Oliver Laric - Versions (2009)

Screen shot from Versions 2009,

Four Channel Video, 6.25

Starting in 2009 Versions by Oliver Laric is a series of three video works presenting a body of research on appropriation, the remix and the hybrid. Comprised of theoretical, thematic and aesthetic links between otherwise disparate subjects, Laric uses the dialogue in the films to describe notions of authenticity in relation to the image. 

The 2009 video starts with a widely broadcasted image published by an Iranian revolutionary group in 2008 (see above). Later proved to be a fake, the image then became the source of mass manipulation by anonymous authors and published widely online. Laric uses this example alongside others to explore historical and contemporary ideas of image hierarchies. 

In tune with Larics repeated interests on ideas of permanence, value and semblance, these works also express the problematized relationship between media and simulation. Although not a new topic, Larics work suggests that our perceptions of this has been warped further by our ability to equally produce as well as consume imagery online.

A video of the work can be found here.

Harun Farocki - War At A Distance

Harun Farocki War At A Distance

2003

(video, 54 mins, still)

German filmmaker and video-installation artist Harun Farocki's War at a Distance is an experimental film that examines the role of images in contemporary warfare and industry. Farocki's style is often meditative and slow, its power lies in subtly leading towards conclusions without explicitly taking a position. 

Here the artist traces lines that link the production of modern day industry to the destruction of modern day warfare via a consideration of automation and a removal of direct human engagement. The picture of global economics that he paints is a complex and multi-faceted one where the by-products of war enter into circulation in consumer markets.

The film examines the history of missile-guidance systems from the Second World War onwards. Farocki's ongoing engagement with questions around the power, function and potential of the image focusses in on the increasing lack of distinction between CGI and real-life footage. He traces this back to the early 90s and the news coverage of the Gulf War noting a shift between moving image as fact or record to it's newer role as a productive force in its own right.

Central to Farocki's project is a consideration of different types of image production; in particular a fascination with images that are made for mechanical eyes rather than those of humans. 

View a short clip here.

Josephine Meckseper - Cobra

Josephine Meckseper - Cobra, 2012

Meckseper's work idealizes political and economic positions by appropriating both consumerist and revolutionary tropes. Slick presentation of ready-made objects and commodities act as symbols of a ruthless capitalist economy.

Regularly focusing on war and the oil industry in the US, Meckseper's film 0% Down refers explicitly to the militaristic advertising rhetoric and crude sales tactics used by the automobile industry to sell high performance cars. Mecksepers work presents itself as highly commodified polished objects, however it also acts to subvert the consumerist agenda often at stake with many art practices.

"The work equally reflects the role of the artist in our current consumer society. How does one reconcile the symbolic and the monetary value of cultural production? How does one make visible real economic and political realities without just mimicking them? Is there really still a subculture or subversiveness in art? This is the narrative behind the recent display sculptures" - Josephine Meckseper

Viper, 2009

Hannah Sawtell - Vendor

Hannah Sawtell Vendor

2012
Installation view, Bloomberg SPACE, London

Hannah Sawtell's Vendor, currently on display at Bloomberg SPACE, London, is one half of a 2-part exhibition completed after the artist's residency in the financial forecaster's office spaces. Paired with Osculator at London's ICA, this part of the coupled work consists of an installation of images culled from the internet displayed in purpose-built units which sit in between being sculptures in their own right, or stands for the display of the images they house.

This slick inventory of images, each mounted with a clinical precision in trade-show-display-styled structures on plates of toughened glass reminiscent of screens, relate different digitally rendered 'surfaces' and other found or appropriated 'contemporary material'. Sawtell sets up a slippage between the sensory and the virtual, a conflation of our senses of sight and touch.

Mirroring the experiencing of web-browsing through its dizzying force-feed of seemingly un-related, disparate imagery, Sawtell disrupts the relation of 2- and 3-dimensional disrupting our reading of these flat surfaces by presenting them in space. We have a sense  sense of a fleeting engagement with a mass of information. The work reflects and reflects upon the circulation of data and imagery in the contemporary digital age.

