Babak Ghazi, Model, 2008, Digital print on canvas, one of twenty-six components, Courtesy the artist. |
Nought to Sixty: 60 Contemporary Artists in Six Months at ICA London |
ICA Nought to Sixty is an ambitious, fast-moving programme of exhibitions and events that — over the course of six months — is presenting solo projects by sixty emerging British- and Irish-based artists. This wide-ranging programme is being held at the ICA from spring until autumn 2008, over which period there will be new events staged every week, building up a multi-faceted portrait of the contemporary art scene in Britain and Ireland. The artists in Nought to Sixty are drawn from a thriving art scene that stretches across Britain and Ireland, but which is especially concentrated in cities such as London, Glasgow and Dublin. Most of the participating artists are under 35, and few of them have had significant commercial exposure. The project draws instead on a network of artist-run initiatives and brings this energy into the ICA, emphasising the ICA's founding role as a club which fosters exchange between artists — and between artists and the public. All of the artists and artist groups in Nought to Sixty are presenting solo projects, and hence the programme avoids the group show format into which emerging artists are so often placed — and instead gives participants a more autonomous space. The core of the programme takes the form of exhibitions in the ICA's Upper Galleries, but the season also includes events in the ICA Theatre, Cinemas and Nash and Brandon Rooms as well in the building's public areas. Exhibitions will last a week, and are being marked by special opening and closing viewings every Monday evening from 7 to 10pm. Monday evenings are also being used for performances, screenings and talks, as well as for other events featuring Nought to Sixty artists and guests. The special exhibition viewings on Mondays are free and open to all; the other events are also free, although booking for these is required. The Nought to Sixty programme is being announced monthly, and publicised through the monthly magazine as well as on the ICA's website. As well as details of each month's programme, the magazine and website will also carry further comment and information, including extended essays and a gazetteer of artist-run projects and resources. The ICA wants to encourage debate about the range of forces that make up a healthy art scene, and to this end the events programme includes a series of monthly salon discussions. Nought to Sixty is being organised by Mark Sladen and Richard Birkett of the ICA, with the help of a wide range of collaborators. The programme is supported by the Scottish Arts Council, Culture Ireland and The Henry Moore Foundation. Additional partners are Afterall, Art Review and LUX. Nought to Sixty is a major part of a range of events designed to mark the ICA's 60th anniversary, a season which climaxes with a 6oth anniversary exhibition and auction in September-October 2008. — Mark Sladen, Director of exhibitions, ICA Babak Ghazi Babak Ghazi (born London, 1977, lives in London) is the mastermind of an irregularly published magazine called Not Yet — a title that hints at what his overall practice proposes: the idea of things existing in a temporal narrative that is available to him to re-order and re-present. Ghazi's practice draws on notions of appropriation and history; he dips back and reframes past works of art and cultural imagery, presenting them as new, unfamiliar and changed — or simply suddenly remembered — in the present. For a work shown in 2007 at the Chelsea Space of the Chelsea College of Art & Design (where Ghazi teaches), the artist bought a 1975 issue of Data Arte magazine that had been missing from the school's library, put it on display and donated it to the institution after the exhibition was finished, literally recuperating the contents of the publication. The 1970s and 80s are key to his practice: for other works he has mined photo spreads, album covers and "designer" objects from these periods, including Perspex cubes and glam-dripping sunglass advertisements. Ghazi's work owes a great deal to Pop Art and the latter's inclusion of popular material as both affirmation and critique; like that movement's best-known star, Andy Warhol, he also pushes such material close to abstraction. A series of altered images of David Bowie, entitled ShapeShifter (2004), depicts the singer with his face swollen and stretched as if in a funhouse mirror. Another series, Untitled (2004), overlays a magazine photo of sunglasses with kaleidoscope-like fragments of broken CDs. Finally, in the works on show at the ICA, Model (2008), Ghazi pays homage to Warhol's exceptional series of paintings, Shadows (1978). Warhol's paintings are made from silk-screened images of shadows, used in both negative and positive form, and perhaps surprisingly summon up the Abstract Expressionist style that he had earlier helped to displace. Ghazi's work, in turn, employs an image of a model wearing a Katherine Hamnett slogan T-shirt from a 1984 issue of Vogue — a pout-y image very much of its time — and reproduces it in a number of negative and solarised versions, hung around the room in a manner which mimics the serial installation of the Warhol original. Ghazi's Model evokes Pop, abstraction and the will towards trauma within Warholian repetition — as well as both 1978 and 1984, and the present moment of encounter with the "digitised" image. In creating a new inventory made by accumulation and repetition, it