Go Forth and Thrash

research diagram

2012-01-30T20:46:00.000Z

I've got to magic a 3000 word proposal into a 1000 word proposal.
It would be fairly at odds with the spirit of the project if I were to whine about about last minute rule changing. I'm going to attempt to use a graph instead of my original literature survey. It's pretty daunting to see what I've spent the last year to eighteen months reading and doing.

Funkadelic, Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow.

2012-01-28T10:27:00.003Z

Further travels in funk, further travels in mud and death.

More writing on and through music.

Sender Brocken

2012-01-22T11:49:00.001Z

One of my new research strands for this year is Sender Brocken, which is publishing and broadcasting base. It will have a broad scope interests, with a specific allegiance toward the formless, things which cross borders and exist in singularity. Points of reference would include: theory-fiction, speculative realism, performance, education, critique, science-fiction, poetry, materialisms of all kinds.
We have a physical space on the edge of west london which will be used as a studio and workshop for invited artists to develop and realise projects but it does seem naive in the present time not to think of all projects as essentially nomadic. Never the less, a concrete floor and a roof is available and that is reassuring to know.
The first product of Sender Brocken will begin shortly, consisting of a publication/proposition which is itself the ideological seed which will become an exhibition once it finds a suitable place to germinate.
If you would like to know more about Sender Brocken including information on submissions, please contact senderbrocken@gmail.com
www.senderbrocken.co.uk

Pot Healers (2012)

2012-01-20T15:24:00.001Z

Philip K Dick, Bertolt Brecht, Octopus, Ceramics, Space.
<br>P

Trees and Plinths (2012)

2012-01-11T22:21:00.002Z

Art/Converters! Studio 1.1 19th January - 29th January

2012-01-08T18:03:00.003Z

above, DAVID BEN WHITE, 'Wig Painting' 2007 40 x 50 cms

Art/Converters!
Thursday 19th to Sunday 29th January 2012
private view Thursday 19th 6 - 9pm

amongst those Art/Converting so far and in no particular order are

LAURA MORRISON, MARCUS COPE, PAUL SAVAGE, STEPHANIE MORAN, ANNIE KEVANS, KATE LYDDON, ROSS WALKER, VANESSA JACKSON, JOHN DOUGILL, CRAIG ANDREWS, SACHA CRADDOCK, GILL ORD, RALPH DOREY, JOSHUA RAFFELL, ROBIN SEIR, RON MEERBEEK, SARAH McNULTY, JEFFORD HORRIGAN, WILL CRUICKSHANK, GLEN WILD, DAMIAN GRIFFITHS, WILLIAM STEIN, DAVID BEN WHITE ALAN MAGEE, CLARE PRICE, HOWARD DYKE, JEREMY WILLETT, AMANDA BENSON, KAY WALSH, TOM CHAMBERLAIN, CHRISTOPHER BOND, JOHN SUMMERS, DANIEL DEVLIN...

We're starting 2012 with a major fundraising initiative. We've asked artists from past and future shows to donate work (of any value) which can be sold for the simple one-size-fits-all sum of £200.

The show will be a wonderful opportunity to buy truly affordable art from truly engaging artists.

It is not only an incredibly generous gift to us from artists we love and admire but also a generous gift from those artists to you, the viewer; the chance for you simply to buy something you like safe in the knowledge that the artist has the serious, sincere qualities upon which studio1.1's reputation stands.

And at the same time of course your purchase will gain the added value of having contributed to the continued survival of a space that lives for and believes in the artists it shows.

studio1.1 thanks you for your help. Images of the donated work will appear shortly on our website.

The show's private view is on Thursday 19th from 6 till 9; at 7 the event will be opened by Sacha Craddock with a short introduction. It will continue to Sunday 29th, 12 till 6. To mark as clearly as possible its authentic fundraising status the show is called...

ART/CONVERTERS!

studio1.1
57a Redchurch St London E2 7DJ
tubes: Shoreditch High St/Liverpool St/Old St
bus: 8, 26, 35, 47, 48, 149, 344, 388
email: studio1-1.gallery@virgin.net
tel: 07952 986696
web: http://www.studio1-1.co.uk
open: Wednesday to Sunday 12-6 pm
or by appointment

on the transition from eleven to twelve and the hopeful death of the fine art BA.

2012-01-02T19:24:00.000Z

I'm around two weeks away from handing in my research proposal, my life has been completely taken over by this work for a long time, but the last couple of months have been the most intense. I have said a number of times previously that I have a genuine regret that I did not study an academic discipline, I have very little other than the sort of autodidactic knowledge that never ever feels completely secure. I am aware also that my refusal to ever head back and start at the beginning has made the road all the harder. A question I return to frequently is "what should an art education consist of?" and the follow up question "what is an art education for?" What I think is missing from such an education is an engagement with a wider reality, in place of hours of undirected time and an insular self-referential environment, there should be enforced encounters beyond experience, and radical critique of such experience. Gone should be the comforts of learning a craft, of learning the encyclopaedia of technique instead we should muck out stables, cook at a shelter, write a radio-play, haul back-line for a music hire company, sit in on history, midwifery and beauty therapy lectures in a variety of institutions. Art education has shown use only in the instances where it advances an individual's capacity to engage with the world, but it has done this badly and patchily. Career lecturers while away a student's time with the same list of artists, alluding to a lofty ideal of aesthetics and philosophy while hiding the only practical information they might impart for the future they present before the student's eyes, namely to learn to identify, accumulate and use the social currency which drives art as a business above all else. Why not instead enhance the individual so that they might construct an alternative to that awful system? How can we sit by as the institutions which pride themselves of their position as the vanguard fail to remove their activities from the bourgeois production of commodities for the gentry via the patronising exploitation of the lower classes? Why do we ignore the system of courtship and favour which effectively renders all other variation of artistic practice as flavours of the same ice cream? There should be no distinction between theory and practice and advancement should be of the self rather than what the self can present to a world. I do not wish to see the things made shiny by the morally bankrupt, the confidences of the middle-classes who see early on that what is needed to be successful is first of all to look successful. Be careless with professional materials and your efforts will be rewarded. Regardless of how it has ever been, that is now absurd. In the face of so much creativity in riots and animal husbandry and communication infrastructures, art education has been fatally uncritical of its own role and its own potential. The role of artist is primary that of the bricoleur, the adapter, the one open to meshing with new systems and throwing up new systems which are founded only upon the moving things that pass around rather than a static academy. That should be the training, and then the drive to learn how to throw a pot, or prime a canvas or shear a sheep will not only come forth naturally, but will make sense in terms of its use, rather than simply the accumulation of a skill which might, if one is luckily, be exploited by another further up the food chain.
I do not in any way bemoan my own education, it was the only one I had and the only one I could get and I am grateful. I do think the undergraduate art system will, in the face of genuine free-schools, pirate academy and bendy-bus pedagogy find itself utterly lacking and I hope that it does something about this before all but the most needy, foolish and scared abandon it for a more genuine experience of art learning.

New thing by me on the 1970s blog, the things of altman, bacon and weir are cast adrift in a sea of immanence and bob about like lost angry turtles.

2011-12-13T20:35:00.000Z

Click the link to go, this one might be a good one.

... and what will be left of them?: Robert Altman's 3 Women, Peter Weir's The Last Wav...: “See the cliffs again, be again between the cliffs and the sea, reeling shrinking with your hands over your ears, headlong, innocent, suspec...

Screening at Corner College in Zurich

2011-12-05T12:47:00.001Z

Sunk In is being shown at Corner College, Kochstrasse 1, CH-8004 Zürich,

10th January 2012, 8pm.

Kino
Soirée Video
Nicole Bachmann

Still from Dave Charlesworth: Wander (Walker), 2011

Die zurzeit in London lebende Künstlerin Nicole Bachmann zeigt einige Videos frischer künstlerischer Positionen. Bis heute sind Videos folgender Personen vorgesehen:

Annie Davie (UK)
Dave Charlesworth (UK)
Ralph Dorey (UK)
Eunjung Park (Korea)

Weitere Informationen folgen.

Bildungsroman (2009) Full publication

2011-12-04T14:41:00.001Z

2011-11-28T13:43:00.001Z

new website

2011-11-15T13:11:00.001Z

www.ralphdorey.co.uk or the link on the right
any bugs, please let me know. thanks!

Gregg Araki, Willem Dafoe, Lost in the Woods, Bean Face.

2011-11-07T22:59:00.001Z

new post on the 90s blog on fuzziness in the wings and pre-millennium melt down.
Click the iguana.

I wrote a post on the power of dirt between 1983 and 1985 for Wayne Kasper's 80s blog

2011-10-29T21:20:00.000+01:00

Faces on posters Too many choices: ...Poured Across The Border...: Come and See 1 is about blood in the margins, it is about the filth and the great horrible real of unknowable matter in your boots, i...

New stockist, X Marks The Bökship

2011-10-28T17:22:00.000+01:00

As the title say, X Marks The Bökship, opposite Cambridge Heath Station in E2 is now stocking some things I've made recently.

Paul Thek / China Miéville / Axioms of Uncertainty

2011-10-20T19:37:00.000+01:00

I built jig after jig after jig to manoeuvre some material past. Through the line of a blade's becoming. Everything is a surrogate, everything is a use-value of some sort. Chips and chocks are not an ends but a means to more means, a balancing system that stacks thoughts on moments on places on forms. Everything waltzes round and around like the pins in the lock's cylinder. No, more like planets, decaying orbits of time, the imperfection of repetition inherent in the most simple operation. It all just got older, then it just got weaker.

dumb fucking mischief and broken bones from about 2007. It was all a jig, I just couldn't figure it then, couldn't use it right. All build up and then a mis-swing.

I tried to write a comment on Ben Woodard's wordpress, I don't know if I managed to do so, let alone articulate myself.

here it is

Hi Ben,
Surely there is an argument that the flaw in what Fabio proposes is held within this line "The limits of our epistemic grasp cannot be overcome via either poetic talk nor via a mysteriously efficacious intellectual intuition. They can only be probed and pushed by rational inquiry."

The assumption here is that a fluid and "poetic" mode is firstly a muddying of language. This is just as false as to state that there is such thing as a transparent mode of discourse in the first place. Therefore I see no problem in a writer accepting the instability of the language used and using this language to bring out something from its resonance of uncertainty. This seems not just suitable but preferable when attempting to deal with ideas which would resist that language of "rational enquiry" just as physical matter resists the translation into description.

I'm reminded of what David Lee Roth said in response to his being told that money couldn't by him happiness. He said that while it might not buy happiness, it could buy a yacht that would let him sail up right along side it.
There are things which we can't hit head on and expect to contain them, however we have come to the belief that we can because our methods of approach and evaluation do not allow for the missing parts, they do not have the means of seeing them so they don't acknowledge they have been missed.

The point that I'd like to make is that the express use of language, of the disjointed animal resonance of words and images forced into proximity with one another and denying in the reader the illusion of a direct link, forces a relationship of uncertainty in that reader.

This would be the sailing of the boat along side, a creative act that seeks not to encapsulate something, but to create both a platform for examining it and quite simply a new thing.

The breed of academic writing which comfortably strays into an unstable language of poiesis is one I readily welcome for its acceptance of fragility, its denial of a mono-authority and its activation of discourse away from commentary.

That said, plain Lovecraft pastiche is never acceptable because like all nerdy fandom it utterly misses the point by getting bogged down in some talismanic detail.

I wrote something in the comments of one of my own earlier posts about Méiville and Thek, how I wanted to write about them as models for how to deal with the unstable through unstable means.

This is also what I like about Alex Hudson's paintings, how they depict a space which is failing through means which are equally failing. Experience is ragged and falling down on its knees and through the floor and the only way to approach this experience is through an equally cracked and splitting viscous cell.

Fabio Gironi's post on Hypertiling, was the subject of the Woodard post, and my own commentary. I think the point about Black Metal is astute, it is part of a conservative insular mindset, it is the appropriation of the pagan and the classical to justify the white self just like the worst Germanic history. I'd planned to write about how there was a progression in the community of musicians who played black and other kinds of extreme metal in Luton toward right wing ideology (not actually ideology, more like style). How this had been explained to me as the need to be more black in terms of being darker, how as the music was to get more rigid in its adherence to genre (like the way Hardcore killed itself), to a certain (incredibly stylised and conservative) angle of extreme noise the self had to push further too. To be a Nazi was to prove that you were capable of playing hard enough (like you had to be X to be hardcore enough, that Puritanism, an exemplary self inflicted restraint to show you could take it). I decided to just leave it at that, the Nazi Black Metal musicians where not people I remember talking to and anything more than this would be so blown away in it's anecdotal character.

As for Paul Thek, writing about him almost seems to doomed to fall apart and descend into discussion of form mired with biography. I thought about the Artist Co-Op and the Greenbay Packers, and then that thought ended like that. snap. A hard end.
Thek's work was total and temporal. The timelyness and the thinglyness are overwhelming in everything pretty much that came after the meat vitrines. After he stopped making work about things. After he stopped making work about protection. When the meat became pyramid and the pyramid became a head

Thek's head.

I want to write about how Thek's physicality and ruinous corporeality was true and honest. How it was the opposite of stylized (and how stylized was the wrong word because style is not the negative that I'm referring to, it's more like a cardboard suitcase blacked in polish, the lies of bad design and worse art. One thing as another, Mimesis), and how I'd go looking for and find a word that meant that and all the other things I need it to do, a perfect ready-made jig as if such a thing ever existed!

Was going to write about bronze casting and the chain of form killing matter like a chain of evidence, a long line of agreement held fast by something, I don't know what but it's like a social contract that's for sure so back to Latour.

And the difference between a found object and a model.

That stuff is all coming, or not, or past or never happened.

Publication / Compound Second Edition / 2011

2011-10-18T20:43:00.001+01:00

Compound (second edition), work present, work not present, work borrowed work, and work undone.
2011
16 pp
Edition of 20 plus 5 artist's proofs
BW prepared laser print on 135gsm cartridge, plus coloured laser copy paper, plus four dye inkjet plates mounted with animal skin glue, perfect bound with red thread.

Compound is a rogue spoke from a lost work.
Compound is a bound composite of documentary images, instructions for an application of sculpture and a one act play for three sailors discussing the ontological implications of a future parliament of noises, rock videos and marine geography.