Vendor is on display at Bloomberg SPACE, London, until January 12th 2013.

Seth Price - Business Envelopes, Gifts, Twine

Seth Price - Business Envelopes, Gifts, Twine

2008 - present

Seth Price's work spans text, video, sculpture and sound. He has become internationally known for his conceptual works revolving around ideas of appropriation, and the circulation of materials and information around the world.

'Business Envelopes, Gifts, Twine' are a series of images of envelopes or packages wrapped up with twine printed onto protective 'safety' film mounted on reflective acrylic sheets.  Price's work engages with strategies of recirculation, packaging and dispersion to make us consider issues of material and cultural production. As the 'Business Envelopes, Gifts, Twine'  works are displayed their printed surface slowly peals off. Only 'opening' after the exhibition has hosted its Private View the work begins to corrupt itself presumably hinting at the inevitable detritus of commodity culture.

Alighiero Boetti - Dossier Postale

Alighiero Boetti Dossier Postale (Postal Dossier)

1969–70

Alighiero Boetti began making postal works in 1969, marking a departure from his previous involvement with the Atre Povera movement and showing a new interest in systems and chance operations.

For Viaggi Postali (Postal Voyages) 25 friends, co-workers or family members were selected. The artist sent envelopes addressed to his 'travellers', knowing they would be returned as undeliverable. Boetti photocopied the returned mail, placed it into a new envelope and sent it on its next journey. These photocopies were gathered together and systematically ordered in the Dossier Postale (Postal Dossier). 

Imaginary journeys were drawn up for his addressees; Boetti would send the gallerist Leo Castelli on a tour or Morocco's grandest hotels, his colleague, the artist Giulio Paolini, would be sent to every address Boetti had ever lived in. Other 'recipients' included Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Lucy Lippard and Seth Siegelaub.

 Each envelope contains the entire journey, though it is invisible to the viewer. 19 of the original 25 'journeys' were completed, with 6 not returned.

Eugenio Dittborn - To Return (RTM) Airmail Painting

Eugenio Dittborn, To Return (RTM) Airmail Painting No. 103, 1993


Born in Chile in 1943, Dittborn based much of his work on the critical examination of the marginal position of his home country in relation to wider international developments.

He adopted photography as a means to document his surroundings and combined this with excerpts found in books and newspapers. The paintings are made using traditional craft based skills such as stitching and screen printing onto thin folded sections of cheap non-woven fabric. Since their production in the early 80's, the Airmail Paintings have constantly been on the move;  the large panels are neatly folded into cardboard envelopes and are sent by post to the gallery they will be shown in. 

"These itinerant artworks collect meanings like souvenirs, as they journey from place to place, across borders, over time. Made, in part, in response to Santiago's place at the periphery of the international art scene and partly to circumvent the oppressive and regimented structures of Chile's military government, (as well as to reflect previous periods of colonization and repression) these mobile visual messages are free to go anywhere and initiate an evolving dialogue with their global audience." 



"The Airmail Paintings were conceived for at least two specific sites; that of the sender and that of the receiver, as well as for breaking/producing the distance between the two." Eugenio Dittborn.




Eugenio Dittborn, To Travel (RTM) Airmail Painting No. 76, 1990

Janek Schaefer - Recorded Delivery

Janek Schaefer Recorded Delivery 
1995

In 1995 Janek Schaefer packaged up a voice activated Dictaphone and posted it to the venue of  the group show 'Self Storage', organised by Art Angel, curated by Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson. The resulting work is a recording of loudest (or 'most sonically interesting') 72 minutes of the parcel's 15 hour journey to Acorn Self-Storage in Wembley. Predominantly comprised of the incidental clatters, rustles and bangs of a parcel passing through the postal system, the piece is interspersed with snippets of music and conversation, plus some bawdy back-room banter from some postal workers. The work is a succinct  self-contained document of its own creation; a composition set into motion by the artist's act of defining its parameters.

