The New York-based collective, consisting of stylist Avena Gallagher, artist and creative director Babak Radboy and fashion designer Cyril Duval, sees itself as “a multinational brand posing as an art-project posing as a multinational brand posing as a biennial” and for this year’s event, titled Shanzhai Biennial No. 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace, they will attempt to sell a £32,000,000 estate consisting of parallel commercial installations peppered with high-gloss ads.
Removing the last scrap of pretense from what is becoming an increasingly commercialised art market, the collective takes the notion of commercial art to the next level, transforming both the gallery and Frieze space into functioning real estate boutiques designed to “unlock the potential of Frieze as a lifestyle brand”.
Ten minutes walk from Project Native Informant’s converted garage project space in Mayfair is luxury department store Liberty. Opened in 1875 by Arthur Lasenby Liberty, over the past 140 years it has become a global household name, selling high-end homeware and fashion brands alongside its own-brand products. It has a history of working with notable designers like William Morris and Archibald Knox, and has been an important site for the advancement of design in the UK. The Liberty building on Great Marlborough Street is itself an iconic location – built in the 1920s in a Tudor revival style it’s an instantly recognisable building, and a London shopping landmark. It’s not cheap, though. Sitting somewhere between couture and high-end high street, it caters to a particular strata of the rich.
In L.I.B.E.R.T.Y.Morag Keil has transposed the mock Tudor facade of the department store into the gallery. Each wall is decorated with strips of black half-timbering – appropriately treated, carefully cut and professionally attached. It’s a slightly disorientating experience, the framing exists as a relief whilst shifting the reading of the entire space with its specificity. We’re suddenly enclosed within a form that suggests an exterior – the facade of Liberty is wherever you look. We are trapped outside, inside, with no way to access what’s behind the walls.
In the corner of the gallery are two Windsor chairs painted with copper paint and splashed green with oxidation. Arranged like in a waiting room they hold copies of the exhibition text – an interview with Keil by Harry Burke. Titled Can you live in art? it’s conducted in a 20-questions format, like an unedited magazine lifestyle interview, informal but professional. They discuss Keil’s recent work, as well as her approaches and ideas on the art world and the state of contemporary living. One answer is conspicuous in its absence, there’s simply blank space in response to, “Do you have a social art practice or a formal art practice?”
The ideas sold about freedom in contemporary living constitute a deceptive ideology: ostensibly defined as the increase in flexibility, our lives mainly manifest as precarious and alienated, despite how much money we might accumulate. Keil shows us Liberty as a site where the galvanisation of this ideology is exceptionally evident. It’s a brand that flourishes largely because of suggestions of its own historic importance. It deals in adornments, designs and fashion – the materials and objects that furnish our lives and act as signs that distinguish our relative level of success under capitalism. The precarity of contemporary living means we will never fully achieve the freedom that owning an item from Liberty might suggest we have. In Keil’s L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. we are allowed to step in, to be immersed in the signs of heritage, but never allowed real access. **
The anonymous contemporary art collective – created by artists Richard Parry and Carlos Noronha Feio – functions as a collaborative artistic project, accepting commission and producing merchandise in a sprawl of “crypt-impressionistic fiction”.
The recent (or recent-seeming) trend of visual and musical artists collaborating on synergic projects continues with Hoyle’s collusion with Spectres, whose sprawling guitar noise and tempos find its visual counterpart in her abstracted videos.
The event –which will begin at 19:00 and run for a little over an hour –is curated by Jackson Bateman and supported by MFA Curating, Goldsmiths.
More so than a narrative presentation, Andrew Norman Wilson’s SONE at London’s Project Native Informant is an assemblage of protective materials, a critique and an actionable framework. It is also the title of the video and performance artist’s New York-based production company distributing its work through stock image sites Getty, Pond5 and iStock, as well as in the PNI space and New York’s Untitled Gallery. Dealing in methods of image appropriation and dissemination, the SONE exhibition presents the artist’s multifaceted practice while reveling in the ridiculous. Visitor’s are greeted with an engraved private aircraft windshield titled ‘Risk Prevention Investment Object 3’ and a series of other found objects and 3D video loops. The pieces, evenly spaced throughout the room and close to the floor despite their gaudy pink plinths, resemble an exalted scrapyard.