Sunk In / Installation / KPH Volume, Copenhagen.

2011-10-18T19:50:00.003+01:00

Photo credit: Bibi Katholm

Above is a photograph of the work Sunk In, (2011, paper, DVD, hemmed cotton, inkjet prints, laser prints, photocopies, iodine, collage, various local materials, dimensions variable) as installed by Bibi Katholm and Shane Bradford at KPH Volume, Copenhagen in 2011 as part of the group exhibition, In Case We Don't Die.

For video see earlier post.

Sunk In comprises of a set of ephemeral duplicate materials and a loose series of interoperable instructions for their installation in my absence.

... and what will be left of them?: On The Corner

2011-10-13T20:27:00.000+01:00

... and what will be left of them?: On The Corner: It’s hard to imagine now that Third World War ever existed. They are a singular proposition, Communist (or at least communist-leaning) ...

Sunk in (2011)

2011-10-04T22:37:00.000+01:00

Sunk In (2011) from ralph dorey on Vimeo.

In Case We Don't Die part 4

2011-09-20T19:38:00.000+01:00

In Case We Don’t Die
October 14^th – 22^nd 2011
Open daily 1pm – 5 pm or by appointment
Grand opening Friday 14^th of October, 6pm – 9pm
with live performance + DJ set by Moonbird (DK) http://themoonbird.com/

Location: KPH Volume Project space, Enghavevej 82 – 84, Copenhagen, DK

Andreas Emenius (SE), Bibi Katholm (DK), Kasper Sonne (DK), Shane Bradford (UK), Ida Kvetny (DK), Nicholas Jeffrey (UK), Ralph Dorey (UK), Astrid Myntekær (DK), John Strutton (UK), Pascal Rousson (FR), Alex Hudson (UK), Alan Ruiz (MX/US), Thomas Øvlisen (DK)
Curator: Bibi Katholm
The exhibition has previously been shown in different versions at Chausseestraße in Berlin, Vegas Gallery in London, and Helene Nyborg Contemporary in Copenhagen.
For further information : www.incasewedontdie.com

Yet another railing against the Anti-Praxis, the Doom Carrion animals of art.

2011-09-20T16:33:00.002+01:00

I wrote an essay for The Institute of Spectralogical Audio Research on the subject of belief.

the link is here

Then, a couple of days ago a came across this essay by Anthony Huberman from Afterall, via Beatriz Olabarrieta's blog

Huberman's essay deals with a similar area, but more specifically it is concerned with the balance of knowledge against what we do not know, and how the negative space of the unknown is essential for this balance, Balance is perhaps incorrect because it implies the static, equilibrium is more appropriate because the state which is being described is one which is moving, like birds in formation, or molecules of boiling water. I like the Huberman essay a lot, and it resonates quite strongly with what I like about Olabarrieta's work too, the power of absence. Of poesis. How something can be a merging of the physical and ideal in a way which is not representation, it is just one thing which denies the primacy of either, just as it denies the possibility of being contained within one or the other. Furthermore, the work is as ephemeral as a true hybrid, just holding for the moment, like water tension.

The essay for T.I.S.A.R is part of a series of guest responses on that blog on the subject of belief. Re-reading my submission email to matt I found this which actually serves as a post script for the whole adventure,

The actual answer to the question "what do you believe in?" is "I believe that the Righteous Animal Unknowable has not been subdued and will one day rise up like a great army of beavers and angler fish and envelope humanity in a serene poetry of mud and the moment. If you listen closely to the album "Slip It In" by Black Flag you can hear the sound of it coming."

notes from the last weeks of summer 2011

2011-09-20T15:54:00.000+01:00

Looking up at me from the bed they were utterly terrified, covered in sweat and lacking blood.

All the time we talked my eyes rest bringing themselves to rest on fluids, the water in eyes, the blood wet beneath translucent surgical tape which led the tubes feed by drip, the urine in it’s square box beside the bed, the morphine in another box, in a parcel within a box, locked. I looked out the window at the rain and with no anxiety at all let minutes pass which must have been agonising for whom I was supposed to be comforting. I fell again and again into a balanced meditation, the rain, the urine, the measured bottle of water, the measured cup with that was to be filled. I drifted out of measurement, into fluid. I regret this, I was there for another, and yet I could not resist this pull into something so completely selfish, just perfect balance oblivious to time.

The hair had been pulled from the back of the cat’s shoulders by her brother, it is wet at the edges, the skin, like it is too permeable to hold back the water inside like sodden marsh ground which gives up when you stand on it. No, not like marsh soil, it is too firm, it still looks solid, there are no breaks, the water just springs forth, like if one stands upon a waterlogged board, perhaps in the bottom of a boat or on a building site, carting barrows or buckets of hardcore over that same marsh ground. The separate parts, the granular, that is underneath the board, that is still to come.

When you slip your hands into mud whilst ascending a bank it is the stones within the mud that most hold your attention, these things which resist their own compression and destruction but do not hold their place. They move with your hands, just same as the rest.

I own a guitar which is compressed. It is a small guitar, a bass guitar not the size it should be, bigger than a six string but less than a standard bass guitar. Over the years I have compressed it further. I have beaten it about in service of music and carelessness. There are gouges on the front which are in fact the grain of the wood, my playing as warn down the wood and in some places warn harder (perhaps where the hard resin is within the wooden strata), deeper.

In our kitchen we have a table, one of who’s legs shows the same sort of marks, the lines of the grain define as some parts have been taken and some left to stand. This was done by the cats, the first cat started on the leg of bench I built into the wall of the studio, when it came to move I brought the leg too, built into a long kitchen table. It stands out being a good two inches thicker than the other timber used. The cats (now four of them) have clawed it over and over. They often pull at the fractions of nearly dislodged wood with their teeth and drop them places, in shoes for example. The table leg is beautiful, I am amazed at how the resinous (?) parts have stayed smooth, unmarked, it looks like petrified roots coming down in petrified soil, and in small places like lightening. I think there is a material which when struck by lightening records it somehow, this might be sand but I’m not sure.

The marks on my bass guitar look less like the leg compared with rest of the table. The whole guitar is too beaten, the source of the damage too clear (me). I have compressed it further, I had the nut filed back and the bridge re set to accommodate much heavier, thicker strings. I tuned these strings low, so when struck they vibrated slowly and with purpose. I plugged this instrument into a loud and responsive amplifier, actually I plugged it into two, one that could concentrate on the low frequencies, and one that could take the high. This second one was a guitar amplifier. Both amplifiers are very responsive, the slightest touch sounds out. The sound is broad, covering a large spectrum, but still ragged, full of holes. This is perhaps what I meant by it’s being compressed, it feels over full, the slightest touch sounds out, but iregular, not just spilling from the top but from the sides, like a hernia. When I am not playing I must stand very still, hold my weight in on both feet and to the centre or else my movements will cause the point where leather strap meets wooden body will groan like a ship and creak out. I have to pay close attention to this because I am aware that the sound does not stand out in my perception, it is like breathing, you don’t hear your own so well. I stand very still and something find my self swaying, this sound is like a ship, very low, like wood under pressure.

I made a note to myself today to remember that I do not wish to represent anything

All physicallity is left behind (one part of three readings)

2011-09-17T11:57:00.000+01:00

You can't take it with you. As we become base matter we lose the other kind of physicality, leave it all behind. It becomes memory, phantomic. It becomes representation without flesh, whilst all around the grit piles up. Ghosts in the graveyard, ghosts in the junkyard. It splits. Substance, Sub-stance, what stands beneath, the systems of the netherworld. I will send you telegrams from this Hades, nothing of me touched them, I can't get through the twists and cyphers of the methods of translation and transport and transplant. This is a stand in, it is a place holder, it defines a space for me, marks it out. I can only send an indication of form, and a request to pile up matter at its corners, earth, grave dirt. Made potent by mere agreement, nothing more. More ghosts there.

I was writing to you, and now I am reading out what I wrote, I wish this speech to be shown in the event of my absence, I wish I could be there in person with you all, to accept this award, to give my testimony, but I can't. Instead I send this totem, this ghost totem, it moves it's mouth and says my words and when you rush at it in anger or in love or in irritation it just dissolves. I do not wish for transubstantiation, for that agreement of substance.

My pre-recorded messages are only thinly clad, they will fall about and fall apart and I shall not stand by them. Shall not sign them or sign for them should they returned to me. The messenger is dispatched without the key to his own encryption or the key to reopen the crypt. The diplomat is dead to me already but build a cairn for him, and around it the stone walls of Cornwall, which in turn wrap slate in root and living fibre. Now beat him with these rocks so that my words might crack inside him, become therefore new, belonging not to me, nor him, but to that place, surrounded by matter. Let these broken words spark against stone to render the élan vital, for as long as the animation spell can hold. Not long, before all crumbles. Returns. Is left behind.

Dear All, I have a request.

2011-09-04T12:15:00.000+01:00

Dear All. I wish to come to you and produce a work that operates between sculpture, drawing, sound, text and action, all wrapped up through and by video.

I am interested in objects as protagonists in the discourse of an unreliable narrator. This is the very scenario occupied by the sculptor, by the design-maker, an everyday scenario of interaction with veiled material that becomes something infinitely more active in synergetic moments.

I believe that the creative act is a means to something.

I believe in training but not rehearsing.

I would use the space, time and resources of Your Institution to create a place to make film. This film has its point of departure in the literary and cinematic tradition of the “lone astronaut” as a means of examining a world in which objects are also actors. It is along the frontiers that we are most engrossed in the physical.

This framework mirrors that of the residency itself. Arrive, establish, study, respond, declare.

The film will document itself, a home made steady-cam is a beautiful thing to behold.

I am interested in broken language as a means of access. Certainty is clearly a myth, but one we hold on dearly to (who is speaking? The authoritative voice! Are you certain?). All work is in progress, and we should not be shamed by the realization that nothing is ever truly done. We should certainly not pretend it is, rather we can recognize that what makes it beautiful it’s use, the light of what passed through it. There was nothing there and then after the growth and passing of idea, there was something left.

This is not to say there is nothing but a working out, a detective story, reality is rarely that neat and neither is good art. The artists is a conduit of mediation and we might note that in terms of the creative act the rules of physics (matter and energy cannot be destroyed or created) do not apply, instead we should think more of a muscle or of memory, the more you use it the more there is.

The poetry is the thing outside of language, on the other side of a language which has always wrought it’s tyranny on the rights of objects and on our ability to engage with the real.
This is tragic news indeed but the lump of broken language can, like an atom, be turned to more energized uses. There’s clearly more to Joyce than footnotes.

If you let me stay, I’d like to interact with people, encounters are objects too. Our most powerful institutions are invisible, they are simply agreements.

It isn’t performance if you mean it.

I am interested in method, a way of behaving and a philosophy of work, as opposed to an easily reduced description of intent and content.

What do our heroes look like?

Parallel discourse and adventure are the only certainties with the indescribable undercurrent.

message from last week on riots.

2011-08-31T12:39:00.000+01:00

Hey [...] thanks for that[...]I certainly agree with your sentiment that two lazy narratives have been produced by the left and the right, the former putting the blame solely on the crushing of expectations and the right on simple yobbishness. After a lot of trawling (over the last few weeks I pretty much dropped everything else in order to read all kinds of news and comment on the rioting, like I imagine a lot of people did) I found three articles which seemed to engage a bit more, firstly one by Sophie Himmelblau which finally puts a name to the horrendous unspoken of "gentrification". likewise James Meek in the LRB and then Owen Hathery at Verso which deal with the fact that what is described as culturally dissolved is actually more a vinaigrette, it's two separate things stuck together in the same space.

I haven't felt confident enough about the history of converging lines which met with the riots, to fully articulate what I think is going on. What I am fairly sure about is: firstly there is no break between the time pre-riots and the events themselves, there is no transition from one thing to another, its just the same as it has been, only turned up. Secondly the riots (as the state of play prior to the riots) were a reflection of a people's dislocation from reality. By this I mean that we have been engaged with things which are entire fictions (as you mentioned in your post, the American gang culture, the middle class thrill of living within a cultural safari park). We have engaged not with the phenomena but the narratives we have grafted to such phenomena. I think this is what people are referring to when they describe a "life style" they would like.

I'm writing a huge article for an anthropology and Hauntology blog at the moment. The most I've been about to talk about the riots within that is this footnote;

"10 I’m dredging up the armatures of the 1980’s because the lumps which they initially dealt with has also bobbed up from the bottom of the river again, albeit in a slightly grown and mutated form. As I am writing this violence is blooming across London and other urban areas throughout the country and this violence has focused most prominently on acquisition of commodities. It is in the light of fires at furniture stores and the faces people with armfuls of electrical equipment and Tesco-Value rice that a cultural of acquisition is most strongly illuminated. Riots and looting seem to push acquisition to a point of extreme abstraction, but really we were already there. The streets are not full of naked people stealing clothes and I assume that most stealing food are not starving, in fact I doubt many walking off with televisions do not already posses one (though perhaps not as good) already. An 11 year old boy who was caught with a £50 rubbish bin has made the news frequently as the youngest (so far) to be prosecuted. We must wonder if he still would have been carrying this object 20 minutes later, or whether it would have found itself amongst the thousand of articles littering the streets, bait for the wonderful legal invention of “theft by finding”? The point in the looting seems to be about the taking, not the having. Taking is a dimensionless space between the hard edges of the future and the past, and it is exactly what our Capitalist society is driven by, the need for the unattainable, the crossed out thing between what you want and what you have. People are stealing luxury articles, and we could be forgiven for citing their high value for this, but remember than in a situation such as this, the depreciation of value is huge, (these items could not be any hotter!) and who would buy anything in the midst of a looting spree? No, the situation is itself more abstract, it’s the surpass value, the cultural value, the unreal value of points that count here. Like the shopping zombies in Romero’s Dawn of The Dead people are performing an action that is really no less or more meaningless than it was before. The site of value in society has been on the unapproachable point of acquisition, to get the new thing, that transition from the object of desire to the deterioration badge of shame (the past), this has been the goal, so when an opportunity to achieve this goal over and over again, with hundreds of others at your side as appeared, quite a lot have been unable to resist. The emptiness of this action (there is nothing in that gap) is perhaps a cause of the event’s frenzy and the capacity for people to transgress accepted rules of behaviour. Acquisition is empty, and therefor it is unreal. It is like a dream where you (repeatedly) reach out for the object and never seem to actually touch it, yet this absence is what we are focused on when we buy and re-buy and upgrade and renew. Everything else retreats into the background, the marker of the future acquisition and the record of the past acquisition have faded. We can see how the currency transference of money (acquired through the sale of labour) to simple labour (lift, thrown, reach, grab, run) could be a relatively minor detail."

I believe it is all part of the same condition, a total disfranchisement from reality that has at one end has the previously-law-abiding person suddenly stealing from a burning BodyShop at the other has MPs threatening to evict people from social housing, as if that would do anything but stoke the fires! It's just the mirage of the narrative, rioters regurgitation the same rhetoric of our jobless recession world that the MP's fabricated to sell them the misery of less services in the first place. The spin has become real, we told the story enough times that it's made itself a body.

Ah well, fuck it all. This is a lot longer than a facebook message should be. I might edited it and put it on my blog, which has gone silent since the riots. What's your plans for back in London then?
all the best

Cast of Revival: Redux

2011-08-31T12:06:00.001+01:00

Title: Cast of Revival Redux
Author: Ralph Dorey
Self published, edition of 20 (plus 5 artist's proofs)
15cm x 21cm, 28 pages on 130gsm paper.
Shellac varnish and oil paint on BW laser print, staple bound.
2011
£5

Description:
An exhibition folded into it's source material folded into its making folded into a publication folded into its method of printing. Cast of Revival Redux is concerned with trees and flowers and the history of German youth movements prior to the Reich, the élan vital of samurai films, ideology and temporary autonomous spaces. Cast of Revival Redux is a bandage wrapped around a notebook of folk songs.

Practical Pacivity.

2011-07-25T16:14:00.001+01:00

Nick Land says and Jeri Johnson replies

2011-07-23T18:18:00.000+01:00

fade up to
man kneading bread on a board, dark tanned hands on white dough containing seeds and flakes of barley. when the man pulls the bread toward him the board slides too so that when he pushes it forward again it sometimes bangs against the tiles at the back of the kitchen counter.

voice over, female, late teens:
Philosophy, in its longing to rationalise, formalise, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that is strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power, for unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We posses art lest we perish of the truth.

Man stops kneading bread, fade to black

sounds of wind and birds. Cut to close up of spout of kettle. Voice over continues:
The words make the man. One cannot see through them to the character underneath; there is no underneath. Or, to return to the metaphor, one cannot chop down the trees to find the wood; the trees are the wood.

kettle boils and whistles. a hand enters shot to flip the whistle from the spout. Fade to black.

Jam Econo, makes a stench.

2011-07-10T18:21:00.002+01:00

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;The question is how to do it right. What code do we follow when no ideology exists that we would not tear down with the tenacity of a raging immune system?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;How can we train?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;We could replicate an action observed in order to learn it, learn how it feels?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;It is not macho to be independent. Rather it is a sexist distortion of what the feminine is that makes this natural state of resourcefulness appear brutish by comparison. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;We don’t need to think in terms of the extremes. This midway monstrous point can be the purest and in fact is more likely to be so.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Break open the language and break open the branch. The story should be as remembered. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Produce works, perform actions, make a video entitled “how to work out”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;I deal with fragments. This is forward looking archaeology, though all archaeology is forward looking; we find one piece then look for the next, find a tooth, look for a jaw!&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;The board is changing so what we are looking for is a way to keep our knees bent against he rolling and rocking. We need our sea-knees!&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;I’m not into extremes (there are not any extremes except in theory). I’m into the network, always local always close at every step. Finished is a farce! &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;A room contains 5 sycamore branches of between 6 and 8 foot in length. The end cut form the trunk is bound in a cast of plaster formed from a rough clay mould.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;There are six low platforms around the room and the some of the branches rest on, against and across these. The platforms are 1 foot high with a top surface of variable dimensions between 3 foot by 9 foot and 6 foot by 6 foot. They are all finished in a black liqueur and two have a horizontal cream stripe, 1 inch thick that circles each platform at 2 inches form the ground.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;On the wall are three large black and white photocopy prints each 4 feet wide and 10 feet high. Each of the prints are on separate walls and their contents are as follows: print one, an image of a, alpine mountainside taken from a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp; 1980s climbing magazine, the manner of printing in the original combined with the increased contrast in the blown up print leaves it uncertain as to whether the image is upside down or not. Print two, a photograph of the musician David Yow taken from a free poster in Kerrang magazine, a similar shot to this was used for the cover of the 1995 jesus lizard album “goat”. In neither image can we clearly see Yow’s face. The third image is filled with block text which states “I Tried/To Kick/ The Ball /but My /Tenni Flew/ Right Off”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

The question is how to do it right. What code do we follow when no ideology exists that we would not tear down with the tenacity of a raging immune system?

How can we train?
We could replicate an action observed in order to learn it, learn how it feels?

It is not macho to be independent. Rather it is a sexist distortion of what the feminine is that makes this natural state of resourcefulness appear brutish by comparison.

We don’t need to think in terms of the extremes. This midway monstrous point can be the purest and in fact is more likely to be so.

Break open the language and break open the branch. The story should be as remembered.

Produce works, perform actions, make a video entitled “how to work out”

I deal with fragments. This is forward looking archaeology, though all archaeology is forward looking; we find one piece then look for the next, find a tooth, look for a jaw!
The board is changing so what we are looking for is a way to keep our knees bent against he rolling and rocking. We need our sea-knees!
I’m not into extremes (there are not any extremes except in theory). I’m into the network, always local always close at every step. Finished is a farce!

A room contains 5 sycamore branches of between 6 and 8 foot in length. The end cut form the trunk is bound in a cast of plaster formed from a rough clay mould.
There are six low platforms around the room and the some of the branches rest on, against and across these. The platforms are 1 foot high with a top surface of variable dimensions between 3 foot by 9 foot and 6 foot by 6 foot. They are all finished in a black liqueur and two have a horizontal cream stripe, 1 inch thick that circles each platform at 2 inches from the ground.

On the wall are three large black and white photocopy prints each 4 feet wide and 10 feet high. Each of the prints are on separate walls and their contents are as follows: print one, an image of an alpine mountainside taken from a 1980s climbing magazine, the manner of printing in the original combined with the increased contrast in the blown up print leaves it uncertain as to whether the image is upside down or not. Print two, a photograph of the musician David Yow taken from a free poster in Kerrang magazine, a similar shot to this was used for the cover of the 1995 Jesus Lizard album Goat. In neither image can we clearly see Yow’s face. The third image is filled with block text which states “I Tried/To Kick/ The Ball /but My /Tenni Flew/ Right Off”

The content is

2011-07-10T18:04:00.001+01:00

I believe in the undesirable synergetic relationships between objects.

I am interested in method, a way of behaving and a philosophy of work.

Should we not just wander off somewhere and produce? Does this limit the scope of production?
Not really, on the amount of time/resources can limit that.

The content is

The content is making art.

And other things. The fracturing of language and other methods of creating. Post Apocalyptic cinema arrives in force right at the end of the second world war to reflect on the new threat of total war however it also overlaps with another product of WW2, space exploration. Europe is in ruins and we explore these. Then begin to fantasise about future ruins when what we have is wrought into tamer landscapes of new development. Over these years we come to terms with the unlikelyhood of new and exciting lands, the globe is mapped, the moon is empty and the enthusiasm of the pre-landing days are not the same of the enthusiasm of a world after the race. However the cold war offers the possibility of new space, the thrill of the disaster movie is the awakened terrain.

Broken equipment is the only new thing under the sun. We name these new things, put down our flags and move on further, we were promised progress for ever by our parents and if we must destroy half the planet to have a new land to map then all the more Romantic. It will not be us that presses the button for sure, it will be a government, and it will be the government and the infrastructure which is destroyed leaving us to start again. The broken equipment is visible to us, we are in it, in the real and playing with the un-named and what if we, this time, choose not to name it?

We have broken language before to get it’s insides, it’s messy organs. When we did it right it was not just to create a Fiji mermaid for us to christen in front of the world, to fix down in a tank, It was because these broken words, this broken language, could retain it’s visibility only through remaining broken. To footnote it, to socialise, was an attempt to harness it and that was a crying shame really. However much was too wild and in fact all the harnessers fixed were themselves and proclaimed to be the thing they were trying to tame. But this itself is no surprise because that’s all we have ever done, placed a veneer down and called it the floor. That was the dream of progress we were promised, there would always be more round the curve of the earth just waiting to be accounted for, whether by the disaster of nature or the disaster of man. The question is whether this time we can keep the language broken, not a fix to it a footnote that will tie it down. I’m not suggesting we deny it history, in fact I am proposing that we hold all of it’s history with it, and our own, including what has passed since we last looked at it.

jersey devil

2011-07-10T10:36:00.006+01:00

He's the plan, if we walk about we can construct an institution out of nothing but discrete human relationships, and this institution is as much an object as a ball or a bat or a crown.

This institution is then responsible for it's own affairs and specifically with it's diplomatic relationships with such objects as a ball, a bat or a crown.

We could borrow the power of other established institutions, the industries of design, of management, of our parents with the way they used to loom over us at dinner, chewing like a combine and breathing through noses. We could do that too.

Four legs under the table. But one keeps falling off.

Down tune to SEA bridge pick up in the neck.

The silence gets Bigger.
What is the opposite of erosion? or is there no opposite? because whatever is wearing away is being replaced by something else? The cliffs at Dover are crumbling away sneaking back but all the time the sea is advancing? The dirt your standing on came from Rotorua mate.

But can we sneak out of the power game? Every radical break becomes part of the canon, every method of survival becomes a means of further coercion one hundred yards down the track.

Put your hands in clay and just hold them there.

It's all fragments the stuff that's falling out of the sky. Put it in a box but it on a box put it under a box its still a fragments, a meteorite, a thought experiment. Bergson was utterly wrong when he denied objects history, objects are all history, it's common sense.

Went for a walk in the forest to get out of the heat. Beautiful in the shade, in the damp, in the cool. Smells of washed sand. I sweat like anything, saw a grass snake, first time I've ever seen a snake in this country, led it's way out of a pile of ranger's woodchips and into the ferns. saw another in the pond, just head above water, the washed.
Walked too far, no buses, no nothing. Had to walk down the dual carriage way all rare plants and stolen drain covers. The weight of air carried past. fields and trees and just under the M25. Waltham Abbey is a shit hole.

What I believe

2011-06-18T21:05:00.002+01:00

Things to remember begins with things being ready. where something winds up should not be a given, should not be thrown hop-skipp-hop into the waves and deny all responsibility. Obviously we are responsible!

How does memory come into this? Memory must be the model for it all, in terms of an imperfect-perfection, outside of power. How do things mutate?
My memory is getting worse to the point that I'm thinking about going back to the doctor again. I know working memory is about 20 to 25 seconds but the rate I read at i can barely hold a sentence together. I write notes everywhere.

We think of the past as stable, rather, we use the past as a stabiliser. "This is what we have done before". However, it must now have filtered through to even our most general public conciousness that the past is not stable at all. Not remotely. So does my memory problem really mean anything? I start form the bottom of the pile and the top of the page every morning. I'm as dumb as the day. But who isn't because surely to trust what you remember is just as ill advised because fairly unlikely to be true today.

So I wake up each day on the ground. I don't wake up on the first step of the third or the ninth. I wake up on the ground and start again. but its fine because the steps are different anyway and who am I kidding thinking they might not have changed might have left it all the same today.

Some things I remember pretty well. On Friday the 13th of May 2011 I jumped a red light coming onto Stoke Newington High street at about 08:30 and got caught in a police trap. I got given a spot fine and the policeman complimented me on my bicycle and all I kept looking at were his MET cycling gloves and thinking how much I needed to new pair since leaving mine on my bike in Ramsgate last summer and how the police ones were probably very well made yet they looked so simple and maybe I could get a pair.

I am an awful musician. I can't hardly remember what's coming next in a song and it takes all my concentration to keep it all lined up ahead of me that I respond to what's actually happening in that particular moment purely through instinct. I'm better when I'm drunk and I'm better on stage. I think. If there was just now then I'd be fine. but I'd have to know there was just now.

My day to day generally involves just the now part though, so most of the week I'm ok, I just get on with it. Yesterday I sat with a student for about 20 minutes and she rolled about the tiny balls of clay that I was making and we both made karate noises. I didn't plan for that to happen, its just the way things worked out. The aim was simply to both be focused on the same thing and in that the activity was a total success and I'm really proud of how it worked out. Surely it means a lot to be unquestionably in a dialogue with someone who can't speak a single word and has a sign vocabulary of about two. However It means a lot more that the dialogue itself is beyond translation into anything, it's utterly resistant because it's far too complicated, that's a useful state to be able to get into.

I'm responsible for where I wake up. I got here somehow. There is no void-grid space in which no one reigns and there is no government and its just blank. I used to think there was, in the pages of a book, on a picture plain but that is surely absurd, you can't stand anything on nothing, even philosophy.

Read fiction for a while and listen to Minutemen.

We don't need to bail out the boat, it's sitting as high in the water as we need it to.

2011-06-15T21:04:00.003+01:00

There are an awful lot of things you could do with the power from a bicycle.

I made a lot of stuff that looked like parts of buildings, I've got pretty good at digging with an azada as well, I obsess on the rotary motion.

There is a clicking noises coming from my bike but I can't manage to work out the reason or the cure.

Sometimes even the best design looses track of itself and drifts into Sunday afternoon.

I want to write a story but its all just colour and texture, I can't handle the sequentiality of narrative, it should all be there at the same time. the best I can do is camera instructions, to pan through the object on a huge all terrain dolly.

I really like food and animals the most.

eaten landscape

2011-04-30T17:00:00.002+01:00

We're going to go for a walk and talk about things and do things too. The walk is going to happen in the woods, there will parts of the conversation which involve seeing how long one can hang suspended form a tree branch and there will be parts of the conversation which much be conducted with leaves in the mouth.The thing we want to do is try and operate within the space, not on top of it or in spite of it. We need to forget about the layer on top. this is not to say that culture is to be left at the door, far from it, but culture must be brought down into the slippery stuff, it must be brought down to the ends of our fingers so we can't make a firm distinction between stuff and the thoughts on stuff. actually that's not quite right, we'll never lose capacity to make a distinction, we just need to honestly see these things on the same page without ignorance.On average we eat about 20 kinds of vegetables, orangutans eat about 300 different kinds.

