This issue of Arc, the Royal College of Art’s student-led magazine, carries an accent.
It is about personal voice and how things are spoken both on and off the page. It depends on where you are – have been – and who you spend time with; it is about dialect and how some things rub off or pass down or stop mid-Atlantic. And it is about stress, emphasis – the marks above letters or on musical notes, the effect of one colour next to another. The accents in this issue register between saying what you think and thinking about what is said – they are sounds, affectations, marks, tics, tones.
Ruth Beale, Bookbed, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.
The day after the opening of Ruth Beale’s exhibition ‘Bookbed’ at Peckham Platform the gallery is busy, the door swinging open and shut almost constantly. Beale is sitting opposite me on the eponymous bed explaining how the previous week has involved a lot of late night sewing. A stripy green mattress re-fashioned into the shape of an open book that curves gently away from its central ‘spine’, the Bookbed is wonderfully soft, a perfect place to sit, lie or curl up with a good book. Positioned in front of the gallery’s shop-window it is presented as a first taste of the exhibition to the passers-by of Peckham High Street. The situation is at once intimate – it’s not everyday an artist invites you into their bed – and performative: we are something of a spectacle, to those looking through the window, but also to the gallery visitor, who may never have dreamed of clambering onto an artwork.
Gargantuan is a film about scale. It is short, sweet and a bit silly. The film starts with a gigantic reptile that fills the screen as a voice begins to sing: ‘Gargantuan amphibian. Enormous amphibian.’ Then the camera slowly starts to zoom out, and it becomes ‘Medium’, ‘Modest’ and eventually ‘Miniscule’ as it is revealed to us that what we are looking at is in fact a small newt. ‘Minute.’ say John Smith, who is lying in bed, his head and his amphibian friend both propped on pillows, ‘I love my newt.’
As real as walking down the street and going to the grocery store, John Baldessari, Andy Holden, Shana Moulton, Rachel Maclean, Heather Phillipson, Samara Scott. Installation view at Rowing, London, October — November 2013
‘Godfather of Conceptual Art’ John Baldessari is best known for his humorous subversion of the ideology of images. When Baldessari was asked by artist Paul Pfeiffer what percentage of his visual material was found and how much he generated himself he responded, that it was 50/50 and the half that he collects and the half that he generates inform him equally. He continued:
In the 20th century in general every movie we see on TV, everything we see in newspapers or magazines is just as real as walking down the street and going to the grocery store.
As the press release for the exhibition, which takes its title from his statement, advances, ‘Baldessari’s answer not only reveals the complex interdependence between reality and fiction, but how reality – to quote psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – ‘takes on the structure of a fiction.’’
A Small Hiccup, Grand Union, Birmingham. Installation view, 2013.
If you have ever spent any time considering how language mutates, from marvelling at how swiftly neologisms like ‘omnishambles’ enter the dictionary to bemoaning how IAU (incessant acronym use) is degrading the English language, then maybe it will not be too great a leap for you to imagine a world in which language itself has become diseased. ‘Pontypool’ (2008), a low budget horror film, which does what ambitious low budget horror should by working within its limited means to convey a disturbing but compelling idea, introduces a new form of viral infection: a linguistic disease spread through speech.
Charlotte Prodger, :-*, 2012. Ripped YouTube videos on Hantarex video monitors. Courtesy the artist.
Over the last five years Wysing Arts Centre has experimented with different programmatic structures in order to support artists to make new work. During 2013 they will be further exploring how structures, some visible and others implied, might be used to uncover meaning, narrative, paradox or indeed certainty through their prestigious residency programme. This year there will be two sets of residents, the first group is made up of Anna Barham, David Osbaldeston, Charlotte Prodger and Florian Roithmayr. The programme title, ‘Convention T’, refers to logician, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) who applied logic to sentence structure in order to make the truth visible through language. Tarski created a structure, a meta-language, that could be applied to real, everyday, language in order to generate true statements, known as T sentences -— ‘A and B’ is true if and only if A is true and B is true translates as Snow is white if and only if snow is white.
The second of two interviews with Wysing’s 2013 artists-in-residence is with Charlotte Prodger, an artist based in Glasgow who works with 16mm film, video, writing and performance. She uses the meeting of language and technology to generate cross-associations and slippages, inviting new routes of interpretation. Source material includes YouTube videos, personal anecdotes and the legacy of structural film and queer subjectivity, which she uses to explore contradictions that arise between form and content.
‘Puppet Show’ is the latest in a series of group exhibitions and productions within Eastside Projects that ‘examine modes of display and the construction of the public sphere’. The medium, be it painting, sculpture, the gallery or the book, is not only represented in its multiplicity but is also actively engaged with to form connections, test propositions and produce new work. Making a tangential leap from ‘Narrative Show’ in 2011, the artists Celine Condorelli and Tom Bloor have curated an exhibition that explores the subversive potential of mediating their message through crude and diminutive alter egos by installing, or revealing, a puppet state.
Amanda Beech, Final Machine, LGP Projects, Coventy. Installation view, 2013.
In 1967 French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser delivered a series of three lectures as part of the ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ at the École Normale Supérieure, a course of initiation for non-philosophers inaugurated by Althusser and colleagues as an attempt to move philosophy from a specialist and abstract discourse towards a practical application, ‘a weapon in the ideological battle’. Delivered across the academic year they drew huge crowds from the student body, coming to a close on the eve of the eruption of riots in May 1968.
Events series curated by Beth Bramich providing a platform for Midlands based artists working in film and video and encouraging a critical dialogue amongst local practitioners. In Production ran from 2010–12 and was hosted by Nottingham Contemporary. It was also presented in collaboration with Outpost Gallery, Norwich and David Dale Gallery, Glasgow. Featured artists and guest speakers included: Kitty Anderson, Darren Banks, Gareth Bell-Jones, Alice Bradshaw, Mark Essen, Mateus Domingos, Blue Firth, Ellie Harrison, Louis Henderson, Claire Hope, Candice Jacobs, Ben Judd, Paul Pieroni, Alexander Stevenson, Corin Sworn, Tether, Katy Woods and Emily Wilczek.
Beth Bramich 