Event date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Location: Netil House, 1 Westgate Street, London E8 3RL
Time: 7:00pm – midnight
Organizers:
Sonel Breslav, Editor, Artcards London
Tom Trevatt, Editor, Incognitum Hactenus
Admission: BYOB, £2 suggested donation

The programme includes:
INCOGNITUM HACTENUS presents:
Lions
Simon Clark
Gandt
a/tt(a)c
and a screening of Re-Animator, 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon – based on a ‘Herbert West, Re-Animator’ a short story by H.P. Lovecraft

Incognitum Hactenus is a new quarterly journal featuring writing on art, horror, and philosophy. Conceived as an ongoing investigation into each sphere and its crossovers, the journal publishes new work by leading international scholars, artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians, and designers. With a focused interest in that which finds an affiliation with horrific contemporaneity and the exposure to radical thought, Incognitum Hactenum reveals the twisting of contingency (that which comes from outside) as it produces new monstrosities. We aim to tear asunder the fleshy belly of the established and expected. Editors: Caryn Coleman and Tom Trevatt.

THIS IS TOMORROW
Online Magazine and comprehensive archive of contemporary art based in London. International contributors review exhibitions in London, New York, Venice, Berlin, Paris, LA, and Vienna.

LIME HEADED DOG

ALASDAIR DUNCAN

LAURIE INNES
Spoken/sung monologue from his work in progress; ‘Alan Turing Did Not Die In Vain

Tracey Emin, Artist, London
Jerry Gorovoy, Louise Bourgeois’s longtime assistant, New York
Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Moderator | Ulf Küster, Curator, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

It Pays My Way and it Corrodes My Soul, 2011, Performance by Stephen Cornford(UK) and Paul Whitty

Last Saturday LEAP, the Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, launched a new bi-monthly series called Body Controlled, presenting
artists dedicated to performance art and exploring sound using electronics and other art forms. For its first installment titled, Other Spaces, the artists used the dynamic of preexisting architecture and virtual spaces as a point of departure for work on display through December 2, 2011. Highlights of Saturday’s inaugural event included Robert Henke’s twelve-hour installation/performance, Microsphere. Well known within both academics and club culture Henke has been involved in negotiating the evolution of computer based music for decades and helped pioneer today’s standard software for live performance, Ableton Live. While I only stayed for the first two hours of his set visitors were welcome to pass by until mid-morning the next day, breakfast was apparently served in the final hours. During the time I was present I took notice of Henke’s peaceful performance demeanor, the invisible anxiety that permeates most was non-existent. His expert execution allowed sounds to develop within the space breaking down typical audience-performer barriers. Focus returned to the audience and the space as Henke took short smoking breaks and even ate some grapes while he played at what looked like a recording station from the future. Massive cabling protruded from the back of a desk that was under lit by a florescent red tube and a carefully rigged computer screen floated, suspended from the ceiling. Fluctuating between listening to the development of sound, Henke added various traditional and non-traditional instruments to the mix and their play back became part of a developing new sound and spatial atmosphere.

Microsphere 2011, performative installation for ten speakers and percussion, Robert Henke (DE)

Henke translated the present space through sound but the rest of the performances explored sounds of other spaces bringing prerecorded environments and objects into the mix. Peter Kirn used preexisting recordings from various locations and samples of piano that were played back through digital tools. Hardware based performance duo, Stephen Cornford and Paul Whitty deconstructed the sounds of a reel-to-reel tape recorder and various other obsolete machinery in an operation-like performance. Piece by piece the equipment continued to play until the duo deteriorated the mechanics beyond playability and thus ended the performance. Stephen Cornford also presented a sound based installation in the front window of LEAP. Binatone Galaxy is a series of old tape recorders, wall mounted in random formation that play hacked tape cassettes. The result is a symphonious sound wall amplifying each machine as it works. Motion sensors vary the composition by stopping the tape players whenever a person gets close. This seems to tease the viewer who is forced to stand back and listen from a distance while being tempted to get close and hear the noise of each player.

Binatone Galaxy, 2011, installation with used cassette players

In a stairwell leading up to the second floor (and an amazing view of Berlin’s Fernsehturn) a site responsive piece called Volume by Robert Mathy amplifies the noise of the infrastructure. A series of small motors are attached to various objects and a small metal spike on each one hits the surface of the object. The noises they produce are spread out over the space and create a sound composition from the architecture. The experience was really playful and reminded me of being a kid, exploring the sound of objects in your proximity. Somehow the environment also started to feel cavernous. Anticipating the possibility of sound seemed akin to moving through a dark space and waiting for visual cues to guide your way. While standing still, the installation produced new depths and its time based evolution made your ears wander. The event, Other Spaces, on a whole could be said to be working towards this same sensation. While we remained at LEAP the sounds presented therein brought us to new spaces.

