Posts Tagged ‘2013’

The Last Man

What would it mean to design or manufacture with no society to serve or sell to?
What might happen to the pursuit of function or beauty if neither trade nor fashion existed?

In an effort to imagine this scenario,  this project introduces The Last Man –  the final, lone member of humanity – who gamely continues to design and build his own material world, free from societal norms or constraints of time.

There has been no disaster, the buildings stand, the shelves are still stacked, there are simply no other people. The Last Man puts aside his grief and looks to the future, constructing his own surroundings replete with an array of artefacts that perfectly suits his practical and emotional needs, transforming himself  from passive consumer to active protagonist. With no prior skill in making, collected together the objects, environments, images and writings of The Last Man will describe the joy, obsessions, frustrations and ingenuity of a single person struggling to maintain hope and purpose through an engagement with his material world.

The Last Man: Chapter 1 Improvement  consists of a mass participatory experiment that saw students, staff and others create  new objects for The Last Man that focus on progression and improvement in contemporary product design.  Over a three week period, Gallery visitors were invited to take away one of fifty existing found objects, and improve it in any way they choose over twenty-four hours. The object must then be returned and made available for other participants to adapt; the process repeating across the three weeks with all participants remaining anonymous.

The ongoing project provides a speculative vantage point to consider issues relating to product design and consumerism, manifested through a series of experiments that call on the views, tastes and skills of multiple participants to produce objects that represent the work of  The Last Man.

Throughout December 2013, Gallery visitors were invited to borrow an object from The Last Man‘s collection, make an improvement to it, of whatever kind, and return it the following day. The object was then available to be chosen by another participant, whose improvement could alter previous work. Exactly what constitutes ‘improvement’ was the fundamental question at play. Individual contributions are anonymous, voluntary and impermanent, but each was documented and published online  in a visual log of up to two years of The Last Man‘s solitary yet hopeful acts of labour and imagination.

Gallery Residency: 4 – 21 December 2013
Collection Times:  3pm to close (Tue-Sat) / Return Times:  11am to midday (Tue-Sat)

Fabien Cappello

Fellowship Exhibition: Fabien Cappello  Streetscape 23 April – 13 June 2015
Stanley Picker Gallery and various sites around Kingston upon Thames

Since graduating from Design Products at the Royal College of Art in 2009  Fabien Cappello has created a diverse body of work that explores creative applications of local resources and local manufacture, his work exploring the disciplines of product and furniture design with a strong consideration for both craft techniques and light industrial production.

Cappello’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project is an investigation into the notion of local manufacturing in which he asks:  “What does ‘made locally’ mean when it is about the production of our built environment, and can a designer intervene in or activate that process?”

Research will focus on the public realm, using a series of case-studies representing differing scales and definitions of what “Made in London” might actually mean.  The project’s concentric geographies and associated publics will include the immediate University Campus environment of the Stanley Picker Gallery, the wider locality of Kingston upon Thames, and South West, Central and Greater London. Each case-study will comprise an inventory of local resources, and the design and production of a piece of work that highlights new possibilities in manufacturing our shared environment.

Cappello describes his principal motivation as an attempt “to draw links between the action of manufacturing and the ‘raison d’être’ of an object, motivated by a critical reaction to global material culture”.  His Stanley Picker Fellowship project will aim to propose new economic and social systems for objects to exist in the public realm. Whilst some of the individual research solutions may find an echo in wider commercial context or in global systems, some will remain small and local, focusing more on the cultural value of the objects produced.

Laura Grace Ford

Laura Grace Ford (formerly Oldfield Ford) is a London-based artist and writer concerned with issues surrounding contemporary political protest, urbanism, architecture and memory. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007 she has become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. She is the author of Savage Messiah.

Her Stanley Picker Fellowship project involves undertaking an investigation into the sociogeography of the suburbs, specifically within the old boundaries of the county of Surrey, examining marginal political and counter-cultural groups in an attempt to ascertain the affects of landscape on the collective psyche.