Review of In Case We Don't Die Copenhagen in Politiken

2011-04-29T14:28:00.002+01:00

http://ibyen.dk/kunst/anmeldelser/ECE1243081/to-gallerier-slipper-naturkraefterne-loes/

new work

2011-04-24T12:50:00.000+01:00

new work has been added to my website, click the image to go there..

tulenizdat / it shook me by the hand and then it punched me in the ear

2011-04-21T20:02:00.000+01:00

it shook me by the hand, and then it punched me in the ear is now available from independent publishers Tulenizdat. Click the image to go to their site...

Further travels of On Going: the thing and the image of itself

2011-04-11T18:46:00.000+01:00

further to the post from a few days ago On Going is also in LCC's zine collection now too...

Zen Arcade

2011-04-11T18:41:00.000+01:00

I wrote this last October in an email answering a question about an old piece of work. The text got edited and used on a website in a way I wasn't happy with, so I haven't really thought about it until now. I just re-read it and though it doesn't depart massively from a lot of other writing on here I have decided to put it here.

Zen Arcade Precision Collider was a project that I started work on straight after the completion of my MA and with hind sight I can see that it focused on some areas of what has come, through understanding as well as development to be my over all defining interest. This would perhaps be the questions of how we can reconfigure our position to Modernism and extract the spirit of this so as to apply this to ourselves, right now, as we are. This is against the attitude to history that we are justified in simply borrowing language as long as we demonstrate knowing, that we can rely on the newness of the day to remove our ideas from those we reference and that "holding up" is enough commentary. I would argue that there is something in Modernism which remains after the bracketing out of things like attitude to history, attitude to aesthetics, attitude to form and so on. I'm not sure how best to describe it, but this thing that is left, this ghost, this poetic hum is (in my hypothesis) a primal driving force that defines an authentic position between us and the Other, between our capacity of Agency and the action/space of nature.

I think that this thing I'm hunting is present throughout time, and might be defined as an authentic existence, to "do it right". I think that we, the generation present at this thin and questioning stage of Modernism (as opposed to our grandparents who had only to fight against the detractors who still wanted neo-classical columns on their public buildings and recognisable tale of conventional morality in their novels) have a chance at unpicking the threads of the day to day that hide this ghost, but even now these threads are being picked up by others and the whole endeavour muddied as the whole radical and untamed aspect of Modernism is being assimilated back into the canon, not to be lost but at least to be hidden yet again.

So that, you could say is my concern, and what I do and have been doing is researching how I might find this thing, how I might understand it. The things I make are in a specific position in that they are not really items of display, they may be presented to the world in the for of exhibitions or books, but they aren't looking at you. By this I mean that these objects are the things cast off in a process of research, they're still frozen in the last dialogue with me as I made them, like a tool constructed and then set down at the table after use. To this end, I work with a combination of observation, improvisation and then later on reflection.

I try and follow a path that like the titular character in Tarkovsky's Stalker is often based on intuition as much as knowledge and is often an intentional losing of the outside observer self. Keeping the relics as a language of documentation and then making further relics in the process of examining these.

To this end Zen Arcade Precision Collider was driven by a few things but centrally a search for something in the growing up a of a hero, the Bildungsroman. I thought a lot about survival, the individual and the landscape. I tried to plot the lines that connected the film Badlands by Terrence Malick, the album Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü and the poetic resonance of a building that is both a space and something that interrupts space. All of these lines I followed on a hunch that something was present, indicators above ground pointed to something beneath it.

28th October 2010

photographs / Denmark / Sweden

2011-04-06T13:17:00.002+01:00

field trip magazine 2 / cafe royal books

2011-04-04T15:24:00.001+01:00

I have work in this magazine which comes out in a week or so from Cafe Royal.

Field Trip Magazine #2
Various Artists
2011
76 pages
20cm x 28cm
b/w digital
numbered edition of 150

If you go to this link there is full online version of the magazine.

actually hold on a moment, let's see if this works...

the further travels of Mountain Summit

2011-04-01T21:23:00.003+01:00

Me and My Friends Vol8: Mountain Summit has now been added to the Zine Collection, London College of Communication Library. London.

Egaku / draw for japan / buy zines / Art Fair in aid of Japan Sunday 3rd April, 12 - 8pm

2011-03-31T22:13:00.000+01:00

I have some stuff for sale at this event this Sunday.....

http://www.egaku.org.uk/

Art Fair in aid of Japan
Sunday 3rd April, 12 - 8pm
At Jaguar Shoes
32-36 Kingsland Road
Shoreditch, E2 8DA

If you're not in Copenhagen.

2011-03-25T17:30:00.000Z

First image from In Case We Don't Die (part 3),
Helene Nyborg Contemporary
Store Kongensgade 40H, ground floor
Skt. Annæ Passage
DK-1264 Copenhagen K

open till April 16th 2011,
http://www.helenenyborg.com/

Photo Credit : Bibi Katholm

It Shook Me By The Hand And Then It Punched Me In The Ear

2011-03-23T22:08:00.001Z

Publications / Compound

2011-03-15T22:51:00.000Z

Publications / Cast of Revival

2011-03-15T22:50:00.000Z

Publications / School of The Moment Part 2

2011-03-15T22:48:00.000Z

research application.

2011-03-11T19:30:00.000Z

I submitted this to the RCA painting department recently, and felt that this blog might be a good place for it to live, rather than forever staying wrapped up as a pdf in my documents folder. it is a four part proposal as required, covering recent development, planned trajectory of research, proposed strategies and context for the work. Here it is.

Ralph Dorey provisional proposal for MPhil Painting 2011.

Part 1: Recent Development.

2007: submitted MA dissertation “I am a Golden God!” An Examination of Failure and Personal Perfection.

In 2008 I exhibited a building entitled Outpost of Progress (slide 10).
Between hunting lodge and temple and in a state of transformation from one to the other circularly.
The building was to be the site of numerous orbits, the object and the image, antiquity and modernity, the hero and the masses all chasing one another like comets.
This building was built upon an exploration of language that attempted to come to terms with Modernism as our mythology. The aim of my research at this time was to re-animate this mythology, move from gesture to resonance and to move further up river to the source of something of which I believed Modernism to be a ground swell.

2009: Produced a project (slides 08 and 09) that consisted of an installation in the front room of a flat, a second in the window of a barber shop, a book entitled Bildungsroman and a box of materials which were posted to Chicago and installed to my specifications as part of NEXT. The third and fourth parts of this project began my exploration into ideological compression and expansion, that is to say the compression of the institution to an ideal or attitude, to be able to travel light and upon arrival at the destination, outspan.

Bildungsroman, as well as the box of prepared materials and instructions sent to Chicago both involve a consideration of art as a wild rallying of ideas to ends of reactions between them. This rejection of a single, sealed and solid form and instead considering the myriad parts enclosed by a thread of other means is continued throughout my practice. I have sought to find ways in which the thingliness of some material and a textual reference might be combined with something without matter such as a cultural incident, or a belief without being bent toward a directly expressible outcome that would render the specifics redundant.

Princess Yuki Retains The State (2009. slides 05, 06 and 07) considered the relationship between the civic encasement of ideals such as the sovereigns embodiment of a potential state and that of the Modernist creative act itself, an authentic response based on the right here and the right now.

In 2010 I made a series of installations which moved the site of action further from the studio, experimenting with controlled improvisation and to create a space of action to hold the artwork itself, without the spectacle quality of performance.
A rucksack was packed with prepared artefacts and materials which constitute part of a vocabulary of both formal, pictorial and referential content. I carried this rucksack with me to Berlin and combined with basic vernacular materials to build an installation.

Began investigation the notion of incompleteness. / Artist is witness of the things made.

Gave lecture at Brighton University entitled On Going which argued for sculpture to demonstrate its own fluidity as a document of the understanding that occurred during making and against a culture of sculptural fragility which I perceived as creating a further layer of codification rather than debunking the myth of material permanence.

Undertook residency to research the moment as a means to and site of art. Experimented with methods of recording this indirectly whilst camping in the woods, working in a foundry and exploring the Isle of Thanet.

Part 2: Trajectory.

Writing/speaking and other forms of language as both means and record.

Examine the loops of action, the stream of consciousness retraced and panned and sieved and picked over for geological understanding.
To this end I am investigating Ulysses as a model for both “Situated Knowledge” (the subjective partial knowledge is not only acknowledge but utilised as a site of reaction in terms of the author, the characters and the physical form of the book. The unreliable narrators are the only ones worth listening too, consider Rashomon..) , the creation of a discourse being simultaneously the creation of a resource, and the potential for loops of feedback within this, as well as its use of language which operates simultaneously in a mode of interpretation and a wild and raw one of volatile association. It moves forward and back at once, paths are blazed and steps are retraced in one kinetic action.

Survival/Compression A further question would be how do we survive? To bracket out that which we imagine we survive against, and now just focus on what is left. To survive is to get the job done, with no waste,with a poetic economy, to assess the terrain and then... Respond. I contain not only my history but the systems, the ideology, the problematic. Like Princess Yuki I can travel light, a mute woodcutter’s daughter and still be the heir and ignition (the tightest point in the lines between past and future, a lens) of my empire.

Design and Living the moment of direct engagement with reality.

Le Corbusier’s Modernism as example of with/against reality.

A: [Language as a limit to engagement with The Real. Lacan]

Which is the counterpoint to…

B: [I am interested in use for art creation. The creative act not only being the site of art but also a resource for philosophical enquiry. I would compare this to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world. This would operate as the theoretical grounding for looking at the other side of language.]

The above areas being contained within the following theme…

I am interested in exploring the approach to the creative act, the run up. I am interested in making the creative act the focus, but rather than making this spectacle through performance, making it a thing to be used.

THE ACT OF MAKING CAN BE USED
How can this be used? What approach/priming is needed? I am investigating what can be done to set the stage before the creative act, what collaborative role assignment can do, what can be done to bring this stage out.

The creative act as a state of development and a resource for future consideration has its parallels:
This thought-through-action is the engine of development. Development itself, the Bergsonian fluid state is the place where I would attempt to site art and to which I would draw comparison to survival, architecture, the Bildungsroman and through this the drive of Modernism itself.

art

3: Strategies and Methods.

1. I have been confronting different scenarios, splitting the duality of making and reflecting or bringing these together to become an activity that occupies both spaces. What is it to hold tight? What is it to let go?

2. To make something which is a record of itself, to make an artefact that is condensed and unadulterated in it’s documentation of it’s own becoming.
I believe that this becoming is the site of direct engagement with the world and the core of Modernism.

I am concerned with the open ground between preparation and understanding. In numerous works I have formed a scenario for engagement with the act of making (slides 02, 03 and 14), preparing equipment and materials which are then used to execute a work, considering the difference between spontaneity and the well rehearsed.
I have disrupted the creative act by inserting a dialogue into it, considering that a principle of engagement might be a one on one encounter with the world, this is tested with a proposal that certain group activities might remove our distanced third person viewing of our activity.
I have considered what effect purpose might have on the creative act.

3. Joyce’s Ulysses also serves as a model for the entropic relationship between the interpretable and the irreducible.

Considering the balance of order and disorder as reflecting that of the symbolic and the concrete. Publications allow for the forcing of associations between the different types of discourse which might otherwise be reduced. Here it could hold tight, here it can let go.

4. I have looked at the ideal of resourcefulness, particularly through the novel and cinema. I am interested in an idealised rugged resourcefulness as holds together some specific genres of fiction. The Cowboy and The Samurai, the Eastern and the Western

(i) Fiction (novel, theatre and film) in its position of controlling the progression of events allows for a unique resourcefulness, the flawless.
To be resourceful is to be in tune, to move in the same direction as everything else.
(ii) Man as individual / man as part of land. This land as a point of convergence, of its own interrelationships and being. The idealised state requiring only the most base material, the mere things.
Examination and application of systems between ideas posed by Heidegger, Lacan and Bergson.

Making work in landscape, responding to need, to site, to journey. Perform activity in order to reflect upon question. How does performing action illuminate question?

My methods of working revolve around a duality of detailed observation and research, against prepared but intuitive engagement and response. A focus of my research is this making itself, and so process contains an in-fed development as result of its reflective approach. I am concerned with methods of recording experience and development and as well as the language of communicating this, being particularly thorough regarding the potential for distortion and collapse in this language, should it not be sufficiently flexible.

I am trying to find ways to train for the creative act, in order to use it it for something, and then document this, to use it better, to train better.

Part 4: Context.

In the mid-nineteen seventies television series Kung Fu, David Carradine wanders the Southern States in a search that is little more than an arbitrary co-ordinate. Beyond even the episodic nature of television at the time Carradine continually emerges from a desert vacuum to observe and respond to the continually renewed context in which he finds himself. Carradine grows, but all else is merely a context to elicit his response, which is consistently and effortlessly move through this 50 minute space.

In Andrei Tarkovky’s Stalker the titular character expounds a monologue on the preferable resilience of pliancy.

Werner Herzog’s Aguire ,Wrath of God shows a territorial state of fixed perimeter floating in space. Comparatively Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress shows a state of infinite potential compressed to the size of an inexpressive but consciously mobile human body.

Blood Meridian by Cormac MacCarthy is in part accounted for by the line “There is joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”

Martin Heidegger’s zuhandenheit can be examined in terms of a pure design solution model. In such a model context and the alignment required to bring about harmony is simultaneously revealed (in that it is responded to by the agent) and hidden (the agent does not grasp either). In Design For The Real World Victor Papanek describes a similar mode of design, while lamenting that purity of design is most readily found under the motivation of war and disaster.

For Heidegger the Greek temple reveals the sky above it. Le Corbusier’s Sainte Marie de La Tourette creates and occupies a space/being in parallel to, while distinct from the landscape it occupies.

Steven Claydon’s 2007/2008 exhibition at the Camden art Centre and accompanying notes put forward investigation into: producing for “productions sake, in lieu of the tangible, in lieu of manifesto”, the creative (and fictive) power of categorisation, and the hunt of the elusive Heideggerian “thingliness of things”.