Presumably, SONE serves as protection against an onslaught of consumer culture. Most of the objects on show are forms of protective gear, across the aforementioned windshield, a paintball mask and a luxury automotive headlight protected by a glass casing. There’s the added emphasis beyond their intended use, while being presented on top of platforms made from anti-static packing foam embedded with rim cylinder locks. Once the works are purchased from the gallery, they are ‘unlocked’ and embedded directly into the foam packaging, much in the same way that a watermarked online stock image might be released from its milky white logo when ‘checking out’.
Andrew Norman Wilson, SONE exhibition view (2014). Courtesy PNI.
One of Wilson’s better known video works, ‘Workers Leaving the Googleplex’, adopted a journalistic approach to capitalist infrastructures. As a former employee at Google, the work examined and criticised the shady working conditions of underpaid labourers. The videos at SONE, however, are more open-ended forms of institutional critique. ‘Invisibility-cloaked hand gestures in offshore financial centre jungle’ (2014) narrates a business agreement gone awry through camouflaged handshakes and pseudo-sign-language pointing to the cryptic nature of non-descript offshore transactions. According to Wilson, the gesticulations are “professional-social, then coercive, then oratorical, then a nervous breakdown,” while apparent relief comes in the form of mindfulness meditation music (a practice Wilson explored before with his ‘Body Deselect’ mix) comes in the form of the ubiquitous simulated helicopter sounds filling the exhibition space.
A second video piece ‘Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke’ (2014) features cash machines spitting out billows of smoke corresponding to the colours of the bank they belong to; indicating the confusion (or, literally, smokescreen) brought about by financial transactions. What is it we are really gettting from an ATM after all?
Andrew Norman Wilson, ‘Risk Prevention Investment Object 4’. (2014). Courtesy PNI.
Aside form the objects and video installations scattered across the PNI floor, there’s a poster/edition of ‘Image Concept Proposals’ downloadable from the Project Native Informant website detailing a variety of instructive proposals for future images, leaving its viewer to realise their own equally absurd stock photos to rival the likes of SONE’s ‘Sobbing Drunk CEO’. Meanwhile sonics play a key role in not only evoking the futility of finding peace in the mechanised sounds of a helicopter rotor system, but in establishing the interrelatedness and ultimate nonsense of all the above elements via Wilson’s first love in music. Because, beyond the seemingly random ‘DJ Norm’ set list performed at the Lexington the night of the exhibition opening -including OMC’s ‘How Bizarre‘ -there’s a humour to SONE that might be lost among the banal products and sleek aesthetic of Wilson’s corporate critique. But on closer inspection, they reveal a complex set of signifiers essentially pointing to their inherent emptiness. **
London’s Project Native Informant presents group exhibition I love you Me Either, opening February 12 and running to March 29.
As supplement to contributor Ulrike Ottinger‘s, Ticket of No Return, screening at the ICA London on February 19, the exhibition features its own ‘unusual characters’ working across the artist and film-maker’s stylised portrait of the city she calls home from her so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’.
London’s Project Native Informant is showing four films by four international artists for Movie Night, Number One on January 28.
Following the theme of People and programmed by Art Review managing editor and writer Oliver Basciano, the theme follows “emotion, being and physicality; and the politics thereof” and features work by Laida Lertxundi, Iván Marino and Aya Eliav and Enrique Ramirez. Those films include ‘Footnotes to a House of Love’ and ‘The Room Called Heaven’ by Lertxundi, ‘The Day You Arrive in Buenos Aires’ by Marino and Eliav and ‘Brises’ by Ramirez.
