Beacon Bi-Monthly 11: 7 July 2012
Hello there everyone, I’m
David Zelder, a published author from Lincoln.
My novel Yomping Outside is available from my website www.davidzelder.co.uk
Part of the proceeds of all
sales goes to The Royal Marines Charitable Trust fund and I am currently
negotiating with a film producer who wants to turn the book into a movie next
year.
I was delighted when Nicola
and John asked me to be the guest blogger for this full and interesting evening
in Wellingore. I thank them for their
courtesy and warm welcome.
As 7.00 p.m. rapidly
approached the room filled and I guess around 55 people were there breathlessly
anticipating an evening of culture and variety.
They were not disappointed. As I looked round the room just before the 1st
presentation I thought to myself “help” I am a writer in a room full of
artists. Is there a collective noun to
describe a group of artists? Probably not, so as a wordsmith I figured either a
canvas or a palette of artists would suffice!!
So how was this writer going
to convey 3 hours of material and words into a précis or abstract of the
evening and condense it into a manageable blog? Well as someone who travels
extensively to view fine art and appreciates it whether in La Prada, The Tate
Modern, The Guggenheim in Venice or La Louvre or even La Piscine in Lille I
should be able to achieve some semblance of order!!. A starting point is perhaps some quotes from
artistic genius of the 20th century which put into context what we
saw on Friday:-
The fact that I myself , at the moment of painting, do
not understand my own pictures , does not mean that these pictures have no
meaning.
Salvador
Dalί.
I am very conscious of all that has happened in art
during the last seventy-five years. I
don’t ignore it; I feel I’ve tried to assimilate it into my kind of art.
David Hockney
And
Life is what creates the contrasts, without which art
would be unimaginable and incomplete.
Marc Chagall
The latter is taken from one
of my prized possessions, a limited edition book by Bill Wyman and signed by
him, rejoicing in the title Wyman Shoots Chagall. As well as
being a guitar player of high quality, Bill is also an accomplished
photographer and was a neighbour of Chagall in France.
Anyway, I digress, so, on
with the show:-
First up were
Reactor
(Nicky Russell, Daniel Williams, Stuart Tate).
(Nicky Russell, Daniel Williams, Stuart Tate).
The group describe their
activities as assembling different realities which involves participation from
Reactor members and their audience.
They explore dislodged
relationships, role adjustments and the avoidance of fixed roles. Their belief
is that primary and secondary adjustments produce more benefits. They explore disruptive secondary adjustments
which can lead to industrial action such as strikes.
To illustrate their work they produced slides summarising their project The Greenman and Regular Fellows
The core members were
interested in membership as a social construct using temporary groups and
fellowship. This produced unexpected
relationships. Role adjustments were explored in detail. A person starting a
new role will experience primary adjustments and their employers may well allow
them to slack off to create a belief the employee is “getting away with something”.
Then there will be secondary adjustments as the staff get more into their role
but may well move on to disruptive secondary adjustments.
The next experiential
discovery we explored was front and back behaviour, exemplified by a hotel
environment. The receptionist may well
display differing behaviour to that of kitchen staff. The group wished to explore the relationship
between this front and back space.
The group therefore developed
roles that people could take on in primary adjustment and move on to secondary
adjustment. They discussed the issues of
Chinese whispers in developing people. A
role was described to an individual and then they were told they would have to describe
it to another person. How would that
second and additional descriptions differ from the starting dialogue?
They chose a pub as the
vehicle for this project as it had so many differing spaces, each with a
discrete role and function. Alternate reality was encouraged in the
participants, personality and conditioning dictates how individuals react. A
debate ensued on how one becomes a “member” of Reactor, which was almost
portrayed as a parallel universe, or a highly secret underground movement. Membership was secretive, restricted, and,
apparently prized. Words were dissected and reassembled. Are you a regular? Are you irregular. Said quickly they both sound the same. So what level of membership goes with “regular”?
Illustrative diagrams were
shown with P being your present universe, S being self and A_B at the top my
memory being the adjusted roles.
 |
 |
In order to explore the
concepts, the group used traditional English mummers’ roles and regulars at the
pub went into the back space to design some entertainment. This led to the establishment of a
hierarchical club or society. Membership
rules were established in the pub with appropriate paperwork. The members used a self determining check as
to whether they were a regular and whether they are allowed to pass through to
the back space.