The on-paper layout of the show is as modest as the aesthetic of its comprising works. Small magnets float on the surface of three framed monochromes. A sculpture comprised of metal tubing rests on the floor atop two bath mats. The color options are equally basic. Khaki, indigo, grey, primary blue and red; a dominant presence of utilitarian décor reinforces an investment in aesthetic accountability. Donovan’s this-and-not-that approach to material selection provides a grounds for divorce from the immediate ready-made coding of the hardware store vocabulary, enabling closer engagement with the virtual-rendering capacities of its signified(s). Monochromes and bath mats serve as ground for the material gestures of magnets and tubing. These gestures mark identity and form within their respective decorative grounds, wresting affective impact from formal composition.

Bath mat or monochrome? Red or blue? For the wall or the floor? Aesthetic utility is as interchangeable as it is mutable. This concept is particularly exemplified by the last piece in the show, a small grey monochrome. Similar to its aesthetic kin in format: brushed acrylic on metal monochrome in a white frame, magnets and drilled holes arranged on top. But in this case, the compositional logic has been expanded upon. Two small black strips of what appear to be torn construction paper interrupt the uniformly brushed texture of the framed surface. The compositional integrity of the construction paper proves humorously impotent within the work as a whole. It functions only as a reiteration of the already established monochrome image. A decorative gesture within an already decorative space; equally textural, and equally empty. Rather than marking the space of the sculpture itself, the black marks simply bleed into the decorative ground on which they are inserted. The viewer is reminded of exactly what’s in front of them; a monochromatic space reinforcing the essentially empty presence of a decorative allusion.

But there is a playfulness at work. Magnets obstruct the historically meditative capacities of the monochrome. A literal placeholder, its efficacy is held at bay to its new function as a refrigerator door for material gesture. The humor within these faux utilitarian gestures points to something else; a folly of sculptural purposelessness. Wikipedia yields the following on the subject:

“In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but either suggesting by its appearance or some other purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends the normal range of ornaments or other class of building to which it belongs.[1]”

A common strategy throughout the show, utilitarian ornament serves as Donovan’s architecture of folly. We are shown one object, arranged in such a way that it transcends its historical archetype, suggesting ulterior function. In this light, the grey monochrome presents an absence of the hand in plain sight. An understanding of its authorial function collapses the handcrafted earnestness of its comprising materials. The form of the monochrome image becomes humorously interchangeable, and in turn, its material integrity is rendered cold to the earnest guise of its immediate presence; as shallow and empty as the bath mat resting on the floor beneath it.

Though I was oblivious to it at the time, when my Mom’s hard drive was erased, something else happened. With its contents lost forever, the status of the original machine was turned back to its material constituents; an empty shell of plastic and metal. Folly is the sculptural apparatus that wipes out the original coding of ready-made utility. It provides an implication of ulterior function to the work that suppresses immediate interpretations of its surface level form(s). The refrigerator door becomes virtual ground. There is no framed picture, only a sign pointing elsewhere. We don’t know what it’s made out of, but we believe what it says.

So how can this functionality be engaged in such essentially shallow territory? How do you explore the core of what you know to be hollow; dig for meaning when there’s nothing beyond the surface? Donovan’s solution is neither looking past, nor through, rather aiming our focus at what’s on top: gestural marks, magnets, holes, and tubing. Their physicality and compositional authority feels less solidified than their respective grounds. There is a lack of strength to their bond(s) with the grounds on which they rest; a soft hand to their semi-permanent arrangement. The gentle hold of the magnet, the tack welds of the metal tubing; just enough effort to hold the thing in place while we take a closer look, but lacking just enough strength to allow a sense of singular result. These are gestures of reflective impermanence. Their soft materiality gives way to the presence of a recombinant logic; a multitude of compositional possibilities.[2] This multitude is the vehicle that allows the mobility of each gesture within the virtual space of its ground. Charged and waiting to be reorganized, these objects rest on the surface of monochromes and bath mats. Compositional geography becomes obsolete. They mark their respective grounds less like lines in the sand and more like parked cars; simultaneously signifying placement with the potential for reorganization.

This multitude is manipulated and utilized as a gestural whole when placed in juxtaposition to a folly of decorative archetypes. Magnets reactivate the shallow surface of the framed monochrome by bringing to light the inherent dimension of attraction. In similar fashion, the khaki tubing renegotiates the decorative void of the bath mats. Vast and malleable, a virtual space is formed, and composition is but a decentralized multitude within it. A reflexive, recombinant sea of possibilities; the shallow becomes the ideal ground for operative interpretation. Lines don’t stick, they float; meaning doesn’t stop, it rests.

-Craig Smith-Dermody

[2] see Brooke Sinkinson Withrow’s press release

Second to None

Ry Rocklen has developed a language that is poetic and unique. His originality is an accomplishment considering the thousands of artists who used found objects in their work. Ry inserts old objects with his artistic mojo, giving them new life in a different realm. Perhaps you caught his previous outings in New York City at Marc Jancou in 2009 or in the Whitney Biennial of 2008. Rocklen’s latest New York show is up at Untitled on the Lower East Side until October 16th.

