has been set. That for the last thirty of more years a convention of video work being shown on monitor or wall.

Echoing the tradition modes of cinema and television. Which was often used by artists to promote a sense of familiarity and pulling the viewer in.

The biggest change in galleries seems to be the move from monitors to flat screens.

Theirs is also the question of why there hasn’t been a ‘second wave’ of video artists. Given the availability of the technology and the changes of that technology it’s a wonder we haven’t seen artists embrace it to make and show art in new ways. Janet Cardiff has employed this tech in this piece.

Maybe it just hasn't gotten into the gallery space, maybe it’s up on YouTube. Maybe it’s a technology that artist are just understanding the possibilities in their hands.

http://www.cfcca.org.uk/exhibition/li-binyuan/

150/50

150

What would possess someone to own something they could never use. Even if it cost 50p. In this case a possibly Japanese 7 inch found in a charity shop in Newport, Wales. Perhaps I was attracted to it because it came with a prehistory, with a multitude of narratives leading to me.

Those narratives best describes the reasons for owning this object. For example the cover, which appears to be a film still. A snapshot of a narrative. Where a woman lays on the floor, clutching a parcel (a child?) Her face twisted in anguish, while under the stoney uncaring gaze of a man.

It's a provocative, evocative image, which drags you into its enigma. Allowing you to spawn multiple narratives, making it a totem for my imagination. The narratives opened by this object, coalesce to form a irresistible mystery.

One I wish not not to solve.

50
When a apparently useless yet cheap item appears in a Welsh charity shop. Its multiple narratives leading to you. Yet this isn't where the narrative ends. The item is foreign tounged and imaged provocatively. Giving me open narratives. For my imagination to continually roam.

Only In England, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool

I am not looking at photographs, I’m looking at people looking at photographs of people (and writing this). I’m at Only in England a collection of the works of photographers Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr at the Walker Gallery.

Which is considering it’s a damp Tuesday is quite busy. People gather around images of other people, people caught in a moment. Can’t put my finger on it but there’s a strange voyeuristic feeling about the process. As if each photo is a window onto a private section of a life.

I quickly notice that many people are approaching the photographs and pointing calling attention to a certain detail or aspect of the image. Often this action is connected with a memory or nostalgia, responses to the images include “Do you remember?” or “..on Thrusdays you could get tea and cake..”

It begs the question, what are people seeing when they look at these photographs? Is it more than the deadpan recording of light on chemically treated paper. Or a number of moments, deemed important by the photographers’ eye. A selected fraction of a second of a life caught for ongoing examination. Again where back to voyeurism.

Due the photographs themselves act as a mirror in which the viewer can see a reflection of themselves. Not the whole self but fractions which allow aspects of memory and expectation to be released.

As the viewer’s more from image to image, there reflections form some can of judgement or conclusion on the figures which inhabit that two dimensional plain. Look at their faces, their dresses, their behaviour. Perhaps a strange disconnect occurs between the present and the past, or in this case a captured past.

Regarding the photographs as a captured past, brings me to consider that these photographs somehow provide us with an eternal present. The places, people within the photographs are free from time and have no past, present or future.

Of course this offers the viewer the opportunity to look, to stare, to gawp, to really lean in. In ways that is usually socially unacceptable. The people in the photographs aren’t here, like were here in the gallery space and therefore the social rules do not apply.

All part of the cameras ability to create a distance between subject and viewer.  The distance is compounded by the fact the photographs are in black and white and seem to be produced by analogue means. This plus the subject matter cement these images into a collective idea of the past, they mark an undefinable difference between then and now.

This idea of the difference between a then and a now leads me to what maybe an obvious question. How do these images relate to the current proliferation of photographs throughout the likes of the internet?

What are we attempting when we snap and post that image of something strange, funny, a cat? Are we somehow attempting a freeze a moment? To disconnect and remove ourselves from that moment in order that we can look externally upon that moment and spark the sensations and motivations which created the image in the first place.

Within the act of snapping a photo is this idea of spontaneity of capturing a moment, though that is often untrue. Even though that idea has attached itself indelibly to photography no matter who is controlling the lens.

Equally the photograph is shorthand for the past. As I said they become a collective memory of the past. Yet the physically photograph becomes no more immune to the passing of time, no more than we are.  For once the photographs in this exhibition whereas achingly modern as any selfie.

