Londons’ The Woodmill is hosting The Mechanical Garden and Other Long Encores production at Dilston Grove, opening September 21 and running to October 26.
Conceived by Naomi Pearce and inspired by the speculative diagram, ‘Mechanical Garden’, of late pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps, the project explores cycles of growth and destruction alongside the “motif and metaphor” of the garden – in this case one constructed from the scrap metal remnants of industry and urbanisation.
Re-imagined and materialised by artists Richard Sides, Ben Burgis and Stuart Middleton in Southwark Park’s Dilston Grove, the collaborative work will be activated by an audio guide, described by the press blurb as “part soundtrack, part oral history” featuring contributions by writers and musicians including Simon Werner, Alice Hattrick and Steven Warwick (aka Heatsick), as well as a series of performances by the likes of Anne Bean, Ashkelon and Alina Astrova (aka Inga Copeland).
With privatisation and gentrification becoming an increasingly urgent issue for the independent art space (see the current Lima Zulu eviction trial as just one example of many), Cripps’ history with 70s abandoned warehouse and ‘artist colony’ Butler’s Wharf, since converted into luxury flats, is expressed through an accompanying essay on The Woodmill event page:
“You recuperated it all into an alternative cycle, one that didn’t have to make any economic sense, and one that would end with a garden party.”
NYC-based Al Qadiri released her Asiatisch album on London’s Hyperdub label last month, while Heatsick follows up his RE-ENGINEERING album release on PAN from earlier this year and Extended Play performance in at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.
Heatsick‘s Steven Warwick returns for the long-awaited London edition of his dance party, Extended Play, on May 25.
Extended Play is Warwick’s latest three-hour Casio improvisation, based around his Deviation EP, featuring a live, specially engineered audiovisual performance by the artist.
Influenced by early Chicago house mixtapes, musique concrète and psychedelia, Extended Play combines unusual sounds in order to expand the senses, creating a dizzying live show created in real time, while vocals and visuals loop around themselves in Warwick’s hands.
Artist and producer Steven Warwick (aka Heatsick) is presenting the inaugural exhibition of the late Jesse Garcia, Trial & Error, at Berlin’s Kinderhook & Caracas, opening May 9 and running to June 7.
An artist and filmmaker working across photography, political documentary and mixed media, Garcia passed away last year leaving ongoing projects and a largely private body of photography work behind him, to be shown for the first time in Berlin along with “various objects and ephemera” he created or collected in his lifetime.
Initiated and curated by Warwick, the producer’s latest Heatsick album RE-ENGINEERING, released on PAN last year, was dedicated to Garcia and also features a vocal sample from the artist on the track ‘DIAL AGAIN’. A selection of his music collection along with a video of a Heatsick club visual called ‘Déviation Loop’, will also carry the exhibition into café Martinique next door.
The press release for the exhibition comes accompanied by this statement from Warwick:
“Whilst writing this text I was reminded of a phrase by philosopher Reza Negarestani about Inhumanism and Rationalism, in which he posits ‘a demand for construction, to define what it is to be human by treating human as a constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention’.
Just as the site of Garcia as a space of remembrance should not be mere nostalgia, but rather components to assemble thought aimed towards the future, so this exhibition is comprised of visual cues such as the metal cabinet (part supermarket, part archive), the record archive to be played by the viewer, and the construction piping, to be viewed and experienced as an unlocked archive, set in motion and reconfigured with current emotions, thoughts and experiences looking forwards.”
Heatsick dropped another artist-directed video, this time for ‘RE-ENGINEERING’, the title track from his LP released on PAN in November last year.
So far artists Rachel Reupke and frequent Heatsick collaborator Hanne Lippard have contributed videos to songs from the album. This time around Berlin-based Stefan Fähler presents a moving still life of Mark Colle‘s flower arrangements, while nudging to a New Materialist fetish for the form and texture of Heatsick’s “modern rubbish”, while model Tiffany Corsten kind of does but doesn’t really look at them.
