CAFE TROJAN HORSE
a r a r, Patrick Coyle, Lawrence Leaman, Ania
Micinska, Joe Watling and Sayshun Jay
Curated by Shama Khanna
The Gallery, Goldsmiths College, First Floor,
Goldsmiths Student Union, Dixon Road, New
Cross, SE14 6NW
Exhibition open: 10.11.09 – 20.11.09 Monday – Friday 11 – 6pm
Closing Event: Friday 20 November 7 - 8pm
In conversation event with the artists and curator taking the theme of collaboration in art and curatorial practice as a starting point.
Free event – all welcome
How this exhibition came about: (Several conversations, some reading and the installation)
The curator, Khanna, heard another curator, Tirdad Zolghadr ask, ‘whether the art has to come first in a curatorial setting?’.
Lawrence Leaman countered Zolghadr’s question by asking, ‘If the artist accepts that there is a notional cut-off point between making and exhibiting why can’t the curator also accept this? Why can’t this cut-off be the point at which something unexpected happens which couldn’t have been predicted or predicated from the curator’s ivory tower?’.
Out of these discussions Khanna set out to show;
i) How the curatorial setting is always informed by a prior knowledge of the work.
ii) The exchange provoked by this setting is different from the singular experience of the work itself in that there are other practices – of the curator on one hand and the audience members on the other, affecting the work (which are neither neutral or beyond reproach).
Khanna approached some of the artists involved in the show to contribute existing work and others to respond specifically to her comparison of the exhibition to a waiting room – either a passive space or a space where one actively anticipates some sort of metaphorical call to the attention.
In an early email to Patrick Coyle she wonders about, ‘the withheld promise of the exhibition – sustained by the absence of the artist – considering whether art is ever trying to communicate anything, and the approaches if any, artists take to addressing the inherent distance of their work from an audience’.
In response Coyle considered the proximity of The Gallery with the cafe next door, ‘… I like the idea of making the gallery more like the caf? in terms of its function as a ‘passive’ space i.e. of contemplation as opposed to activation.’
In correspondence with Joe Watling, Khanna again evoked the idea that, ‘when you go to an exhibition there is the promise of the artist being there, which is never actually expected to be filled… I’m questioning whether anything unexpected actually ever happens in it to question this assumed denial’.
In their installation ‘Collaborate’ (2008) Watling and Sayshun Jay use computer programming to initiate a playing out of innumerable outcomes to a set of problems, or rather, an infinite number narrative sequences that have yet to be imagined in the real. The joint work was made by the artists separately. From their remote locations they would work within their own specialisms on different aspects of the work. The process was both a solution to working apart and this also became the theme of the work – a model of how they could work together, although apart from one another, and how the combined result of their work could be used as a prototype for other collaborative situations.
To encounter the work is to be mesmerized – the visual projection appears to interact with the sturdy, flat planes of the wooden structure, the levels of attentiveness and paradoxical expansiveness of a mathematical formula seem almost impossible.The more you learn about the possibilities of the work, created to test out the unforeseen, similarly to a Turing machine - to read the unreadable - the less grounded you feel even though you haven’t moved an inch.
The live collaboration group, a r a r, similarly look for the glitch in technology, the loophole which offers an alternative story line – the one that never happened, that could offer that elusive ‘something unexpected’. Their live improvisation was initiated by sound artist Vasco Alvar who creates his own instruments such as the re-tunable Radio Keyboard and cut vinyl records which, as part of a r a r, he mixes with effects units to create loops in the rhythm of the track and feedback. These sounds combine both intuitively and spontaneously with Sam Ayre’s saxaphone
playing and Louie Rice’s light modulations with a solar panel, a light bulb and further effects units.
Ania Micinska’s work ‘Ye Ye Ye (Bande a Part) is a strange homage to a film, where she has erased the actors. Rather than cutting and pasting, in this digital collage she has exhaustively cut the subject of the scene without a replacement; erasing the time, leaving just the space. This reduction leaves an imminence which is loaded with desire, or is it calm – the state of contemplation Coyle was thinking about?
Khanna considers that, instead of film which has been re-appropriated into the mainstream by advertising, instead of sound and even silence which has been commodified as muzac, and instead of the printed media, programming and the internet which can have the effect of standardizing experience, the work here counters the communicative function of this media, complicating the automatic nature of our response. In his text ‘Having an Idea in Cinema’, theorist Gilles Deleuze writes about how, in art and cinema, there is an attempt to communicate an idea, which is inherently different from the communication of an instruction or information. He describes it as a form of resistance to so-called information societies. So if not obeying or mimicking the artwork how can those encountering it continue, or ‘collaborate’ with the line of thought it provokes? And if nothing is provoked, how does this loss of trust, by the viewer as much as the artist, manifest? (How instrumental is art’s exclusion?)
Leaman describes how;
‘When visiting an exhibition we hope for a certain quality of experience. We might hope to be struck by beauty, or to be amused by social commentary… However this anticipation is of a particular kind… based on previous experience – but we hope to be amused anew. When we don’t ‘get’ an exhibition, we might express ourselves by saying nothing has been communicated to me… … I don’t think we expect something to be communicated before the exhibition, but might explain our disappointment in these terms.’
Khanna understands from this that there must be something in the art that we do engage with that generates a curiosity, or necessity even, to do something, or at least to return to see more. She suggests the process of communicating an idea is the work’s unique creative instability. The Zolghadrian ‘conceit’ of the exhibition therefore is to allow space for the work but also to draw attention to the cross-over which operates between them, and the unforeseen effects of the artists and curator working in collaboration multiplying the in-roads and exits out of the work and the exhibition as a whole.
CAFE TROJAN HORSE - Closing Event:
Friday 20 November 7 - 8pm
Free event - all welcome
For further information, please contact Meeshka Bernabe on 079 0895 0041 or email
mig@gold.ac.uk.
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