Only the people and places that once reflected light that shone on treated film remain untouched by time.

Cornerhouse

http://confusedguff.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/opposite-ends.html

http://confusedguff.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/jamie-shovlin-hiker-meat-cornerhouse.html

http://confusedguff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/rainy-day-in-manchester.html

http://confusedguff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/samantha-donnelly-contour-states.html

http://confusedguff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/constellations-cornerhouse-manchester.html

Group Therapy/Labyrinth Psychotica FACT LIverpool

How do you write about a show like Group Therapy, how do you convert the experienced of this multi-layered, complex collection of works. Without controlling or predetermining the virgin viewers perceptions.

Also as the exhibition (or expedition) is the exploration of the juncture between mental health and contemporary technologies. Can I make it through without a hackneyed and redundant statements like: ‘people be crazy’ or ‘who’s the truly insane?’

What is my experience of this subject? It mostly comes from my favourite authors, Philip K Dick. Who famously went through a major psychotic transformation or breakdown, which gave us the book VALIS. I think the point I’m trying to make is that within my nominal mind is the idea of mental breakdown as a transforming experience, one of potential and change.

This feels like a fantasy. Often mental distress is accompanied by fear and isolation. My small experience of this came through the experience of anxiety attacks. Perhaps a very common form of mental distress. Though many people have similar experience, as far as you’re aware you’re the only one to feel this way.

How can you express any experience of mental activity? If you could then at least you could begin to understand what’s happening to you and therefore others can understand. Which seems to be the mission of Jennifer Kanary Nikolov(a)’s Labyrinth Psychotica. An attempt to recreate the conditions of psychosis in a psychical experience.  

Once in that maze, grabbing and reaching for the curtains which define the maze. Textures change, alter I keep my hand up feeling the materials as they pass my hand. This becomes at once worrying and yet comforting. As you field of vision becomes a grey palette what you’re walking into become less defined. The fabric walls increasingly become your world, they ground you.

The sensation is that you might be falling but your falling in the right direction. They might be huge gaps that are going to swallow you, but they’re your gaps, your path.

Though at first that path seems short as I get stuck going back and forth from the start to the first hallucination post. This posts of bright LED lights throw up images when you quickly dart your eyes back and forth. In do so an image of Marilyn Monroe floats in front of me. I think of Ballard I think of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Eventually I find a path through bleeping LED lights, number displays flashing its importance. The numbers are relevant somehow. Voices are heard and compete with the knowledge that the only person nearby is the friendly invigilator.  

Is this then the essence of mental distress, of psychosis? The ghost experience, of things that are there but not. It’s like the solidification of imagination, these things; feelings exist for me they are part of my world. When these experiences don’t manifest themselves within the world or culture around you that seems to be a problem.

After an encounter with a demanding set of headphones. I find myself stumbling out of the maze, pretty sure of what’s happened but not. Dressed in a lab coat (did I mention you get to wear a lab coat? You do!) The impression of being involved in an experiment is great. The sensations felt while in the Labyrinth Psychotica do leave you with the imprint of the conditions of psychosis and having that can act as a started point to better explain, to lay persons like me, what that term actual means. Therefore you can better understand the person.

Initially I thought I would write more widely about the Group Therapy exhibition.  Rather than focus one piece, for me the Labyrinth Psychotica distils some of the themes of this exhibition. From the use of technology to deepen the understanding the individual experience, to how the whole exhibition serves as a ‘maze’ which requires exploration and investigation.

On leaving and after foundling the pillows in the MadLove Asylum I feel the need to return and carry on exploring. Also, somehow, the outside feels different now…

The Quiet FACT Liverpool

It's hectic, its half term, in an effort to fill the time people are taking to the streets of Liverpool. Swelling the population, swelling the noise.

The hubbub is up.

To avoid this I'm travelling up Wood St, which is quieter in comparison. Just other people avoided the mainstream or having of fag break.

I'm on my way to FACT to see the Quiet, which promises to be a immersive installation which will recreate the still before the storm.

Or I hope it will as attempts to find more information just leads to a silent 404 page. I hope it is.

There it is in the foyer of FACT a strange combination of plywood and soft baby blue, erm stuff.

On the entrance there's a hefty bolt, it makes me hesitate. Is there someone locked inside a unknown stillness inside? Anyway the gallery assistant assures me I'm free to enter.