2.07 San Francisco – Slate
2.12 The Empty Bottle
2.13 St. Louis – William A Kerr Foundation
2.14 New York – Issue Project Room
2.15 Boston – Goethe Institute
2.16 Philadelphia- Kung fu Necktie
2.21 Portland- Reed University
2.22 Los Angeles – Private Island
Following up the release of his definitive RE-ENGINEERING LP on PANin November last year, Steven Warwick(aka Heatsick) is launching his book Interiors at Motto Berlin, on January 15.
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.” **
Frankly spoken Steve Warwick (aka Heatsick) doesn’t court controversy, he’s just being honest. The casio-wielding performer, who started in drone and ended in house music, might seem to some like he’s chasing the zeitgeist. But with his progressively sparer assemblages of frisky blowouts built for the dance floor -from PAN-released INTERSEX, through to Rush Hour’s Convergence -if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find a clear, though complex, narrative through critical theory, from German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s idea of Zwischenstufe to Parisian architecture
Conversation with the English-born, Berlin-based artist and musician is just as in-depth as his concepts. His vast knowledge-base is equalled only by his willingness to dissect and deconstruct it, from the impact of computers and the internet on a generation, to the vapidity of what can most broadly be referred to as ‘Net Art’. That’s because Warwick’s hypercritical, slightly cynical, nature is mirrored by an evolving oeuvre of looping, self-devouring sound scapes, spiralling nowhere in particular. From his early beginnings as a film student, to Fine Artist, to a Berlin resident creating degenerating cassette tape loops, Warwick’s is a world shaped by experience, observation and erudition, which bizarrely makes from some fairly visceral beats. But then, just because something is of a physical realm doesn’t mean it’s not complex. After all, electronic music in itself is a composite medium bound to the body and Heatsick is its prime example.
Heatsick. Photo by Josephine Pryde
Do you think being divisive as an artist is important for creating a discourse?
Steve Warwick: Yeah… but I do find that way of operating also a bit boring. Because if that’s actually the primary way that you operate…
Like M.I.A. or something.
SW: God, yeah.
I find her interesting because it’s like she’s the personification of this era; unedited self-expression through twitter and facebook.
SW: I think they are edited. I would actually say that it’s hyper-constructed and well thought out. But because of the age that we live, it’s actually become unconscious, while at the same time it’s so structured. It’s like a structured reality.
You were born in 1981, so you must still remember a time before the internet…
SW: Yep. I was actually on the precipice of that. I didn’t get an email until I was 19.
Do you feel like you come from a position of privilege? Where a younger generation that doesn’t have an alternative mode of operating from the virtual has no choice but to engage with these sites.
SW: It’s like when we were talking about Twitter. People have absorbed these neo-liberal forms of expression, through lifestyle marketing and advertising. It’s like they’ve become it. It’s not like the whole idea of Kraftwerk saying, ‘I’ve become the machine’ or whatever, it’s not even that. It’s taken to the next level of people absorbing this advertising structure without realising it.
Or people talking in terms of ‘branding’. You’re only calling it that because you’re working within a modern paradigm.
SW: Exactly, it’s the forms we have at our disposal and if you’re dissatisfied with something, you could try and remould something or change it. This is what’s interesting about all this hybridisation that’s going on; that’s the one thing I do like about it. It’s like that whole post-Donna Haraway kind of thing. I just feel like it always gets missed. Where you have people talking about internet art and this dis Magazine scene but that’s when you just take the form of something, without actually any content. So now you have a lot of work, which looks like critical theory but it’s actually just aestheticised; all this ‘Made in China’ bullshit that you see.
Like Item Idem or Shanzai Biennial?