Grace Ford aims for the project to be an “investigation into the marginal, a process of burrowing under the heritage version of England to uncover the repressed psyche of a land.  I want to ask how far are the marginal political ideologies that emerge in the fraying edges of our cities a product of that environment and what new discourses are fomenting in the liminal zones of the commuter belt.”

The artist will undertake a series of short journeys through specific sites of cultural and socio-political significance relating to radical counterculture, land contestation and marginal political ideologies within the old boundaries of Surrey. These walks will form the basis for a new series of paintings and accompanying written text looking at  Surrey’s contested spaces  including  derelict airfields (Wisley), abandoned military sites (Deepdene Bunker, Dunsfold Aerodrome), land-grabbed commons (St. George’s Hill, Cobham), islands in the Thames (Ham Island, Eel Pie Island, Swan Island, Alcott House), and housing schemes (Cambridge Road and Kingsnympton Estates).

The project will ultimately aim to “seek the traces of marginal lifestyles and political ideologies from the Diggers and Winstanley in St George’s Hill to the premonitions of Ballard in Kingdom Come. The walks and subsequent studio work will serve as examinations of physical marks in the landscape, of folklore, collective memory, and the politics of contemporary protest.”

Grace Ford will be participating in a number of exhibitions around the country in advance of her Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition this coming Autumn. Bluecoat Liverpool is currently exhibiting her work as part of Soft Estate (until 23 February and travelling to Spacex Exeter in April 2014), the title derived from the Highway’s Agency description of the natural habitats of motorways and trunk roads, the liminal zones around Britain’s motorway networks. Tate Britain will be showing works by the artist as part of Ruin Lust, an exhibition of a wide-ranging interpretation on the subject of ruins in art from the 17th (reviewed in The Guardian) century to the present day (4 March-18 May 2014). Forming part of a V&A touring exhibition entitled Recording Britain, Grace Ford will present a series of drawings made while documenting the area cleared for the 2012 Olympics; the artist judging the John Ruskin Prize Recording Britain Now, showing at the Millennium Galleries Sheffield (3 April-2 Nov 2014). Finally, the artist will be presenting work in Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK at the British Library (2 May-19 Aug 2014) exploring the full range of the genre from mainstream to underground.

Sound Matters

A Crafts Council Touring Exhibition

Sound Matters considers the connections between craft practice and sound art. Seven contemporary works have been selected to illustrate ways in which these two distinct practices can collide. Exploring the physicality of sound, the works are characterised by both their sonic properties and materiality.

The makers and artists represented in this exhibition demonstrate how an engagement with sound also implicates an engagement with matter. Drawn from across creative disciplines, each work is indicative of a different approach: looking to traditional craft heritage and processes such as weaving and woodturning to create new sound forms, playing with shared technologies and language and revealing the sounds of materials.

With its equal emphasis on sound and form, Sound Matters offers a new and multi-sensory engagement with craft, with each work demanding to be heard as well as seen. With works of varying scale and volume, it is as important to listen as to look to fully experience the show.

Sound Matters is produced by the Crafts Council with David Toop, Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at University of the Arts London, as curatorial advisor, and with exhibition design by Faudet-Harrison, Lecturers at Kingston University.

Crafts Council logo

Boudicca

Exhibition: Boudicca  The Liquid Game 6 Feb – 22 March 2014
Q&A Event: 6pm Wed 5 March Boudicca In Conversation with Jonathan Faiers
Author of Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film

Fellowship Statement:

Outside, no boundary, allow the screen to tear and potentially find questions still unanswerable but close to something we do not as yet understand or know.

After being caught in a cycle of fashion as an industry for many years, we find ourselves at a point where possibly there could come a moment when all that we have found is allowed to roam, become part of a new way of working.

Outside, no category, allow the dress to tear and potentially form new opportunity.

We worked last year within the field of chronophotography, which in itself is a very old technique invented by Etienne Jules Marey, who with the use of intermittent mechanisms similar to those used in sewing machines later went on to be one of the many catalysts to the recording and screening of moving image.