frames the strident projection of identity contained within the dated magazine image. And in the gap between Warhol and himself Ghazi invokes the shifting territory of selfhood, and the borderline areas of public imagery that are at once superficial and politicised. — Melissa Gronlund Nina Canell and Robin Watkins Nina Canell (born Växjö, Sweden, 1979, lives in Dublin) and Robin Watkins (born Stockholm, Sweden, 1980, lives in Dublin) are long-term collaborators. Canell creates sculpture in the most expanded sense, assemblages that fuse matter, light and sound to create surreal testing grounds. Working together, Canell and Watkins have previously realised several film works and musical recordings as well as numerous live performances and events. For Nought to Sixty the artists have made a new gallery-specific installation, one which brings together a number of recent works to form a sculptural whole. The film work shown is Digging a Hole (2008), which portrays a man in his overalls digging in a bog. The sculptures include A Meditation on Minerals and Bats (2007), Heat Sculpture (2007) and Score for Two Lungs (2008). For her most recent solo exhibition, Slight Heat of the Eyelid, Mother's Tankstation, Dublin (2008), Canell created an installation of seven sculptures, independent yet complimentary. The works seemed like elements in a periodic table that had been energetically shaken, leaving them re-ordered and re-charged. The title of the show goes some way to indicating the interests of the artist, who explores what Samuel Beckett called "all that inner space one never sees." In Beckett's Molloy (1955), the character "C" decides one day to climb a hill rather than simply peer at it from afar, and moves from observed to physically-learned experience and on towards a third, more intuited realm. Similarly, the flickering sights and sounds of Canell and Watkins' ICA installation -— the first solo presentation of their work in London — are best navigated by the incalculable, intuited or imagined. One central characteristic of the works of Canell and Watkins is their use of unorthodox sculptural materials and combinations— including found debris as well as precise custom-fabricated objects. Heat Sculpture (2007), for example, comprises a leafless branch, trapped or cradled in the fingers of four neon lights, the whole composition tied together with cables. Another characteristic of the duo's work — and one which emphasises its extra-linguistic properties — is its use of music. In a recent interview Canell and Watkins said that, "in contrast to audio-art which foregrounds perceptual effects, technological progression, and self-referentiality, [we are] interested in engaging with acoustic phenomena as a catalyst for collective imagination, the construction of a magical image [...]." Music, whether played live, pre-recorded or merely signified by the presence of instruments, is a key mechanism within their work, and always an agent of transformation. — Isobel Harbison Alastair MacKinven Alastair MacKinven (born Clatterbridge, UK, 1971, lives in London) has an obsession with the body — its limits, idiosyncrasies and various behaviours. In his 8mm film All the Things You Could Be by Now if Robert Smithson's Wife Was Your Mother (2007) he transferred a pile of dirt from one area of a lawn to another, remaking the 1979 work Star Crossed by Nancy Holt (who was Robert Smithson's wife) MacKinven embedded a large pipe in the pile, undressed, then passed naked into the pipe and came out, wrapping himself in a silver blanket like a newborn child. Like the title, the work refers to conception, birth and supposed transformation; the artist's bare body becomes a base from which MacKinven questions art's myths, and in particular its associations with the transformative. MacKinven's exhibition for Nought to Sixty entitled Et Sic In Infinitum Again employs the so-called "Penrose stairs" — familiar from the M.C. Escher's 1960 lithograph Ascending and Descending — which connect into each other in an impossible loop. MacKinven has made a series of paintings of the stairs, surrounding the canvases with the kind of handrails used to help the elderly and infirm. Installed incongruously in the gallery space, these handrails are perhaps guides to viewing: ridiculously corporeal aids for a supposedly intellectual activity. In these and other projects MacKinven treats the body both as something mystical, to be revered in its complexity, and as something problematic, a site of antagonism that must be regulated either through pseudo-Conceptualist scientific discourse or by adolescent shock tactics. Both these strands are evident, for example, in a soft-focus photograph from 2006: the exoticism of the subject matter (it is an image appropriated from National Geographic of a naked girl getting out of the water) and the crudeness of its title (Default Masturbatory Stimuli). Similarly, for a recent performance at the Camden Arts Centre MacKinven glued his hand to the floor of one of the galleries. He then sat there waiting to see how long it would take until the institution's attendants offered him help — brought him a glass of water, for example — or tried to unglue him from the floor. This piece, which clearly plays with notions of institutional critique, was given a different spin in its title, Cut Off My Hand to Spite My Cock (2008), shifting the emphasis from a public investigation to a private act. Issues such as trust, vulnerability, violation and shame — are all relevant to his practice — as they are to many