The landscape of the book

Just a quick post on another artist making books into sculptural works of art, Guy Laramee. His books works come in the form of two projects, Biblios and The Great Wall. Interestingly, Laramee conceptualises both projects through a story of civilisations, perhaps in a way that offers links to the work of altermodernist artist Charles Avery (see previous blog posts on Avery's The Islanders and Onomatopoeia).

Biblios is based around an ancient peoples called The Biblios. The Biblios invented words for the world around them, and so that they these words didn't die, they began to collect them in libraries. Moreover, the Biblios believed that words contained the spirit of the thing they designate.

The Biblios, as a people, die out, and according to the legend which Laramee writes, "It is generally agreed that Biblios dies under the weight of their knowledge". To read all of Laramee's commentary on Biblios, visit here.

The Great Wall, on the other hand, is about a civilisation from the future, a Chinese Empire of the 23rd Century keen to chronicle the histories of "The Great Panics" of the 21st and 22nd Centuries. The result was a vast encyclopaedia entitled 'The Great Wall'.

Laramee's work are intriguing objects, blending the bookwork as art, with landscape and fictional archaeology. Interestingly, Laramee's own artistic statement links his bookart projects to the supposed death of the book in the early 21st century. He goes on to say:

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. piles of obsolete encyclopaedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simple IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

The Other Side - Ian Breakwell

Just about to finish in the new year is a showing of Ian Breakwell's (2002) short video projection The Other Side at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield. During his residency at The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea in 2000, Breakwell was apparently struck by the Pavilion's community, and particularly the tea dances held on the terrace. It is upon this dancing that Breakwell's film focuses.

According to the exhibition material, Breakwell wrote of the Pavilion tea dances: "There was this whole atmostphere with the setting sun, calm sea, cheesy music and old people gracefully dancing. It was almost kitsch but at the same time there was something almost magical about it." Watching Breakwell's film certainly evokes such kitsch magic.

In the film we see the terrace as the sun goes down, the camera moving back and forth while the old couples dance outside on the terrace. All of this is set to music from Schubert and features occasional close-ups of the couples in silhouette.

The movement of the camera, classical music, graceful slow movements of the dances and the soft colours of the setting sun make watching The Other Side a mesmerising experience. It lulls the viewer into a state of serene reflection.

When the film ends, the image fades to black and the music dies, replaced instead by the sound of the sea and gulls. In itself, such sound would not be unsettling; it might be calming perhaps. However, because the preceding film offers a hypnotic lullaby, the ocean sounds are disruptive. They puncture the tranquility and evoke a melancholic contemplation on our mortality and the paths of our human lives...

The Infernal Dream of Mutt & Jeff - Zoe Beloff @ Site Gallery

Site Gallery, Sheffield, is currently showing an exhibition of Zoe Beloff's work, entitled 'The Infernal Dream of Mutt & Jeff'. Having first encountered Beloff's work through Steve Tomasula's new media novel TOC, I was excited about seeing more of the artist's work.

The exhibition seemed to be divided into three key pieces: an animated film of Mutt and Jeff, the central characters of America's longest-running comic strip (created by Bud Fisher), a triptych film combining two old industrial films from the 1950s and a new film starring Kate Valk (of the Wooster Group NYC) and a contextual commentary which featured cronocyclography. All in all, the exhibition puts forward a complex network of works and ideas. The Mutt & Jeff film clearly evokes a sense of popular culture and of media society.

The triptych film is pretty fascinating. The two 1950s films which it uses are Motion Studies Application and Folie a Deux. Both are instructional: the former designed to achieve uttermost efficiency on the production line and the latter to educate viewers as to how to recognise a particular mental disorder. In itself, the pairing of subject matter is somewhat at odds, and creates a tension of meaning. The new film however complicates the art work further, adding another layer of meaning.

In the new film, Wooster Group actress Kate Valk can be seen 'going through the motions'. Her actions, be they related to product-assembly or mental illness are out of joint, out of time; indeed, they are often slowed down so that they become hyper-real, perhaps exposing the mechanics of a capitalist work force. At other times, Valk's actions move in sync with the participants of Motion Studies Application or Folie a Deux; setting up a further dialectic in the form of an alienation of self.

The Croncyclography in the exhibition was perhaps one of my favourite parts. The exhibition material explained, "Frank and Lilian Gilbreth photographed workers performing a task and wired with a light attached to their finger". Afterwards, the Gilbreth's created sculptures based on the light paths. Beloff's exhibition included photographs of Valk's actions in the film:

The croncyclographs show up productive motion of the body. Moreover, it shows up the relationship between time, motion, and capital. The fiscal value of the productive body is shown up in the photos and sculptures as a real and tangible thing.

Zoe Beloff: The Infernal Dream of Mutt & Jeff is on at Site Gallery until 21st January 2012, and is well worth a visit. You can also read an interview with the artist on ebr.

Occupy Comics

When writing the Introduction for The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature with Brian McHale and Joe Bray, I was thinking about the possible futures of experimental literature.