Outside, still strangers, that may even return to the cycle, the symbolism of the repeat and contrarily find a beauty in order this time around, of repeated times and connection within the chaos of it all.

Coding and connective technologies add to the mathematics within the work; sequence and storytelling could still lead us to the game.”

Zowie Broach & Brian Kirkby

Previous Fellowship Activities:
Introductory Residency: 1-16 May 2013 (extended from 8 May)
Launch Event: 5-7pm Wednesday 1 May Stanley Picker Gallery Project Studio

Suggested Reading & Viewing: “Leave no maggot lonely…” Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
Listed below are a few moments of exchange, dialogue, debate that lead you into a world that we cherish and continue to develop and constantly update and ask questions around. Some of these links lead to what we call masters, that eternally stand as teachers for us all; those that align your thoughts and remind you of truths.

1. Pinter on Beckett –  www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N99S8n2TiA
2. Sopolsky –  www.openculture.com/2011/03/freesapolskycourse.html
3. Gaming lecture Jesse Schell – vimeo.com/18407613
4. All Machines of Loving Grace 1 , 2 & 3 directed and produced by Adam Curtis –  thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/
5. Jonathan Lethem – see text below with link to bootleg LeXture sound file.
6. Solar sinter in desert – https://kayserworks.com/#/798817030644/
7. WG Sebald – Rings of Saturn
8. JG Ballard on Burroughs –  www.salon.com/1997/09/02/wbs/
9. Roberto Bolano “I am dying now, but I still have many things to say” the opening lines of ‘Night in Chile.’
10. Gaming article The Journey – www.creativeapplications.net/games/exhausting-gameplay-by-douglas-edric-stanley-theory-games/
11. Holy Motors –  a film by Leo Carax
12. Aaron Schwartz – boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
13. Dead Man – Neil Young www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6aCMgy0ES4

Appendix to 5. (above):
Confidently donning a pair of sneakers with green laces, a white striped shirt, professor glasses and a beige jacket, on Saturday April 21 2012 Jonathan Lethem delivered the tenth State of Cinema address at the 55th San Francisco Film Festival, a honor he shared with the likes of Tilda Swinton (2006) and WIRED magazine Senior Maverick Editor Kevin Kelly (2008). Click here to listen to a bootleg recording of the event.

Lethem opened his talk with a joke “About a French magician… Actually the most celebrated stage magician in France”, a prelude to his own act, “A six-plate spinning performance”. Lethem justified his presence in the packed Sundance Kabuki movie theater by explaining that, like the American woman of the aforementioned joke, he was once “cajoled into a dark room to stare at ghosts on a screen”. The magic of cinema quickly became an “object of devotion that would destroy my life” as any reader of The Disappointment Artist and his masterful new collection of essays, The Ecstasy of Influence. Nonfictions, Etc. (reviewed here, in Italian), knows. Lethem described his movie going fascination as “A long, uninterrupted continuous daydream, a telescoping of a culture I could live inside, one that could help me explain what it was like to be conscious, nervous, mixed-up, hungry… To be born, involuntarily, a body, hurling into history, hurling into time”. Thus, cinema became a generator of role models, explanations, paradigms… A perpetual Lacanian mirror stage. In short, cnema provides narrative that help us remediate the existential trauma of “being-thrown-into-the world”.

His six plate-spinning acts of bravura – all spinning at once on broomsticks – required an attentive audience, an audience that was expected “to connect the dots” between “something embarrassing,” “the mumblecore genre” which Lethem finds both “arresting” and “vital.”, with the state of media. A second topic was “The Occupy Wall Street movement [which] derives its power by its lack of inarticulation”. Third, “neotony, a concept borrowed from evolutionary science”, which Lethem cogently applied to the arts, and cinema in particular. Subsequently, as a corollary, Lethem explained “the role of cinema as an aging character in the new media realm”. “Cinema has no present,” claimed Lethem, who then concluded his talk by illustrating two key dichotomies: “true vs. real” and “Sponge listening vs. Obedient listening.” Et voilà.