Walead Beshty - Fedex Sculptures

Walead Beshty - Fedex Sculptures

2005 - present

Beshty's 'Fedex Sculptures' are a series of cubes made from shatterproof glass to fit the exact interior dimensions of a standard Fedex box. Each occasion the work is exhibited it is posted to the gallery using the international postal service instead of professional art couriers. As the work gets moved from Beshty's studio to the gallery and back it enevitably gets damaged en route by its handeling.

The Fedex box's precise dimensions are patented and have been described as 'a corporately owned unit of space'. As these specified unit's travel through the 'non-places' and voids of international airspace they accumulate cracks and scratches which act as a trace of the objects transit. A critical glance at the customary systems of art production and distribution, the works not only act as material representations of the processes involved in their transportation, but the number of impacts and cracks on the sculptures  add their creation as much as their destruction. 

Gustav Metzger - Auto-destructive Art

Documentary portrait of Gustav Metzger at Regent Street Polytechnic, 1965
Directed by H. Liversidge

Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.

Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.

Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological techniques.

The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception.

The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.

Self-destructive art can be machine produced and factory assembled.

Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a life time varying from a few moments to twenty years. When the disintegrative process is complete the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped. 

Gustav Metzger Auto-Destructive Art (1959)

Gustav Metzger painting with hydrochloric 
acid on nylon. South Bank, London, 1961/1966.

In 1959 Gustav Metzger began spraying hydrochloric acid onto sheets of nylon as an 'auto-destructive' artistic act. These 'paintings' often lasted only a few seconds, creating rapidly-changing holes in the material which disintegrated under the effects of the acid, before totally disintegrating. After the works were completed the supports and remnants were scrapped.


The term Auto-Destructive Art was coined by him around this time and cemented in an article of 1962 entitled Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art, in the art journal Ark. Initially conceived as act of protest against nuclear weapons, the artistic direction proved highly productive for him and led to him produced numerous works in this fashion as well as well as later works that were simultaneously Auto-Destructive and Auto-Creative, an example being his Liquid Crystal Light Projections that create a new form through the destruction of a previous one.

Liquid Crystal Light Environment 1998 - 1999

Max Ruf - Boomerang (1-3)

Max Ruf - Boomerang '2'

Acetone, bleach, floor stripper on archival print, aluminium frame, 2012

Born in Germany 1982, Ruf's work explores ambiguous manifestations of narrative and recent histories via an images' relationship to its materialistic entropy. 

Boomerang is a series of 'paintings' made from photographs of arial landscapes taken by his father whilst pursuing his hobby of balloon riding. Utilised as a readymade, Ruf investigates the materiality of his fathers photographs by painting over the images with a series of toxic substances such as Acetone, bleach and 'floor stripper'. Ruf's act of 'painting' dissolves the pigments of the prints, erasing the photographic resolution to a wash of abstract marks and consequently the objects connection to its past.

The re-surfacing effect of the toxic substances on the surface of the photographs creates images of a different sort of topology; Perhaps one that is further removed, alien and ambiguous: There is a suggestion of strain on the faculties of memory and history as the abstract forms become reminiscent of systems found in macrocosmic images. Encased back into their original frames the Boomerang paintings further propose the reliance on display and presentation that both images and concepts such as narrative have. 

Ruf's work is currently on show at Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Cooperas Hill Building, Liverpool until 25th November 2012. and ICA London,  27th November - 14th January 2013

Amikam Toren - Armchair Paintings

Amikam Toren Armchair Painting - Untitled (inner beauty)

2008

 ‘What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter ... like a comforting influence, a mental balm – something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue’.

 Henri Matisse

Armchair Painting - Untitled (who needs 
actions when you got words) 2006  

Armchair Paintings is an ongoing series of works by Israeli/British artist Amikam Toren. 

