‘An Afternoon for Ian’is on at London’s The Showroom on December 3.
The afternoon of presentations is part of Here is Information. Mobilise: a weekend-long set of events dedicated to celebrating the life and work of Ian White (1971-2013), taking place at The Showroom and ICA in collaboration with LUX.
m-Health calms and rejuvenates you. The show, running at London’s Cell Project Space from July 25 to August 2, as a whole is an event that lasts for several days with physical works that feel like place-holders or mood-setters. It begins with a micro-event weekend of four presentations and performances by Norwegian artist Andreas Ervik, yoga and body-extension instructor, Mayan Patel and London based artists, Jonny JJ Winter and Hannah Lees, who give out individual sourdough balls in goody bags after a Sunday evening rooftop baking session.
In Cell Project Space’s main gallery space artist Ian Giles has painted the back wall in faded olive green and there are small ceramic bulb-like bowls with aromatherapy oils burning inside them producing tiny streams that float above the first bench in the show. You’re invited to sit there by the lovely invigilator who provides you with a glass of water when you do. The tiny streams fill the whole room. On the first Saturday during Ervik and Winters’ performances, the aromatherapy oils burn rejuvenating energy for one half of the day, for the second half they burn calming and slowing energy.
Mayan Patel, ‘Yoga and Meditation’ (2015) Install view. Courtesy SANKE and the artist.
The second bench in the show is one you can’t sit on so easily, or at least it references those benches you find in the city: ones too short to fit a tired adult head and legs on; ones fitted out with spikes; ones that refuse any kind of respite. For m-Health, London-based artists Pablo Jones-Soler has set two handled pieces in concrete blocks. They actually look a bit like cots. It’s as though they’d been lifted straight off the road and into this art-spa. Conversely, they might have been those benches taken from a hypothetical ‘how-to-gentrify’ tool kit, set straight into the concrete outside a newly rejuvenated site.
This show, like most good ones, makes you think about things outside of the room, inside of your body and the implications of you, physically – particularly while sitting on Giles’ bench. It’s here that the amethyst in Hannah Lees’ cut up repurposed red wine barrels of ‘our life, that temporary eclipse to that other’ (2015) starts to work on you. Because according to ancient myth if one drinks alcohol whilst wearing amethyst close to any part of the body, the alcohol will not take hold. In other words, the inside of the body remains non-toxic.
As though to absorb the event of an art show preview inside a single-bodied artwork, Jonny JJ Winter’s handmade juice bar offers “~~_`~~” (drinks), inscribed in a non-language in mud on a menu hanging above the jigsawed wood. It exists around the back of the rest of the show where it stays: a mess untouched until the close of m-Health. Rotting – but local(!!) – blended fruit sits still after a week with stale olives. The reverse side of Giles’ olive green wall has had a mud face-mask but maybe one that is left too long. It’s crumbling. ‘Hangover Drink’ (2015), which is described by the artist as something “reverse spherified” and includes an “aggressively added pinch of watercress” could have been you, intoxicated on the inside trying to physically un-do the absorption.
The emphasis (and celebration) of local, immediate rawness is also calmly presented in SANKE, by Andreas Ervik. SANKE, meaning ‘to gather’ in Norwegian, is a brand that makes things like REGN, a perfume that smells like earth after a shower of summer rain, according to the website, where you can purchase items from the different ranges. For m-Health, and live all afternoon on that initial Saturday, Ervik presents and launches the new range alongside a slow, serene promo-video that is fixed to the wall elegantly. SANKE makes you think of the forest. That deep thought alone can work to re-configure something quite animal in you: a bit like when you take a proper and full breath, once in a while. It (the thought) feels a bit like the copper plate that oxidises and re-purifies – and turns bright blue – both Lees’ repurposed red wine barrels and the water inside them that holds Lees’ rush weeds, floating and alive.
Rachel Reupke provides the second calming video for m-Health. ‘Containing Matters of No Very Peaceable Colour’ (2009) introduces the feeling that bath towels hold in their absorbing softness an intense sense of the body, beautifully and strikingly. Played over the rolling pink hues of folded (stock image) towels is a soundtrack of a list of chanted Google hashtags:
“female”, “couples”, “domestic”, “flat”, “ages: 20-25 years”, “ages 25-30 years”, “one woman only”, “only one woman”, “family”, “family with two children” etc.
