Event 2
Toby Huddlestone: Artist Talk
Outhouse, Norwich
07.08.09
Two aspects of Toby’s work interested me in particular. The first was his ongoing series of interventions in front of artworks in galleries, filmed unobtrusively, and in most cases conducted without a live audience. They are published online, and have a secondary audience who can view them as a body of work, rather than one quick incident in a space. He said that these are composed as performances-to-camera, and that shyness plays a part in this decision. I think that the collecting of video becomes the focus of the work, more so than the action itself.
The second aspect was his piece “Walking at the same speed as people”, which was a personal intervention in a busy commuter stretch of pavement. The people he is mirroring presumably experience the work as a slightly uncomfortable few seconds, in a space in which they are forced to behave in a particular way by the architecture.
Events 3 & 4
Richard Long: Heaven and Earth
Tate Britain
Sound Escapes
Space, Mare Street, London
15.08.09
I used to love Richard Long’s work when I was at sixth form because it seemed amazing that you could turn walking and mapping into an art practice. I’d not really revisited his work since then, so it was really interesting to see this retrospective after the intervening ten years. I like his most recent work, which manifests in the gallery space as a colour photograph, overlaid with coloured graphic text, much like a film poster. It is different from his handpainted texts of the 60s and 70s: less about the hand of the artist perhaps? The most interesting piece of the exhibition was actually the room full of his catalogues and artist’s books, because the scale (like notebooks) seems a step closer to the activity of the walks. They also represent a pretty comprehensive collection of approaches to disseminating live practice through text and object, which is something I am considering during this Escalator research period. (It was also full of maps, which are a personal fascination of mine…)
Sound Escapes was a brilliant exhibition: a great balance of proper theory (from both scientists and artists), and great artworks. My favourite was a really simple demonstration of resonance by Dawn Scarfe, inspired by Helmholtz. She developed a new set of ‘listening glasses’ (with a scientific glass-blower), which you picked up with white gloves and placed against your ear: they are calibrated to resonate at specific frequencies, so they help the listener to isolate particular sounds in the room. I particularly enjoyed the delicacy and ritual with which they were handled by the public. Visually, it was presented in a fairly straight historical manner, with typeset booklets in the style of the 1863 publication, and whilst this was appropriate to the concerns of the artist, I could imagine a more contemporary presentation would be just as effective in demonstrating the concept.