Brent Birnbaum: You could not escape the media letting us New Yorkers know this 9/11 was the 10-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Your current show opened on September 7th and one of the first works you see upon entering the gallery contains a large weathered American flag. A few threads gently touch and hover above the ground. In another sculpture titled Dreams of Liberta, a pillow with an American flag image is used. Was the 9/11 anniversary something you were conscious of when preparing for this show?

Ry Rocklen: In the wake of 9/11 the American flag bled into the fabric of our everyday lives, its colors and design found in a host of objects important to us as Americans and as people. Through pens, pillows, towels, bandannas, clothing, and flags we celebrate our great nation and remember the tremendous loss brought about on that day. I am excited by all these permutations and the liberties taken with the flags design in fitting whatever object it is adorning. With “A Touch of Grace” I was intrigued by the idea and form of a flag that hangs the length of the pole and comes as perilously close to the ground as possible.

"A Touch of Grace"

BB: You are not surprised when you see a sculpture involving trophies anymore, yet they are rarely used successfully. Your giant trophy sculpture, Second to None, is the most
successful I’ve seen. How long did it take to collect all the trophies used?

RR: Trophies, not unlike American flags, have grown in abundance, as the fabrication of their parts has become a multi-million dollar a year industry. On a regular visit to Junk Shop 3D I saw 100 or so trophies sitting together on a high shelf. I was immediately attracted to their sparkle, form, and all that they have come to represent. I left them behind wondering how I would use them. On the car ride home I decided to find a way to bring all the golden statues on the tops of trophies to the same level, with the smallest of trophies rising high as the tallest. The next day I returned to buy the trophies and over the course of the next year and a half collected, planned, and assembled Second to None.

BB: We can guess you might have trolled eBay and local thrift stores, but did you have any unexpected encounters on this trophy hunt via Craigslist or some other source? I’m picturing some middle-aged ex-motocross dude who is finally parting with his old trophies he has kept displayed in his garage. Maybe this is part of the power of the work – thinking of accomplished childhood dreams turned into passé objects occupying valuable space. What do you think about this?

RR: I look at the collection of trophies as the crystalline materialization of practice, passion, and dedication. A trophy is both a bi-product and a means to an end. They are the treasure at the end of a voyage and a symbol of the love for the journey. Once I bought the bulk of trophies from Junk Shop 3D it became easier to procure them. The collection had its own gravity and soon without me trying friends and family were giving me their old trophies.

"The Queen's Reign"

BB: Furthermore, did you play sports growing up and receive any trophies in your childhood? I’m wondering if nostalgia is involved personally for you in the creation of this work. The final work seems like a clean slate. The personalization is gone and now we are all after the one “big fish.” It also made me think of collectors “trophy hunting” through the galleries.

RR: When I was a kid I really wanted to win trophies and although I didn’t play many sports. When I saw all the trophies on the shelf at Junk Shop 3D the same part of my psyche that was attracted to trophies as a child was activated as an adult. I consider the sculpture a celebration of the trophies themselves, their design, their form, and the logic and language of the world of trophies. The sculpture becomes an armature onto which we can project countless stories of triumph and accomplishment.

BB: Let’s stay with Second to None and dissect your process once more. Did you go through several ideas of how to use the trophies before settling on the winner? If so, can you share to unrealized ideas?

RR: The basic idea for Second to None was a constant, to bring all of the tops of the trophies to the same level. I realized early on I did not want Second to None to include anything outside the material and formal language of the trophies. That meant no plexi-glass, no fishing line, no glue, etc. Instead I used existing means of trophy production, ordering parts from trophy suppliers, to assemble Second to None.

BB: Let’s discuss The Queen’s Reign. What came first – knowing how you wanted to use the earrings or finding the umbrella stand?

RR: On my way home from the studio I spotted the umbrella stand used in The Queens Reign being sold as part of a sidewalk sale, so I pulled over and bought it. Once I got the umbrella stand back to the studio I envisioned it covered with earrings shaped like water drops. I liked to strangeness of the combination of objects and the simplicity of its making, collecting earrings, drilling holes in the umbrella stand and hanging the earrings through the holes.

My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.’- Kodos, Treehouse of Horror VII

But these utopic systems ape dreams of self-reliance, of ‘all ships rising with the tide’, and are instead instantly subsumed into markets of capital and exchange- gusts to gold. The world depicted here has a similar relation to the viewer. Standing in the gallery we feel on stage, or as if the various objects are props to be activated like a toy box, but I think the truth of the matter is less participational. Marsden depicts a universe in which we are sidelined by double-speak and luxury, by a politic which is close-enough or least-of-evils. There are no solutions here, projects of unity and energy are transposed into means of perpetuation, a shadow version of sustainability. Set for an Altered State is a wonderful parting note from an outsider whose vision of this place was welcome, and hopefully will not be gone for long.