It’s as though the bath towel is Google and it hugs you as soon as you fit into the right category. Precious body. But also non-specific, it turns out, after you put the headphones down and consider that Google recital, playing on repeat beneath every commodity that’s for sale online.**
The biennial festival celebrates new visual art, film, and performance and has grown well outside of Whitstable’s art community, garnering an international reputation for up-and-coming artists and rich programmes.
Bringing together a series of screen-based presentations by artists working with the moving image, including Steve Reinke, Juliette Bonneviot, Rachel Reupke, Jenna Bliss, Sam Keogh and Chris Kraus and others, the festival follows three distinct, though interrelated themes across Moving Parts, Burning the Days and Selected.
Each programme explores the negotiation between people and their environment, censorship and the voice, as well as a selection of works chosen by Lucy Clout, Anna Gritz and Omar Kholeif.
Following Hanne Lippard‘s video for ‘MIMOSA’, Rachel Reupke directed Heatsick‘s ‘CLEAR CHANEL’, lifted from the Berlin-based artist’s RE-ENGINEERING, released on PAN, November 26.
Premiered on XLR8 and running along a similar aesthetic as ‘MIMOSA”s slightly skewed stock imagery for the home user, Reupke’s expanding and contracting tree bark and an endless stack of envelopes playfully echoes speculative realism’s fetishistic relationship with the material. As aid to the undulating one-minute instrumental named after what Heatsick calls “the smell of modernity“, ‘CLEAR CHANEL’ proposes a sight and a sound for it too.
A board of blinding lights, the metronomic click of a beat-up CASIO taps against an elastic keyboard loop that stretches and contracts, expands and compresses, across the ebbing tide of space and time. A tiny bottle of Chanel No. 5 materialises, Steven Warwick gingerly squirting its contents on a convulsing audience at the Berghain in Berlin. This is one of several times I’ve seen, felt and absorbed a Heatsick performance but the perfume’s a first.
At the time, I thought it was just another addition to the multi-sensory experience that Warwick strives towards; a bodily transcendence founded on a powerful conceptual bearing. By now I’ve figured otherwise. Said ‘feminine fine fragrance’ reappears, again and again, as a bootlegged ‘climate change’ sweatshirt and the “clear chanel” of his RE-ENGINEERING artist statement, a manifesto of sorts accompanying what he calls the “11 blobs” of his upcoming vinyl release, out through PAN on November 26. “It’s the smell of modernity”.
Warwick is as much a musician as he is an artist and intellectual, the distinction as imperceptible as his life view is malleable. A Berlin-based performer steeped in a visual culture orbiting but not limited to the city, his first full-length as Heatsick is littered with references to the contemporary art discourse and theory that he disrupts, dissects and often parodies, in the same cyclical way that RE-ENGINEERING ends as it begins, if not in a distant, degraded form.
Fellow artist Hanne Lippard’s colourless, disembodied voice preens, over measured exhalations and a crisp melody evoking a dial tone, as she robotically engages in a disintegrating loop of references; speaking, quoting, sloganeering, “black power”, “gay Google”, “what we do is secret”, “labour in the bodily mode”, “second annual trend report”, over a rhythm that is less a groove than a forward lurch. Warwick’s manifesto’s “relentless interconnectivity” carries on, across ideas and ideologies, philosophers and philosophies, even past recordings and present tracks, surfacing and disappearing across its track listing.
“I’ve just really thought about these things, they’re such concerns,” says Warwick through Skype and on tour in Australia, about the ideas and aesthetics that he often explicitly explores, sometimes abuses, on RE-ENGINEERING, “That’s the thing with a lot of network theory and circulation. I’m really trying to link a lot of ideas, or map my own ontology, or even some kind of mode, and I’m trying to think about why I think that. Sometimes, if I see people referencing certain philosophers or schools of thought, and it’s just a bit of a quick joke, you feel a bit short-changed, and not in a particularly subversive way.”
Jesse Garciapurrs, disjointedly in ‘DIAL AGAIN’ emulating the stilted automated voice, deliberately, poorly, over swaggering toms, while Warwick’s voice comes through a far-off megaphone, beneath the noise of a field recording, repeating Lippard’s words (“Modern life is still rubbish, you say. Modern rubbish is still life”) from the beginning, now at the end, as it links into album-closer, ‘ACCELERATIONISTA’ –a circular motion of movement ending up where it began, but different.