Previous exhibitions include 2013 at Reena Spaulings in New York, Alternative Living at LimaZulu, in London, another ‘NUFAN’ one at Temnikova & Kasela and tending to work in corrupting and disrupting existing norms across rituals, perceptions or image formats. Nettell was also in a band called Plug, who’s ‘Body Story’, released in 2011, is quite good.
Superficially diverse but elementally connected –if for nothing more than their positioning outside of the official programme –a handful of things worth doing beyond Regent’s Park during Frieze week criss-crossed the London city map. In fact, geographical location had almost as much to do with an event’s significance as it did the event itself. Emerging art from the dynamic South London cluster started the week with Harry Sanderson’s Unified Fabric exhibition at Arcadia Missa and Jesse Darling’s play on the notion of Frieze event exclusivity with her Haus party –art as presentation and piss up –at the centre of it.
Closer to the well-to-do west but not quite there was Moving Image London, on the South Bank and in the Bargehouse and possibly one of the most exciting exhibitions by sheer volume and diversity of video works from across the globe, as well as the unforeseeably controversial National #Selfie Portrait Gallery huddle on the top floor. In the upmarket commercial district of Mayfair, the GCC art collective’s Achievements in Swiss Summit, its Rolls Royce joyrides and location at Project Native Informant assuming the pan-regional political pose of a Gulf Arab delegation. Wrapping up the week of outer-events and perceivably speaking to its artists’ proximity to making the leap to Frieze Proper soon, the Sunday Art Fair at Westminster University’s Ambika P3, literally down the road from the official site, showed interesting works from ripening, nearly ripe, artists set to complete the art market cycle.
Unified Fabric exhibition view. Image courtesy of Arcadia Missa.
But in the meantime, a moment for the underground. Down here a ring of sound and images has Harry Sanderson’s DIY render farm at Unified Fabric surrounded; the super computer and the labour behind it literally placed at the centre of videos looking at the problem of the image. Among them is Hito Steyerl’s ‘STRIKE’, exploring the artist’s position in relation to the screen and Clunie Reid’s ‘The More or Less of Miley Cyrus’, interrogating representations and their source in an uncomfortably familiar image.
Then there’s Darling’s Haus. As a relative outsider, the prospect of a Camberwell residence packed with strangers was an intimidating one to say the least, but appropriate to the invite-only setting of “post-fordist scene colleagues” the event consciously caters to. A house party but also a showcase of video works and performances, its gesture to a Frieze-emulating fake-exclusivity was realised by a guest list and actual bouncer with an entry stamp reading “neoliberal singularity”. Darling’s ongoing refusal to “frame” her work in the ‘white cube’, as she iterated in a recent aqnb interview, reflects the anarchic nature of London art as “gallery-as-brand-as-dj-as-person”, while one busting for a wee is confronted by a ‘performative’ toilet; a couch keeping the bathroom door ajar for your viewing pleasure. Precious privacy is mercifully granted a floor up with one that shuts but the option of keeping public, as a nudge to contingency, with an in-house camera inviting patrons to contribute toilet selfies, beneath a mirror with text that reads “PLEASE FUCK #frieze”.
Downstairs, Lead Pipe, a “metal band” featuring a shirtless Arcadia Missa co-curator Tom Clark on drums, as well as artists Charlie Woolley, Harry Burkeand Paul Kneale, play among Leslie Kulesh’s artforum chain decorations, while a hand written poster on DJ Imran Perretta, aka Madboy Zimba’s deck (singular) announces studio visits around his corner of the lounge room (#fuckfrieze). There’s also the promised stack of “good” video art –the “bad” being screened in the perpetually rammed kitchen that I don’t dare enter –called The basis of all structures is the placing, very carefully, of two bricks (Faust was right, have no regrets) curated by Takeshi Shiomitsu. I’m not sure how ‘good’ The Armando Iannucci Shows episode called ‘Twats’ is in itself but the (homo)eroticised initiation of a young protégé into the business world by puffing on his first official phallus in Annika Larsson’s ‘Cigar’ suggests the commentary’s in the context.