“Cinema, like art itself, has one goal and one goal only: to defy time”, he said, paraphrasing Bob Dylan. “The purpose of art is to stop time”. “Every moviegoer recognizes that standards as a sensation recorded in the body, a literal suspension of our lives in the medium of cinematic life”.

1) “Mumblecore is both an arresting and important genre”, Lethem argued. The comment section for the typical mumblecore film on IMDB will likely include remarks like “This is like a John Cassavetes’ movies about boring dumb rich kids with shitty tastes and everything,” (“Real comment grabbed at random,” assured Lethem). “These fierce words encapsulate every piece of resistance against that grassroots movement otherwise known as mumblecore.” The term itself, mumblecore, like “queer” and “quacker”, derives from someone else’s scorn, thus was openly derogatory, but, with an act of cultural transcoding, it was first appropriated by the scorned subculture and then subverted, until it became legitimized, so to speak. “Everything about these movies is embarrassing”. “The embarrassment has potential for reciprocity, with cinema itself and with us”. In fact, “It is embarrassing to embarrass others and it is embarrassing to witness embarrassment”. Therefore, mumblecore is really about “The ecstasy of embarrassment”.

Lethem confessed his obsession for the “mumblecore character”, the mumblecore type, a pantomime that he simply “Cannot stop watching”. He is not a fan of the “Shaky camera aesthetics [and the cellphone, and YouTube] which define the very essence of this art form”, a convention that he compared to “Writing in the present tense,”, itself “An abdication of formal tools the artist could cling to”. And yet, he finds mumblecore absolutely fascinating, to the point that these films are “slightly rewiring” his synapses”, he said. Lethem auggested that “Andy Warhol, and not John Cassavetes, is the real father of the genre.” Both Warhol and the mumblecore directors, “Introduce characters that seem barely willing to perform. In both cases, the viewer’s attention floats in a medium of sporadic arousal”. According to Lethem, “a fictional scene in a movie is an inadvertent documentary of the actors’ lives”. “If there is one thing certain in 21st century art making, is that to present one’s vulnerabilities is to call forth the haters”. He added that, “It is typical lately to dismiss a generation’s prototypical artists by suggesting that their susceptibility to congenital pre-adolescence disqualifies their claims on our grown-up attention…. As if any of us can safely claim to be watching with ‘grown-up attention'”. “The counter-argument is that late techno-capitalism has made spoiled children of us all. Or at least, wants to.” “We gaze into the mumble. And the mumble gazes back at us”. The demands of the mumblecoreans remind Lethem of the demands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

2) The strength of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement consists in their “Deliberate indeterminacy”. The refusal to address the reasons of their protest is the ultimate form of resistance, suggested Lethem who was as befuddled about their sudden appearance as anybody else, “Including probably the protesters themselves”. OCW is really about “bodies in spaces.” The protesters at Zuccotti Park were repeatedly asked to “State their demands”. Instead, they miraculously simply decided “To remain, on strictly political terms, inarticulate”, and by doing so, “They refused to be compromised and to become like any other political movement in history.” Thus, “Their own existence… Their own presence… became a declaration of intents”, a comment that echoes a similar remark previously made by Slavoj Zizek. “They did not take any hostages. They became the hostages,” said Lethem. Quoting philosopher Judith Levine, the novelist argued that “The movement does not have demands, but desires” and “It successfully rejected any attempt to commodify and objectify the protest”. Therefore, their act must be considered “A declaration of inchoate expressiveness […] An admission of vulnerability…. A thing the marketplace tells us should be contemptible because unworkable, because it is uncommodifiable”. Thus, the OCW protest showed us “the very possibility of a critique of our complicity and tolerance for the System” aka market capitalism, that is often confused with a concept like America. Thus, “OWS was a triumph, one impossible to revoke,” said Lethem.

