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ATKINSON - BRISLEY - HEAD
ATKINSON – BRISLEY - HEAD curated by Richard Ducker The 1960s and 1970s were a period of radical transformation in contemporary art, resulting in what Terry Atkinson has aptly described as a “complex and expanded” field of art practices and related institutions, both in the UK and abroad. The most visible legacy in Britain of such innovatory work is that now historicised under the rubric of “young British art”, with the truly innovative developments of the ‘60s and ‘70s having been to a large e… Continue
Posted on 19th June 2008 at 12:00pm — 1 Comment
Parallax
P A R A L L A X Paul Carter - John Clayman - Shona Davies - Philip Hausmeier Sharon Kivland - Rosie Leventon - Charles Mason - Ian Monroe Callum Morton - Margaret O’Brien - Lucy Reynolds - Kate Terry John Wynne - Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich - Catherine Yass curated by Richard Ducker It is a matter of distance and it is a matter of position. Parallax involves positions and relations and the movement that aligns or displaces an object or objects. Something is set against a background; one m… Continue
Posted on 3rd April 2008 at 11:58am —
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FIELDGATE GALLERY at
The Wharf Road Project
Fluid Foundations
curated by Richard Ducker
Monica Biagioli – John Clayman – Ben Cove – Richard Ducker
Stewart Gough – Kathleen Herbert – Lee Maelzer
Given the inescapable statement of the building’s function, Richard Ducker has curated around the idea of the architectural and flights of fancy that respond to the strong office sensibility of the space.
The built environment is the landscape which we all occupy, and although architecture has the illusion of permanence, our relationship to it is fluid and often uneasy. It can inspire awe through its spectacle, or be the backdrop to real or cinematic narratives: crime, romance, consumerism, work, recreation. With these sites we experience complex psychological responses, sometimes extreme and often contradictory. There is an accumulation of history, re-animated for the present, while the present lacks stability, slipping back into the historical narrative from which it emerged. Within this, like a soap opera, lie individual stories, human exchanges.
Each of the artists in this exhibition explores in different ways the notion of our relationship to the architectural. Some make a direct reference through their material language, while others explore the more human or domestic. The human presence here tends to be inferred rather than portrayed, and we are left with a landscape of absence and boredom, while fascination is found in the banal and insignificant, and intimations of a longing for a somewhere else beyond the office desk.
Exhibition runs from 4th October - 19th October 2008
Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 12 - 7pm
The Wenlock Building
50-60 Wharf Road
London N1 7RN
Closest tubes: Angel and Old Street
The Wharf Road Project brings more than 20 innovative contemporary art initiatives together for the first time in a central location, creating a seminal showcase for the more unusual and innovative. The Wharf Road Project is not an art fair, but a large-scale exhibition featuring the best of London’s specialist and experimental art spaces, complemented by a programme of performances, screenings, music and guided tours.
Participants have each been allocated one of the 5-storey venue’s rooms to curate exhibitions which reflect their artistic endeavours and curatorial ethos. This mash-up of different organisations will create an opportunity to engage with established art spaces as well as some of the newest and most exciting art initiatives in London.
The Wenlock building is owned by Workspace Group plc who have long been supporters of the arts and London’s creative industries. V22 is the first cooperatively run art collection, owned by artists themselves as well as external investor-patrons. Our ethos is to make the best new art accessible to more people in more ways. The Wharf Road Project is a celebration of artists, their supporters and the wider industry. V22 will feature new works for its collection selected by Martin Westwood and Martin Creed.
PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE: C Carter Presents; Collecting Live Art; Dallas Seitz, Lisa Penny & Trevor Hall; David Risley; E:vent; Everyday press; Fergal Stapleton, courtesy Carl Freedman; FIELDGATE; Frog Morris with Lee Campbell; Igloo; Laura White invites Alison Wilding, Bettina Buck and Phyllida Barlow; Linda Persson & Natasha Rees; Martin Creed for V22; Martin Westwood for V22; Matt Williams; MOT Presents: THE NEW DOME; Parade; Peter Jones, courtesy of Pizza Horse and the Fat Sisters; The David Roberts Art Foundation; PILOT; Poignancy passing Muster; Seventeen; Stedefreund, Berlin; Supplement; The Hex; TOM ROWLAND FINE ART; Truck Art
Supported by V22, Workspace Group PLC and Arts Council England
www.fieldgategallery.com
http://www.v22presents.com
Posted by ArtReview magazine on 15 September 2008 at 3:05pm in ArtReview Magazine Reviews
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Issue 25, September 2008
Fieldgate Gallery, London
14 June – 13 July
Review by Martin Coomer
So it's au revoir, Fieldgate, at least for now. Where will we go now for such defiantly artist-run acreage? Fittingly for the final show, curator Richard Ducker has called upon an uncompromising old guard (age range: early sixties to mid-seventies) while cementing Fieldgate's independent credentials. A more populist organiser might have mixed these relatively unsung heroes of British art with younger international artists working in ostensibly similar veins – Martin Creed, Spencer Finch or Dash Snow, perhaps. Thankfully Ducker avoids the baton-passing cliché of legitimising the past through the present, instead combining decades-old and very recent works by the trio to make the point (and depressingly, it's a point that needs to be made) that what’s on show is contemporary art.
The work itself proves more than resilient enough to cope with any disgruntlement on its behalf. Classics, including Stuart Brisley's disgorgement endurance performance Arbeit Macht Frei (1973), in which the artist vomits copiously, then submerges himself in a bath of water, remind us of his justified 'godfather of British performance art' tag but aren't shown in isolation. In a suite of smaller rooms given over to Brisley's film and sculpture, an almost Magrittean humour emerges. He's still capable of producing chilling, almost unwatchable work, though, such as Estonia (2008), including a dreadfully matter-of-fact animation of a ship slowly listing while we hear a string of exchanges – misunderstandings, mostly – between a lifeguard, approaching craft and the crew of the ferry MV Estonia as it sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994.
Continuity in Terry Atkinson's post-Art and Language output (he left the group in 1974) can be read as the ongoing exploration of friction between formal and more fluid elements of artistic production, and the equivalents that can be drawn in wider political and social spheres. In paintings and heavily captioned drawings made during the 1980s he focuses on the political situation in Northern Ireland, using the bunker as an example of modernist reductivism to provide a foil for figurative elements – political and art historical – involved in often darkly witty narratives. Alluding to the conventions and niceties of picture-making and political negotiation, the results point towards bottom-line intractability. Grease Flag 2 (1991), whose saltire-and-cross formation of shallow wooden axle-grease-filled troughs turns the Union Jack into a kind of perpetually open wound, might have been made at the time of the first Gulf War, but its relevance remains clear.
Atkinson's Grease Works series was partly informed by distinctions between software and hardware technology in computer science. For Tim Head it's the potential instability of this relationship that yields results. Laughing Cavalier (2002), a vision-curdling monitor work, relays a constantly shifting pattern of colours randomly selected by a computer but determined by the idiosyncrasies of the hardware used. Punctuating the main gallery are his 2008 Dust Flowers 'paintings' – fabric printed with magnified inkjet pointillism, again randomly generated by computer. Initially these appear to be a visual balm. In fact, the opposite is true. Head presents us with various manifestations of a selfperpetuating horror vacui, an abstract equivalent of the instability, claustrophobia, excess and dissolution that gels the work of this trio beyond its explicit reference points.
Tags: fieldgate gallery, stuart brisley, terry atkinson, martin coomer, tim head
I would like to make people aware of White House Project in the first place. I would like them to respond to it, feel it and give feedback. And to sell it too...
Hopefully, you'll get some time to look into it. The project is connected to cities and countries, the next one is Spain. The current one was mostly European.
There are many interesting and exciting details to come along with new exhibitions. Enjoy.
Thanks.
GH
Thanks!
Is this smoothing of differances a benefit of historical distance or just blanding out?
The gallery is fully programmed, and we're not accepting any further submissions at this time. Atkinson - Brisley - Head is our last show as the lease ends this summer. Thank you.
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