The same could be said for the Frieze week art interactions in general, where perceptions of legitimacy are established by a series of ritual gestures and arbitrary signifiers determining social value. Achievements in Swiss Summit exposes said charade as a Gulf Arab “delegation” of nine artists –including Fatima Al Qadiri, her sister Monira, Sophia Al Maria and Khalid Al Gharaballi, among others –descend on Mayfair to congratulate themselves on their oblique accomplishments, buried in political jargon and described as “a High Level Strategic Dialogue”. What the specifics of that dialogue is, is anyone’s guess but it’s in the ceremony surrounding it that the empty concession to economic self-interest is exposed: a display case of glass trophies, proud symbols of accord, and large-scale photos of delegates in thobes, shaking hands, drinking tea and signing papers in the idyllic backdrop of a Swiss village. Here, ‘delegates’ exchange “cordial talks” and discuss a nebulous agenda, while visitors ride the Rolls in circles around the gallery to a looping recording of the collective’s official charter, hijacked from their Gulf Cooperation Council namesake. Meanwhile, in the same way that the chaotic Haus party in Camberwell knowingly celebrates what Darling calls its “post-fordist network of friendly/collegial affect & etc”, so too does the GCC hold on to its in-group interests of art associations, friends and family in a brilliantly-executed and pointless PR exercise.
Achievements in Swiss Summit exhibitionview. Image courtesy of Project Native Informant.
Perceivably reflecting the outsider perspective of the GCC set –as an exhibition set apart by its location in Mayfair and its ‘delegates’ transplanted from the Gulf to the Swiss mountains –so too does the green triangular display of the Maraya Video Archive at the multi-level Moving Image art fair present a similar vantage point. It features video works by three UAE-based artists, Alaa Edris, Nermine Hammam and Karim Al Husseini under a title explicitly referencing the geopolitical nature of their presence. Between Edris’ expressionistic montage of pre-confederation British film documentation and personal footage in ‘Kharareef’ and Al Husseini’s poignant mixed-media narrative on the dispersal of his family’s Palestinian roots across the globe in ‘Dew Not’, the display not only illustrates their experience as unique but as a fundamentally, and problematically, alien one. It’s very proximity to Constant Dullaart’s stunning ‘Niagara Falls, Special Economic Zone PRC, HD VIDEO’ –a single shot video of said miniature natural wonder at China’s ‘The Windows of the World’ theme park in Shenzen focussed on an unaware couple posing for photos –exposes the problem of the artist as outsider looking in. Those issues of patronage and intervention it raises are echoed in the intrusion of a Mountain Dew delivery truck and a ship marked “UN” in Al Husseini’s video, pointing toward a type of occupation, beyond the Israeli kind and to a corporate and humanitarian one.
Hence, the Maraya Video Archive display’s situation between Cliff Evans’ play on Jasper Johns’ work of the same name, ‘Flag’, and Jonathan Monaghan’s CGI animation, ‘Mothership’. One, a digital simulation of its familiar stars and stripes made up entirely of drones, watching its audience and awaiting orders to strike. The other, a more insidious system of control realised in its ubiquitous popular cultural tropes and the entertainment industry’s art of emotional manipulation and propaganda by littering the surreal landscape with images of Marvel superheroes, London city discworlds and that flying ‘mothership’ propelled by a Fed Ex engine.