In Can Objects Perform?: Agency and Thingliness in Contemporary Sculpture and Installation, a paper delivered at the Henry Moore institute last year, Pil and Galia Kollectiv examine the relationship between “object orientated art” and the recent Object Orientated Philosophy of Bruno Latour, or the Speculative Realists. This is an area to which I intend significant investigation, aligning as it does with a crisis already perceived in this contemporary mode of art, that of a softening of both conceptual alignment and formal structure. I would propose an investigation into the application of Object Orientated Philosophy to current modes of art along with a reconsideration of the Author in discourse on such work, presenting the site of art as convergence of numerous trajectories of becoming, include that of the artist. An Artist/Author model for such investigation would be Paul Thek, who with less ghostly persona-baggage may prove more wieldable than the more immediate choice of Joseph Beuys.

Key references:

Aguire, The Wrath of God, 1972 [Film] Directed by Werner Herzog. West Germany: Herzog, Hessischer Rundfunk.

Apocalypse Now Redux, 2001. [Film] Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA: Paramount.

Badlands, 1973. [Film] Directed by Terrence Malick. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Bergson, H., 1945, Creative Evolution. New York: Cosimo Classics.

Strange Events Permit Themselves The Luxury of Occurring, 2007. [Exhibition] Steven Claydon. London: Camden Art Centre.

Conrad, J., 1900. Tales of Unrest [Pdf] London: E. Nash and Grayson. Available at: [Accessed 15 January 2011]

Davis, M., 1970. Bitches Brew [Music Recording]. London: CBS.

Derrida, J., 1993. Specters of Marx. Translated from French by P. Kamuf. Abandon: Routledge.

Dersu Azula, 1975. [Film] Directed by Akira Kurosawa. U.S.S.R: Mosfilm Studios.

The Architect’s Home in The Ravine, 1991. [Painting] Peter Doig. (Saatchi Gallery Collection)

Falckenberg, H. And Waybill, P. eds., 2008. Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

For a Few Dollars More, 1966 [Film] Directed by Sergio Leone. Italy: P.E.A

Foucault, M. What Is an Author? 1979 in: P. Rabinow, Ed. 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gioni, M, Hoptman, L and Flood, R., 2007. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, London: Phaeton.

Grass, G., 1959. The Tin Drum. Translated from German by R. Mannheim. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Heidegger, M., 1936. The Origin of The Work of Art. In: D. F. Krell, ed. 1993. Basic Writings From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). 2nd Ed. New York: Harper Collins.

Joyce, J., 1922. Ulysses. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.

Kuoni, C. ed., 1993. Joseph Buys in America: Energy Plan for The Western Man. Writings by and Interviews with The Artist. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

Lacan, J., 1978. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: Norton.

McCarthy C., 1985. Blood Meridian or : The Evening Redness in The West. New York: Vintage International.

Melville, H., 1851. Moby Dick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.

Papanek, V., 1977. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. St. Albans: Paladin.

Rashomon, 1950. [Film] Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: RKO Radio Pictures.

Signs of Life, 1968. [Film] Directed by Werner Herzog. Germany: Werner Kerzog Filmproduktion.

Sontag, S., 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics.

Stalker, 1979. [Film] Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. U.S.S.R: Mosfilm Studios.

The Hidden Fortress, 1958. [Film] Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Toho Co.

The Long Riders, 1980. [Film] Directed by Walter Hill. USA: Huka Productions.

The Powell-Cotton Museum, Quex Park, Kent.

The Thin Red Line, 1998. [Film] Directed by Terrence Malick. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Tree Board (1, 2 and 3) / Alley Way

2011-03-10T22:50:00.000Z

In Case We Don't Die / Copenhagen

2011-03-04T21:33:00.000Z

Berlin * London * Copenhagen* Non-Stop!
   18. March – 16. April 2011
AN EXHIBITION WITH:
Stephen Dunne (UK) // Andreas Emenius (SE) // Bibi Katholm (DK) // Shane Bradford (UK) // Ida Kvetny (DK) // Jacob Kirkegaard (DK) // Ralph Dorey (UK) // Peter Rune Christiansen (DK) // John Strutton (UK) // Pascal Rousson (FR) // Alex Hudson (UK)
CURATED BY: Bibi Katholm
LOCATION:   Helene Nyborg Contemporary, St. Kongensgade 40 H, 1264 Copenhagen K.
GRAND OPENING: Friday 18. March 2011, 5pm – 7pm.
Including a live performance by Reverend Shine Snake Oil Co.
OPENING HOURS:   Tuesday – Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday 11am-2pm and by appointment.

These days…
These days potential catastrophes are everywhere you look. The world is so full of danger, threats, stress, overload and insecurity, and most of the time it feels very likely that we are all going to be dead soon, the only question is when, exactly? Assuming that we, against all odds, survive the terrifying pitfalls of the future that lies ahead, is creativity going to be the thing that saves us? What kind of art would a generation of unlikely survivors produce, and where would they find their inspiration?
This exhibition represents a joining of forces between 11 contemporary artists from Berlin, London and Copenhagen, all travelling down similar creative paths, investigating the power of ritual, visions of the future, and a kind of “supernatural” presence that sometimes reveals itself during the creative process.

This is the 3rd version of In Case We Don’t Die. Prior to the Copenhagen version the exhibition has been on show in Berlin (Chaussestraße 105) and in London (Vegas Gallery) during 2010.

For further information:

www.helenenyborg.com

Compound Four / Sonic Wrestling

2011-02-13T22:28:00.000Z

Compound Four, 2011. Photographed for upcoming publication.

photo taken on 12th February 2011 during the performance at Sonic Wrestling, an event at Elevator Gallery sponsored by Wire Magazine.

River crossing, bark comes off in pieces: On the paintings of Alex Hudson.

2011-02-09T13:31:00.000Z

River crossing, bark comes off in pieces: On the paintings of Alex Hudson.

Alex Hudson "Untitled" Oil on Linen, 2010.

I.
The first word that comes to mind is obliteration. By this I mean the evaporation of form, which could equally be the result of a process of addition as it could of subtraction. Moss grows over the rock. Moss grows over a rock that once held an indisputable form, though now that form is less determinable, the problem being that form is now not only obscured (as would be the case with some other solid interrupting line of sight) but that the sovereignty of the object is at stake, it has company inseparable, and the crowd obliterates the edges of the man.

II.
A man slowly collects pieces of flint of between one pound and three pounds. Damp or dry, cold or warm. These flints are singular units and taken as they were from the mud-flats of the east coast. Many are worn smooth, all resistance knocked out of them, however with consideration we know that they are not singular and distinct but merely orphaned, knocked from the larger rock just as they themselves will doubtlessly be unable to retain all of themselves against time. Something is missing, and this may be a result of the gathering crowd or that part unable to be retained.

III.
A dead tree appears and reappears, always out of space but still in taut resonance with place (within) and line (with) and edge (without) that surround it1. A lost bough taken from some other setting and drifting on

1 It is worth considering here that the historical development of abstraction in painting is one of obliteration as renewal, or rather an action that is at once destruction as well as revealing. Furthermore the image of the dead branch, slightly uncoupled from the space it occupies and repeated in more than one of Alex Hudson’s paintings offers a hint of further contextual understanding for the work in terms of this obliteration. Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough begins with a discussion of Turner’s painting of the same name, the central titular tree within which is the ancestor of Hudson’s orphaned branch. In Frazer’s text The Golden Bough is the site of continual renewal by obliteration through the succession of the priest of Nemi who waited beneath it.

“He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.”
Frazer, J. G. 1993. The Golden Bough. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 1993, pp. 1.

and on it lodges here in the painting again and again, like the strip of cloth falling that dictates “here is where
it will happen”.2

IV.
Look out the window at the path of the road and bodies that slip about on it and how the sun in shining down wipes over them simply denying their full form right at the moment of illuminating it. Look into this room in the dark and full visual orientation is equally denied. A denial not only of comprehension of how margins of space are held to each other but equally of my own firm coordinates to such positions.
And now look out on the water as the sun goes down.
And finally walk out into the snow.

V.
These paintings are a place rent apart and in doing so they merge surface with what is beneath this veneer.
It is this balancing movement between depth and phenomena, between paint and image.

VI.
MONOCHROME I: The golden light is at once a reminder of two opposing views and the point at which they
meet, which is what defines the locale of these paintings. The limit on the palette retains the power of

2 Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker has numerous echoes in Alex Hudson’s paintings but it is perhaps in the spirit of fluctuating space that it most resonates. These are places of uncertainty, of transformation, just as the Zone of Stalker is an area both of unpredictable physics and the possibility of ultimate renewal. The landscapes depicted by Hudson are similar locations, their rendering unstable and threatening to fall away at points but constant throughout this is a strength of atmosphere, the spirit of place. Just as a wrecked ship is still a ship despite its absent parts, and just as the Zone retains its anthropomorphic identity despite its changing terrain Alex Hudson’s paintings retain a solidity of place even where stability of space is most compromised in its portrayal. It is also worth noting that the principle threat of the Zone in Stalker and detailed most clearly in the film’s literary source material, is the abandonment of the laws of physics and the tearing apart of matter and space.

“Redrick saw the helicopter. It had fallen, apparently, into the middle of a mosquito mange spot, and its fuselage had been squashed into a metal pancake. Its tail had remained intact, only slightly bent, and it stuck out over the glade like a black hook. The stabilizer was also whole, and it squeaked distinctly, turning in the light breeze. The mange must have been very powerful, for there hadn’t even been a real fire, and the Royal Air Force insignia was very clear on the flattened metal. Redrick had not seen one in many years and had almost forgotten what the insignia looked like.”
Stugatsky, A and Stugatsky, B. 1978 Roadside Picnic Newton Abbot: Readers Union, pp. 127.
In Hudson’s images the spaceless geometric cuts of white and the compositional compression of lost corners and uncertain volume vibrate with this grammar of science fiction as much as they do with Cubism and its legacy.

Verfremdungseffekt3 (as too does the judder of space that one experiences in trying to sit these cellarobjects in relation to one another) but in our memories the monochrome is not so alien an experience. The golden light is one of cinematic contrast. We find it when walking through the barn and seeing the hard edged perfection of a beam of light cutting through cracks in slats hitting an irregular floor like a diagram. This light obliterates so much of the spectrum with its privileged colour and contrast with the darkness around.

Alex Hudson "Clarion" 2011, oil on linen.

I.
In the film Signs of Life4 by Werner Herzog, life is dissolved and allowed to settle in strata. Three German soldiers and the local woman whom one of them marries attempt to divert themselves while on assignment guarding a fortress in occupied Crete. The building is not so much in ruins as in a cyclical act of ruin. The walls are worn with age but have been shorn up with parts of statues. The captured munitions the men guard are useless for their German equipment but are readily fashioned into fireworks. The men lose their training and readiness to the sun and boredom, but gain something else through translating the engraved stones that make up the fortifications and through their relationship with the local people, the animals, the landscape. The men are caretakers of this space, and like layers of sediment they settle into a relationship with it that is at once discrete and complimentary. In these paintings, in both the depth of image and language and the breadth of form and paint, space is in the act of cyclical ruin and of renewal. Lines are described that are not simply bathed in shadow or cut with light but are corporeally dissolved by these. Hudson’s depicted bays and glens and hollows are sites of absence themselves (this is geography defined by that which is not present), but in each form that exists as both spar and branch, there is a near catastrophic sucking of volume. These lines are failing, the paint is failing. A failing line meets a falling form. Paint and image prop one another up.

3 “A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar”
Brecht, B., 1949. A Short Organum for The Theatre. In J. Willet, ed. 1964 Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, pp.192

4 Lebenszeichen, 1968. [Film] Directed by Werner Herzog. West Germany: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

II.
Fade up. Sounds of men talking while working, interior of train cabin. Camera frames both window to exterior and two seats either side. The cabin is finished in mixture of elegant but worn woodwork, darkly stained and inlaid in black. The cabin is tooled and engraved with a style and attention that suitably places the scene in the early part of the twentieth century, while the print on the upholstery and functionally tied curtains suggest northern Europe as the origin of this workmanship if not the current location. On the seats either side of the sash window and nearest to the opening which is held open a few inches with a small metal object sit two men, their bodies face one another but both have turned their heads to look out and away from the camera. What is outside the window is not entirely visible, being obscured by the edges of the window. What is visible is a regular pattern of functionally if not rough panelled wood which implies exterior use in the manner of either a temporary or permanent facade, hoarding or container.

The man on the right hand side of the frame wipes the back of his neck using his left hand, but does not move his head away from the window.

The wooden panelling visible through the cabin window moves to the right to reveal the inside of a goods carriage of what is now discernible as another train on tracks parallel to those of the passenger train that we are within. A dark skinned man in shirt sleeves is visible standing in the opening, he crouches at the edge facing toward us but looking to something below our field of vision and to the left, both arms outstretched as if to receive something. The man holds this position for a few moments, rocking and steadying himself every few seconds as if too fatigued to comfortably hold this position for long but with attention fixed on something unseen that compels him to stay as such. Stretching out even further the man in the goods carriage takes of hold of something we cannot initially see. He stands up turning back into the carriage revealing a bundle of metal rods under his arm. The dark skinned man walks toward the right and is no longer visible in the carriage.

The carriage door slides back from the right to the left. The entire panelled side of the goods carriage now moves to the right slowly but it is left unclear as to whether this train is moving, or the passenger train which we and the two men look from the window.5

III.
The ceiling is coming in, the image cropped in such utilitarian force as to compress the space of the painting around us as we are drawn in. We might strain our eyes to see into some corner but it is not light that is absent but form and space. Confronting a painting, I am put in a position at once compelled but excluded and it is the dark corners that performs this application that invites but denies. Within and without, within and without, this is the break of image with object, like water on the rocks.

IV.
MONOCHROME II: Oily light like the dawn blue or rural starlight, this is also something we recognise. The thickened sepia of the darker paintings is the palette of eyes straining to the point of a breaking down of comprehension, it is skylighted trees and the bumping flexing proto-forms in our peripheral vision that are the only alternative to the simple void that is directly in front.

Ralph Dorey
London
27th December 2010

5 I have long been interested in a language of movement, whether in space or time or some kind of transformation, which describes that movement/duration/flux while remaining free from explicit or implied direction and thereby traced/predicted trajectory. Alex Hudson’s paintings offer a fluid image as means of conveying a fluid space, a space that simultaneously expands and collapses, rots and rebuilds, moves toward us and away. The places in Hudson's work are equally ambiguous in their temporal position, hints of cultural markers appear just below the surface in some, but even with these pegged positions the temporal fabric seems to pull in all directions. Brian Dillon writes of the capacity of ruins to point forward and back in time in an essay for the Whitstable Biennalle Film Programme, which Dillon also curated earlier this year,

“The ruins of the twentieth century, or of the decade just ended, point assuredly to a world gone by, but more resonantly they suggest futures as yet unlived and at present grounded in the recent past, where they do not really belong. The modern ruin seems doubly out of time - it returns from the past to haunt our present and at the same time appears to have arrived from a future that is challenges us to bring into being”
Dillon, B. 2010 Ur-Now: the Ruins of the Contemporary. Press release, (n.d.)
Hudson’s places contain the function of the modern ruin, but this does not account for the relationship between landscape and architecture within them which is deconstructed through forms that oscillate between branch and bar. Just as ruinous depiction meets with the ruinous depicted, there is another equipoise of the natural and the manmade. We might more simply consider this the becoming of purpose, the becoming of certainty and control which meets its equivalent in the becoming of disorder, the becoming of the Romantic Nature.

Head (29 January 2011)

2011-02-01T17:42:00.002Z

Image credit: Schwartz Gallery

Title: Head (29 January 2011)
Date: 2011
Material: Graphite, oil paint, shellac and collage on paper, fabric and fixings.
Dimensions: Variable

This is currently on display at Schwartz Gallery, Hackney Wick London.

Sonic Wrestling / The A band / Elevator Gallery

2011-01-30T23:17:00.001Z

I have been recruited to play in the Psychick Defenders for this show. I have far more amplification and distortion than skill with an instrument, but I think this might actually be what's needed.

In Case We Don't Die (Copenhagen) / Project Statement.

2011-01-19T19:25:00.000Z

Ralph Dorey

In Case We Don’t Die
Project Statement 4
19th January 2011

The Mountain Summit is a roadside forum holding forth that all fires are signal fires.
The actions could suffer collective description as; the research into modes of existence relating to objects as a means of coming to terms with the lost spirit we most readily identify with Modernism.
I am concerned with the act as a means of both uncovering and documenting, identifying the moment as the site of most consequence.
In the summer of last year I stayed in a tent in the once orderly but now wild arboretum of a country estate. Under the tree canopy I stored possessions out of sight so that they would not need be carried once I stuck camp each morning. The bag of food kept safe and cool in the lee of a tree had a defined end of consumption. Other things became less and less attached to a specific use-destiny, objects of purpose but writhing free from the hold of this purpose. I kept things safe and marked out. Some were base things like rocks or soil to which I could not help but assign formal potential for these things were to be pressed with hands or they were to hold on to the ground. Some things were of a more Gordian resonance and more unstable to consider, for they grew or could grow and they rhymed and could rhyme and all the while they were looked at and thought of by myself and by each other.

The Brooklyn days: The Tenuous Universe

2010-12-24T19:56:00.000Z

The Brooklyn days: The Tenuous Universe

Research notes. 6th December 2010

2010-12-06T18:10:00.001Z

Ralph Dorey
Research notes. 6th December 2010

Art as a means to reality
“The Stalker: Because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing.
When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible, when he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a plant is growing, it’s tender and pliant, but when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” Stalker Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky. 1979.

To begin with there is a question of language.
I am interested in ways in which discourse can be used, and so naturally this requires a means of talking about such use. Here, there is an overlap with Foucault, with discourse as an act, “the author function”. I would argue that the act is (or is capable of being) both a means and a source. The naturalist’s field notes are the recording of discovery, but the creation of discourse is itself capable of being both genesis and witness. This is perhaps best described in terms of the creation of discourses most bound up in the “thinglyness” of the world. At moments of engagement, the authentic Heideggerian being, when manipulating or manoeuvring paint or rocks, this is not just a balanced state but one that is an extension of thought that moves beyond the Symbolic Order.
This thought-through-action is the engine of development. Development itself, the fluid state (to borrow from Bergson) is the place where I would attempt to site art and to which I would draw comparison to the development of the Hero (Bildungsroman, or the action caught up mid-development, and no stopping; the film Badlands, the scenarios of Walter Hill) and through this the drive of Modernism itself.
I believe that all developments must be taken into account, that all is fluid and what we are looking for is the spark between things passing, rather than the nailed down planks in order one against the next. To this end I am investigating Ulysses as a model for both “Situated Knowledge” (the subjective partial knowledge is not only acknowledge but utilised as a site of reaction in terms of the author, the characters and the physical form of the book. The unreliable narrators are the only ones worth listening too, consider Rashomon..) , the creation of a discourse being simultaneously the creation of a resource, and the potential for loops of feedback within this, as well as its use of language which operates simultaneously in a mode of interpretation and a wild and raw one of volatile association. It moves forward and back at once, paths are blazed and steps are retraced in one kinetic action.

Survival / compression
A further question would be how do we survive? To bracket out that which we imagine we survive against, and now just focus on what is left. To survive is to get the job done, with no waste,with a poetic economy, to assess the terrain and then... Respond. I contain not only my history but the systems, the ideology, the problematic. Like Princess Yuki I can travel light, a mute woodcutter’s daughter and still be the heir and ignition (the tightest point in the lines between past and future, a lens) of my empire.

Paths of Bodies
To deal with systems, away from the real, perversely, away from situated knowledge to deal with the abstract, because this is a mine also, or the point on the climbing wall that allow the paths of bodies. The hole in the ground owns the space above it.

What is to be done?
Can there be landscapes to hold this fraction and that broken object and this truncated exclamation?
What word might mean both collapse and growth? A many-armed scale.
The campsite is between body, object, architecture and landscape, it bends with all these and receives a different kind of permanence from the monument. How can one be so prepared, so engaged?

Death Waits in Your Car

2010-12-06T17:57:00.004Z

I pay the rope out as I lead the donkey, leaning slightly into its shoulder as we both try to keep balance. The rope loops down to the floor in coils as the animal slides over rocks and split skinned roots arching out of the camber and I keep feeding and we walk on clockwise.

Death waits in your car.

A light is on in the house, then when you look again, all the lights are on.

A man says “it feels like I have iron filings on my teeth, I’m so nervous”

A switch is cut.

It is important that the structure be both waterproof and pervious to cross winds so that these may pass through it meeting no resistance for this resistance would bring about the collapse of the enterprise.

You could walk for miles and see nothing

Opening. Shine.

Misbelief

Low is stronger.

Finally, things for holding water.

History of the sled

2010-12-06T17:56:00.002Z

History of the sled

Ever since we had strength to do so, we have dragged objects across the ground.

We pull bones out of the cave and set them upright, leaning, then move on.

That expression, “ to carry the world on ones shoulders”, the story of Atlas, The sherpa porter who carries your pack, these are all misleading. In reality might it be more accurate that we drag behind us? Like a sled, or a plough.

This isn't an unreasonable state. Considering our being bound to the earth it makes sense that everyone else would be so to. There should’ be any rides. There aren’t any.

So we drag behind us the luggage of history and these carpet bags and trunks accumulate leaf and root and lumps of chalk the size of your fist that feel wet and uncertain.

Three things happen here. One we carve sea-furrows in the things we walk on, obliterating our own tracks and leaving the bloody edges impressed upon and below the surface and recording the passing of something quite different to us with altogether inexplicable locomotion.

The second and third things that happen are sited within the objects being pulled. As we drag these objects they alter, weather, degrade and grow, their core unstable by still constant, made constant by their being dragged. We acquire passengers, like the tick on the behind of the hiker and like that tick they exist as passenger only for that last moment of potential before assimilation with the body. A man’s parasites are his own, there are no rides. And while all this is happening the very nature of the load is always changing, rotting, blooming and cracking like we all know that you drag anything in your wake for long enough and it will cease to be that which you first grasped, it will cease to be anything definable.

In classical civilisation time was thought of as like a wind that rushes from behind you, only sensed prior to its passing and with its passing only the implications of its great agency visible. It seems prudent then for us to pull our-load backwards, like someone with head pressed to the very lip of exhaustion or one rowing a boat. bow and stroke, bow and stroke.

We could stop of course but then everything else would stop the fluctuation of the baggage, the fluctuation of the land beneath it and to start again is uncertain.

"finally, almost the entire "Big Bambú" experience"

2010-12-01T12:31:00.000Z

my friend Alastair just sent me a link to this, click the image for the link..

Tomorrow Hits / documentation 1

2010-11-30T17:48:00.000Z

Cast and Bloom and Flower / Icons

2010-11-30T17:44:00.000Z

workshop

2010-11-30T17:42:00.000Z

Tomorrow Hits / night time.

2010-11-30T17:40:00.000Z

The School of The Moment / photos

2010-11-24T13:05:00.000Z

2010-11-21T22:31:00.000Z

RCA Secret / postcards

2010-11-21T12:31:00.000Z

Tomorrow Hits

2010-11-16T21:29:00.000Z

Conscious In Time

2010-11-15T10:20:00.000Z

from
Conscious In Time
The Bergson-Einstein-debate about the Duration of SpaceTime.
Otto B. Wiersma
http://www.ottobw.dds.nl/filosofie/consciousness.htm

In his 1907 book Bergson appreciates the logic of solids as making our intellect triumph in geometry. But that’s only one side of the story (after all it’s life that made geometricians). Life as transcending teleology as well as mechanism is according to B a continuous change / transition / progress / transformation / maturation / evolution. This opens our eyes also for the ‘arrow of time’: ‘Consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. That is why our duration is irreversible.’ B opposes the idea that aspects of the present are calculable as functions of the past (e.g. as differential equations). Bergson: ‘The most complex has been able to issue from the most simple by way of evolution.’ but ‘Anything that is irreducible (..) and irreversible in the successive moments of a history eludes science.’ For which Bergson uses comparative arguments: ‘life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines’. This way Bergson opposes both radical mechanism (the real is complete – the only problem is that our mind just doesn’t know that) and radical finalism (realization of a previously arranged programme - as inverted mechanism), although refuting radical mechanism and radical finalism is not as easy for both of them. Finding a trace of spontaneity will refute radical mechanism, but there is no similar refutation for radical finalism. With his Philosophy of Life Bergson claims to transcend both mechanism and finalism, looking for another principle of organization. For this he refers to ‘curious facts of regeneration’ in order to postulate an ‘appeal to some inner directing principle in order to account for this convergence of effects’ which may also ‘imply consciousness and will (..) admitting an internal and psychological principle of development’. Darwinian, neo-Darwinian nor neo-Lamarckism deliver an explanation of this development. According to B an original impetus of life is the fundamental cause of variations, that accumulate and create new organs and new species. For instance: two points are equally striking in an organ like the eye: the complexity of its structure and the simplicity of its function. Nature does not show straight ways to succesfull organs and species: failure seems the rule, success exceptional and always imperfect. In the creative process B distinguishes intelligence (manifacturing) and instinct (organizing): two different methods of action on inert matter, which both involve knowledge that is acted. In this context he makes some remarks about ‘matter’ that sound very modern in 2005: Matter can be seen as ‘elementary vibrations, the shortest of which are of very slight duration, almost vanishing, but not nothing.’ And again he constrasts the succession of eventities with simultaneity: ‘For the (..) system of to-day actually to be superimposed on that of yesterday, the latter must have waited for the former, time must have halted, and everything become simultaneous: that happens in geometry, but in geometry alone. (..) Induction therefore implies first that, in the world of the physicist as in that of the geometrician, time does not count. But it implies also that qualities can be superposed on each other like magnitudes. (..) Matter becomes, it seems to us, geometry itself.’ But this approach of science itself is contingent, relative to the variables it has chosen, relative to the order in which it has successively put the problems. So again B contrasts the order of the vital or the willed (impetus, impulsion) against the order of the inert and the automatic’.

Cast of Revival

2010-11-14T09:23:00.002Z

Icons: A Silent Auction Of Contemporary Art In Aid Of St Joseph's Hospice at St Botolph-Without-Aldgate

2010-11-02T19:48:00.002Z

PRIVATE VIEW:
THURSDAY 18TH NOVEMBER 18:00 - 21:00

Emi Avora, Sarah Jane Barnes, Darren Beatty, Karl Bielik, Kevin Broughton & Fiona Birnie, Sean Branagan, Oana Camilleri, Elena Cecchinato, Jake Clark, Oliver Clegg, Paul Cole, Giles Corby, Alex Daw, Mengsel Design, Robin Dixon, Peter Doig, Ralph Dorey, Elmgreen & Dragset, Richard Ducker, Kris Emmerson, Sophie Erlund, Ruth Ewan, Ben Faga, Nooshin Farhid, Dave Farnham, Oona Grimes, Gonkar Gyatso, Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Harrison, Adam Hemuss, Alex Hudson, Henry Hudson, Mandy Hudson, Kate Hughes, Max Hymes, Chantal Joffe, Ben Johnson, Birthe Jorgensen, Deirdre King, Peter Lamb, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Hugh Mendes, Hiroko Nakao, Chris Ofili, Grayson Perry, Robert Rush, Harry Sewell, Keir Smith, Malin Ståhl, Richard Stone, Kate Street, Mimei Thompson, Hugh Wilson, Jeanine Woollard, Mark Wright

Turner Prize winners Grayson Perry and Chris Ofili are among the high profile names donating works for this exhibition and silent auction to be held over 2 days. The auction will help to raise essential funds for St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney, which provides end-of-life care to those with incurable illnesses in east and north east London. Victoria Miro, of Victoria Miro Gallery is Patron of the event and is helping attract artists, including Chantal Joffe, Peter Doig, Hiroko Nakao, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Elmgreen and Dragset. With over 50 pieces from both established and emerging artists, the auction offers a unique opportunity to get your hands on some original, high quality art works whilst supporting a worthwhile cause.