So I do, and like a deep breath, the silence is there, the stillness, the expectation that something will happen. Like a breath its gone and there I am in a room filled with that twilight that comes with a heavily overcasted day.

One where you can't tell were the light is coming from.hh

With a collection of tropical plants, lights and the sighing of a air conditioner. The muffled songs of the outside leak through from a distant world.

Though I feel I could stay I feel that my time here is fleeting. On exiting the installation I feel oddly upbeat. As if the installation has acted like a mental reset.

It's a slight experience but a affective one. Later I capture myself thinking about that space. Almost like a secret. I also think about that episode of the Avengers where a eccentric Army Major recreates a tropical jungle in his mansion.

Maybe because the both create hermetically sealed individual worlds.

For the Mowdery's!

So, Lauren, do you think it might be serious with this Karl fella? 

Yeah, Ok then I’ll say I few words about this wedding thing, about love, relationships and Lauren and Karl. 

Where to start, really, where to start? I could give out quote after quote about love; I mean I can find some good’uns. All that stuff, all that heart and flowers, Hallmark view of the power of liking someone a lot. Somehow doesn’t reflect the feelings the Lauren and Karl share. 

For what we have before us is more complex, deeper then something that could be summed up in a few well-chosen lines, or a speech. 

This marriage is another episode, another step in the on-going public display of affection that is your relationship. 

I was ‘nearby’ at the beginning and remember I conversation in TJ’s Newport about a boy Lauren met during a trip to Huddersfield. When she spoke about this boy there was a something in her tone that was a clear indication of attraction, a spark. Though when I asked Lauren if is liked this boy she was all ‘yeah he’s ok’. Anyway this attraction grew; with the occasional nudge from Jack Daniels a relationship was formed.

Since then I’ve been witness to the small acts of tenderness between these two. The carefully constructed mixtapes, the gifts bought with an ease which belies the thoughtful affection which goes with it. I’ve even seen the smile on Laurens face as she typed away sending messages to Karl over the internet. 

So what’s my point? Well all these moments are the evidence of why these two belong together. All these little acts of affection, all the quiet un-witnessed moments of love had led Lauren and Karl to this point. To this act of love, this marriage, this symbol of commitment, this statement of the obvious, and marvel at the fact that within a universe of billions of stars, on a planet with billions of people. 

Two people who are right for each other and are willing to share a life together can find each other.

Now you’re legally stuck together, until one of you is DEAD! 

The Mowdery’s! 

The Passing of The Biennial 2014

It’s been a funny Biennial, gaining mixed reviews. Some of them proclaiming doom and gloom or criticising the lack of political engagement.

Myself I wrote this for The Double Negative focusing on how I saw it as a Biennial which presented work that played with the conventions of the gallery space and the role of the visitor within that gallery space.

Three months on and how does this still stand up? Well Claude Parent at Tate Liverpool is still a playful, exciting change to the normal modes of gallery viewing. While the exhibition upstairs is interesting if a little hit and miss.

Though it’s always great to see work by Susan Hiller.

Whistler at The Bluecoat, I feel pretty much the same as I first saw it.

As for Sharon Lockhart’s exhibition at FACT I still find Lockhart’s use of the gallery space more engaging then the actual concepts that inform the work.

What of the main exhibition at The Old Blind School? On my final visit though I enjoyed the many sci-fi tinged works I felt that a lot of it had lost it shine. Now I see the edges of the projection screen of William Leavitt’s Artic Earth and Michael Stevenson’s remote controlled doors where far to accommodating for you notice that anything was awry.

Ultimately how do I feel about the Biennial? Well I’m not sure after the initial excitement of its arrive I never found myself possessed by a urge to revisit many exhibitions. On the whole I have had a more positive reaction to the 2014 Biennial then others. Looking back on it I wonder if this has been a Biennial that didn’t really have its mind on the here and now, but rather it was looking towards its possible future expanding outside the city centre.

Maybe this is true of most Biennials I guess we’ll see in two years’ time.

Thinking City: Adam Chodzko, Liverpool Biennial

Funny, when things seem to come together.

The way life can connect seemingly disparate things. Giving the impression of a greater meaning, I think that this is sometime referred to as synchronicity. A recent experience of this phenomenon involves my current (paid) job, a novel, the current social-economic situation and a performance lecture.

