The latest from marginendeavour - 3 potential Eyesore billboard designs

 Front

 Back

Kelly Richardson - Pillars of Dawn at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland

Kelly Richardson's current exhibition, Pillars of Dawn at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, (NGCA) features a new video animation and a number of large digital prints. The landscapes that Richardson has created are empty with no sign of animals or humans. The trees are formed from thousands of crystals that glisten in the twilight.

As we enter the gallery the invigilator explains how the artist has requested that the gallery be dark, and therefore he will close the door. This is no surprise to me, especially given the content of the work. As I watched the video I was bothered by the fact that I could see two of the digital prints in my peripheral vision. These distracted me, preventing me from devoting my full attention to the video. They also lit up the space and made me conscious of the other people in the gallery. I turned around to find that the invigilator had opened the door again and light was pouring in again. I wanted to feel immersed in the landscape, and yet the clinking of the coffee cups in the cafe and the warmth of the gallery felt too comfortable. Perhaps if there was a gentle breeze of cool air, and with no distractions from noise or light, it would be more engaging.

http://northerngalleryforcontemporaryart.co.uk/kelly-richardson/

WordPower: Language as Medium

I'm excited to announce that I have just ordered a copy of WordPower: Language as Medium, a new two-part publication exploring works by a selection of 100 contemporary artists who implement the direct use of language and the written word in their process. The publication includes a certain Newcastle-based artist, Helen Shaddock!

Reflecting on the shift from representative forms to simplified modes of visual communication, WordPower features practices ranging from socially engaged and participatory approaches to sculptural, conceptual, performative and new media formats.

For more information, and to purchase a copy for yourself, please visit

https://libraryx.org.uk/wordpower-language-as-medium/

Surfaces

Pattern experiment

On Exactitude in Science by Alan Butler at BALTIC as part of Digital Citizen – The Precarious Subject

"This two screen installation is a synchronized presentation of Godfrey Reggio's 1983 experimental film Koyaanisqatsi (1982) & Alan Butler's Koyaanisgtav (2017). Butler’s work uses the virtual worlds within popular video game Grand Theft Auto to create a shot-for-shot remake of Koyaanisqatsi. Featuring renowned music by Philip Glass, the narration-less Koyaanisqatsi presents a visual essay in slow-motion and time-lapse of the many cities and natural landscapes across the United States of America."

Koyaanisqatsi is a truly mesmorising film and Butler has enhanced this by creating a virtual remake of the entire film. It was only after a while that I realised that the film on the right was digitally created as opposed to being real life footage. The editing is seamless, and the attention to detail is faultless.

http://baltic.art/whats-on/exhibitions/alan-butler-in-conversation-with-alessandro-vincentelli

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings

Historian of emotions Professor Thomas Dixon explains how looking to the past can help us understand our feelings in the present.

Many of us still remember the images of Paul Gascoigne crying at the 1990 World Cup, Mrs Thatcher’s red eyes on leaving Downing Street, and the national mourning for Princess Diana. Over twenty years later, the tide of tears shows no sign of receding. From public inquiries to primetime TV, the Premier League to Prime Minister’s Questions, emotions seem to be everywhere in public life. With a cool head and some much-needed historical perspective, Professor Thomas Dixon opens the Free Thinking festival 2019 by showing that our emotions themselves have a history.

In recent decades, some scientists have claimed there are just five or six ‘basic emotions’, but the category of ‘emotions’ did not exist until the nineteenth century, and history reveals a much richer picture of passions, affections, and sentiments. Ranging from revolutionary feelings and the sentimental tales of Charles Dickens to the poetic rage of Audre Lorde, Thomas Dixon paints a historical panorama of emotions and ends by asking what we can learn from our ancestors about the value of stoical restraint. The lecture will be followed by an interview conducted by Matthew Sweet and questions from the Free Thinking Festival audience at Sage Gateshead.

Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions, the first of its kind in the UK. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003rsw

The latest marginendeavour collage experiment

Start the Week - Emotions at the Free Thinking Festival, Sage, Gateshead

At the weekend Sage, Gateshead was host to the Free Thinking Festival, which this year, was focused on emotions. This week's BBC Radio 4 Start the Week programme, presented by Tom Sutcliffe, explores the art and science of communication. 

The American diplomat William J Burns played a central role in American foreign policy from the end of the Cold War to the collapse of relations with Putin’s Russian, including secret talks with Iran. He explores the language of diplomacy.

Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She reflects on how as a teenager she stopped speaking for almost a year. In her book Unspeakable she considers the power of silence. Harriet Shawcross talks about how, when one does not speak about emotions, one begins to have a muted emotional experience. Speech makes the experience emotional. When writing a text message or an email, there is a lot of control, forethought and there is no room for spontaneity. She writes about ways to use speech as a cure to selective mutism. She discusses her experience of volunteering for the Samaritans and how volunteers are trained to not respond immediately (somewhat against the trend in social media), but sit with what is being said, not offering solutions, but trying to go alongside someone into the dark places that normal conversations do not normally go. It does not close down the emotion or dismiss it, but acknowledges that it is there and the person is guided through dealing with the emotion. 

The musician and composer Kathryn Tickell roots her work in in the landscape and people of Northumbria. She is the foremost exponent of the Northumbrian pipes, and tells the story of Northumbria with - and without - words.

Thomas Dixon studies emotional outbursts as the director of the Centre for the History of Emotions. He unveils the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of anger and weeping. He talks about the importance of distinguishing between passions that may be troublesome violent and evil and affections that may be gentle and virtuous. We dont need more anger. There seems to be a change in how society judges the actions that we take in a given set of circumstances to what we feel in a given set of circumstances. Whereas we used to judge people on what they did, with the rise of social media we are tending to see the constant re-representation of feelings which might be miles away from any actual feelings. By talking about anger are politicians legitimising anger? 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003t9g

The latest marginendeavour collage development

My brain is turning to mush

Making Art with Frances Morris: Sophie Calle

I recognise that I like to be in control. I often find it easier to respond to instructions or a set of restrictions than I do to be given complete free-reign. Within my art practice (as well as in life), I often devise my own set of rules to follow. For instance, only use the colour white, fill the entire frame with pattern, only use materials that are edible. 

https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/visual_arts/the_artist_dining_room_sophie_calle_supper_club/7618

It is these tendencies that initially introduced me to the work of Sophie Calle, an artist who is famously controlling and who devises and implements "rules of the game". 'Sophie works with real life experiences we can all relate to – the death of a parent, the end of a relationship. Her work resonates with her preoccupations - death, absence, the mourning of the passing of life. "Growth is a series of mournings."

Calle recently produced an album of songs by 40 international musicians, in memory of her dead cat Souris. There’s Jarvis Cocker, Juliette Armanet, Bono, Michael Stipe to name a few. She’s made work out of her mother dying or her boyfriend ditching her. She’s had a job as a stripper, made a crazy road movie called No Sex Last Night. She's contacted everyone in a lost address book she found on the street. She’s asked people to describe their most exquisite pain, invited strangers to attend the funeral of their secrets. She’s asked museum staff to remember stolen paintings, blind people to describe the most beautiful thing they’ve seen. And although the work seems apparently dry - images and texts, books - it's deeply personal for those involved, and for us - the viewer.

In this BBC Radio 4 programme, Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, meets French artist Sophie Calle in her studio in south west Paris.

Experimental collage

The latest marginendeavour work in progress

Grayson Perry: En Garde

In this episode of Archive on Four (BBC Radio 4) Grayson Perry goes backwards in the archive in search of the moment the avant-garde died.

'It's a century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called Fountain to an exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain was a urinal -- not a painting of a urinal or a sculpture, just a urinal, bought from a Manhattan hardware store and signed R.Mutt.

(c) Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 / Photo (c) Tate

The Society of Independent Artists rejected Duchamp's provocation and the original object was lost. Nowadays Duchamp's urinal is canonised as the fountainhead of conceptual art and the high water (closet) mark of the avant garde. Replicas of the Fountain grace museums around the world - emblems of the avant-garde spirit of experimentation and confrontation. Somewhere in the intervening years though, something changed - contemporary art lost its ability to shock and critique. We're still hopelessly drawn to the idea of art that's 'cutting edge', 'ground-breaking', 'revolutionary'. But is that possible at this point -- haven't we seen it all before?

 
Maybe the death knell was sounded when the Saatchi Gallery opened on the South Bank? Or with the advent of protest and radical chic in the 1960s? Maybe it was when the CIA funded the abstract expressionists? Or when the post-war art market began to reign supreme? Or when the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 1927? Or maybe it was all a matter of style the very moment Duchamp's Fountain was conceived?'

Perry questions whether the avant garde over emphasises the importance of the individual at the expense of valuing the collective.

Can people be accidentally avant garde? One tends to think that people have somehow made a set of conscious decisions to 'break the mould' and do something groundbreaking, but quite often they have simply done something that they find interesting and have not considered the notion of the avant garde. 

This episode features Brian Eno, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nnenna Okore, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Thornton.

Producer: Martin Williams.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090v482

Another wunderful evening with team Wunderbar (and Caitlin Merrett-King)

Glasgow-based artist Caitlin Merritt-King is currently doing a residency at the Newbridge Project in which she is wanting to record a new podcast exploring:

- methods of collaboration

- the political nature of working with friends

- friendship as emotional and feminised labour

- how we exercise care and love within art practice.


The podcast is going to serve as an informal archive that will aim to be a useful tool for experimenting for Newbridge now and in the future.

When I saw the 'Call for Ideas' I thought it could be an opportunity for us to share some of the Great & Tiny War experience. I was not necessarily thinking of it as a podcast just about Great & Tiny War, but more about the experience of all of us working together.

So, I arranged for us to meet (well, as many of us as were available), and we spent the evening talk about collaboration, working together, being friends, being women, caring for each other, caring in the art world, the nature of feminine work, Great and Tiny War, Bobby Baker and so on. Caitlin is going to edit the footage and the podcast will be available online in the near future.

The Occasion Collective - SLOW at Durham Castle

Last Saturday evening I had the pleasure of experiencing SLOW, an immersive live sound performance and promenade held in the majestic grandeur of Durham Castle, hosted by The Occasion Collective (TOC).

"TOC is a curatorial and practice-based artist-led collective which provides artists with the opportunity to exhibit, develop and collaborate.with a focus on engaging new audiences with spectacular and speculative creative practice. TOC champions transdisciplinary collaboration, and creates a much-needed platform for artists of varied disciplines for mutual benefit."

SLOW by Jamie Cook, looks to explore the possibilities of acoustic/electronic collaboration through large-scale, immersive, meditative, promenade performance and installation. Cook’s work often utilises mixed media collaboration, exploring the relationships between art/music/dance/film and how the lines between these practises can be blurred to create new and interesting possibilities.

In response to Cook's work, the history and heritage of Durham Castle and it's surrounding research, TOC artists Bex Harvey, James Pickering and Adam Goodwin displayed a number of audio-visual installations. 

As the musicians played in the Castle's Great Hall, the complex, poly-rhythmic, surround-sound textures created were channelled throughout the winding stairs and underground chapel and a number of other hidden locations within the Castle grounds. The Castle came alive and there was a really special vibe as people bustled round trying to find all that was to be seen. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and was not expecting for it to be as extensive as it was. The only slight downsides were that it was very difficult to hear the audio from the videos as the audio from the Great Hall was so well circulated throughout the entire Castle. 