canonical works of art and performance of the 1970s, works which MacKinven often references. A series entitled Critical Theory, shown at the Art Basel fair in 2007, is constituted by a group of paintings in MacKinven's trademark grey palette. The paintings depict different star ratings: from one (poor) to five (excellent). He asked his gallerist to sell them at prices that accorded to the rating, so that a "one star" painting would cost less than a "five star" one. Throughout his practice MacKinven's base humour satirises the value systems of the art world, whilst wryly deflecting to a more corporeal practice of involuntary evaluation. — Melissa Gronlund Seamus Harahan Seamus Harahan (born Belfast, 1968, lives in Belfast) uses his video camera — a relatively accessible and moderately affordable technology — to take hand-held, seemingly amateur footage, the contents of this footage locating Harahan through found activity occurring around him. The main subject is the urban environment, its incidental detail and fugitive nature. The light is often unfiltered and the image over-exposed, implying a mode of filmmaking that prioritises recording before thought, the absent-minded gaze. Music is a vital element in all of Harahan's works, with songs used as soundtracks or informing the composition, title or duration of individual pieces. The artist takes songs from an eclectic range of sources, including reggae and hip hop as well as traditional English and Irish music. The recording style can be equally telling, from scratchy track-intros (Picking Up Change in the King Fu Theatre, 2004) to a John Peel introduction to a live session track (Free as a Bird, 2006). These seemingly disparate musical sources are laid over Harahan's urban footage, often coming with references to war and conflict, including lyrics intending to motivate or comfort soldiers and freedom fighters. The marriage of such lyrics to footage of Belfast, but particularly to images that focus on the minutiae of found activity, strike a balance between a sense of political conflict and an intuitive response to individual human concerns. |
In Clonemen (2004), a track by an American rap group accompanies footage of Northern Ireland's hinterlands, over which the British flag constantly reappears, a journey that detours along the M1 to Belfast. Avoiding dogmatic rhetorical devices, the artist manages to suggest not the eye of surveillance, but instead the viewpoint of a fascinated bystander — one whose environment is in a constant state of unravelling (a position echoed in the artist's choice of music). Harahan's work can be interpreted as an open and sophisticated exploration of the shortcomings of social and political representation in general, rather than a lament or protest concerning Northern Ireland in particular. At the ICA Seamus Harahan is presenting a two-screen video installation entitled Valley of Jehosephat / Version – In Your Mind (2007). In this work the same footage is projected alternately on two adjoining walls, the two loops accompanied by different songs. One is a roots reggae track by Max Romeo from the late 1970s — referring to a biblical valley of judgment. The other is Bryan Ferry's In Your Mind (1977), which suggests a philosophical quest for personal resolution. Both songs accompany the same footage of the Bloody Sunday Commemoration in Derry, and Harahan's camera captures marchers, uniformed bandsmen, bystanders, commemorative banners, political murals and graffiti — as well as other cameras recording the event. The alternating soundtracks destabilise our reading of the work, which becomes almost meditative in quality. — Isobel Harbison Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth with Boyle Family Kim Coleman (born Northern Ireland, 1976, lives in London) and Jenny Hogarth (born Glasgow, 1979, lives in Edinburgh) work collaboratively, placing a great deal of emphasis on the participatory and performative aspects of art practice. They describe their approach as a "discussion about creativity and making art as well as a model of teamwork and friendship." This dialogue has manifested itself both in their joint practice and in the development of numerous artist-led activities that have been central to the Edinburgh art scene for several years (including Embassy Gallery which the artists helped found in 2003). Previous collaborative performance works by Coleman and Hogarth, including Raiding the Icebox at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005, and Fool's Mate at Ross Bandstand, Edinburgh, 2007, have been characterised by both a staged and spectacular quality and an emphasis on group participation. The works often open up the process of collaboration for dissection — monitoring the mechanisms by which it is produced. While this makes the process transparent, it also provides an overabundance of information and serves to obfuscate the outcome, the focus on the act of representation rendering the practice theatrical. This creates a tension between the spontaneous and the premeditated; a dialectic greatly inspired by the pioneering performance pieces of the Boyle Family, one of whose works is being re-interpreted by Coleman and Hogarth as part of Nought to Sixty. In the mid 1960s the English artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills organised a number of important events and performances in London, including several at the ICA. These performances exemplified the emergent psychedelic liberalism of the period, most notably the infamous Son et Lumiere for Bodily