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.

LIES Inc.

You know an exhibition is going to be out of the ordinary when, on entry, you're greeted by a disclaimer: "Please be warned -  you enter at your own risk". There's been a lot of buzz surrounding Site Gallery's newest exhibition 'LIES Inc.', a retrospective of the work of Eva and Franco Mattes (its been touted in The Guardian and BBC). These are notoriously playful artists - 'pranksters' the BBC calls them who in The Guardian's words will be up to "some kind of no good". Controversy and intrigue are words that come to mind. Afterall, the two are known for stealing, with the help of distraction and a Swiss army knife, fragments from famous artworks by the likes of Warhol, Kadinsky, and Beuys.

The Sheffield exhibition opens with the pair's signature Catt, a sculpture which features a cat in a birdcage that Eva and Franco Mattes duped the art world with by passing it off as a work by Maurizio Cattelan. The most facinating piece exhibited in Site Gallery was, for me, a work called No Fun. No Fun exploits a live-webcam software tool called Chatroulette in which users 'gamble' by accessing and communicating with other Chatroulette users at random. When the unwitting participants click 'Next' and reach the live-feed from the camera Eva and Franco Mattes have set up, the image which greets them is that of an uncomfortably real-looking (but of course, staged) suicide. In No Fun, we can see both live feeds, the fake suicide and the different user's reactions.

I was mesmerised by No Fun, watching and listening to the other user's reactions for some time. The experience is really unsettling, not least because it exposes the immoral side to human nature (In the time I watched it, only 1 person called 911; some didn't take it seriously but most of those who did quickly disconnected, keen to alleviate themselves from the situation and any form of moral responsibility).

The other thing at 'LIES Inc.' that really got me was a new work, Plan C and the ominously named The Liquidator, described by site as a "sculptural merry-go-round". At the end of the Gallery exhbition, we saw a short film called Let Them Believe which documents the development of Plan C. In doing so, it depicts the creation of Plan C as an undercover research trip to Chernobyl, torn and shattered as it is by the 1986 nuclear disaster. According to the film, the merry-go-round was part of an amusement park being built, and was opened early so that it could be enjoyed before the world seemingly ended. Plan C itself was the recovery of a merry-go-round from the site, housed for a few short days at a secret Sheffield location as The Liquidator, the merry-go-round now regenerated or at least cobbled together from materials taken from the Chernobyl site 25 years on. And the materials themselves still hold/emit low-level radioactive charge.

To go on the merry-go-round, we had to sign a disclaimer (!) and were asked to wear Hazmat suits for protection from the radiation. Below you can see Alice, Sarah, Rob, and I all kitted up!

The ride itself was actually really fun. Who doesn't like a merry-go-round? And its location in a disused Sheffield factory by the river was beautiful - street art by Kid Acne and Emarama.

At the end of the ride, we were measured for radiation, as was the ride, with the count continuing to rise.

Plan C and The Liquidator are brilliant works of art, and so unnerving. There's something really perverse about enjoying yourself and having fun on a merry-go-round which signifies tragedy. However, with Eva and Franco Mattes' reputation, can they be trusted? Is The Liquidator really what it claims to be? Or is it another elaborate hoax, with the Let Them Believe film serving to authenticate it? Whichever it is (and I think walking the line between the two is in itself fascinating), it works to expose to us the triviality of artfans contemplating how such a work of art made them feel in the context of the horror and tragedy of Chernobyl, itself with timely parallels to recent events in Japan.

Despite, or perhaps fundamental to, the duplicitous nature of their art, Eva and Franco Mattes certainly have a serious message, and one that asks us to confront who and what we are.

(Pictures come from my iPhone and the kindness of Alison Geldart who has a very interesting blog about words here)

XYZ

Last week, my friend Alice and I went to see XYZ at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Site has some great exhibitions and its great to do stuff in the Steel City (rather than always having to hop on the train to London). XYZ is an artistic exploration of augmented reality, so I was really looking forward to it.

XYZ was commissioned by Site Gallery and is an augmented reality sculpture project, with sculptures generated by Sarah Staton and interpreted within virtual space by Chris Hodson. To view and experience these 3-dimensional virtual sculptures, you needed iPhone technology. After downloading the app (Junaio, in this case) and selecting the XYZ channel, you held the camera on your phone up to a black and white geometric image. Soon enough, the Junaio platform reinterprets reality, bringing the virtual into view.

In their own publicity material, Site Gallery question the material form of sculpture: "What happens to sculpture when it is rendered virtual? What do you gain and what do you lose? In virtual reality concrete can float, liquid can solidify, but the materiality of sculpture, the space it takes up in relation to bodies, its inherent gravity is gone". XYZ indeed raises some interesting questions about the nature of sculpture and of art itself. How do we judge an art form which is seemingly intangible?

Importantly, the tangibility of XYZ comes from the very corporeal act of the viewer / iPhone user - your act of bringing the art work into being itself is the tactile foundation of each sculpture. What I found interesting was the precariousness of manifesting the sculptures. Move your phone too quickly and they vanished; reach out to try to touch them (your hand blocking the motivating image) and they disappeared. Interestingly, this somehow made them precious. Intriguing and precious.

XYZ closed at Site Gallery last Saturday, but they've got lots of exciting things coming up... So Sheffield folk - keep an eye out and an ear to the ground!