SW: I’m talking about Timur Si-Qin and Aids-3d; all these people in Berlin. I know where they’re coming from but I still think it’s incredibly boring. You’ve got something like Bernadette Corporation. They were a very interesting group I think but we’re living in a time now where what they were doing in the mid-90s has now become incredibly formalised. It’s very relevant to what’s happening now but the sad irony is that we’ve got people who are just taking bits of it, and not in a kind of queer or hybridisation kind of way. It’s just, ‘look at the flat surface of this’.
I sometimes find that form a bit problematic. There’s an incredible foundation for proper discourse but it doesn’t always explore that. It’s like ‘post-post-irony’ with little justification.
SW: Absolutely. It’s just very outdated, it’s retro in a way; playing around with this Andy Warhol idea. It’s so fucking conservative and that’s what makes me really angry. All of this shit is completely conservative and neo liberal and they don’t even realise it. They just think they’re being clever and it’s not clever. It’s completely the opposite. It’s retrogressive, counterproductive and boring [laughs].
It’s interesting, the range of fairly complex ideas, from across media, that influence your music.
SW: Well, I’m trained as a fine artist. I studied film and video initially until the faculty closed and I was working with eight and 16 millimetre loops. I just see it as a natural extension of what I’m doing with this looping pedal that I have, where I can loop up to eight seconds of music.
After they closed our faculty, I started working in a fine art context. So I started playing around with more sculpture, installation and sound. It’s kind of still what I’m doing now. After I graduated, I didn’t have a computer or access to a film faculty for editing, so I literally stopped and was working with printed-matter collage but then also music. What I liked about music, and I still do, is that it’s very immediate.
What was the name of the visual art show you did in the summer?
SW: It’s called Sicherheitsdienst Im Auftrag der BVG. Even if you don’t understand German you get how oppressive it is, just by the title [laughs].It’s basically the title on the back of the jackets of the private security force, which is employed by the public transport authority. You know, they’re open barriers. Again, you have this idea of transparency and welcoming. It works on ‘trust’, you could say, but then people used to have plain-clothed officers…
So it’s basically an extension of Soviet occupation.
SW: Yes. And also it became visible, where they’re saying, ‘we are the force. We’re employed. We’re a private security force.’ So then the invisible becomes visible but it’s also, at the same time, a distance because it’s a gated community.
This is what I find interesting about social networks and things like Twitter. It’s all about this idea of engagement but actually it’s always privatised, controlled, regulated, in an unregulated market. That’s what I’m against and that’s what I’m referencing and talking about.
You could apply that to ideas of hauntology…
SW: That all comes from [Jacques] Derrida. Spectres of Marx.
These kids doing ‘hauntology’ within music seem to consciously disappear into their own online universes.
SW: It’s a bit like the internet; the word ‘blogosphere’ or something. It’s a structured reality and it does affect us, even though it’s virtual. It’s an invisible force.
It’s like that external compulsion to step in line with online social networking. It’s made very difficult to function outside of it.
SW: It’s like this dark smile: ‘you’re welcome’ but you’re not at all [laughs]. It gets a bit science fiction sometimes. What’s that John Carpenter film… They Live. It gets a bit like that or something.
You mentioned you didn’t have access to a computer after you graduated, do you have one now?
SW: Yeah, I have a computer and I’m involved in all of this. I’m not outside of it and that’s what I’m doing. I’m just commenting on it. I’m just saying that this is how we’re operating.
What drew me to your work in the first place was your PAN release INTERSEX because of those ideas of shifting gender constructs.
SW: It’s like this whole anti-genre thing, of shifting around. It’s basically applying everything you do from these expanded forms of sexuality. You have to acknowledge that it’s there but, it’s like Déviation for me. It’s also a play on ‘deviation’ or whatever, which I found less interesting but it’s also a bit of ‘smirk’; it’s more just this idea of a feedback loop for me. To move on from the field of sexuality, to city planning, the grid of the city, and then the grid of the internet with ‘Convergence’ –smartphones and apps and privatised experience. For me they make logical sense but I think I have to say it as well, because maybe it’s a bit misty.
