Five

5.08/05/13

Thijs groot Wassink

'On collaboration, supposedly dumb questions and how these have been applied in the production of artist books'.

www.wassinklundgren.com

"Why collaborate at all?... One big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom... There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions ... and sometimes, faster results.(David Byrne: Journal 03.15.10) WassinkLundgren is a meeting of two creatively mischievous minds: Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren. As their conjoined name suggests, the pair work as a single, two-headed creative entity, looking at the world around them through the medium of photography, while simultaneously playing around with ideas of creativity and collaboration through that same medium. Each of their projects, to differing degrees, takes them on a tightrope walk of discovery where chance, accident and uncertainty often seem as important as the pursuit of a single governing idea". Sean O'Hagan 2013

The talk centred around 3 books produced by WassinkLundren (Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren) over the last few years. Tokyo Tokyo (2010), Empty Bottles (2007) and their latest book HITS (2013). 

Image from Tokyo Tokyo © WassinkLundgren

With the 2 artists living so far apart (Ruben lives in China) Thijs there are obvious questions regarding authorship but these problems are quickly dismissed as uninteresting and  do not appear to concern this artist collaboration, who operate as a kind of two headed beast.

Thijs addressed some of the practicalities of a long-distant collaboration as well as discussing the use of play as a means of entering a new work.Often this initial sense of fun remains central to their work but there are projects, for example Empty Bottles, that flip this initial playfulness and take on more sober subjects. Empty Bottles is a book of "photographs of full-time scavengers, cleaners and other citizens of Beijing and Shanghai picking up plastic bottles that were placed in front of the camera". 

Image from Empty Bottles © WassinkLundgren

And the cake was chocolate....

Four

4. 25/04/13 

Andrew Bick

'Against cultural amnesia'

Andrew Bick, Savage School Window Gallery, Vyner St, London 2010

A war against cultural amnesia…

At a recent CAS conference on curating and commissioning Ingrid Swenson, director of Peer projects in London expressed frustration, towards the end of the day in that she was ‘bored with hearing about young and emerging artists. Young and emerging is all very well, but I’m more interested in old and submerged artists these days”. The report on the conference goes on to describe “a palpable surge of approval” for this statement. I was not an attendee, [I picked up the report later on twitter], but am very much there with Swenson’s argument. In particular, I have been engaged with the work of British Construction and Systems artists over the past few years…

Such an influence, submerged, like Swenson's analogy, and therefore less easy to identify, is nevertheless, in my opinion, a vital component of any analytical debate concerning what drives abstraction now as much as what drives my own experimentation.  Exploring the implications of Construction and Systems in relation to my own practice as well as that of artists in my own and younger generations, whose connection to them is sometimes even less direct, has become a war against cultural amnesia. Naming it this way indicates a level of discomfort for any of the protagonists, older or younger. This short talk is a partial account of some of the resulting experiments…

Andrew Bick, April 2013.

The talk brought to light a much neglected period in British Art and introduced us all to a number of exciting artworks, interesting texts and exhibitions.

Here's a sample of some of the things that came up.

The exhibition Construction and Its Shadow, curated by Andrew Bick, 2011 at Leeds Art Gallery.
http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/collections/collections-displays1/previous-displays1/construction-and-its-shadow

Pier + Ocean: Construction in European and American Art of the Seventies, the Hayward Gallery's 1980 exhibition.

The 2012 exhibition Concrete Parallels/ Concretos Paralelos at Laurent Delaye Gallery. Here's Abstract Critical's article on it:

http://abstractcritical.com/note/concrete-parallels-concretos-paralelos/

Artworks by Achill Redo (Anthony Hill's pseudonym) 

Kenneth Martin's Chance and Order series.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-chance-and-order-group-vii-drawing-6-t01847

Mary Martin's beautiful relief constructions.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mary-martin-1586

Of course there was cake, a honey loaf.

And a full moon.

Three

3.  20/03/13

Imagining a re-synchronising: 

(The Phantom Twin)

In the form of a video conversation The Modern Language Experiment screened a collection of short films and videos by artists Robert Crosse, Erica Scourti and Maria Marshall and two clips from the documentaries Kony 2012 and We Live in Public. Matthew Stock and Keh Ng took slightly adverse positions to consider when and what would constitute a collaboration in video and film based art practices. 

'The process of formulating the collective possibilities that presents themselves when we no longer focus on the individual as the basic atom of creative production.

Beyond the experience of being a creative self we are becoming more and more attuned to multifaceted and dynamic creative generation that issues from collective entities. This creative matrix seems to be a promising ground from which to start thinking about social and political life and to imagine ways in which we might take up the challenges of the future.'

For me the axis of the discussion was, are we as viewers of screens, collaborators? 

Here are some links to the texts and films discussed:

The Loneliness of the Project by Boris Groys, 2002

http://www.ny-magazine.org/PDF/Issue%201.1.%20Boris%20Groys.pdf

Kony 2012

http://vimeo.com/invisible/kony2012

We Live in Public

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XSTwfdFwIYY

www.modernlanguageexperiment.org

 

This video conversation was a collaboration between The Modern Language Experiment and madamewang.com and it will generate an Event Article as part of a forthcoming series of Event Articles on madamewang.com 

  

 And the cake was peanut butter and white chocolate blondies...

Two

2. 13/03/13

‘A quest for a beautiful balance of signs and things’

 
The second in the series was a discussion on 'blurry and diffused bits in painterly abstraction' with the artist Anna Salamon. Anna thoughtfully provided the audience with handout of the keywords and artists that she talked about and here they are (including some very interesting texts). 

Relevant devices:

embodied vision, particular conditions of observation, mono-chrome and grid, inadequate or incompatible technology, figure+ground=vision, cloud and smoke as natural signs, harp-edged (digital) language, formlessness

Artists mentioned (in order of appearance)

Katy Moran, Varda Caivano, Phillip Guston, Katharina Grosse, Gerhard Richter, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann, Albert Durer, Cy Twombly, John Hollander (shaped poems), Nancy Spero, Henri Michaux, Joan Mitchell, Jonathan Lasker

Books mentioned or referred to :

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, Princeton University Press 2011

Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality. The Nature of Information at the Turn of Millenium, The University of Chicago Press 1999

James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation, Stanford University Press 2008

Jame Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, Cambridge University Press 2011

Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, Yale University Press 2004

Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images. Questioning the End of a Certain History of Art, The Pennsylvania State University Press 2005

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, MIT 1995

Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, Cambridge University Press 1995

For me, Anna's talk was a reminder of the importance of the incidental in painting, I'm not sure whether I entirely believe in it but I took away the desire to be receptive to the idea. 

Below is Stephen Grant's response to Anna's talk. 

Stephen Grant Untitled

'This painting was done in response to Anna's talk. Although they are not abstract in any way I was struck by the sense of freedom through the diverse options available to the artist. I had not fully realized the restraints I had placed on myself until I had heard Anna’s talk.'SG

Oh, and the cake was chocolate and vanilla marble cake.