My other mildly critical comment would be that it would have been useful to know how many video works or other artworks there were to find. A map would have guided us round, but I appreciate that the artists may have wanted for things to be less obvious and add to the sense of discovery as one wanders around.

SLOW - Composed by Jamie Cook

Performed by

Jamie Cook (electronics)

Will Hammond (vibraphone)

Merle Harbron (fiddle)

Ceitidh Macleod (cello)

Adam Sams (bass clarinet)










https://youtu.be/YSlu5WpGZJQ

The latest marginendeavour work in progress

Mark Bradford - Los Moscos

Mark Bradford
Los Moscos 2004
Mixed media on canvas

I am blown away by the intensity of this work, and am attracted to the complexity of the surface. There is so much depth and detail, and I could look at it for hours. I am paying particular attention to the composition and the colours, and am considering such things in relation to the experiments that marginendeavour have been doing with our collage work.

This large-scale collage includes materials found by the artist on the streets around his studio in Los Angeles, USA. Visually suggestive of aerial maps of sprawling, urban areas, the collage is constructed entirely from paper fragments which, the artist believes, 'act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of paper and it's like reading the the streets through the signs'. The work takes its title from a derogatory slang term for migrant day labourers in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting the artist's long-standing interest in the sub-cultures of the inner city.

Attempting to draw the feeling in my abdomen

The beginning of the next work by marginendeavour

Art of listening

Listening is central to projects such as Great and Tiny War and My quest to find a shaddock, and it is a skill that I have been made aware of more recently. It seems that it is a difficult skill to develop and one that perhaps is becoming less so as we become more reliant on technology.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/art-of-listening-bbc-listening-project?fbclid=IwAR0NJt0DoJbYSBPTKqsn1VbOjkSgkRK3Qqy-LBczIxSz3O6u5DQcod3YWgc

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/25/how-to-be-a-good-listener-the-experts-guide

Ongoing studio experiments

The latest from margin endeavour - spot the difference

Boustrophedon style writing

Just came across an article about boustrophedon style writing, and think it will be interesting in relation to the work I am doing for an exhibition in a barn on the outskirts of Hexham.  

'Boustrophedon means something like "as the ox turns."  Today we write in stoichedon style, in which all the letters face the same direction, like soldiers standing in formation.  Boustrophedon is based on an agricultural, not a military ideal:the writer writes as a farmer plows.  Write to the end of the line, and then, rather than returning to the left side of the page, turn the letters to face the opposite direction and write from right to left.  When you read boustrophedon, your eye follows a zig-zag across the page -- or the stone.

Have a look at this close-up of the engraving at Gortys and look at the way letters like "E," "K," and "S" face in adjacent lines:

https://slowperc.blogspot.com/2013/01/writing-law-and-memory-in-ancient-gortyn.html

Penelope by Anthony Howell

I have been listening to the Heroine episode of Words and Music on BBC Radio 3, 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0b5sz5m

and the following poem grabbed my attention

PENELOPE

To do what you undid
The night before
To undo what you did
The day before

To undo what you undid
Again the next night
To do what you did
As you do the next day

Only to undo it again
Just as you did
The night before
In order to do it again

Just as you did
The day before
The day before
Just as you did

In order to do it again
The night before
Just as you did
Only to undo it again

As you do the next day
To do what you did
Again the next night
To undo what you undid

Anthony Howell

It will take me some time to get my head around this poem, but it is reminding me of the act of compensation; how one may do something one day in order to compensate for the day before. For instance, "I needed to have a lie in this morning because yesterday I did not get a good night's sleep." This act of compensation could then lead to other compensatory behaviour being necessary. And so the cycle continues in a perpetual manner.

Ongoing studio experiments

Ongoing studio experiments

marginendeavour work in progress

The background of this artwork is made up of a collage of different samples of white that have been cut out from magazines. It is when the samples are displayed close together in such a manner that one recognises the variations in tones.

Ongoing studio experiments

Inverted lined paper