Jennet Thomas, All Suffering SOON TO END!

Comprising of a film and neighbouring installation, Jennet Thomas' solo show at Matt's Gallery presents a paradoxical meeting of the rambling rhetoric of a purple-skinned, evangelical preacher on the doorstep of the suburban home of a pensioner couple.  Inspired by a Jehovah's witnesses pamphlet (of the same name), the film is a portrait of British suburbia punctured by the arrival of the Alice-in-Wonderland-like characters to deliver the utopian dream of a world without suffering.

In an effort to convert the husband and wife, the narrative unravels repetitiously, with the preacher (and his sidekick, the green nun) using a healthy dose of dance music to pound out the promise All suffering SOON TO END!  A trip to a theme park of miniatures and a grow-your-own Adam and Eve add another level of absurdity to a work which does all but sermonise "the circus has come to town".

The tree of knowledge from the film is featured in the installation, from which emanates a voice speaking the original text which inspired the work and a projection of the hypnotic test card from the couple's television screen.  If you're really lucky, you might just meet a preacher or nun whilst you're there, now rendered mute as if a moving costume or life-size doll.

Allowing time to consider the work has lead me to appreciate its density of themes and questions regarding the cultism of conventional and unconventional modes of living and the lingering hopes of idealism in a capitalist system.  But this came to me after the circus had left, or rather, I had left the circus and was able to make sense of an otherwise sensational portrait of absurdity.

All suffering SOON TO END! is on at Matt's Gallery until 6th June 2010.

What will the next revolution look like?

What will the next revolution look like? is a performance by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler which charts the conception of The Museum of Non Participation through video, film, slides and narration.  Situated at Waterside Project Space as part of the current exhibition All that remains... the Teenagers of Socialism, two narrators (Karen Mirza and Nabil Ahmed) navigate the space and the spectators using text and image to recount the projects journey since its inception in 2007.

Whilst on a visit to Islamabad, Mirza and Butler witnessed a violence clash between plain clothes police officers and suited lawyers who were protesting outside the supreme court, from the window of the National Gallery.  Caught between the images of the gallery inside and the images of real violence occurring outside, as witnesses, Mirza and Butler became participants in an important event.

This raises the question; What position do you take?  Do you go outside and intervene, or do you remain a spectator?  What would you do?  As both artists and citizens Mirza and Butler have considered their positions and perspectives in whether or not one chooses to participate.  These questions sparked an investigation into ways of processing the complexities of social and political experience in Pakistan.

Interestingly The Museum of Participation in Urdu translates as The House of the Unexpected,  and indeed that might have been a suitable alternative title for this performance.  The narratives covered not only what had been witnessed and experienced in Islamabad and Karachi, but also posed questions about how resistance is represented.  The Museum of Non Participation focuses on cross-cultural exchange through language and knowledge, but also uses story telling as a method to find and ask the difficult questions about east/west relations, and the representations of those relations.

The most interesting parts of the performance were where the narratives took centre stage.  As they were conveying an important story and raising relevant contemporary issues about the politics of aesthetics, I felt that perhaps the format did not offer much more than a conventional lecture might have.  However, seeing it played out in the space meant watching others watching became part of the experience.  In creating a performance about political dialogic exchange I believe it becomes necessary to instigate a situation where that dialogue might be furthered, as the performance raised questions for me which my familiarity with this project have not been able to answer.

The creation of social spaces and opportunities for new dialogues are increasingly important in artistic practice and particularly where art and politics meet (The Museum of Non Participation's space behind a barbers shop on Bethnal Green Road last year provides an excellent example).  Just as we consider the same question as citizens, as artists we must decide whether or not it is necessary to participate and become involved in issues that affect the world beyond artistic practice.  As The Museum of Non Participation demonstrates, in participating in one system you choose not to participate in others, so the question for us all becomes not whether to participate... but, how?

All that remains... the Teenagers of Socialism exhibition continues at Waterside Project Space until 25th April 2010.

Mike Nelson to represent Britain in Venice

Twice Turner prize nominated artist Mike Nelson has been chosen to represent Britain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

One can only try to imagine what Nelson will conjure up to transform the British Pavilion, but Adrian Searle insists his work must "punch above its weight" if he is to compete with the installation big hitters of recent years such as Elmsgreen and Dragset (2009), Gregor Schneider (2001) and Christian Boltanski at this year's Monumenta.