As anecdotal evidence of a world view externally shaped, Eve Sussman and Simon Lee’s ‘Seitenflügel’, a floor down, tricks my eyes into thinking its a large-scale projection of an iPhone interface from a distance but turns out to be a stylised view of apartment windows inhabited by the artists’ Berliner neighbours. More than an insight into our everyday voyeurism, said incidental confusion for a smartphone is a telling illustration of modern life as State control via the consensus rule of an inward and outward-looking screen. In some ways the National #Selfie Portrait Gallery, curated by Kyle Chayka and Marina Galperina subverts that system in 16 commissions from emerging artists. As a showcase of short-form video contributions based around the digital self-portrait, or “selfie”, artistJennifer Chan mediates her recent feline phase, also performed on twitter, by literally drawing the ‘Cat Ears’ of its title on a pixelated shot of herself saying “my dick”, while ever-prolific Darling presents herself nude and in a sunbed, all Žižek quotes and apocalyptic self-obsessions vocalised through a pitched-up voiceover (“like me ya know I jus wanna look good naked”) in ‘Lil Icarus’. Paul Outlaw and Jennifer Catron literally devour each other, in the form of busts fashioned from food, in ‘Succulent’. Anthony Antonellis mediates himself, to himself, through his macbook screen, flesh fading into his keyboard, while Daniel Swan’s self is represented by the dazzling cover of a smartphone facing outward in Selfie Video Loop.
Pronouncing this form of self-mediation a “democratic artistic medium”, the N#SPG press release assumes the concept of liberal freedom –from political autonomy to access to technology –isn’t still a privilege afforded a lucky few, here demonstrated in a collection of works by EU and US-based artists only. Again, it’s a hard reality physically realised by their positioning on opposite ends of the same room and in view Al Husseini’s ‘Dew Not’. Meanwhile, a general public still hostile to the dynamic net art community, the consciously exhibitionistic nature of National #Selfie Portrait Gallery especially, was aptly summarised in a tweet by fellow ‘selfie’ contributor Petra Cortright. A link to the 700-plus comments (“each more LOL than the next”) on a Yahoo News article on the exhibition with the ‘narcissistics’, ‘not arts’ and ‘I could do thats’ liberally heaped on the resounding thumbs down from the Yahoo.com readership.
epic resource of over 700 comments each more LOL than the next: National #Selfie Portrait Gallery opens in London http://t.co/3dCL4wVX9U
This very focus on ‘real art’ and what legitimises it is a recurring theme on the Frieze Fringe, resonating through to the Sunday Art Fair as it establishes its place in the hierarchy of cultural value. The Ambika space is less ‘white cube’ and more “vast concrete construction hall”, speaking to the nature of the fair, down the road from Frieze London and showing artists just outside or halfway in to the big leagues. The ICA: Off-Site video showcase features Sophia Al Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri’s ‘HOW CAN I RESIST U’and Martin Arnold’s unsettling ‘Hydra’ video loop, an animation reduced to its eyes, teeth and salivating tongue, making reference to the sexualised nature of children’s TV and resembling the creepy Cheshire Cat of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Katja Novitskova’s ‘Branching IV’and ‘Approximation VIII’ digital print cut outs and Avery Singer’s acrylics on canvas, grey and ungraspable geometric forms, in ‘Exhibitionist’ and ‘Dancers Around an Effigy to Modernism’ keep things abstract, expressing a contemporary tension between overtly political art concerned with the exploitation behind image production –most explicitly illustrated by Harry Sanderson’s Unified Fabric –and a growing concern with lofty philosophical concepts, potentially in response to imminent environmental catastrophe, even human extinction.
That’s a possibility George Henry Longly attempts to counteract in his rather dazzling marble tablets that look like they could survive the ravages of time in a way that a MOV file won’t. Respectively engraved with “GHL”, “SORRY”, “Don’t be an Asshole”, among other things, and studded with gilded tubes of YSL “Touche Éclat” complexion highlighters and silver plated “poppers”, Longly speaks to said fatalistic outlook by evoking a sense of knowing what the problem is, being helpless in resolving it and doing what you do in the meantime. **
George Henry Longly. Sunday Art Fair Install view. Image courtesy of Luttgenmeijer.
Frieze Art Fair runs in London’s Regent’s Park annually in October. The fringe events happen elsewhere.
Header image: #fuckfrieze: Scenes from JD’s Neuliberal London. Image courtesy of Jesse Darling.