	St Botolph-Without-Aldgate / Aldgate High Street, London EC3N 1AB

Is the Exmoor Emperor stag still alive? | Metro.co.uk

2010-10-30T18:50:00.000+01:00

Is the Exmoor Emperor stag still alive? | Metro.co.uk

The Aim is Getting Better 0.5 / Meltdowns

2010-10-29T21:56:00.003+01:00

Starkwhite Blog: NICE WORK: installation views (Part 1)

2010-10-28T14:23:00.000+01:00

Starkwhite Blog: NICE WORK: installation views (Part 1): "Our exhibition Nice Work continues this week and is scheduled to end on Wednesday 22 September 2010. Images (from the top): Whitne..."

The Walters Prize 2010 - Auckland Art Gallery

2010-10-28T14:13:00.000+01:00

The Walters Prize 2010 - Auckland Art Gallery

New Zealand 1

2010-10-28T13:41:00.000+01:00

all images linked from The Museum of New Zealand, http://www.tepapa.govt.nz

Blackwater - Bill Culbert / Ralph Hotere

Untitled. From the series: Working drawings for ’Pathway to the sea, Aramoana’ - Bill Cullbert / Ralph Hotere

Clinic of Phantasms - Giovanni Intra

London Highgate Cemetery / halloween

2010-10-28T12:48:00.001+01:00

London Highgate Cemetery
Originally uploaded by fuerst

last tour, sunday 31st october 2pm
http://www.highgate-cemetery.org

5ive / Burning Season / mind of a rock

2010-10-23T10:17:00.003+01:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-lede-t.html

Middlesex Philosophy Events open to public

2010-10-23T09:20:00.000+01:00

http://savemdxphil.com

Middlesex Philosophy Seminar and Events, 2010-11

Posted on 1 October 2010 by christian kerslake

The Philosophy programme at Middlesex is due to close in 2012. Admissions have been stopped, and only second- and third-year undergraduate students now remain. We will announce the appointment of a new temporary lecturer in Philosophy shortly.
Below is the schedule for the Philosophy Seminar. This series is aimed at Philosophy and Humanities students at Middlesex, but is also open to the public, and anyone interested in fundamental enquiry about philosophical issues is welcome to attend.
Seminars will mostly be held on Thursdays, at 6.30pm, but three (30 November, 25 January and 15 February) will be held on Tuesdays at 5.30pm. All seminars will take place in the Saloon (M004), Mansion Building, Trent Park. (Cockfosters/Oakwood tube).
Please also note the workshop on Wednesday 3 November, ‘The Humanities and the Idea of the University’. This will take place between 11am and 6pm, in the Saloon, Mansion Building. The ‘Hegel Now?’ workshop on 5 May will take place from 2pm – 8.30pm (room to be announced).

Thursday 14 October. Alex Callinicos (Kings College London): ‘Slavoj Žižek and the Critique of Political Economy’

Thursday 28 October. Nina Power (Roehampton): ‘Intellectual Equality: Rancière and Education’

Wednesday 3 November. Workshop: ‘The Humanities and the Idea of the University’

Thursday 11 November. Susan James (Birkbeck): ‘Spinoza, Rembrandt and Suspicion’

Thursday 18 November. Sean Sayers (Kent): ‘Marx’s Concept of Communism’

Tuesday 30 November. Christopher Norris (Cardiff): ‘Aesthetic Ideology Revisited’

Thursday 9 December. Gary Lachman (London): ‘What is Cosmic Consciousness?’

Tuesday 25 January. Robin Le Poidevin (Leeds): ‘The Beginning of Time’

Thursday 3 February. Keith Ansell Pearson (Warwick): ‘Beyond Compassion: On Nietzsche’s Moral Therapy in Dawn’

Tuesday 15 February. Dylan Evans (University College Cork): ‘Is Lacanian Psychoanalysis Wrong, Or Not Even Wrong?’

Thursday 3 March. Marcus Boon (York University, Toronto): ‘The Politics of Just Intonation: Music, Mathematics and Philosophy after La Monte Young’

Thursday 17 March. Martin Liebscher (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London): ‘Sigmund Freud and his Philosophical Mediators’

Thursday 31 March. David Lapoujade (Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne): Title to be announced.

Thursday 5 May. Workshop: ‘Hegel Now?’ Including Slavoj Žižek on ‘Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?’ Further speakers to be confirmed.

In addition, this semester we will be running two short courses open to the general public. These will take place in the Green Room (M009), Mansion Building, on Friday afternoons between 4-6pm. From 15 October to 12 November, Meade McCloughan will lead a course on Marx’s Capital, and from 26 November to 10 December, Rosa Nogues will give an introduction to French feminist philosophy.
Please direct enquiries to c.kerslake@mdx.ac.uk

Authenticity? is that what is at the middle?

2010-10-22T21:46:00.000+01:00

SISYPHUS: THE ABSURD HERO / Core Gallery

2010-10-18T10:43:00.001+01:00

I was just reading this article from Eurozine on Camus The stranger, the mother and the Algerian revolution A postcolonial reading of Albert Camus then remembered that this exhibition opens next week.

SISYPHUS: THE ABSURD HERO PRIVATE VIEW: THURSDAY 21ST OCTOBER 18:30 - 20:30
Core Gallery, Deptford | SE8 3DX | www.coregallery.co.uk
DEPTFORD LAST FRIDAYS LATE OPENING: FRIDAY 29TH OCTOBER UNTIL 20:30
EXHIBITION CONTINUES: 22ND - 30TH OCTOBER 2010
NICK BAILEY | ALEXANDER BATES | JIM BOND | RODNEY DEE | JOO HEE HWANG
MATTHEW JAMES KAY | RACHEL PRICE (CURATOR)

Image: Jim Bond

Sisyphus was the king in Greek Mythology who for his crimes (ultimately his love of life) was subjected to the ceaseless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it fall down the other side and to repeat this task for all eternity.

In response to the Myth the 7 exhibiting artists present sculpture, kinetic works and video exploring themes of futility, circularity and the absurd whilst displaying an immersion in the process. The artists through their works strive to reflect the futility of Sisyphus' task and indeed man's unending search for meaning with honesty and humour.

From an artist's perspective it would be difficult to conjure a more powerful or relevant image than that of Sisyphus under the weight of his boulder absorbed in the unrelenting physicality of his toil without respite or reward.

"... His hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing".
(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
Core Gallery
C101 Faircharm Trading Estate
8 – 12 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 3DX
Tel: 020 8692 2783http://www.coregallery.co.uk/home
www.deptfordartmap.com
Enquiries to: info@coregallery.co.uk
--

LUCY CONOCHIE 'Simile' at studio 1.1

2010-10-16T10:07:00.000+01:00

LUCY CONOCHIE 'Simile' at studio 1.1

John Wallbank: New Work at Standpoint Gallery

2010-10-16T09:43:00.004+01:00

John Wallbank: New Work at Standpoint Gallery


image taken from Hazard All Studio 1.1 in 2007

Image from Standpoint Gallery publication 2010 John Wallbank: New Work.

Wallbank's work in this exhibition has revealed itself. It is also the act of revealing the absent. Three years ago I saw the exhibition Hazard All at Studio 1.1 which with title and work defined itself upon the alter of Modernism in ruinous splendour. The work alluded to an evolution of formalism to a fluid ease with itself, with its purpose, with its materiality. This current exhibition at Standpoint, the culmination of the year as recipient of the Mark Tanner sculpture prize cast this previous intent in new and more complicated light. Two things define the learning of the work in this show, one louder, one quieter, a Major and a minor if you will. The Major is the subject, which I would name the Phantasmal Volume. Wallbank's work is concerned with the cloaking of form not fully present, only there in potential. With an sensitivity of archaeology, volume is drawn out in the space between solid forms such as a corner, a hollow, whether these are tight and of the same armature or separate, the line of trajectory crossing space to be resolved. This sensibility is echoed in the minor theme, that of the presentation of art. Poetic solvency of the frame, of the plinth of the periphery of art is dotted here and there. This is clearly echoed in the materiality of the work, worked and used and re worked and reused materials, so clearly from a studio, perhaps Wallbank's, perhaps another's, and suggesting an repetition of reincarnation as to be endless, without static state at any time. "I have always been here before", in the words of Roky Erickson.
In the accompanying text for the exhibition Colin Perry suggests that "if they were drawings, these objects would be abstract sketches rather than blueprints for workable designs". Perhaps it is a matter of language but I would argue that this is incorrect. These "objects" are both "blueprints for workable designs" and the results of such designs. The point is they cross the labour divide from drawing board to workshop. Drawn in space is a cliché but here is holds. Space is pulled, it is drawn out and marked as in the application of a draftsperson's tools of defining space, but simultaneously this is an occurrence of the corporeal, it is theory and practice. Rather than praxis I would use the other Platonic, poiesis to define this activity. The work grows, and it blooms and all the time it is concerned with defining space like a cat's cradle. It is important then that the minor theme of the edge of display in art is here in John Wallbank's work as this completes the dance, from solid presentation back to ghost of form, every stage is folded inn on itself and used to define the work both unmade and made at any moment. All is temporal. All is a ghost.

cows / drawings

2010-10-13T21:40:00.001+01:00

Schwartz Gallery / UND - INTERCONTINENTAL

2010-10-13T21:34:00.006+01:00

image: Saturn Three dir: Stanley Donen 1980

Schwartz Gallery is a very good example of what an artist run project space is capable of. It is about a year since I worked with the space and maybe two years since I originally met the directors/curators, while the space itself has been open for about a year before that. What strikes me most about this place is that it displays a a huge commitment to its own development, awareness to sophisticated and active modes of curation, and simply put it has a great deal of integrity. There is a great precedent for project spaces (and indeed any kind of platform for artists) to be guided by personal politics and service to the armatures of social value, to use the space and its currency to further some other goal, rather than simply to improve and challenge the exhibition discourse. Focusing on things like the market and on strategies for increased worth is obviously a big role of the conventional art gallery. This is actually true regardless of whether the space defines itself as "commercial" or "not for profit". Having participated behind the scenes in a number of different art spaces, I've realised that if you remove the drive for financial increase, then another factor will take its place, thus the unfortunate potential for public gallery management to see that post as an opportunity to further their own individual career, to network, to amass connections and social credit in a manner of someone handing out items from their office stationary supplies. However Schwartz Gallery seems to have a replaced the drive for financial increase with something slightly different, and that is the drive for innovation and improvement in curation. They are also focused on this happening right now, not just in some future venture somewhere more glamorous than Hackney Wick.

Ismail Erbil and Patrick Michalopoulos have overseen a space that in around three years has operated on a curve of engagement and self evaluation that is unarguably impressive. It is apparent from entering the space that its true model is that of the forum or the laboratory. The curators clearly spend much of their time in their studio above essentially plotting strategies for activating not only the works of artists, but the artists themselves. The underpinning approaches they create for engagement between the different parties involved in a project are rarely static and never unconsidered. Roles are changed, relationships and responsibilities between the layers of an exhibition are challenged and artists are forced to confront their own position outside of the insular security of their own studio. Schwartz Gallery is not simply a star service that bends to accommodate an existing work.
In a time when many spaces are satisfied with so little, Schwartz Gallery seems positively neurotic in its level of self critique and self improvement. One wonders whether an equilibrium of space and approach will be found before realising that this is what makes Schwartz Gallery so interesting and why its curation is so strong. The space does not stop. With every project it rebuilds itself, marks a new direction on the map and figures out how to tune this particular engine to get there. The press release follows for their next exhibition. UND - INTERCONTINENTAL opens tomorrow along with the inaugural venture of the new project space which features the work of the curators themselves.

UND 6 – INTERCONTINENTAL, 15.10.10 – 07.11.10

Billy Gruner – Punk Painting-Sound Installation, 2010.

Curated by Billy Gruner, Jan van der Ploeg and Tilman.

Private View: Friday,15th October, 6-9 p.m

Exhibition dates: 15th October – 7th November 2010

Billy Gruner, Adrian Macdonald, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Rachel Park, John Adair, Judith Duquemin, Justin Andrews, Ruark Lewis, Giles Ryder, Suzie Idiens, Lynne Eastaway, Sophia Egarchos, Jan Van der Ploeg, Frank Ammerlaan, Marita Fraser, Michelle Grabner, Terry Haggerty, Alex Lawler , Geoff Lucas,Paul Morrison, Sean Shanahan,DJ Simpson, Tilman, Sebastian Wickeroth, Clemens Hollerer, Greet Billet, Ward Denys, Colombe Marcasiano, Ingrid Maria Sinibaldi,Tom Benson, Michael Duffy, Alma Tischler-Wood.

UND 6 – INTERCONTINENTAL is a group show of international artists exhibiting at Schwartz Gallery working within what could broadly be described as non-objective contemporary art. Organised by artists-curators Tilman, Jan Van der Ploeg and Billy Gruner, it is an annual event that at its root remains an experimental developmental project; a yearly opportunity for convergence for related artists to present and view new work out of a greater array of activity. That activity may fall under the banner of Presentational Art (US), Super Formalism or Minimal Pop (EU) or, as it is defined in Australia, Post Formalism. The UND 6 INTERCONTINENTAL show has been coordinated by Tilman, Jan Van der Ploeg and Billy Gruner working from the artist-run spaces they have established within a broad network. These include CCNOA in Brussels, PS in Amsterdam and SNO in Sydney respectively. Artists will have participated by presenting new work that they have themselves selected. This artist-driven approach taking place across a diverse and multiple network of artists engages traction with other interested artists, gallerists and collectors, outside of conventional systems.

Schwartz Gallery Project Space presents new work by emerging London-based contemporary artists alongside its main programme of exhibitions with the aim of providing exhibition, critical debate and networking opportunities. A newly-created project space, within the existing gallery space, will present exhibitions opening on the same night as exhibitions in the main space, jointly creating a dynamic and flexible exhibitions platform.