Nelson's installations offer the possibility to be more than transported, to be transformed; locked in a performance which is encountered rather than conducted, sensational as well as sensory.

Richard Grayson, from his essay on The Deliverance and the Patience:

"We move through the wooden door into spaces that shift us between sweatshop and workshop, travel agents and gambling den, from rooms for pedagogy to rooms for pleasure.  Spaces where we can slip from one state and condition into another.  The immediately startling thing about this is that these spaces and architectures are unpeopled- we have entered some Marie Celeste, and we are perhaps the first person to step there since... well, whatever happened... and first off it is ourselves that we find being shaped and articulated by the spaces as we are cast in the role of part trespasser, part archaeologist and part detective: a person moving through the traces of other's existences trying to understand what catastrophe may have caused this emptiness and what condition may have shaped the inhabitants lives."

Nelson has the opportunity to create something quite incredible, I'll follow Searle in saying "I really hope Nelson does something extreme, and manages to excel himself.  I really hope he fucks with the pavilion, and with our heads."

Pictured:  Mike Nelson Preface to the 2004 edition (Triple Bluff Canyon) (2004) showing as part of Crash at the Gagosian Gallery (2010)

No Soul For Sale

Tate Modern is celebrating its 10th birthday with a weekend-long eclectic festival in the shape of No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents, which will take place in Turbine Hall mid-May.  Originally devised by X Initiative, the event had its first airing in June last year at the former Dia Art Foundation headquarters in New York, with 40 independent international arts collectives and not-for-profit organisations taking part.

Inspired by Lars von Trier's Dogville, the event will focus on creating a collaborative, communal, anti-commercial art fair atmosphere where performance, film, music, installation and who knows what else can be watched and talked about, with Tate Modern staying open until midnight on Friday and Saturday to accommodate all the activities.

Visitors at NY's No Soul For Sale opening night will have seen Mexican City-based artist Martin Soto Climent construct a beer can sculpture Impulsive Chorus (pictured above) from 1000 beer cans, kildly emptied and donated by the public throughout the night.

More than 50 organisations/collectives have been invited to take part, including White Columns (New York), Kling and Bang Gallery (Reykjavik), Y3K (Melbourne) and e-flux (Berlin), as well as London-based organisations like Museum of Everything, Auto Italia and no.w.here.

Also, if you visit the gallery on May 12th you may see several hundred cake-carrying school children mildly fatigued from a walk from Borough Market to Tate Modern in honour of its birthday.  So grab yourself some cake and a birthday sing-song if you have the chance.

Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Cecilia Alemani, Massimiliano Gioni and Tate Modern, No Soul For Sale is on at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern from 14th-16th May 2010.

A History of Irritated Material at Raven Row

A History of Irritated Material is an exhibition that highlights art's relationship with politics and the archive over the past few decades.  Including projects by Group Material, Lygia Clark and Suely Rolnik, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, Ad Reinhart and a numbers of others, it features more than enough material to keep visitors busy for a good while.

The works or projects reference political conflicts since WWII; examining how the artist's response produces "irritable" forms of critique that situate the work between an aesthetic of cultural resistance and a criticism of its own status as an art object.

The curator Lars Bang Larson contemporizes the artists' work in the context of art and culture's present habitation of the individualist experience drawn from a "globalised world".  In reading Larson's response (in his introductory essay to the exhibition's accompanying document) I began to consider the work I had seen in relation to an aspect of my own practice which is concerned with art's scepticism of the political.

It is important to acknowledge the ruptures that political art practice instigates in terms of aestheticising forms of socio-political criticism.  But in the interest of moving forward and actively re-engaging with contemporary politics, it is important that art does not function as a mirror for the political situation, or even as a critique of conflict.  It must be its own conflict and its own critique in order to be able to respond to politics not through scepticism, but through engagement.

There is a breadth of work in this show that illustrates and plays with frictious social and political ideologies.  None more so than Disobedience, An Ongoing Video Archive which is an optimally installed video compilation featuring Bernadette Corporation, Harun Farocki, Etcetera and Critical Art Ensemble among others.  The design (by Xabier Salaberria) of the construction is both barrier and an aid in viewing the many works on show but I found it particularly distracting, especially in deciding what to watch.  However, there is a consistent conversation here concerning "the political subject as the media object", offering numerous examples of cultural resistance and dissent in the production of video art as well as political activism.