3) Neoteny, “a mildly esoteric term that […] comes from biological, evolutionary sciences […] refers to the possibility of seeing the retention of some infant forms of a previous species in a later, more advanced species”. In neoteny, Letham explained, “A species advances by retaining characteristics typical of adolescents.” For instance, “Human beings are a neotenous version of some apes species”. Physical anthropologist Barry Bogin considers Betty Boop to be an example of neoteny: “A fully grown-up woman who presents elements of a child,” as Lethem put it. The same applies to Japanese manga, which represent a “Window into the future of man”. Lethem argued that neoteny could be used to explain the evolution of media and arts, including popular culture genres. For instance, rock and roll can be regarded as a neotonous development of jazz, insofar it remediates elements of jazz, but “With a new tempo, style, and purpose”. “The transitional genre that connects jazz to rock and roll was derisively called ‘clown jazz’, a term used to describe transitional figures such as Cab Calloway”. Lethem also mentioned Pablo Picasso’s fascination for early African art, adding that such reinterpretation of primitivism could be explained in neotonous terms as the persistence of playful, lusory, childish attitudes in the so-called grown-up artist. Neoteny can be also seen in the “Preference to the sketch over the finished painting, the demotape over the finished track or the rehearsal over the final performance on the stage”. The “preliminary form” is, for Lethem, the very site of neoteny.

According to Lethen, several film directors, e.g. Orseon Welles, Chris Marker, Michael Almereyda, clearly show neotonous traits in their “essay films”. The neotenous aesthetics revolves around the idea of leaving some “Unresolved elements or problems inside the works,” that is, to showcase the nature of the problem without necessarily come to any solution. So why is this phenomenon important? According to Lethem, neoteny is particularly true in our age, an age “We call postmodernity, apocalypse, globalization, hyper-connectivity, hyper-velocity”. The common denominator of all these definitions is that they identify a problem, a problem requiring “an unprecedented level of playfulness”. Thus, to survive today one must adopt a neotonous attitude: embrace hesitation and indecisiveness. “The Arts as a whole can be seen in a neotonous relationship to our world”. According to Lethem, like play “Art is largely not utilitarian, and uncommodifiable activity, deeply typical of children”. Thus, “All arts are a form of play”. Huizinga would certainly agree.

4) The next spinning plate is technology, and new media, or better, the relationship between technology and cinema. Lethem, who lived in the Bay Area in the Nineties, described the state of hyper-excitement that accompanied the so-called “virtual reality revolution,” prophesized, among the others, by Jaron Lanier. “It was supposed to generate a complete media convergence, which, in turn, was going to eradicate the difference among all media. None of these phenomena happen.” Lethem, as a novelist, compared himself as a time traveler, a voyager from approximately a century ago, “Aa time when novels were supposedly ruled the world, before being thrown into obsolescence by the arrival of new media forms like radio plays or cinema”. `”We all know the script, we have all taken it into our bodies… New forms and media arrive and destroy the earlier ones: painting destroyed by photography, theater destroyed by radio, radio destroyed by cinema, cinema destroyed by television, television destroyed by the internet, home taping is killing the record industry and so on… But such technological apocalypse never took place.”

New media never truly annihilate old media, says Lethem, who confesses that still owns – and uses – a fax machine. He also noted how supposedly new forms of communication like Twitter are being used to deliver old media content, like “Gossip” about why the Pulitzer committee – a bunch of old newspapers editors – could not decide on a winner. If there is one thing that we tend to overestimate, says Lethem, is the newness of new media. Lethem suggests that the appearance of a new medium produces two main effects on the older medium that it will supposedly replace. First, the old medium becomes “Even older”, that is, it further and deeper develops its “specificity”. For instance, “When cinema entered the scene, writers experimented with new styles of writing that could not possibly be emulated or replicated by other media, e.g. stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narration, multiple subjectivities and so forth.”. The same applies to painting which explodes with Impressionism, Expressionism with the emergence of photography and cinema, as the documentary Picasso and Braque go to the Movies perfectly illustrates.

