Open Fri-Sun 11am-5pm 8-23 June 2019 and June 6-21 2020
(2020 dates tbc)
CLEAVE shows the work of artists Lisa Andrew, Karen Banks, Linden Braye, Jenny Brown, Socorro Cifuentes, Ben Denham, Nola Farman, WeiZen Ho, Fiona Kemp/Virginia Hilyard, Jacek Przybyszewski and Margaret Roberts.
Articulate
is organising CLEAVE to present works that rely on earlier artwork for their sense and construction—works that extend dialogues with artists that have come before, or that are types of appropriation, reiteration, quotation, copy, re-mix, re-make etc, methods of artmaking that are among the wide range now available to artists.
We call it CLEAVE to emphasise a simultaneous attachment to and distinction from an earlier artwork, as Rex Butler may have meant when he wrote two decades ago: The appropriated copy is always both a destabilising recontextualisation of the original and a testament to its lasting power.(1)
We are thinking of CLEAVE as an extension of our underlying interest in site-specific and other spatial art practices because appropriation and related practices also communicate content through their media and construction. We expect for example that site-specific works have the potential to revalue place by giving a work's actual location a role in its construction of meaning, and ask now if appropriation, re-makes, etc., also revalue the past, or reconstruct relationships with what remains of it, in a similar way (not expecting that artworks will 'answer' such questions of course).(2)
We call it CLEAVE to emphasise a simultaneous attachment to and distinction from an earlier artwork, as Rex Butler may have meant when he wrote two decades ago: The appropriated copy is always both a destabilising recontextualisation of the original and a testament to its lasting power.(1)
We are thinking of CLEAVE as an extension of our underlying interest in site-specific and other spatial art practices because appropriation and related practices also communicate content through their media and construction. We expect for example that site-specific works have the potential to revalue place by giving a work's actual location a role in its construction of meaning, and ask now if appropriation, re-makes, etc., also revalue the past, or reconstruct relationships with what remains of it, in a similar way (not expecting that artworks will 'answer' such questions of course).(2)
We
are planning the CLEAVE project in two parts, as a planning show in June 2019 (opening 7 June), that introduces another in mid 2020. We hope each will also have associated talk-events—as planning discussions, artists’ talks, and other contributions. By drawing in the experience and insights of artists with a range of experiences in this area, we hope that the first event will seed expanded activity in the second.
(2) Drawing on the argument that the modern culture we are embedded in is characterised by the devaluation of both place and the past, in Anthony Giddens The Consequences of Modernity Stanford University Press 1990
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CLEAVE extends the definition of 'an artwork' to include traditional Chinese and SouthEast Asian possession rituals (WeiZen Ho), activist projects (Jenny Brown, Socorro Cifuentes), works of literature and film (Nola Farman, Fiona Kemp/Virginia Hilyard) as well as what is more conventionally understood as 'artworks' (Lisa Andrew, Karen Banks, Linden Braye, Ben Denham, Margaret Roberts) and the process of appropriating/re-mixing itself (Jacek Przybyszewski).
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Image: Researcher activists Gladys Tzul Tzul and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, still from Socorro Cifuentes, 'Experiencing the World as Our Own' (2018, 11'43"), a rearguard remix with different ideas and experiences of activists and intellectuals regarding storytelling, orality, listening, memory and justice. Socorro's remix work is thought of as a practice of listening to important political ideas/practices, and aims to recirculate and create relationships among them.
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Francis Alÿs Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing Video, 4:59 min (loop), color, sound 1997. Ben Denham includes a work titled Heat Death: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, Reprise, inspired by Francis Alÿs' work.
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| Image: Dora Maar, Untitled 1933-34.
Karen Banks plans to project a hand-processed 16mm film which has been digitally manipulated
onto a pane of yellow glass. Re-covering the “hand”, a thematic image for Surrealist photographers,
the video follows the contours of Dora Maar’s Untitled 1933-34 as it traces an unfolding into
an unknown landscape.
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| Image above: Helio Oiticica Parangolés: www.reddit.com. Lisa Andrew plans to play with the idea of Helio Oiticica Parangolés creating the potential for audience participation. |
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| Above image: Mario Merz "Igloos" installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2018-2019. Courtesy: Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Foto: Renato Ghiazza © Mario Merz. Linden Braye plans to remake a Merz igloo, perhaps in light of her interest in the western sun that enters Articulate. |
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| Above image: andrei-tarkovsky.com. Fiona Kemp and Virginia Hilyard plan a single screen video and sound work based on 360 and gimbal video they shot in Kronstadt in Russia, referring to work of Andrei Tarkovsky. They are working with the sense of ‘peeling one side from the other' that occurs within the 360 video spheres. This is also reflected in the image itself - the interiors of an abandoned house - decay and dilapidation. They will develop an ambient soundtrack which will play into the space. |
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| Jacek Przybyszewski plans to invite the audience to engage with processes of re-mixing |
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| Nola Farman re-engages Eugene Ionesco's The Hermit for the second time: see earlier engagement: https://inrelationto.weebly.com/nola-farman.html |
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| Margaret Roberts plans to remake Sophie Taeuber Arp's Vertical-HorizontalComposition 1928 (above) through attempting to add space and reduce time. |
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| WeiZen Ho (from T h e S u b t l e B e i n g s 2018)
This installation is one of the elements to the ‘The Subtle Beings’ project and specifically a response to the conversations and stories in the communion area next to the home of one of the female shamans from the ‘Rungus’ tribe in Sabah (Malaysian Borneo), where major possession rituals take place. I am reflecting on how the roof structure of the area we were sitting in would be raised several storeys higher during ritual ceremonies and a small platform would be built close to the roof area, enough for the female ritual-maker to conduct her invocation song and dance. It is also connected with the fact that the female maternal lineage has been slowly disintegrating as daughters are less willing to take on the apprenticeship role. I used the memory fragmentatio
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