Toren, who has been producing these works since 1989, sources original oil paintings from markets, car boot sales or second hand shops and lives with the work until he happens upon a suitable phrase to insert. The stencilled lettering is cut away from the canvas in a process of erasure rather than addition, spelling out appropriated phrases from graffiti, leaflets or signage. 

Sometimes uncanny, sometimes offensive, sometimes funny, the texts are always incongruous with the images behind them. Cutting through the image's focal point they are often somewhat confusing in a manner that one can imagine would please Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. This clashing of one world of banality with another lends a both the image and the text a strangeness that neither would have on its own. The works are funny at the same time as giving a knowing nod to their artistic precedents - Duchamp's readymades, Fontana's slashed canvases, the aforementioned Surrealists' play with mis-married words and images. 

The Matisse quote Toren references in the series' title is easily read as a defense, or even a call, for sappy leisure painting devoid of the kind any avant garde agenda or politics; it is worth noting that this was written in 1908 - a time when Matisse was widely derided and ridiculed by his artistic milieux for his radicality. The decorative and the avant garde are both present in these works, as is a questioning of the role of art in everyday life.

Armchair Painting - Untitled 2001

Armchair Painting - Untitled 1990

Richard Stone - Mono & The Day Will Come

Richard Stone - Mono & The Day Will Come,

Antique oil on board, antique parian porcelain, wax 

Appropriating found paintings and sculptures Richard Stone reclaims potentially kitsch artifacts and reworks them through simple processes of abstraction. The classical reference points of the figure and landscape are intangibly out of reach as Stone's investment in these objects has submerged their otherwise tawdry relations with a sense of absence and metamorphosis.

Either by adding wax to porcelain figures or removing paint from antique oil paintings, Stone's emphasis seems to be on solitude and enforced amnesia. Overlooked generic landscapes of past years and ideals are abstracted to a point of sublime like contemplation, and the proposed heroism of mass produced classical figurines is annulled. Neither destructive nor iconoclastic Stone's work offers up somber poetic entry points to these past monuments of taste.

Ruth Claxton - Lands End

Ruth Claxton Lands End

2008 - 09

    

Ruth Claxton's Lands End is an evolving body of work presented as a sprawling installation of steel structures housing and exhibiting a series of modified porcelain figurines. The structures themselves are nested rings of steel alternately open or filled with chromatic plates or mirrors extending and disrupting the exhibition space. Commissioned by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK and subsequently touring around the UK and beyond, the installation is developed and reconfigured at each outing, responding to the specificities of each site that it visits.

The structures are peopled by kitsch figurines collected by the artist from car boot sales, eBay or junk shops and then modified through interventions that frequently see the heads, faces and eyes of the figures concealed. The blinded, obscured figures present themselves in uncanny tableaux shifting our attention from the grand, visually dense, sculptural complexity of the installation at large to the minute and carefully executed details.

Hadley+Maxwell - Improperties

Hadley & Maxwell - There is plenty of hope, but not for us

2010 - 11, Antique plaster and wooden figures, Chinese wooden lacquer box, styrofoam, wood, screws, bronzing powders, oil and acrylic paint. 

From the body of work Improperties 

Hadley+Maxwell, Who doesnt finger

Hadley+Maxwell's body of work Improperties is a sprawling series of sculptures and installations. Composed of cultural fragments and figurative models, Hadley+Maxwell have sliced the objects and placed them inside museological type displays. Almost as an anthropological section, the cutting of the ojects can be seen as a contemporary translation of past histories and how they are strictly placed in pseudo museological structures. The seemingly violent act also calls to question potential interpretations of these now discarded artifacts

"To cut is to separate, yet cutting also creates the possibility of new, uncommon associations and agglomerations of things beyond familiar properties and modes of classifiable identification." - Patricia Reed, Improper Human-ness

Hadley+Maxwell, Human?

Haris Epaminonda - VOL. VI

Haris Epaminonda VOL. VI 

2010

Installation view

VOL. VI was an installation made for Tate Modern's former Level 2 Gallery space in London by Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda. This sixth part in an ongoing series of Volume works consisted of an array of framed appropriated images taken from anthropology publications - often, but not always, paired - alongside collections of found objects divided by temporary walls in an artfully laid out series of discrete rooms the final of which housed a video. 

The objects have the look and feel of a collection of exotic souvenirs gathered by a colonial explorer: statuettes, carvings, rugs, vessels, utilitarian or decorative. 

Adopting a spare and minimal approach that mimics museological conventions in order to unravel them, Epaminonda's installations bemuse and obfuscate where they should explain, and craft  narrative arcs through the creation of unexpected linkages. The deftly executed juxtapositions generate almost-tangible relationships through their exposure of similarity and difference in the found content. The origins of her objects remain hidden.

Cyprien Gaillard - Floods of the Old and New World

Cyprien Gaillard - Floods of the Old and New World, 2011

This series of works by Paris born artist Cyprien Gaillard is a collection of postcards and snapshot photographs collaged together with labels taken from beer bottles. 'Floods of the Old and New World', combines a selection of Gaillard's personal photographs of a diverse range of urban locations,  with old postcards of 'exotic' or ancient cultures. 

Illustrating the fragmentary nature of anthropology, Gaillard's work addresses the touristic tokenism of yesteryear, and its implied connections with a fictional understanding of foreign cultures conbined with the effects of a globalized economy. Almost functioning like a seal, the beer labels show how implicit branding and consumption could be a way of linking notions of the old with the new.

Superflex - Guaraná Power

Superflex Guaraná Power 2003

Cnsored version at the 27th Sao Paulo Biennial, 2006

Identity and design in collaboration with Rasmus Koch and Mikael Schustin

Superflex distribute their censored product
in the grounds outside the  2006 Sao Paulo Biennial

Superflex are a Danish collective whose work often sees them collaborating with designers, businesses and marketing agencies on projects which engage with issues around social, political and economic critique. Working across installation, film, commodity production and socially engaged/relational practices they seek to explore and expand upon art's potenital for affecting social change and thus challenge ideas about its boundaries and limitations. Superflex describe their works as 'tools'.

In 2003, they set up an ongoing project working with a guaraná farmers' cooperative from Maués in Brazil, producing a soft drink called Guaraná Power. The project was a response to the exploitation of Brazillian Guaraná farmers by multinational soft drink manufacturers operating in the area; despite an increase in profits the price paid for their produce was falling. Through setting up a self-organising company the collective helped farmers to resist the pressure to sell their products to large companies for next to nothing. Since then they have established an association called The Power Foundation, coordinating the company's activities and ensuring that farmers receive a decent and fair price for their guarana plus a profit share from sales of the soft drink.

Superflex have been involved in legal disputes around their use of commercial logos and trademarked material on a number of occasions, an interesting example occurred at the 27th Sao Paulo Biennial in 2006; The president of the biennial foundation, Manoel Francisco Píres da Costa censored the project, forbidding the curators from displaying the Guaraná Power soft drink as well as any references to the product. The group responded by self-censoring to an even higher degree than required, removing the name of the product and adding a black strikethrough on all text related to Superflex and their project from the bienniel's published material. 

Superflex's projects are not so easily read as straight forward anti-capitalist/anti-commercial/angi-globalist campaigns, more as excerices exposing and problematizing the economic relations that render current conditions possible.

Kate Owens - Affair at Styles (pink & blue)

Kate Owens - Affair at Styles (pink & blue)

Soft drink, cotton t-shirt, 2008-11

A Tie-dye t-shirt emerging from a grape drink pushes together two distinct sub-cultural references of late 80's fashion and a Jamaican soft drink brand 'Bigga' popularised in London in the 90's. Negotiating the relationship between product and source, natural and artificial Owens work often asks us to reconsider the relationship between objects in the periphery of visual culture and the potential significance these objects may have in contemporary society. The combination of to the potential toxicity of the drink brand and the fashion of the 'peace-and-love' generation results in a seductive colour field with definate roots in painting. 

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