Fluids and Functions (1967), wherein a couple who had not met before made love on stage whilst wired up to ECG and EEG monitors, their heartbeats and brain patterns projected onto the screen above them. In 1965 the Boyles arranged Oh What a Lovely Whore, an event not carried out by the artists themselves, but orchestrated by guests invited to the ICA, who were presented with a series of props and invited to make their own happening happen. A DIY affair, it signified a paradigm shift that characterised the art of the sixties: the transferral of responsibility from the artist to the viewer. The Boyle's happenings are scores that can be replayed and reinterpreted. The audience and its participation is paramount; it makes up each event anew. The happenings are, potentially at least, as much a part of the ICA's present as they are of its past, and this raises questions worth considering in relation to the re-staging being conducted by Coleman and Hogarth. What happens when a happening happens amidst an audience armed with the hindsight and cynicism of today? Knowledge or experience of the origins of performance might now prevent openness to invitation, and the invitation to play certainly has different connotations. In the current climate — one dominated by the ideology of the artist as facilitator or cultural services provider — the scripting and directing process is more managerial than it once promised. Given this, will today's audience respond with the same degree of enthusiasm and autonomy as their mid-1960s equivalent? If it's possible that the free-play and anarchistic spirit of the inaugural happening might be inhibited in these more self-conscious times, then it's just as likely that it might prove to be a powder keg for a frustrated fraternity. What's certain, either way, is that it will be as effective an acid test of the current cultural climate as it was in the mid-1960s. — Neil Mulholland Aileen Campbell The works of Aileen Campbell (born Greenock, 1968, lives in Glasgow) span performance, sound and video. Central to her practice across these modes of presentation is the human voice — both its live presence and its manipulation through documentation and structured film works. Campbell is herself an experienced chorister, and her work demonstrates an investigation into the voice's connection to the body, and how this relationship is disrupted through training, experimentation and amplification. Whilst her works can refer to music, the processes of disconnection and manipulation that she uses create a more primordial sound — a sound which originates with the body and is intrinsically linked to its restrictions. Early live performances involved Campbell synchronising and combining her own vocal sounds with those of domestic appliances, such as a popcorn machine and a hairdryer. Performed on a podium, the theatrical manner of these experiments is often humorous, but also suggests a fundamental form of communication through mimicry. The framing of Campbell's performances, and the importance of their subsequent presentation through video, is indicative of her position between visual art and experimental music. The artist is a member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, a band of musicians who pursue improvisational techniques via experiments in musical structures within large group contexts. Campbell draws links between her own musical practice and that of the pioneers of vocal techniques from the sixties, including Meredith Monk and Joan La Barbara. Whilst exploring similar territories of sound-making that ground the female voice, she also utilises the structures of performance to play with the visual expectations of an audience. In her 2005 work As Jane Edwards and Geoffrey Rush, Campbell presents a performance that relates to a dramatic section of footage from the 1996 film Shine. The sequence shows the character of pianist David Helfgott bouncing on a trampoline whilst listening to a Vivaldi aria, and Campbell replicates this sequence live, herself bouncing on a trampoline whilst singing the soprano part. Accompanied by a string quartet, her feat both echoes the conventional arrangement of a classical recital and disturbs it through the absurd and drawn-out endurance exercise. The work plays on a perception of the female voice as transcendental, creating a version of the uplifting soundtrack that is re-formed around guttural and unmanageable bodily sounds. Campbell's project for Nought to Sixty develops these concerns around the conventional parameters of a musical performance, and the awareness of physicality within it. In a progression from an earlier work entitled Rehearsal Room (2006), the piece engages an audience as a choral mechanism that creates a live soundtrack. This element of group participation activates the role of the viewer, yet also reduces it to a common action. This commonality only achieves purpose through the eyes and ears of a second audience group, creating across the two different spaces both a seemingly random noise performance and a simultaneous audio/visual accompaniment. — Richard Birkett Hardcore is More Than Music Hardcore Is More Than Music is a banner under which artists Nendie Pinto-Duschinsky (born Oxford, 1980, lives in London) and Nina Manandhar (born London, 1981, lives in London) have grouped a series of varied and hybrid collaborative activities since 2002. Founded whilst the pair were students at Chelsea College of Art and Design, the project began with the production of an eponymous fanzine and has developed into