Also, before I forget something else, here’s part 3 of mine and Paddy’s cellar series.
We shot this in our hostel whilst we were staying in Berlin, hoping to include it in Act Vs. Object alongside our other videos but for MANY reasons we didn’t manage to get it back to the homeland in time. What I like most about this completely absurd hour-long conversation is the way it reflects the process that went into the first two parts. Like part 1, this was the closest place to a living room that we had access to, except it was like a shop window, we could watch the world go by. Lounging out with copious amounts of beer was all that was appropriate, so that’s just what we did, and we did it good baby. It’s just interesting to see how we adapted to that entirely foreign environment (yes, in both senses of the word), and how we found comfort, mainly in alcohol, but you know, that’s the way the world works right? But it wasn’t in the restaurant, or in our bedroom, or on the street, or in a bar - we wanted to spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way.
I think, in relation to the past few projects, the final project has looked back on the personality that runs through the centre of my questioning. Without those moments of solitary contemplation I physically wouldn’t be able to ask those questions, I wouldn’t be able to asses my surroundings; after all, that’s why we don’t ‘see’ what we ‘see’, instead we get distracted by all that imagery that we unintentionally consume because it’s immediate, it’s simple, and it’s just so fucking easy.
The hole Trinity/Den experiment saga continues…
Chris Harman invited us back for another exhibition, Making Waves, which was held again at the Trinity Church, Leeds. I was asked to show the film Z-Axis that can be seen on my website over at adamcluley.com. The church is an awkward place to project anything, except the roof is a pretty good place…and there it went. The exhibition was loosely based around environments, and ‘environmental art’, and so Z-Axis fit in quite nicely, not because it had insects in it and it incorporated ’the natural world’ but because of the way it addresses the way we engage the world - and the way that that engagement differs from the way animals do. Oh, and the blatant experimentation with scale. This has been consistent throughout my work and I think this will become even more evident with my final piece for the FMP.
What are we looking at, and why? Really, why?
So, this is what we showed at Act Vs. Object.
What we set out to do here was, well, to do something. I wanted to see what would happen if we were to approach a blank space with nothing but a knowledge of our house itinerary; Patrick wanted to explore the performance of that process. The result was us creating a space for two people to comfortably sit at least, then with time we settled into our new room, had a beer, and played some Jenga whilst just chilling out, maxing and relaxing all cool.
The choice to go portrait was to comment on the nature of how we perceive that particular room. It is a very narrow room that tapers away from the doorway and the only way to really view the room properly from the outside, is to see it as the camera does here. In other work I have done, I’ve experimented with the instant evaluation that we use to establish the context of our surroundings; with the cellar videos I found that, given a blank canvas, we only really felt the need to fill it with objects. In filling it with objects we created some kind of mongrel space. it served no real purpose, it didn’t hold us for any longer than the video lasts, and it wasn’t particularly cosy. However, if you were to asses the room based on an itinerary, like we made for our second scripted video, it would most likely sound like a living room - it most definately didn’t feel like one. What we expect from living rooms are comfortable amounts of space to be able to navigate the furniture/obstacles - what we got was just furniture, no room to navigate. We also got flaky-paint-brick-walls, and half a ceiling, and a few shit spiders.
But it was still a living room, but also not a living room. Right?
Ok, so I’ve got waylaid with my posts. Whilst I was in Berlin me and Patrick (opensettheatre) managed to exhibit our collaborative piece we shot in the cellar back at the beginning of the FMP. We showed two portrait videos of us emptying a room, filling it with miscellaneous stuff in attempt to make it more welcoming I guess, and then we played Jenga; the second video is a scripted presentation from Patrick that then descends into playing Scrabble. Alas, it wasn’t a crazy step onto the international scene; we didn’t exhibit in Berlin, we exhibited in Trinity Church, Leeds instead, we just happened to be on holiday then - or that’s what we were fooled into thinking anyway. The exhibition Act Vs. Object was coordinated by Chris Harman, who runs The Den Experiment. Over the past few months we’ve gotten to know Chris quite well, and from what I hear this exhibition was received quite well - hence doing another one at Trinity tonight.
More posts along the same lines to come shortly.
I’m titling this with the names of these artists because, despite the fact I really enjoyed Overworlds and Underworlds last week, the Quay Brothers are insanely out of order. The website, a whole week after their event ended, still has no indication of the artists mentioned. Interiews with them,…
So, Patrick saved me the job of having to post about this.
Go, PADDY! I did like the girl with the leaves and the one with the masks, but I mean, that’s about all I know..
I like the one where that bitch was getting tossed around like a ham hock, I guess her name was irrelevant, but maybe that’s just me.
(via extract-reality)
For the last crit I exhibited two videos of me making my rope frames up in Ilkley. I realised after the interrogation that I was incredibly bored with what I was doing. i’d been trying to make it something bigger than it was.
It was never really about any conceptual theory, it was more a personal connection with the sparse, open nature of the countryside, away from all those structures, away from the city. I take a nomadic outlook on life: I wander through time but I have never truly considered myself settled in one place, so the videos then are not an artistic impression of the landscape, they are merely a document of my desire to look back on the bigger picture - to see things from afar. The videos, like the rope that frames the view, are my collection. I collect these positions of utopia: In the rain it was under the trees, in the sun it was open to the limitless sky, either way it was where I wanted to be there and then. The personality that was captured in those videos was a bit of a revelation and subsequently I’ve decided to mix up my ‘final’ piece.
I’ve been involved in a number of projects over the duration of this brief and I intend to submit them all for assessment. So, that being said, I thought about creating a fictional room, a base if you wish for my collective conceptual confusion. I talked it over with Dr. Dan and he agreed it would be a fitting thing for my work, and I’m just going to be more motivated regardless. Further planning to commence.
Erwin Wurm - Narrow House, 2010
I first came across Wurm some time ago, and was particularly interested in his obscure car sculptures. At the time I also took an interest in Narrow House and now it seems more relevant than ever before. Wurm’s fairly self-explanatory house takes the audience and makes them participants amongst his surrealist creation; the building is a tool of humour, it criticises contemporary society with a jocular tone that suggests ridicule but also raises strong questions about our personal space. It might be slightly extreme and claustrophobic but it is a fine example of the dominance architecture can hold over us - something I covered heavily in my dissertation. Wurm also poses a question about reality by utilising the absurd; he asks us to consider what it is that we see in the space around us, and radicalises proportion to draw our attention to the progression of architecture and to society’s warped perception of it.
Sam Schubert: Tape Drawings
I was recently introduced to the work of Sam Schubert who has been working with ‘frames’ and documenting it with photography. Working with similar ideas Schubert has developed at style that sees her tracing out 2D shapes onto 3D environments, this technique places an emphasis on the flatness of the image in contrast with the expansive scenery. As a series the ‘Tape Drawings’ challenge our understanding of perspective, removing the vanishing point and forcing the viewer to asses the terrain but also to question the validity of the image: the copy of the real piece.