The group stressed they do
not ask participants to play someone else, they should retain their own
identity but in an alternate reality. Often things happen in a project that the
group did not initiate or even know about.
An interesting Q&A
session followed with one interrogator asking how membership was secured, the
answer left a large question mark in the air.
An interesting and
challenging presentation with the 3 participants clearly on top of their game.
Next it was the turn of
Sarah Staton
Sarah started with a video
she made with Karin Ruggaber. The short
film was intended to be about lines and show the postmodern architecture of the
city of Sheffield and its strange shapes and its attitude to its cultural
identity.
 |
| Photograph: David Zelder |
Sarah talked about her work
with the University in Sheffield and how she was commissioned to produce a
sculpture for them after a speed dating session with an academic from the
architectural department. They did not
have a front door that was visible or noticeable. The work had a name “Steve
the autonomous machine”. The concept she
devised required living matter to be incorporated on the roof and consist of a
collision of various materials. The plan was also that people could sit in it
as Sarah sees sculpture as becoming an animated object through human presence.
Sarah is considering how to
best incorporate organic matter into her pieces so that there is an element of
planned obsolescence as the plant matter decays.
Such is the quality of
Sarah’s work that as well as commissions she is regularly exhibiting and in
2011 did a number of back to back exhibitions.
One of these was in large family home in Scotland which already exuded
opulence and success, but in a more classical or neo-classical style. So Sarah and the 2 artists with whom she
collaborated on the project were able to install pieces in an interesting
juxtaposition of modern fine art with fine art from another era. The exhibition benefitted greatly from its
being in a private home and thus there was no bureaucracy or form filling in
triplicate or 3 committee meetings to secure permission to move an existing portrait
or sculpture. Better still, no health and safety officers to consult.
 |
 |
Major exhibitions were
mounted at Huddersfield Gallery The
Lowry in Salford and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
In The Yorkshire Sculpture Park the artist wanted to get away from the browns and greens and no colour in the works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and Antony Gormley which are permanently on display at the park. So she introduced colour and used her furniture as sculpture ideas for the theme
 |
Sarah has a keen interest in furniture as a starting
point for a sculpture “a table is to sculpture what a piece of paper is to
drawing.” She has taken table tops and used
computer cutting technology to cut perfect circles out of the table then
suspend them in flowing forms.
 |
Sarah did major permanent
work at The Crucible in Sheffield, including an amazing design for the floor in
the lobby plus seating , as she described “for old ladies to rest” and clever
hostess trolleys for the staff to put interval drinks on for easy collection by
the clients. She was intent on adding
function to form in the work at The Crucible rather than art for art’s
sake. Clearly she achieved that in one
of the most iconic theatres in northern England
And last but not least:-
Traci Kelly
The talk was preceded by a
short introduction to The Summer Lodge.
This is a 2 week event at Nottingham Trent University with this year 27
artists and 14 interns.
 |
One of the first materials
Traci became interested in working with was milk, fluids and work that come
from the body. She also wanted to explore the politics of what happens when
bodies come together then fall apart and reconvene.
She works both as a solo
artist and has a collaborative practice with Richard Hancock. They have a keen interest in live art
practices. They like to show the contrast and confrontation between nature and
architecture and examine how they collide together. When they collaborate, one
artist makes the work and one artist performs the work. They are looking at the materials of the
body, white skin the nature of white skin and drawing attention to what they do
by posing white skin next to other white skin.
 |
So Traci showed an example of
Richard posing next to the carcass of a pig.
The design, drawn on the skin, represents patterns from Richard’s
childhood memories. Traci said that Richard was more comfortable being on show whereas
she found it more difficult but accepted it is a vital part of their work. They insist the pig and the human bodies are
treated the same. If the pig comes to
them shaved, the human is shaved, if the human body is oiled, the pig is oiled.
 |
To illustrate their interest
in local history a haunting photograph was shown of an Iranian poet living at
the time in Nottingham who was ordered to be deported back to Iran and certain
death. As a last ditch protest he had
his eyes, lips and ears sewn up.
An image of poignancy that
brings me to the end of this blog.
ART, in my view, should do 3 things, entertain, provoke comment and then engage the audience in thinking about the subject matter. I think this evening’s presentations have achieved all of this.
Thank you.
David Zelder
Lincoln
July 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment