Abstract Lego Sculpture
The idea for an Abstract Lego Sculpture Workshop in response to artist Rashid Rana’s first UK public solo exhibition at Cornerhouse came to me when I first saw his new body of photo-sculpture works; ordinary, even average domestic objects that had been regressed to the razor edge of visual legibility. The use of block pixels reminded me of Lego, and so the idea was born. We would invite participants to deconstruct and rebuild their own everyday items and in doing so tackle two otherwise brain-hurty artistic concepts for themselves: minimalism, and abstraction. Can we do it? Yes we can!
Plastic Flowers In A Traditional Vase (2007 / detail) Rashid Rana. Image courtesy the artist, Gallery Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai
Rashid’s photo sculptures are responding to Minimalist ideals and intentions – reducing, simmering down to a base flavor like a soup stock, an essence, but also mocking this technique by taking a series of flat 2D photographs of the objects themselves and re-creating them as three-dimensional forms. To use food as a metaphor, this is like taking the contents of a tube of tomato puree, the distilled, ultra-flavoured essence of a specific taste, and moulding it back into the shape of a tomato… even re-attaching it to the vine. It’s absurd, but there is skill and a deliberate intention behind the act.
With the expert tutelage of the UK’s only Lego-certified freelance model builder, Ducan Titmarsh of Bright Bricks, we emulated this same process ourselves in our workshop by taking two objects, a Coke can and a stack of Wii cartridge games, and subjecting them to the same treatment. They will no longer look exactly like the originals, but still be recognizable as such. Think Picasso’s jumbled face-portraits, unblinking cyclopic eyes balanced upon triangular noses, or musical compositions that sound like a piano being dropped from a building. And then run over with a steamroller.
This is the bit where, in a traditional magazine layout, there would be a spiky bright yellow explosion accompanied by the subheading Did You Know…? Minimalism describes the practice and movement across multiple disciplines, but especially visual art and music, where the maker sets out to expose the essence or identity of a subject by stripping it back until only the bare bones remain. Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in the depiction of imagery; a courageous and still controversial approach when much of Western art right up until the mid 19th Century had been preoccupied by the illusion of reality and the orthodox logic of perspective.
Books 2 (2010-11 / detail) Rashid Rana. Image courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London
A coke can is one of the most recognizable items on the planet. It crosses cultures and continents and despite limited editions or redesigns or a change to the font and calligraphic text, it remains red and white and cylindrical. Cast your mind back to school art classes – were you ever asked to draw a crushed coke can? Without realising it, this might well have been your first exposure to the concept of abstraction – of moving away from a literal, clear representation of an object that still retains those core elements despite being jumbled and obscured. The curl of the letter C, the pillar box tint, a peeled ring pull. You don’t need to see all of it to recognise it for what it is.
Similarly, cast your thoughts back to early computer games, or what we know now to be early if you never actually played them. 8-bit, pixelated characters, Spectrum, Atari, Commodore. A limited number of pixels and no such thing as a graphics engine meant that characters and backgrounds were formed of little coloured blocks. Fast forward to the present and the likes of Mario and Sonic still survive in successful franchises, so the option of creating a stack of Wii games is a nod to their earlier incarnations. A thumbprint of red and white squares to represent a mushroom. Rectangles and triangles represent landscapes, bouncing brick-shaped bombs. We used our imagination in that situation, we can do the same now.
We are making, we are unmaking. We are simplifying, we are complicating. Hence the title of the overall exhibition – Everything Is Happening At Once. Thank you to all our participants, all of who commented upon how much fun it was to combine theoretical concepts with a playful make-it-yourself opportunity. Demands were made for further, weekly Lego workshops to tackle art history (a lone voice requested Duplo – we’ll say no more). For those who wish to continue this journey into modern art via the joyful medium of children’s toys, may I recommend John Cake and Darren Neave, an artist duo who recreate seminal YBA installations using – you guessed it – Lego!
Thanks to Explore More blog for the lovely personal write-up of their experience as a participant.
Ron Athey: Gifts of the Spirit
It’s rare that I should be blown away by performance art; challenged perhaps, occasionally touched, but more often contemplative and with a tendency to drift along with my own imagining, straying from the intended path. But tonight I was grounded firmly in the present moment as legendary body artist and former Pentecostal ingénue Ron Athey unveiled his latest ‘channelling’ in the historic and pitch-perfect surroundings of The Whitworth Hall at the University of Manchester.
Presented in conjunction with The Queer Theory of the Avant-Garde conference, ‘Gifts of the Spirit: Automated Writing’ is a performance installation conceived, scored and directed by Ron Athey with automatic composition and music performance by Othon Mataragas. Accompanied by 16 automatic writers, organ, piano, 6 typists, 4 editors, 1 reader and a glossolalia chorus, a curious audience poured into the historic chamber unsure of what to expect. What followed was a direct challenge to the Manchester International Festival in the form of a memorable lifetime moment.
Athey himself was seated upon a raised platform and took the role of reader, conducting the event via a protocol of stop-start initiations for those engaged in production and interpretation. He was placed alongside the chorus, an eclectic mix of types with the distinct appearance of a council or representative body of tribes; the mourning mother, the money lender, the darkling prince, the eunuch, the woman of titled means… these are my interpretations, certainly unintended but no less valid than any other of the wild imaginings that bubbled to the surface during the course of the event.
The parquet floor was papered in a giant ‘X’ made of multiple layers, crawling across and upon which were the writers themselves. At a signal the scrawling began as Athey read from his unpublished memoirs, providing prompt and raw source material for transcription and unravelling. The chorus, for the moment largely silent, were hunched across planchettes that slid and jerked beneath their fingers, eyes closed in readiness as open conduits to the spirit realm.
As the writers edged forward across their own text which grew at a prodigious rate, assistants farmed the words as birds follow a plough to pluck at pink worms unearthed in the soil, tearing or cutting with scissors and carrying across to typists seated at the edge of the walls. These blank-faced sentries transcribed and elaborated using ribbon and carbon sheets, occasionally pausing to lean forward and rip the now drained pages from the facing wall to squeeze further psychic pulp from a new scrap.
Greek composer and pianist Othon Matarangas sat in the organ gallery overlooking proceedings, thundering a dark, pounding fugue from the resonant pipes that floated atop the clattery tap-tap of the typewriters. Now editors leapt up to perform their task, taking the typed sheets and scoring, censoring, highlighting and re-ordering words, sentences and phrases which were then cast back upon the table for the glossolalia chorus to use for their rendition in earnest.
Singing, screaming, yelping and weeping, the atmosphere grew tense and heavy as the speaking in tongues began. One man sat and wept, some edged closer as others inched toward the exit, a female writer stretched and writhed across her patch of paper in what seemed very much like an ecstasy. Speaking for myself, I felt relaxed and comforted, as if the air was filling with a marshmallow viscosity that dulled the shrieks and at times terrifying sounds of the singers.
And then it was over – the link broken. As an example of a group collaborative effort, whether it be for theatrical effect or with a determined if mostly theoretical intention, the result was truly unnerving. Ron Athey is not mocking but celebrating and re-appropriating a personal belief system often dismissed as nonsense, and in doing so I found myself complicit; no longer an observer but an active participant. A wish is a form of summons, after all. Goosebumps were most definitely raised, while as for the sprits of the netherworld itself, who can say. It wasn't for want of trying.
Rule Britannia
Jordan in Derek Jarman's JUBILEE (1977)
I am in no way a flag-waving patriot and the type of national hysteria in evidence at The Last Night of the Proms makes me shudder, but the closest I've ever come to a sense of national pride is my long-standing adoration of Derek Jarman's 1977 punk opus JUBILEE. Of course, the attachment I feel is not to Queen & Country but to alt-muse Jordan, Toyah, Adam Ant and Jarman's brilliant art direction in this tale of a dystopian Britain to which Queen Elizabeth I, aided by elemental spirit guide Ariel and court physician Dr John Dee (Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien), pay an eye-opening visit. Wasp waisted killer vixens run amok, while a twin-set and pearls paired with warpaint never seemed so subversive. I've always wanted to respond somehow, and flushed with adrenaline on the back of Peaches Christ decided it was time to have another pop at the Umbro Industries Creative Grants. Third time lucky? Who can tell.
Unearthly delight
The Atmosphere series began at Inspace last night with the screening of Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey (1994), the definitive documentary upon the life and times of both instrument and inventor, Professor Léon Theremin. Having patented the device in 1928, the mix of mechanical idolatry and entirely human subjectivity resulted in a fitting testimony to a noise as ethereal and transitory as our passage on this Earth. It also focused heavily on enthralling figure and key contributor Clara Rockmore, muse and theremin virtuosa who could tease a concert from the air with her red-clawed fingernails.
A life of champagne and concerts at Carnegie hall challenged societal conventions with a race-defying marriage to an exotic dancer, whereupon Theremin was kidnapped by the KGB, smuggled back to Russia, imprisoned and forced to spend 25 years pursuing espionage technology during the Cold War. The closing scenes of a frail and bent Theremin being reunited with a sparky, sharp-as-a-tack Rockmore felt almost painfully intimate. Oh, and afterwards we all had a go on the real thing, courtesy of FOUND. This is one seriously beautiful film. Or am I just a soft touch? Guilty, m’lud!
moves10
From Liverpool to Manchester and across the UK on screens, on site and online, moves celebrated its 6th successful year by reaching out to more audiences than ever. With nearly 500 submissions from over 40 countries from around the globe, this boutique festival’s impact is greater than ever, encouraging even more talent from across the region, UK and around the world to discover and exchange new methods of telling stories centered around movement on screen through films, installations, forums and live events.
Hot Circuit: Christina Corfield
This year’s theme Framing Motion explored how practitioners choose to frame movement through their choice of setting and context to define the boundaries for screen-based works. These could be real worlds or imaginary, abstract, impossible or augmented environments defined by a specific visual intent. In looking at methods of capturing a sense of pulse and energy, the curatorial outlook also addressed definitions of stillness: the pause-and-relinquish through which motion occurs.
When We Meet Again: Clara Garcia Fraile & Sam Pearson
For the first time a series of installed works studded the halls, rooms and courtyards of Liverpool’s creative hub the Bluecoat, from Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon's tasty AR buffet Urban Picnic, to the one-on-no-one intimacy of video goggle installation When We Meet Again (Clara Fraile & Sam Pearson). Christine Corfield’s Hot Circuit told the 10-screen tale of a 2D teenage pregnancy while viewers automatically flinched and stepped back from the violent crack of a rope pulled with gunshot force through an urban assault course, curling and lashing like an angry electric bolt (Space Drawing No.5, Sai Hua Kuan).
The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968
Nowhere was the festival theme more apparent that within the rare, feature-length screening of Armenian auteur Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates. A useful and highly accessible introduction by Daniel Bird, co-lecturer in Russian and Eastern European Film at Sheffield University equipped us for what lay ahead by encapsulating the life and career of this persecuted visionary, warning us not to expect a story, sense or understanding. Instead we were asked to allow the images to wash over us, like listening to music or the view from a train.
The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968
The colour-drenched stream of static tableaux that followed quite legitimately justified the movie’s claim in Cahiers du cinéma’s top 10 films of all time. A biography of Armenian poet Sayat Nova’s life told in visual and poetic form, rather than pursuing a literal course, Orthodox iconography and Persian miniatures blinked into life. Newly dyed wool is slopped from steaming cauldrons, animals pour through a hive of catacombs, quasi-religious figures glow with an unearthly light, books lie scattered across impossible surfaces, pages turning in the breeze.
The Colour of Pomegrantes (Sayat Nova): Sergei Parajanov, 1968
At the heart of all burns the arresting image of Parajadov’s androgynous muse, Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli, playing no fewer than six roles, both male and female. More of a cultural spa experience than a standard visit to the cinema, watching The Colour of Pomegranates is a visual feast that we can pick at or gorge upon, a precursor to Derek Jarman’s rich visual style or Matthew Barney’s super-stylised filmic orgies (see The Cremaster Cycle).
Like a butterfly cupped in the palm of a hand, this painterly dream is the very definition of movement suspended, an intake of breath before release.
Kraak
A new, not-for-profit gallery and performance space has mushroomed into being above Hula's Tiki bar in Stevenson Square, Manchester. Although it took our finest Miss Marple-like detective skills to find the place as we followed a trail of chalked hieroglyphics, we eventually gained entry to Kraak and what remains at present a 'squat space' for their first Late Night Live Art event.
There were records to be smashed with a hammer, an amplified coat, twiddly knobs, cheap beer served through a hole in the kitchen door, strangely comfortable bust furniture and a lady eating passages offensive to women from Leviticus with a knife and fork.