Pipilotti Rist

View of work installed at Hayward Gallery

I can't say enough good things about this exhibition, it was ethereal beautiful and relaxing but also gruesome humorous and humbling.
I was enthralled by a piece called "Suburban brain" which included a tiny replica of a typical suburban house with working lights in the windows that flicked on and off like a home. I just kept watching the orange curtains light up and throw hazy beams out onto the pristine back garden, thinking of the Sims computer game and getting pangs of nostalgia.




"Selfless In The Bath Of Lava" (still shown above) really made me think about problems with my own work and made me a little bit angry too (at myself) because it reminded me of an epiphany I had a few years ago after finding a tiny shard of glass on the floor with my entire kitchen reflected in it. At the time and since then I've only applied what I learned to my painting work and I'm still doing this terrible pigeonholing with most things that I acquire. It's strange how you can think you're suddenly aware of so much and yet still not grasp the full potential of that knowledge.

The exhibition as a whole was strange for me because it had a commanding presence but it was commanding you to be free, to stop acting with normal gallery etiquette. Her individual projections communicate visceral body awareness in their specific content but it is the delivery of them that actually asks, if not forces you to try and recognize that your body is always active and present.

"Selfless In The Bath Of Lava" which you have to crouch to see and "I'm not the girl" where you have to stick your head in a box brings your mind back to your body's exterior actions while the giant mirror screen lounge room displaying "Lobe of the Lung" (which was like a REALLY long shoegaze music video from the 90s) brings your awareness to the passive movement and energy inside the body.

Collaborative installation/performance with Laura Gardner

Using a device of temptation (the cupcake) we wanted to investigate human behaviour in the context of morality and like previous work, etiquette.

We baked and decorated cupcakes and left them completely unattended and unsignposted on a table where we knew a lot of people would traffic between studios while we filmed from a secret position. We also placed a sound recording device under the table to catch the conversation of anyone approaching the cakes.

Our cakes pre-experiment

Every cake from the plate was eventually stolen and this was not the expected outcome for me. I expected people to be much more timid, I expected the amount (if not more) of attention the cakes received but that only one or two people would be audacious enough to take them.

Now that I’m thinking of these as more of scientific or psychological experiments there are more possibilities for the work, particularly it’s final presentation. Should we be drawing up estimated outcomes, should we be documenting more precise predictions than the speculative conversations during a tea break?

Could mock calculations and hypotheses be presented in a more whimsical state?

This piece really tested ourselves and was most importantly about helping to refine the methods we use to perform and install. Technically there were issues with this experiment and some documentation was lost.

Something that is still intriguing me at this thing, this activity, is that I’m not really sure what to call it because while our previous work was easy to label performance today’s “experiment” is difficult to describe. In a sense it seemed like the cakes were the performers and in baking them we embodied in the tray of cakes part of ourselves, or the characters we needed them to play in our theatre.

Also the concept of the cupcakes themselves is interesting to me at the moment. After reading the article in this months Artist Review “Consider the cupcake..” I’m thinking more about how the cupcake has become some kind of cultural icon, that if we used some less popular type of cake there would have been less temptation. A lot of people would agree that apple crumble is far more delicious than a cupcake but the cupcake has become more of a visual icon, very often cupcakes are decorated in a way that makes them look inedible (in fact two people were discussing over our cakes whether they were real or not). It’s beginning to have the presence of some kind of fashion accessory, that being seen eating a cupcake is very trendy compared to eating for example a flapjack.

Ann Voelke

"Take a nap" 2005

Just discovered the work of this German artist,

"who creates mixed-media paintings with a penchant for bright colors, geometric shapes, and street-art forms. My work explores the relationship between cultural plurality and a recycling of pop-culture, by layering different motifs from Science Fiction film stills and quotations from an art historical background, like Symbolism and color-field paintings"

from an online interview.

The composition of her paintings are testing the dimensions of the stretched canvas in a way that really interests me. The perspective created by the spray paint over well rendered oil gives me the feeling of distortion in memory that I'm trying to convey in my work.

Family dinner today....

became a heated debate about contemporary art when everyone began disregarding Tracy Emin's work as "crap".

Tracy Emin: Love is what you want

Went to see this exhibition today. It was perhaps the most crowded exhibition I've ever been to, especially considering the show has been open for three months.

Her famous embroidered blankets were the first pieces on display and it made me feel like they were items to be "gotten out of the way", as if people should see her most known work and not be distracted by the thought of wanting to see it later.
I suppose I think about retrospective type exhibitions in the same way as I regard the back of dvd cases for films you have never seen before. You see the screenshots and then you're filled with the anticipation of recognising the shots within the film. I think the same of knowing that famous pieces of artwork is in a show. Of course you want to see them, even if you know in general what they look like and have an idea of their meaning, because you need to confirm that they exist in some way.

My favorite pieces were some small paintings. I have always regarded Tracy Emins work as something great and insightful but the grace of her paintings surprised me a lot. They didn't have the hard visceral elements that her other work does. One painting looked to me like a woman lying with the back of a cat in the foreground. If I were very rich I would inquire about purchasing it so that I could look at it all day. It probably wasn't even a cat but that's why I liked it.

Although Tracy Emin is one of the most well respected contemporary artists in the world, a large portion of the general public seem to really disregard her work. I really hope that a lot of people who don't like her well known work went to see this show and maybe they would understand a bit more like I did.

I looked at a lot of the exhibition before watching the film she made about her traumatic abortion. Then all of the work was different and it wouldn't be the same again. It did horrify me and I was still horrified on the train.

The Age of Reason being the book I'm currently reading is a strange coincidence.

Running a creative workshop....

......is a bit different from what I imagined. Possibly because my vision of failure was that I would be inundated with people (inundated meaning dealing with more than 4 people that I never before met in my life). That my direction in the activities would be weak and HORDES of people would be bored and leave.
The reality of the failure (if it was a failure) is that no people (well there were 2) turned up for me to be scared of disappointing. But I'm not sure it was a failure entirely, of course it wasn't the kind of exciting energetic experience that changes people's entire outlook on life, which was obviously what every artist/teacher hopes to achieve by collaborating with people. However I did learn that I have quite a narrow view on what will be a successful art activity, which is possibly fed from the years spent in art institutions hanging around with other artists.
I've come to the conclusion that we artists are actually really easily entertained. I mean being presented with a huge room with a few plug sockets that is entirely devoid of furniture is pretty much birthday/christmas/new year in one for artists.
It was pretty stupid to assume that people would be as easily interested in creative workshops without persuading.

Some friends helping with setup

My extremely popular (NOT) workshop. Oh well live and learn I guess!

Curating experience

Some of my paintings hanging in the space

Before

After

This week I've been working on something called "The Big Empty Shop Experiment" with a group of people in Cardiff.
We've taken a space that's used as a halloween/christmas decoration shop in the winter and turned it into a gallery space running art cinema screenings, a swapshop and creative workshops.

Its involved a LOT of cleaning and just general tidying to make the space hospitable for artwork and the general public but my main job has been curating and hanging the work of local artists, most of whom are students.

I've never really enjoyed the actual hanging of an exhibition as much as I have this week, its been busy but not frantic which is what setting up in past exhibitions has been like. I think it's a combination of
1. Having to make decisions without consultation.
2. Being part of a REALLY good team.

It's strange though, because while I've been in curatorial mode I'm constantly looking at pieces of work but I'm not seeing them as I would normally. I'm surveying them more, I'm seeing them as dimensions and colour. I'm looking intently for relationship of form between the pieces and between the environment. Never thought I would say this but I love curating and hanging!