That lecture by Adam Chodzko took place in an abandoned above ground reservoir in Toxteth.  Now Liverpool gets its water from elsewhere it stands as an monument to Victorian engineering and bravado.

So where once were tonnes of water stands Chodzko and his seemingly modest presentation. Though the reverberation of his voice throughout the space lends his voice a certain booming gravitas

Fitting as Adam is talking about some huge subjects, literary. One of the things under discussion are super container ships. Modern leviathans that cross oceans and seas, making sure that you and I have things like iPods, Lego and training shoes.

This is where the first ‘connection’ comes into play. I have recently read Simon Ings novel ‘Dead Water’ a multi-layered narrative, which features a character Eric Moyes who creates these shipping lines and uses them to hide a terrible secret.

Both Ings and Chodzko touch on the strangeness of these sea born giants which despite their size are as invisible as air. How these thing follow a unique idea of fluid dynamics, operating to the imagined pressures of commerce.

The creation of a constant flow of things and stuff which threatens to overwhelm us and fill the spaces we inhabit. Which brings me to the third ‘connection’ recently I have found myself employed (by a company known for tiny pens, that’s not IKEA) this puts me rather neatly at the end point of this epic voyage of stuff.

One of many who facilitate the ‘last mile’ of that journey. Helping everyone fill their homes with stuff, in the lecture Chodzko speculates that this collection of stuff will lead to the instigation of people creating and dealing with smaller and smaller spaces. He provides this by showing us his prototype living space created from a IKEA wardrobe.

All this may just be preparation for a future, a future that will take place on the giant super-boats. These will become the cities of a flooded world, a world flooded with water and stuff. Once aboard this floated cities we will be surrounded by all of our stuff that we would arrive at some kind of nirvana.

A capitalistic equilibrium, a utopia on the ocean waves.

When where on our never-ending cruise, what will happen to the mega-docks that where once home to these behemoths? Well Chodzko suggests that the ultimate role for these docks, such as the proposed Liverpool 2 superdock is as massive earth-works, as land art. Their destiny is to become supersized monuments to entropy like Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ or even oversized versions of J.G Ballard’s empty swimming pools.

The archaeology of this future is to be built through commerce, we are building it.

We Buy the Cosmos

On Wood St, unsupposing Wood St for a brief moment there exists a conjunction of two experiences of time, history and our place within it.

Both revolve around dumb objects. Objects in themselves arguably nothing more than the material which composes them. Nothing more than the whatever banding of atoms determines them to be.

Starting with a very earthly object, an LP, in particular The Beatles ‘The White Album’. Under the title ‘We Buy White Albums’  artist Rutherford Chang has been endeavouring to collect all numbered copies of The White Album. For Chang the famous white sleeve is a void which the concerns and personal history of whoever possessed it can expand into.

So you get exotic drawings, forgotten names neatly sitting in corners patiently waiting for identification and reunion. You also get a series of objects in various states of decay. Flick through the copies and each one is corrupted by its own existence. Each is its own maker within an individual journey in entropy.

Drifting through sleeve after sleeve, which can get repetitive, you do begin to think about the need for collecting. Is this need to collect some kind of attempt to keep entropy at bay? To halt or slow down the passage of time, by gathering object which hold residual histories.

Or is it simply something to do?    

                                                                                              

Objects with residual history also exist a little further down Wood St. Three meteorites’ sit patience on three brown modular plastic chairs. They can afford to be patient they’ve been around for a long time.

This is Beginnings by AKRA group part of Axolotl at Model. The aforementioned trio of space rocks and earth chairs sits in a group around a humming amp. Partly shielded by an old cinema screen, again objects imparted with historical residue.

The main focus is the meteorites; to experience Beginnings you select a meteorite don headphone and sinister black hood. Already under way is the narrative of the lump you hold in your hand. As the soft LIverpudlian accent intones this narrative, which for me starts somewhere out in space, heading towards, away from a familiar blue planet.

I begin to spin off connections, one of them being Charles and Ray Eames treatise on our place in the universe Powers of Ten. Of course all of this doesn’t matter to the space rock, it just is. All the poetry and astonishment comes from us, the humans. Due to our placement, out temporary placement, in the universe we create a sense of wonder; we attempt to come to terms with the incredible odds of our existence.

We do that do projecting some immense ideas onto the things that make up the world. Whether those object be record sleeves or things that fall from the sky. In pursuit to comprehend our place here and now.