a day in London - meetings and exhibitions - the work exhibited
at Carroll/Fletcher is of the moment - Neoliberal Lulz - upstairs there is a
detailed examination and critical unpicking of capitalism - appropriating the
very tools used in the pursuit of gain - I love The New Gold Diggers by Emilie
Brout and Maxime Marion - a special mention has to be the wondrous infomercials
by Constant Dullaart - DullTech. Downstairs is quite beautiful - Manfred Mohr
has created systems to generate some sublime shifting/moving shapes - Mohr
insists that old techniques of drawing and imagination are not to be imposed on
the machine - it may be a new way of making but the references are there - it
has echo's of the serial art of So lewit's cube/line work. Whitecube Bermondsey
- The history of nothing - a show whose starting point is a film by Paolozzi -
highlights for me were the actual film - a startling prescient observation that
both underpins and undermines some of the work in the show, although Josh
Klein's use of a real face time substitution program to explore ideas of
'post-human' made me laugh but what was I laughing at? In the larger room we
have Sergej Jensen's (great name) use of money bags (bags that coins, change is
transported in) as both a canvas to work on and as the/a reference point for
the work itself gives the work an immediate set of codes to read - I kept
thinking about minimal abstraction and people like Alberto Burri, Barnett
Newman and Robert Ryman - maybe that's the point - referencing and referential
all around.
Our meeting at The House of Commons was truly exciting -
lots of thoughts about duality - dialogue and conversations, back stage and
theatre, old and new - especially around technology. Lots to think about. I
came away thinking about a part of our conversation concerning Pugin - the idea
of the haze of detail and the need for a neo-gothic revivalist architectural
style at that point in history - the image of an idea manifest in a building.
Later, full of connections and connectedness, thinking about the Suffolk fairs
of the early 70's - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sun-East-Norfolk-Suffolk-Fairs/dp/0950870102
again reviving a style to enable a rethinking, a retelling of what it is to be
English, relinquishing the now, using a neo-romantic image of the past, that
had itself been revived to create a new future......what goes around comes
around.