A second consequence or effect is that the novel “Started borrowing elements from cinema,” that is, they emulated new narrative convention and tactics, a process that Richard Grusin and David Jay Bolter called “Remediation” in their seminal 1999 book. In short, the emergence of cinema “re-energized the novel, rather than killing it”. Examples include Joyce, Nabokov, Greene, Robbe-Grillet… Lethem notes that the prevailing rhetoric of “apocalypse” and “disruption” that is, media are allegedly competing with each other in a Darwininian media landscape although in reality they appear to co-exist, interact, and influence each other. “Moral panics” vs. utopian views (“The new medium will free mankind from the chains of the pre-existing conditions”). Lethem talks about the “weird persistence of delivery systems and narrative frameworks that refuse to be dislodged, as if they were part of our own bodies.” “New media bunch up” says Lethem, who considers himself as an “emissary from his own undead medium”.

In a sense, all media are like zombies, they refuse to go away and rest in peace even after they are declared ‘dead’. In this sense, “cinema is the ultimate undead,” as it has been called “finished” so many times in history. Ditto for the novel. And yet, Lethem marvels at the fact that, in the multiplex of his suburban small town of Pomona, he was able to watch independent and foreign gems such as Joseph Cedar’s Footnote and the Dardenne’ brothers The Kid with the Bike “on large screens in dark rooms” and catch on his couch Police, Adjective on Netflix. If there is one thing that new media has produced is a new form of cinephilia. We live in a “festival era”, concluded Lethem.

“Cinema has no present”. Lethem briefly discussed – and dismissed – the stereotype that today’s youth is drowning in a sea of information. As a teacher of undergraduate he finds himself “on the frontlines of a generation which came to age with the cultural shift introduced by the digital access”. On the contrary, Lethem argues that “Today’s kids are swimmers rather than drowners”. They are able to navigate the flow of data much better than we think. “Their appetite is strangely diligent”. Thus, “the digital divide is highly overrated”. The truth is that we have always been facing information overload. And we have always survived thanks to filters, such as critics. Lethem quotes the legendary Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris. “We have always been able to find the things we love”, which is to say that “We have always been postmodern,” concluded Lethem subverting Latour’s claim that “We have never been modern”. Even more, “post-modernity is a description, nothing more It has the same characteristics described in T.S. Eliot’s poems, and James Joyce’s or Julio Cortazars’ novels…” [Additional details here]. What does that mean to cinema? “When I look at them [teenagers immersed in digital media, Ed.] I realize that cinema has no present, but multiple pasts and multiple futures”. There’s more: “Cinema is closer than ever to a new beginning. Not because of arrival of new media… Cinema is constantly reinventing itself. It is not close to its end.” Rather, it is simply restarting, rebooting, ever changing.

As an interesting aside, Lethem warned the audience of “Any time you hear a major media corporation – either an old and decrepit one or a bright and shiny new digital one – telling you that the imperatives of that media corporation coincide with the needs of the Artist, the Future survival of an art medium, or with the needs of the Individual, or the Collective, the Commons… YOU ARE HEARING A LIE”, You are hearing… TOTAL FUCKING BULLSHIT” he concluded. Lethem did not explicitly mention Google or Facebook, but it is clear he was referring to companies that pretend “To organize the world’s knowledge” or “Connect everybody in a frictionless way,” etc.

5) To explain the difference between “the true vs. the real,” Lethem referred to a novel by Samuel Delany, Dhalgren. “We define what is True by a process of exclusion,” he said. “True is what is not false,”(think Ferdinand De Saussure’s explanation of ‘language as a relational process’, e.g. the cat is not a dog; signified > signifier). “The real, on the other hand, is inclusive. So inclusive, in fact, that it includes what we call the Surreal, the Trans-real, the Hyper-real, the Intangible…” The real, according to Lethem, includes ideology, power, language (notices that for Lacan, these belong to the Symbolic, not the Real, which, by definition refuses symbolization).

What is filmmaking, then? “Art is a pursuit of the real, not of the true, for all art consist of artifice […] The manipulation of symbols. Film language is a language despite of being made, usually, of photographic chunks, of photographic evidence of the actual. It is in every sense a construction of gestures, impulses, suspicions, evocations, and dreams. A compilations of fragments…”. However, “If we consent that what appears as real in Art is actually instructed by plastic materials with deeply arbitrary properties we make ourselves eligible to consider the notion that what is consider as natural of everyday life could be a construction as well”. Echoes of Michel Foucault, but also Philip K. Dick.

