On Isolation ::: Various Artists ::: Room 40

On Isolation ::: Various Artists ::: Room 40

This little release offers up some gems, along the lines / theory / inspiration of disconnection, isolation and solitude in the current climate of media overload.

The cd was provided to conference delegates at the University of Tasmania’ in 2006 to “help awaken a deep imagination and engagement with these matters. The conference, set up as an antidote to dominant discourses of globalism, seamless connectivity and information flows, provided a space to discuss both the despair and enchantments that might be contained within numerous fractured spaces, unknown remaining landscapes and social constellations”.

The cd contains fifteen tracks by notable artists such as Stephen Vitiello, David Toop, Richard Chartier – who also designs the minimal packaging - Sebastien Roux and Robin Rimbaud. There are also artists who I haven’t heard of, one of whom – Dale Lloyd – ( WWW.AND-OAR.ORG/DALELLOYD.HTML ) provides one of the tracks I liked the most, ‘Among The Many’. It’s a collage of field recordings, and musical pieces. On the third or fourth listening I realised that part of the recording I was listening to was the sound of passing cars, in a rather liquid, relaxing type of aesthetic. Beautiful.

www.room40.org

http://www.audioh.com/releases/on_isolation.html

Where has all the birdsong gone? ::: Edwards Lane Gallery, Stoke Newington, N16 (behind Stoke Newington Library, off church street )

this exhibition contains much work.

an awful lot of little birds.



some musical type sculpture that children are allowed to play with, and
other sculptural works, most of them by Kate Bradbury, i think, but somne of them may be by Peter Haslunds partner whose name i am afraid to say i forget.

some embroidered pictures that are pretty stunning.



photography, portraiture and more abstract material, by Peter Haslund.



( www.peterhaslund.com )

and some sculptures by a man called Oliver Sparks, that could be great big sculptures: heres hoping....... they made me think about opacity, but in a mental way, like the possibility of someone being open to you / thinking about you, rather than blanking you out.




i'll try and update this a bit more later on with some more names, but its open saturday 9 to 5 and sunday 1 to 5pm. until the 15th september.



L-R - 1, 2, sorry i couldnt remember your names, 3 Peter Haslund, 4 Kate Bradbury

Finding, Transmitting, Receiving ::: Hannah Collins ::: Black Dog Publishing

This book is introduced by an interesting foreword by Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, which kind of composes and introduces the collection.

It contains photographs documenting the human condition in the current time, alluding and/or referencing the past, present and future: or visualising different kinds of ‘time’, slower more traditional time and newer more technological time, to put it crudely.

‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future is contained in time past.’

T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’.

Sometimes disturbing – the picture ‘Life on Film I 2003’ shows us a car in India in good condition, with a man asleep in front of it: it is unlikely to be his car I think – often showing us the provisional nature of life for much of the population, for example in photographs of gypsy encampments within ‘modern’ cities. That this is juxtaposed with pictures such as ‘In the Course of Time, The Road to Auschwitz, 1995’ is unsettling to say the least. One of the earliest shots from 1986, ‘Thin Protective Coverings’, of cardboard boxes, the staple of homeless dwellings and alluding to other more provisional dwellings, offers up questions of modernism, and how far we’ve progressed. This may be a little clumsy a reading, but I cant help noticing. The focus is wider than this, for example in her beautiful black and white portrait of fans (‘In the Course of Time 2, fans, 1996 ) and ramshackle dwellings topped with many, many television aerials ( True Stories I, 1998 ): it’s like she’s showing us the growth of modernism through contrasting the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, and in the conjunction wondering about how they’ll combine, and develop, which might be a more realistic word for what used to be called progress.

It’s also why Iwona Blazwick might refer to the photographs as being able to ‘be experienced as an image and as a kind of architecture; as two dimensional surface and as sculpture’. As well as being a powerfully visual kind of poetry – for example her close up of three ants on the surface of an inflated balloon (Life for Life, 1990) – the pictures suggest something about the politics of space in terms of the quiet contrast between images of more provisional type dwellings and the more hygienic, defined spaces of modern des-res’s ( Mies Pavilion ) and commercial spaces ( Supermarket (pills) 2004 ). One particularly memorable image is ‘True Stories London ( detail )’, which is of rooftops, showing – I presume – a mosques tower in the foreground with the Natwest tower and the city on the horizon.

http://www.hannahcollins.net/

http://www.blackdogonline.com/art/finding,-transmitting,-receiving.html

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/2007/05/book_hannah_collins_finding_tr.php

Design Anarchy ::: Kalle Lasn ::: Adbusters (inc. DVD)

“As a a child I played in the gaps between buildings, ruins of buildings, fallow land, abandoned industrial areas, gravel pits and sand mines. Formed through misplanning, they were our empire, the empire of children.

Ours was a dirty, unused place, with snakes, lizards, insects of every category and wild vegetation.

Children instinctively understand the language of natural vegetation. They can read it, if only they’re allowed to climb the fence and play undisturbed.

But the city gardeners arrive – the eliminators of mystery, the killers of the empty spaces. They mow, pave and plant in zones where children and teenagers once played.

They pave the paths people may walk upon and prohibit walking upon the grass. The grass is always framed with perfectly composed borders and the flowers are always placed in identical pots of cement.

Naturalness is understood as the annihilation of spontaneity through perfect gardening”.

This book raises the questions of the power of the visual, and the politics of space. Whose space, and whose visuals, and is it a democracy or something less than that. Most networks won’t take advertisements who offer the idea of not consuming anything, or that some of our consumption might be wasteful. The lack of hope, or difficulty in hoping, in design as a left wing activity : now seen as merely the tool of commerce:

“In the struggle between commerce and culture, commerce has triumphed and the war is over” : Milton Glaser.

is covered here in some depth and passion. Essentially the book asks, through a mostly visual language that’s quite provocative at times, important questions about the state of the world today: whether it’s a global state of commerce or whether its possible for it to be other than that, whether all the space has to be owned and regimented commercially. It references alternative ideas and movements, such as larger scale ones like Reclaim the Streets and smaller ones that can be just as effective, such as moving the electricity meters out of the cupboard and into somewhere visible, so that you can see how much the meters spinning when you leave the house, and thus how much energy you’re wasting.

In short a stunning extended visual essay on the perils of global hypercapitalism, possible reactions to this, and an impassioned and at times provocative plea for something else. This does not really do justice to the impact of many of the pictures within the book, ranging from the cut and paste political hits ( ‘cognitive dissonance’ ) to beautiful landscapes.

On a slightly tangential tip, Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin have an exhibition on in Paris, starting on the 8th September and running to the 29th, at the Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard. I include it here as its on a similar theme in some ways, about how the worlds been commercialised. They approach their subject via some eiree oil paintings of landscapes.





http://www.galerierichard.com/

http://adbusters.org/blogs/Communication_Arts_on_Design_Anarchy.html

https://secure.adbusters.org/orders/designanarchy/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalle_Lasn

http://benguiver.blogspot.com/

http://brainwash.robertundhorst.de/uncategorized/guerilla-buzz-virales-marketing-adbusters/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBusters