Sunday 4 March 2012

everydaydissent




the Jeremy Deller show at the hayward was for me pointedly depressing, resurrecting the twin 70s icons of oppression and violence. this was most prevalent in the work about the miner turned glam wrestler, Adrian Street, recollections of the boredom of Saturday afternoons came flooding back through the grainy film. the show is quite possibly one of the most important exhibitions so far this year, hopefully promoting a model of dissent and a challenge to the conformity of todays everyday.
possibly the vehicle for this challenge might be at the ica which celebrates the exuberance of dissident voices – often with the use of cheap printing or the office photocopier in the show in numbers – serial publications by artists since 1955 http://www.ica.org.uk/exhibitions or the alternative could be to lounge in the gloriously banal animations of David Shrigley, particularly the headless drummer, the queue, yes a queue to see art, was a challenge – whilst waiting i remembered a time when going to an art gallery was a minority experience, its always a challenge when the alternative is subsumed into the mainstream.
if anybody needed to see a way of doing this ‘challenging the norm thing’ they could look to Lis Rhodes who is also at the ica – she has been making radical and experimental films since the 1970s. i can remember doing some design work called hang on a minute on a new thing called a photocopier - for circles – a women’s film distribution organisation – which had some of her work in it.
meanwhile the drawing studio at nuca has been the site of experimentation and challenge – working with year 3 students on the last opportunity to really explore the possibility of otherness within their work before the push to deliver final product for the final shows.