The exhibition well deserves the time needed to soak in the material on view (particularly Lygia Clark, From Object to Event, produced by Suely Rolnik) and I recommend reading the show's accompanying document which sheds some light on the choices made in curating this exhibition, as might the event Guy Brett and Lars Bang Larson in conversation, 7pm on 31st March 2010 at Raven Row.

A History of Irritated Material is on at Raven Row until 2nd May 2010.

Miroslaw Balka

Video Link:

Tate Channel: The Unilever Series: Miroslaw Balka

In this video Miroslaw Balka discusses his life in Poland, where he still lives and works, using his family home as a studio. Describing the house "like a frozen situation", he talks about his family history and how his sculptures grew from the materials he was surrounded by as a child.

Balka's relationship to materials is an emotional one. Conscious of the material's history and it's "own life"; he speaks of objects that exist as sculptures and objects that have a been used in a practical way with the same sensitive consideration, attentive to the material's origin and history. Guiding us round the house, Balka picks out traces of the past that have been physically imprinted on the house and it's objects; his grandmother's broom, the worn spot in the linoleum where she knelt to pray.

Balka takes us through a jewish ghetto of WWII and then to the train station from where jews were taken to the death camp of Treblinka. He talks movingly about the memorial sculptures at the camp and the material relationship with memory that is so important in his work.

This short film gives a thoughtful insight into How it is, enabing us to consider the work in the context of his own experiences and the depth of history in which he has grown up.

"Things in art don't happen so directly, they are much more mysterious. The change of ideas takes place on the levels that we don't see with the naked eye... in the underground." -Miroslaw Balka.

The Unilever Series: Miroslawe Balka How it is is at Tate Modern in Turbine Hall until 5th April 2010.

Florian Hecker at Chisenhale Gallery

The next week or so is the last chance to see Florian Hecker's electro-accoustic installation at the Chisenhale Gallery in East London.  The exhibition is made up of a set of works that use a sequence of tones to create an orchestrated mass of varying aural experiences that alter as you move around the open space.

With only yourself and the speakers occupying the vast gallery, the sound creates a bodily experience in which you are lead around by your ears and the sensation of comprehending a set of mixed aural signals which become almost overwhelming.  The monophonic tones suggest you are hearing one sound when up close to the speaker and something different as you move away as the tones merge into a near symphonic vibration.

At a talk given by Hecker's philosophical collaborator Robin Mackay, What is an (auditory) object?, the sound was discussed in relation to perception-as-hallucination and in comparison to theories of the eye-brain, in terms of painting.  But I was particularly interested in his interpretation of sound as not just performative, but dramatised.  This has me thinking about the sensation of hearing perception as something as much dramatised by the act of perception as by the performance of sound.

Florian Hecker's exhibition is on at the Chisenhale until 28th March 2010.

Richard Wilson, 20:50

January saw the re-installation of Richard Wilson's 20:50 at the Saatchi Gallery, King's Road.  First installed at Matt's Gallery in 1987, then at Boundary Road and later at County Hall, it has become an integral feature of Saatchi's collection since 1991.

My first viewing of this work was at County Hall where the wooden panelling and cornicing were perfectly reflected in the mirror of crude oil, in which you're given the impression of standing waist deep, the room strangely quiet and heady with the fumes from the oil.

The success of 20:50 to me lies in the sensory impression it creates; one that has stayed with me since I first saw the work over seven years ago.  So in going to revisit it at its new home at the Duke of York's HQ I had this sensory memory held in my mind and could smell the trace of warm oil as I stepped through the front doors.

Approaching the installation from above immediately draws attention to the illusion created by the reflective oil as a false floor, as it is set in below the level of the ground in Gallery 13 on the lower ground floor.  The entry to the walkway was blocked off and I was told by the attendant that visitors could not gain access.  Although the illusion looks as great as ever, somewhere between seeing it on approach and being denied access, I missed the work.

Works like this one (if there are works like this) not only deserve but require experiencial immersion.  Queueing up for half an hour at County Hall was more than worth the minute spent alone in an experience that has locked in my mind.  So I feel it is a great shame to deny visitors the real and intended vision that 20:50 creates, excluding us from a chance to wave our hand over the black sump pool and watch for ripples in the glassy surface.  Perhaps Richard Wilson doesn't mind so much, perhaps other people won't mind so much.  But I will do my best to forget this visit completely, if I can help it at all.