Ismail Erbil and Patrick Michalopoulos

Private View: Friday,15th October, 6-9 p.m

Exhibition dates: 15th October – 7th November 2010

For further information and images please e-mail us on info@schwartzgallery.co.uk

Heidegger. The world and the self

2010-10-10T12:25:00.000+01:00

Legacy / L.I.U / sculpture exhibition

2010-10-09T18:19:00.000+01:00

Legacy I - An outdoor sculpture exhibition curated by L.I.U
4th November - 5th December
Private View: 4th November 6 - 9pm
Saturday and Sunday 12 - 5
Thursday and Friday, daily tours are available by appointment.
Salmon Court
Formans Smokehouse Gallery
Stour Road
Hackney Wick
London
E3 2NT
Trains
Hackney Wick Overground
Pudding Mill Lane DLR
Buses
8 - 339 - 30 - 26 - 388
—————————————————————————
The affective bond between people and place, is the primary theme of LEGACY I. Examining environmental perceptions and values at different levels:
Legacy I will take place within Salmon Court. The court itself offers a foundation to respond to the historical and industrial qualities of the area as well as being in close proximity to the Olympic stadium, the beacon for development and change within Hackney Wick.
The exhibition will respond on many levels to the industrial and temporal characteristics of the area with the artists considering the shifting environments within Hackney Wick from a dialectical perspective, distinguishing different types of environmental experience.
Legacy I offers emerging and mid career artists the opportunity to exhibit large scale and site specific works. It aims to be an annual event in the East London Arts calendar, supporting and encouraging critical debate within the arts and bringing in to focus the effect of regeneration to artistic communities such as Hackney Wick.

Artists:

Paul Carter
Alex Chinneck
Nathaniel Rackowe
Thomas Ireland
Tommy Støckel
Oliver palmer
Molly Smyth
Noel Clueit
Charlotte Becket
Emma Barrow
Gabriele Beveridge
Simon Davenport
Hannah Brown
Sally Wright
Thomas Adank
Robin Shepherd
Craig Barnes
Myles Painter
Ralph Dorey
Daryl brown
Melissa Hinkin
Jamie Partridge
Charlotte Warne Thomas

200 years too late and 200 years too soon

2010-10-09T15:19:00.000+01:00

I lost all my clothes in the storm

2010-10-07T18:40:00.000+01:00

there were long horned cattle all about in the fog and in the fields.

Th Southall show opens tomorrow night

2010-10-07T18:35:00.000+01:00

So Long

2010-10-07T18:20:00.001+01:00

Load the bench and hold me up,
Tie back the trees with cotton,
I shall be done and all will be quick,

School of The Moment 3 / L.I.U / Legacy / Hackney Wick

2010-10-04T22:30:00.003+01:00

Daryl Brown and Ralph Dorey
Proposal for: Legacy at Light Industrial Unit (LIU), Forman’s Yard. 2010.
Title of project to be determined during course of installation.

Earlier in 2010 I attended a talk on subterranean space at the University of Canterbury. The engineer speaking defined the digging of a hole as having two distinct motivations; the acquisition of the material the hole contains, of the acquisition of the space the hole contains. This description draws attention to the phantasmic nature of a hole, which begins with its seem-defined existence prior to being dug. Even after excavation the hole’s existence is within the margins of form. The hole is defined by that which it is not, by its own margins. The hole must be best thought of as an act rather than an object. It is the parting of the larger body, and exists in a continual state of expansion and contraction as margins fluctuate.
If one emerges from a hole (and here the experience is perceptible, though more discretely, upon exiting certain architectural spaces) one is aware of a trajectory. The space of the hole continues up or out and becomes formless as the defining borders are left behind but for the moment when we are still guided by the ghost, the spirit without form. Perhaps consider now the structure of the mining derrick. The surface of the sunk shaft is braced at the sides and simultaneously reenforces the fluctuations of volume, restricting them to a vertical axis as matter, men and tools are brought up and down. Now look to the threshold of the terrene and the celestial, as the scaffold rises up above the pit, cloaking the ghost of the hole like a sheet around a spirit. Ralph Dorey 2nd October 2010.

With the above in mind, Daryl Brown at Ralph Dorey will produce work above a drainage opening in the Forman’s Yard space. The act of making itself will be responsive, building on exercises and preparations conducted in studios and on field excursions. As with previous endeavours of this group, the making in situ is itself an act of research into its own process, while what is exhibited is a relic of this passing occurrence. A space will be constructed that houses its own making as well as the means of examining this.

Daryl Brown and Ralph Dorey. Monday 4th October 2010

sketchbook photographs / Steven Connor / Joyce

2010-09-29T15:00:00.000+01:00

A Few Don'ts (And Dos) By A Cultural Phenomenologist

Because cultural phenomenology would avoid the reduction of the plurality and analytic nonsaturability of cultural experience to common currencies and finalising formulae of all kinds, it would need to nurse an irritability about academic language, and to do without that hunched defensiveness which characterises contemporary critical writing and which seems to me to be having so inspissating an effect on the writing and thinking of those of us schooled in its forms and habits. At the same time, it will involve a confidence in the powers of language, and the possibilities of a cultural poetics. When I first read the work of Derrida, Barthes and Lacan, for example, it was their monstrosity and outlandishness that grasped and called me. The remorseless amalgamating machine of critical theory, and the various agencies for the management, distribution and control of that theory (including a number of books that I have myself written), have pounded that outlandishness into an insipid emulsion, which is now available to applied on every occasion and to every surface. (It's not at all `theory' that I mind about, in fact; it is the theory that has emerged of what `theory' is supposed to be for and be able to do, along with the theory that there is a special kind of defended and certified intellectual enterprise called `theory'. The theory is that theory is an operational guarantor of truthfulness, of being able to see things steadily and see them whole, and thus to be a stay against doubt, delusion, self-interest and ideology. This is the same theory that suggests that theory is the royal road to political emancipation.)

Cultural studies began as the inheritor of a desire to pay attention to forms of popular culture which themselves had seemed to require - for instance in some of the work of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille and Humphrey Jennings - new ways of conceiving what it meant to pay attention. The diffuse and fertile body of dreams and inklings about how to study culture began to go wrong at the moment of its conspicuous success, when it started to become cultural studies, and conceived itself as a programme rather than an inauguration (which is to say, perhaps, around the time we began to describe cultural studies as an it rather than a they), and therefore became too concerned with securing its legitimacy, survival and continuance. I am proposing that we (or, less alarmingly perhaps, I) give up on the struggle to fit ourselves or our students out with generalisable models, methods and critical procedures; which means giving up thinking of ways of reproducing ourselves, of preserving what we take to be our present purposes in reliable and replicable procedures. Or giving up thinking of ways of regulating intellectual conduct, and keeping the barbarians and the nincompoops out.

What would it mean to work, and more particularly to write, without such things? I would like to think of taking as a model Joyce's hypertrophic method of working in Ulysses. Joyce may at some point have had a classically architectonic conception of his novel, as a series of chapters, each with their particular point of focus and thematic concern. Quite late into the writing of the novel, he even produced a schema, or table of relations and correspondences for each of the chapters. But this is not how he found himself having to write his novel, or assist at its writing. As he formed each new chapter, he found himself having to accommodate - or, really, to incubate - a wholly new and newly importunate set of demands. Rather than fitting into the scheme with which he had provided himself, rather than providing the epic of the finished, classical body which he had proposed to himself, Ulysses kept on sprouting new organs, new idioms. One of the less-often noticed byproducts of Ulysses was the transformation of critical language it forced in Joyce when he was required to describe what he was doing to others. When he was attempting to describe the style of the `Nausicaa' chapter, for example, the deficit of metacritical terms forced Joyce to give a specimen of the style rather than a characterisation of it. The chapter is written, he wrote to Frank Budgen, in a `namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy...style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter's palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc etc'. Rather than following a series of methods or frameworks, the chapters in Ulysses enact a series of inveiglings, or incubisms (the latter Joyce's own word for the kind of writing, bred in the dreaming bed, that he was perpetrating). Joyce's work is often said to have an encyclopedic form; but the `epic of the body' put together in Ulysses is more like the fantastic, disordered and mobile body imagined by Diderot in his unfinished Elements of Physiology than the ordered and coordinated corpus of knowledge that finds its official form in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encylopédie: Diderot imagines that each organ and even each sense of the body has its own life, independent of the life of the whole: `Certainly', he writes,`there are two, or even three, quite distinct forms of life. The life of the complete animal. The life of each of its organs. The life of the molecule.'

Connor, Steven http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/cp/incubism.htm 29th September 2010

art as criticism

2010-09-27T17:41:00.002+01:00

someone once proposed to me the question that today's generation of young artists are presented with a crisis of information, that faced with such a saturation of source and skill they have been forced to adopt the role of one who chooses rather than discovers. This is something I'm still mulling over a year or so later, I think there are easy reductions of this problem to "Information Overload" which I think is missing the point, making it seem that we have simply been dumbed by the bombardment and that's that, as if the crisis is just what I used to feel as a teenager watching Twin Peaks episodes back-to-back for 4 hours straight every time a new VHS tape ordered from US Amazon arrived in the post. No, I think the issue has something more to do with the stance toward information, rather than the sheer volume of it and the effect is more a perception rather than just an overload. Growing up in a time when no information (feels) inaccessible is a different one from our parents clearly. I has exposed a style of art making which I'm glad to see gone though, that of the artist who has the better library, where a small fact, a word, an incident from history, perhaps a lost scientific misconception, are simply illustrated through the work. That sort of thing is a little dumb in an age where a few hours mindless linking through the internet will produces hundreds of these cultural novelties.

The issue I have though is not really this one. When I see work and make a judgement on whether want to spend more time with it or not, one of the things that affects me a lot in this decision is the question of whether this work is a commentary or a proposition. Now something can be both obviously, but I think its a question of weighting. Commentary is a relatively safe pursuit, it is within the scaffolding if you will, a proposition is by definition beyond that scaffolding, its a reach. I think its a logic learnt in art school, and in fact the commentary and proposition, almost like left and right hemispheric preference, are two approaches in defining and perceiving art.

I think there needs to be more consideration on this. And that commentary is in itself the worst kind of combination of commentary and proposition.

Rhizomatic / School of The Moment

2010-09-27T12:37:00.002+01:00

print dated on reverse "29th July '29"

School of The Moment

Today is Monday. For the last two days I have been in Southall working on a project with Daryl, Isabella, Katie and Tom. This project is hard to define in terms of the function of the various participants and it is in fact still continuing even as we have returned to our respective bases of operations in London, Norwich, Stevenage and Brighton.
The framework within which we were working is the exhibition detailed at the bottom of this post. I approached these four people, who's work I admired when I received the opportunity to do so by being selected myself for this exhibition. I proposed to them each that this might be an opportunity to investigate the process of production itself as a never-ending series of developments and modifications of our relationship to the world, to see these two days of installing as both the work and the pay off, a relic of which would be left for the show. It is perhaps not this simple though as prior to the show's coming to my attention even, Daryl and I had planned to work together on a sculptural project, building on our ability to work together on objects with minimal verbal communication. So when the opportunity to show, I felt not only that this was a good time to work this way, but that the alternative, of attempting a make a piece of work which I then transported to the site and installed, would be utterly unsuitable. Unsuitable due to the semi-democratic-uncertainty of where we would be showing, who and and what would be showing near by and most importantly that the sheer volume of work (around 250 artists) on display with nullify most subtleties under the very weight of experiencing so many disparate things all fighting for space and attention.

After agreeing with Daryl the plan of, in his words "almost no plan at all" I invited 6 others to take part, of which 3 were able to accept, and outlined mine and Daryl plan expressing a desire for dialogue on this subject before, during and after the install but ultimately making no demands on their participation.

So for two days we've been doing this, we've been working independently at points, communicating at others, exchanging ideas and maintaining correspondence. This will no continue for the next few weeks while the information is developed, the findings of the weekend processed and methods of recording and discussed and then the planned publication of the project will be realised toward the end of the year.

I have enjoyed this weekend a lot, it was great to work as part of a gang in the midst of what was essentially chaos, though I regret not having more of a chance to talk with Katie who was working in a different building to the rest of us, and who is the only one I had not met previously. I think though that the mixture of levels of interpersonal articulation, from working with Daryl continuously to only brief talks with Katie is in itself a very useful comparison.

The exhibition opens on the 8th of October and runs for little over a month, though with access by appointment only.

more soon.

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RHIZOMATIC

1st October – 12th November 2010 by appointment.

Private View Friday 8th October, 6 - 9.30pm (free taxi shuttle from Southall, see below)

Departure Gallery, 5 - 6 Boeing Way, The International Trading Estate, Brent Road, Southall, London UB2 5LF.

Rhizomatic is an experimental, decentralised curatorial system based on the concept of the Rhizome, as explored in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus. This is Departure Gallery’s largest and most ambitious show so far and includes work by over two hundred artists exhibiting in 100,000 sq ft of warehouse space.

Selected artists associated with Departure Gallery were each invited to choose up to six artists to exhibit alongside them. In turn, this second generation were encouraged to invite a further six participants, making a third generation, who could then invite six more. This six-link structure was inspired by the idea that all humans are connected by ‘six degrees of separation’.

A rhizome is a sprawling, unhierarchical system of connections that are constantly in flux and can spring up at any moment in space and time. This exhibition does not seek to fix the rhizome by presenting it in a finished form, but, rather, it represents an attempt to freeze a moment of this rhizomatic process in the interests of examining its structure more closely. Furthermore, the show aims to catch a glimpse of the creative networks within which Departure Gallery’s artists operate, in order to locate ourselves within the wider art world.

“Principles of connection and heterogeneity: at any point a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be…A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences and social struggles.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

This rhizomatic structure has particular resonance in the context of The International Trading Estate, which is a hub of haulage and distribution companies sorting and transporting goods in flux between producer and consumer.

The exhibition will not constitute the end of the rhizome, because a true rhizome has no beginning or end, but is ongoing and unlimited. Each artist involved will continue to make connections during and after the exhibition through the contacts and ideas that emerge as a result of the show. This opens up the possibility of creating a larger sequel exhibition at some point in the future. Who knows where this will go and what might result?

Louise Ashcroft, Curator.

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Getting There: Take national rail from Paddington to Southall (14 minutes) then buses 105, h32, 105 or 482 to Brent Road. On the private view night there will be a free taxi shuttle from Southall Station between 6pm and 9.30pm- turn left out of the station and follow the signs to the shuttle stop.

For more information or to make an appointment please contact

louiseashcroft@departuregallery.com

--
Louise Ashcroft
Director of Exhibitions
Departure Gallery
www.departuregallery.com
mobile 07861 375101

The art becomes a semi-autonomous aspect of lived experience, for the artist as much as for the viewer.

2010-09-20T18:56:00.001+01:00

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/142

Pertit Halilaj

2010-09-15T21:08:00.000+01:00

http://www.chert-berlin.com