- Venue
- Various
- Location
Elsewhere, as part of collective Crowd6, an artist called Steve Varndell presented works made out of a pre-occupation with esoteric numerical systems: digitally reworked paintings of monarchs, benches to look at them on, and also a page in a magazine warning that in the future colours ‘will be described using the Hexadecimal RGB system.’ The line seemed to be that counting in alternate ways to the decimal on which everything operates might have world-changing consequences; I couldn’t see that this was born out in the works, but they did suggest questions of mathematical ‘truth’ and its emancipatory / repressive potentials, the subtle relationships of digitization and subjectivity.
An even greater obsession with the quantifiable, or quantifiable effort, ran through two works by Jamie Randall. These were Pollock’s Summertime: Number 9A rendered exactly, at one-to-one scale, in thread and a recreation of the ‘All work and no play…’ scene from The Shining, with desk, type writer and an inch-high pile of paper, making us wonder if every page is covered in the sentence. Another artist in the same exhibition, Elizabeth Short, had also re-imagined scenes from films: a pair of big glasses based on those sneezed onto in Inner Space (wouldn’t they be even bigger, vast actually, seen from the perspective of a cell-sized viewer?); and a re-worked hoarding from Blade Runner. A separate room had been installed by Naomi Bulmer with a projection of silhouetted mechanical activity, insinuating previous uses of the building, into which opening-night attendees were thrown as wine-glass holding silhouettes.
The group thus worked on a conceptualism which was cohesive but in a way too stable; and while the works were enjoyable and effective their conceptual moves were well-tried: material against content, the withheld, and so on. I will be checking their website – www.crowd6.org.uk – to see if their practices develop a level of risk to match their clearly demonstrated abilities.
Opportunities for unresolved experimentation which may have been missed by these emergent artists were taken up by the more experienced members of a.a.s, who had devised a project called The Family, which seemed to parody secular self-improvement cults. As reception meant participation – staying in a youth hostel with them and flaneuring together – which I didn’t have the chance to, I can’t pass criticism of it, but it looked very interesting and the blog – http://family.404corporate.net/ – is great.
Another project that was not pre- or over-determined was that of Alex Lockett and Ian England, who had been commissioned to build a pigeon loft in a bit of empty scrubland and train 20 homing pigeons for racing. A pamphlet published with The Event by [inertspace] gave the terminology and a project diary that described training with the local fanciers, first flights, caring for the birds and so on. It also gave an account of Pictorial, an event where the pigeons delivered artworks; but in a way this was not needed – their practice as artists / pigeon fanciers was much more provocative, making metaphors and associations with art-making and the institutions of art – the esoteric terminology, obsessive behaviour, types of consciousness employed in practice – beyond their stated interests in modes of communication and collaboration with marginal groups. For me, besides John Hammersly’s contribution, Project Pigeon was the highlight of The Event (even though my engagement was limited to seeing the birds being ‘liberated’ and reading the pamphlet) because it ‘showed itself by itself’, formulating a criticality without prescribed resolution.
After pigeon fancying there came Morris Dancers, which were employed by Mark Essen to dance at the launch night of The Event. To complete the schema, men in sheep-skin coats gave a running, horse race-style commentary on the attendees. Thus having said that The Event was effectively conceptless aside from its ‘art first’ emphasis, we can draw out one strand: traditional and obscure non-art leisure practices appropriated in order to reflect on art, the parochial made critical.
The commentators, who were actors from the theatre group Stan’s Café, quite effectively defamiliarised the goings-on and foregrounded the superficiality typical of these kind of events (they should have been at Frieze). And while the pigeon project seemed to operate earnestly on its own terms, it did feel as if the Morris men were being slightly patronized. Maybe it was just me: the crowd enjoyed the dancing, and there was a mesmeric systems approach to be read into their intricately permutational moves. In fact – this may have been Essen’s intention – the Morris men and their dancing could be seen – if they weren’t being patronised – as standing for the best of The Event itself: a lot of good will, concerted organization, doing your own thing, and not caring what other people think.
(1) according to the website – http://www.artsheffield.org.uk/as08/index.html
(2) from Politics of Installation – http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/31
(3) in his Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)
(4) according to the press release – http://the-event.org/projects/mona-casey/