6) Finally, Lethem illustrated the differences between what he called “Sponge listening vs. Obedient listening”. He did so by describing his own experience as a father of two, a four year old and a two year old. “Obedient listening is when you ask somebody to get into a bath and they do not get into the bath or even acknowledge your presence or that you even said any words at all”. Sponge listening is the kind of immature listening that absorbs all the information one comes in contact without fully understand its implications. “It is a kind of childish, playful, infantile behavior, the kind of behavior we see when a kid discovers a new toy.” Cinema is not very good at obedience listening. “It does not actually bother with it at all. No matter how many times I say, ‘Hey studios, don’t mess with my toys, and comics books, and board games and sexual fantasies, they inevitably screw them up”.

During the brief, but very interesting Q&A session, Lethem argued that internet culture brought the “closet into the open”, that is, it gave ephemera, trivialities, and everyday activities “A new kind of visibility”. “People have always been producing weird stuff and have always been engaging in arcane activities,” Lethem remarked. “What is really new is the fact the now we can see it. We can see it all.We can quantify what we do – or not do – online.” Lethem mentioned the uncanny ability to track, in real time, “how many books I am not selling on Amazon”. “Reality has acquired a new level of measurability”. “The activities we perform in our digital age are not necessarily new. What is new is that. We. Can. See. Them. All.”.

This has created surprising situations. He mentioned the case of his four year old kid who was obsessed by whales and started watching a bunch of whales videos on YouTube. The kid incidentally stumbled upon John Huston’s Moby Dick, “Which is available on YouTube in its entirety,” and subsequently “became obsessed in Moby Dick rather than whales in general,”. Lethem has not told the kid about the book upon which the film is based, but that “will eventually bring the novel into the picture, so to speak”.

Asked about the possible future adaptations of his novels, Lethem mentioned that David Lynch was once interested in his novel Amnesia Moon. “He was not planning to direct the film himself,” Lethem said, “He was going to ask Tim Hunter, who made River’s Edge, to do it”. He also mentioned that David Cronenberg had optioned As She Climbed Across the Table [which incidentally is my favorite novel of his]. So far none of these projects has seen the light of the day, but “things could change”. Lethem also confessed that he sent a copy of Fortress of Solitude to Pedro Almodovar who once “Expressed interest in directing a movie based on a contemporary American novel”. “I guess mine was not that novel,” Lethem joked.

“I really admire those directors who are able to completely reinvent a novel they adapt for the big screen […] Using those parts that work in a cinematic context… Those who suffocate the book, drowning it under water until it becomes a mass of wet pulp. At that point – and only at that point- the novel – or what remains of it- can be turned into a movie”. Et voilÃ

Nicole Wermers

Nicole Wermers’ sculptures, collages and photographs connect formal considerations with a discussion about urban space and its social, economical and psychological aspects.

Visible and invisible structures of the city and their manifestations within architecture, advertising, and designed objects that influence our physical movements and actions, all form frames of reference for her artworks. The ways in which modern surfaces and materials, two- and three-dimensional spaces construct desire and communicate emotions and power is the principal area of her ongoing research practice.

Most of Wermers’ work, although appearing abstract, refers to concrete objects and structures of everyday urban life, such as the gate-like security devices at the exit of departments stores, or gallery-based sculptures that appear to double as standing ashtrays.

Examining the urban experience and the production of public and private space, Wermers will investigate transitional spaces within the city such as museums and cafés, the artist’s Stanley Picker Fellowship focussing on her research interests around the interface of art and design, investigating the grades of utility and functionality of sculptural objects.

Nicole Wermers was  nominated for the Turner Prize 2015.

Marloes ten Bhömer

A Measurable Factor Sets the Conditions of its Operation is an exhibition of investigative pieces, processes, tests and trials for a new footwear collection informed by engineering principles.