I wrote:

"The present experimental literature, of globalisation and/or altermodernism, seeks to challenge the forces of globalisation, internationalism, and capital markets. In keeping with such subversion, current events such as the 'Occupy Wall Street' campaign might fuel literary reactions. 'Occupy Wall Street' began on the 17th September 2011 in Manhattan's Financial District, and spread to major cities in the Western world. Other recent unrest is not unconnected: the 2010/2011 violent civil uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia stemming from political corruption, democratic deficiency, and fiscal problems, and in Greece and Italy in relation to the Eurozone debt crisis. We may, therefore, envisage an experimental literature that addresses what may be seen as the contaminated rule of capitalism."

Unbeknown to me at the time, but newly discovered, my predication was already coming to fruition in the form of Occupy Comics.

Occupy Comics is a project in its earlier stages. It stems from the conviction that the Occupy Wall Street campaign was originally promoted using art and particularly comic art.


This poster, for instance, designed to promote the campaign clearly draws not only on the iconography of street artist Shepard Fairey's O'Bama poster but also graphic art and in particular the cover art of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta.

The idea behind Occupy Comics  is to tell the stories of the Occupy campaign (without the demonisation that media coverage often injected) through art and stories.

Here's the promotional video:

For more information about the campaign, you can go to the Kickstarter site or to Occupy Comics.

Altermodenist Fiction

I've recently completed editing The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, with Brian McHale and Joe Bray. As part of the collection, I wrote an essay on 'Altermodernist Fiction'. Obviously, I can't share that here, but I'm sure a few details won't do any harm!

Altermodernism is, according to Nicolas Bourriaud, the cultural milieu in which we now find ourselves. Bouriaud introduced this conception of the present epoch and its artistic movement in the most recent triennial at London art institute Tate Britain in 2009. The exhibition, which Bourriaud curated, continued the Tate's triennial project in showcasing the best in new British art. The exhibition featured artists such as Charles Avery, Peter Coffin, David Noonan amongst others.

In the exhibition catalogue, Bouriaud reveals that, to some extent, altermodernism has a literary inspiration: the writings of W. G. Sebald. As such, in my essay 'Altermodernist Fiction', I consider the features of contemporary experimental altermodernist fiction. As I explain, altermodernism is "defined by an implicitly politicised aesthetic resistance to globalisation, refusing standardisation, stability, or stasis". Moreover, altermoderist fiction (in line with Bourriaud's consideration of altermodernist art practices are characterised by the treatment of Form, Time, and Identity.

In the essay, I provide analysis of four texts: W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, Liam Gillick's Erasmus is Late, Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing, and Charles Avery's The Islanders.

12 Months of Neon Love

Beginning on Valentine's Day 2011, and set to finish in 2012, Victoria Lucas and Richard William Wheater's collaborative project 12 Months of Neon Love doesn't seem to be a million miles away from Jenny Holzer's work. The project is UK Arts Council funded, and presents romantic song lyrics (1 a month for a year) in red neon on a rooftop in Wakefield.

Heading closer to completion, here's a few the images so far:

Well worth checking out the website!

Postmodernism at the V&A

Back in October, I went to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London to see their latest exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990. I intended, of course, to post about it much sooner, but life got in the way a little...

The exhibition sought to provide an introduction to Postmodernism for the general public, offering an insight into its manifestations in a number of different arts, from art, design, and architecture, to film and fashion. I have to say that I really enjoyed it, but I was disappointed that postmodernist experimentation in the literary arts was almost completely neglected. My visit was rather a long time ago now and so, rather than attempt to review the exhibition, I'm just going to mention two works that seemed particularly powerful and evocative to me.

The exhibition started with the death of Modernism and the uprising of Postmodernism. The museum information stated that while any attempts to date the shift from Modern to Postmodern has been controversial and contested, Architecture critic Charles Jencks points to the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project (with its embodiment of modernist design in concrete with its simple lines) in St. Louis at 3.32pm on 15 March 1972.

At this point in the exhibition, the work of Italian architect and designer Alessandro Messini was cited. His art work, Destruction of Lassu Chair (1974) seems to perform and embody the rejection of modernism.

A Lassu Chair, simple and and pure in form and design, was set on fire, photographs laying witness to it as a burning sepulchre. The images captured by the photographs embody an attack on modernist design, the end of an era, and the emergence of a new cultural moment.

The second piece that I instantly loved was an image of a light installation by Jenny Holzer (whom I've mentioned previously in relation to the avant-garde art collective Franklin Furnace - see here). The installation in question, quite typical of Holzer's neon and light projection work, was installed on a billboard between 1984-6.

'Protect Me From What I Want' is beautiful in the way it speaks directly to deeper human emotions while simultaneously working with its location and environment to offer a critical commentary on consumerist desire and capitalist economy. I love this.

Anyway, that's enough from me.
There's still time to see the V&A's Postmodernism exhibition - its on until the 15 January 2012. There's also a basic but interesting powerpoint, intended as a teacher's resource for those interested here.