“With RE-ENGINEERING,it’s playing around with treating it more like a manual. It’s like, ‘let’s look at these options and maybe you can reprogram yourself to try and get around this dissatisfaction’, or you could just also remould something,” Warwick tells me, following up an email listing ten artists he thinks are doing just that.
***
“Ed Lehan is known for his acerbic commentaries on participation and the public event. See his various shows where the opening will consist of a reconstruction of an empty charity box built by the artist, a case of beers, a barrel of mojito and the visitor(s). For the one at a gallery in Tallin [Error 404 at Temnikova & Kasela] he reconstructed an adizone that had been popping up in various parts of London for the Olympics.”
“In Loretta Fahrenholz’s film ‘Ditch Plains’, a street performance group contort in the early hours of a desolate area of East New York, various upscale hotel spaces and an apartment in Manhattan, post-Hurricane Sandy. It’s a strange post-apocalypse zombie HD afrofuturist hypercapitalistic ecological crisis; a networked virus of disconnect.”
“Georgie Nettell’s last show [2013 at Reena Spaulings]dealt with notions of recycling, circulation and eco branding. Local dirty dishes were picked up in restaurant bus trays and re-presented in the gallery, images found on the internet were downloaded, distressed and formatted onto raw linen canvases. Her musical group, Plug (with Sian Dorrer), also used a stock image as its cover, confusing the listener as to the public image of the group. “
Plug, Body Story (2011) album cover.
“Katja Novitskova uses images found on the internet such as wildlife and prints them out, mounting them in physical space and opening up the notions of documentation, preservation, ecology and materiality. The digital image is itself fuelled by carbon materials and minerals extracted from the earth. Species on the verge of extinction are fed back into image circulation and, in turn, play with the neuro-chemical recognition mechanisms in the viewer’s brain.”
Katja Novitskova, ‘Approximation III’ (2013). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Paul Kindersley’s thebritisharecumming YouTube channel is best viewed left running during a morning after with genuinely bizarre makeup tutorials, presumably also made the morning after (perhaps a satire of the MT genre themselves) at once absurd, daft, unnerving, hilarious and engaging. Current fave: Babes (correct usage).”
“Gili Tal presented REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE [at LimaZulu]as a wall text superimposed by four gestural paintings, evoking haptic gestures and waiting room paintings. The text consisted of the “goriest parts of Marx’s Capital” (itself full of references to Dracula and Frankenstein), written in languages from post-Communist countries and presented with the deceptively friendly aesthetic of an Innocent smoothie, one visitor was heard to have described the show as “Muji Expressionism”.”
Gili Tal, REAL PAIN FOR REAL PEOPLE. Installation view (2013). Photo by Tom Carter.
“Sabine Reitmaier is a photographer and artist whose work blurs commercial and fine art contexts. Her show [Not comme les autres at Galerie Friedlaender] last year consisted of portraits of models staged in a similar method to how she would present them for the Psychologie Heute covers she also shoots for. In the exhibition, the large format photos confront us, provoking how we make neurological recognitions and associations, down to posing, body language or the coloured backgrounds that Reitmaier herself painted as per a photo shoot.”
Sabine Reitmaier, ‘PETIT POIS “CAVIAR VERT”‘(2012). Courtesy and @ Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin.
“Hanne Lippard‘s vocal register evokes the automated hold tone of a service centre phonecall and plays with pre-existing imagery found online. Her videos such as ‘Beige’ deploy wordplay and humour to comment upon the hyperreal mundanity of part time work, lifestyles and (non) space.”
“Sarah MacKillop‘s Ex Library Bookis itself an artist book consisting of fragments of obsolete library books –withdrawn from circulation and sold off at a discounted price onto a discarded heap –presented as a shiny glossy catalogue. Her other artist book, New Stationary Department, consists of various materials found at various stationers, be it neon marker pens or corrective materials such as Tipp-Ex, found in the commercial office, highlighting and reworking notions of editing, work and commercial presentation.”
Ex Library Book by Sara MacKillop. Published by Pork Salad Press (2012). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Rachel Reupkedeals with HD stock images in videos that, when stripped of its conversations, penetrate an eerie and uncanny atmosphere of social relationships and catalogue-like objects. The warm emotional bond of social relation deployed by advertising is stripped and the viewer is suddenly presented with a cold flat image.In ‘Containing Matters of No Peaceable Colour’ from 2009, the hard gaze confronts the viewer with a series of HD towels while an automated voice proceeds to obsessively list a lifestyle specification quota with the delivery of a Robbe-Grillet novel.” **