Marloes ten Bhömer’s aim is to completely replace the standard and regimented approaches to footwear design and manufacturing with the working processes of engineering. This method, which purposefully shirks fashion trends and styles, is based on research into the structural parameters required to support a foot (in a high-heeled position) while in motion.

Displayed throughout the exhibition are artifacts from a series of structural, aesthetic and cultural experiments and outcomes, conducted and produced over the course of a year. The White Prototypes (2013) are test pieces, mapping out specific combinations of foot and ground contact points derived from anatomical and kinematic studies. Alongside them are a collection of sketches, construction rigs, slow-motion video footage, pressure-mat analyses, prototypes of various complexities, film compilations, prints and slides. Intuitive experiments and analytical studies, observations and inferences, triumphs and failures, are all presented here together.

As demonstrated in the projected video Material Compulsion (2013) the high-heeled woman is a complex construct, one designed for, and ultimately sanctioned to, the man-made environment. When placed in alternative settings (through the narrative of a film, for example) or when forced to walk through unique substrates, a woman in heels loses her equilibrium (both physically and culturally) and begins to slip, trip, sink or tumble, thereby transforming her perceived identity.

The consequences of ten Bhömer’s extensive research methodology, developed over the course of her Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, are two-fold: First, the approach reveals a link between rationalised parameters, aesthetic intuition and structural understanding. Second, by considering ‘the woman in motion’ as an engineering problem, she exposes and questions the role high heels play in the cultural construction of female identity.

Marloes ten Bhömer was appointed Stanley Picker Design Fellow in 2011 and is now Research Fellow at the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University. Her work is published and exhibited internationally, including the Krannert Art Museum Illinois, Modemuseum Hasselt, Galerie Lucy Mackintosh Switzerland, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Design Museum Holon, Israel, Spring Projects Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum London.

A special thank you to: Ioannis Belimpasakis, James Brouner, Marc Bultitude, Kenny Evans, Laura Hodson, Phil Hollins, Graeme MacKay, Stephanie Jane Price, Emma Rummins, Nicola Swann, Jane and James at Sugru, Per Tingleff, Noam Toran, Nick Williamson and the Stanley Picker Gallery team.

Andy Holden

Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape is showing at Wasps Studios, Glasgow as part of Glasgow International 2016 from 8-25 April 2016.  Lecture Event: 23 April 7.30pm

Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape is an elaboration in space of the ideas presented in the lecture of the same name. In the lecture staged by Andy Holden together with curator Tyler Woolcott, the pair put forward an idea that we can use the laws of physics as they appear in cartoons, to help us devise a possible way of understanding the landscape “after the end of art history…a landscape where it seems like anything might be possible, but not everything is, there are rules that begin to emerge as we make observations”.

This gallery presentation, developed as the culmination of Holden’s Stanley Picker Fellowship, intends to expand on the lecture with a different approach. Here the Laws of Motion are placed in juxtaposition with new works by Holden intended to explore the multi-morphic space of cartoons as a possible interpretative framework for making sense of his recent pieces. Some of the works, such as the giant Ontograph and the slide projection Great Escape (Silhouette of Passage), relate directly to the laws and the lecture, whilst other pieces relate to the cartoon landscape through their material construction or conceptual premise. The gallery becomes a cartoon landscape whilst the cartoon landscape becomes a way for us to make sense of the works presented.

The central piece Quarry is a group of machine knitted textile replicas of rocks collected by the artist on a trip to Finland, containing tape recorded compositions of voice, environmental sound and prepared piano, emitting quietly from inside each stone. One end of the gallery is taken over by Tribute, a collection of sixty “Ornamites” on curious pallet-like plinths, works so top heavy that at times they seems to be on the edge of the Newtonian laws of gravity, and instead answering only to the cartoon laws. From a constructed projection tower we see a video interpretation of “Law 1” – Anybody suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation – a montage of cartoon characters seemingly hovering above the gallery before realising they are no longer supported and should therefore fall into the exhibition space. Here the cartoon clips become a way of thinking about the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness, and how this might relate to the making of art.