what Manandhar and Pinto-Duschinsky describe as a 'social enterprise'. The initial self-publication of three fanzines sought parallels between a personalised experience of art and the sub-cultures of musical genres such as hardcore punk, techno and grime. HIMTM used interviews, treatise and photography to explicitly develop a 'fan's' response to the creative energy associated with the social spaces of both art and music. The production of these zines enabled Manandhar and Pinto-Duschinsky to draw connections between established cultural practioners and groups of teenagers whose opinions and activities HIMTM tapped into. Simultaneous to these publications they toured a series of participatory projects around schools and youth groups in London, culminating in an set of workshops at Stowe Youth Centre in Westbourne Green (Best Body, 2004), in which influential musicians and producers including Graham Massey (808 State) Jon E Cash (Black Ops) and Alasdair Roberts (Rough Trade) shared expertise with groups of local teenagers. The subsequent incarnations of HIMTM as an increasingly professional magazine (including a supplement produced for The Guardian, and a publication produced with several youth groups over a day-long workshop at Tate Britain) have highlighted a fusion of artistic concerns with the principles of social enterprise. The twin tools of marketing and fundraising have enabled Manandhar and Pinto-Duschinsky not only to pursue and promote their own interests, but also to engage in collaborative activities outside of a traditional cultural framework. The language of 'social exclusion' and urban demographics is at once the territory they manipulate and the site for a mode of creativity. As part of Nought to Sixty, Hardcore is More Than Music is developing a relationship between the ICA and a new newspaper project based at Stowe Youth Centre. This project is focussed on providing training opportunities for unemployed and excluded young people in the Borough of Westminster, through the production of The Cut, a quarterly newspaper featuring the views and interests of this group. The first issue was launched in March at the ICA, and between May and November an issue of The Cut will be produced that focuses on the ICA and the community built around the Nought to Sixty programme. — Richard Birkett Matthew Darbyshire Matthew Darbyshire (born Cambridge, 1977, lives in London) lives in a bubble of deep turquoises, fuchsia pinks and acid yellows — he sees these colours everywhere and so, he points out, do you. Darbyshire is interested in the non-specificity of today's design language: the fact that bright CMYK dots are the logo for an estate agent and a cinema, as well as a NHS walk-in centre; that Arne Jacobsen egg chairs can be found in London's Zetter boutique hotel as well as in recently rebranded McDonald's restaurants. For Nought to Sixty his work is not in the ICA gallery spaces but in the publicly available, non-art spaces that are open to being branded, advertised in or hired for functions; as his ICA project these spaces are given the coloured lighting schemes of other public, retail and corporate spaces from across London. The ICA's windows looking out onto the Mall are illuminated to mimic the yellow lighting of the façade of Selfridges (a department store that has itself used the feminist artist Barbara Kruger's trademark black, white and red posters for its advertising campaign; co-opting work that was originally critical of consumerism). A magenta light strip on the ceiling over the ICA ticketing area alludes to the lighting in the entrance to the Hackney Community College — a far cry from Selfridges, but an organisation that has chosen to express its identity in the same visual vocabulary. A green cast on the desk of the box office evokes the green in the lobby of British Petroleum headquarters. One of the most interesting issues raised by Darbyshire's practice is the polymorphous role of the art institution. Whilst Selfridges, Hackney Community College and BP have little in common, one can imagine links between the ICA and each of these, whether in terms of leisure activity, audience, education programmes or sponsorship. Perhaps most importantly, the ICA is able to utilise the design language of CYMK non-specificity while also to critique its ubiquitous presence. In Darbyshire's recent solo show at Gasworks, a non-profit space in South London, the gallery was used to recreate one of the privatised council flats opposite the venue — the type of property that a young media professional might move into. Darbyshire decorated the transformed gallery fashionably, using a brightly coloured mélange of furniture and accessories bought and borrowed from interior decoration stores ranging from George at Asda and Tesco Direct to Vitra and Fritz Hansen; the work employed the aspirational aesthetic of this imagined resident but pushed it to satiric excess. In the same way that Blades House (2008) analysed contemporary design as well as Gasworks's own role in the process of gentrification, Darbyshire's Nought to Sixty work evokes the ICA's use of branding, but also asks the viewer to look outwards, towards the corporate realities of London. — Melissa Gronlund Darbyshire's lighting scheme for the ICA's Mall windows will continue for the duration of Nought to Sixty, but from June onwards it will change colour on a monthly basis. |
Alastair MacKinven, Default Masturbatory Stimuli, 2006, Archival Digital Print, 43 x 31 cm (framed). |
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