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London Metropolitan University Degree show 2008, reviewed by Imogen Welch.
Sunday 15 June 2008
Fatalism: 1990 - 1992 (installation views)
Fatalism: 1990 - 1992, installation views, Charlotte Young, 2008
As featured in London Metropolitan University Degree Show 2008
As featured in London Metropolitan University Degree Show 2008
Whitstable Biennale 2008 Press Release
PRESS RELEASE Whitstable Biennale 2008, 21 June to 6 July
Whitstable Biennale 2008 announces winners of major award:
"Let art be the balm that heals society"
says Bob and Roberta Smith one of the judges for the The Whitstable Biennale
2008 Open Submission Award. The selection committee comprised Bob and
Roberta Smith (artist), Sue Jones (Director, Whitstable Biennale) and
Charlotte Cullinan (Cullinan & Richards, artists)
This major award was open to both established and emerging artists living
both in the UK and internationally. There were a massive two hundred and
seventy seven entries with many submissions coming from outside the UK and
applications from as far away as Japan. The recipient(s) of the cash prize
win the opportunity create a new work for the Whitstable Biennale 2008
providing them with huge audiences.
Winners: Oreet Ashery and Mike Chavez-Dawson
Oreet Ashery¹s work tends to be complex and relational, but at the same time
humorous and accessible to a wide variety of audiences and communities.
Frequently Ashery will produce work as a character. Her characters include a
rabbit, a black man, a Norwegian postman, a fat farmer and an Arab man,
among others. Marcus Fisher, an orthodox Jewish man is Ashery¹s most
consistent character.
Oreet Ashery will be creating a new performance work entitled ŒThe Saints of
Whitstable¹. Ashery, The Saint, together with disciples, will set up a study
centre from which to carry out a range of saintly activities over the two
weeks.
Mike Chavez-Dawson is creating a temporary cinema-inspired environment,
designed to play host to a series of performances using the skills of a
local hypnotist and the artist's ability to visualise an entire film from
memory. The work is entitled ŒThe Mind Projected Cinema¹ . Audiences will
be asked to take part, watching Rorschach images from the titles of Peter
Cushing films, and imagining the films into being.
Within easy reach of London, 45mins by car and just over an hour by train,
Whitstable is fast becoming the coolest art event in the UK.
Under the directorship of Sue Jones the event is now recognized
internationally, and is one of the UK's most important platforms for both
established and emerging contemporary artists: Sue Jones says " I encourage
the artists I commission to take risks and this has really paid off. People
are very excited by this year¹s line up"
2008 Whitstable Biennale Artists include:
Major new works by:
Jananne Al-Ani € Oreet Ashery € Clio Barnard € Mike Chavez-Dawson € Nick
Crowe € Ryan Gander € Serena Korda
Artists giving performances include:
Neil Bromwich & Zoe Walker € Sian Robinson Davies € Natash Vicars €
Beatty Hallas € Roz Hilton € Robin Deacon € Chris Yates € Mark
Butcher € Sandra Pearson € Charlie Tweed € Emma Leach € Frog Morris
€ Kim Noble € Katy Richardson € Lee Campbell € Victor Mount €
Leigh Clarke € Mark Quinn € Andy Malone € Sally O¹Reilly & Mel
Brimfield € Charlotte Young € James Topple € Colin Riddle € Darren
Callow
Screenings include:
Bruce Naumann € Vito Acconci € Roman Signer € Rebecca Horn € Gordon
Matta Clark € Sarah Turner € Tony Foster € Hope Fitzgerald € Ruth
Beale & Karen Mirza € Joan Jonas € Erwin Wurm
Education Programme (including new works):
Alex Schady € Abigail Hunt € Abi Gilchrist € Alice Walton € Serena
Korda
Satellite Programme:
Over 70 artists are participating in the Whitstable Biennale Satellite
programme entitled ŒLOCAL¹. The title is somewhat ironic and questions the
idea of Œbelonging¹ or Œrelating to¹ a particular area or neighbourhood. The
fringe programme has evolved in parallel with the Whitstable Biennale and
showcases the work of up and coming artists from all over the UK.
Biennale Bag 2008:
Bob and Roberta Smith has been commissioned to design a limited edition
Biennale Bag for Whitistable Biennale 2008
Contact:
Simon Steven
Press Office (UK)
Whitstable Biennale 2008
+44 (0)1843 596 194
press@whitstablebiennale.com
http://www.whitstablebiennale.com
Sunday 17 February 2008
Saturday 16 February 2008
Friday 15 February 2008
Thursday 14 February 2008
Wednesday 13 February 2008
Friday 8 February 2008
Pop Will Shoot Itself - Steven Wells
POP WILL SHOOT ITSELF
The promo video industry is full of chancers, pseuds, maniacs and socially dysfunctional sexheads . . . It's a great life!
STEVEN WELLS
The Guardian
November 13, 1992
I WOKE up Monday morning and decided to become a pop video director. The Manic Street Preachers, those over-educated punky Welsh working-class homoerotic situationists with a death wish and a mega-yen recording contract were about to release a single, so I hammered out a treatment with my friend, Nick Small and arranged to meet the record company.
"Basically," says Nick, "the song Little Baby Nothing is about women's oppression, so we start with a little girl getting her head jumped on by a horrible old man and end with a woman committing suicide by shooting herself between the legs, having gained her revenge in the meantime by killing all the men."
"Um," said the man from Sony Records. "I'm a bit worried about the graffiti." So we dropped the graffiti and the little girl getting her head stomped on and the woman shooting herself and the scene where the little girl with the flame thrower roasts all the Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine fans and we got our feet under the table with ace production company Visionbridge. And The Man from Sony, he say - well, all right then. We were staggered, could it really be this easy?
By this stage we were already nervous wrecks, we'd each lost almost a stone in weight, our hairy facial skins seethed with bulbous zits, our nicotine consumption reaching levels that would kill the strongest beagle.
"Why a pop video?" asked all our middle-class media chums, who are all working on dead boring first "serious" novels. Because, apart from the the TV ad, the pop promo is the only genuinely late 20th century art form and you've got to be either a total doofus or a Nazi to work in advertising. Anyway, seen any brilliant TV ads recently? Plus, if you work in advertising they make you dress like a cross between Cab Calloway and Janet Street-Porter. No thanks.
The video industry is chocka with chancers, pseuds, maniacs, genius inadequates and socially dysfunctional sexheads whose only real ambition in life is to go to Hollywood and make the modern equivalent of grand opera - a gratuitously violent million-dollar special FX monster movie based on a thirties American comic book. They are our kind of people.
The set for Little Baby Nothing is a wall of slogans along the lines of White Men Are Sexually Inferior and All Rock And Roll Is Homosexual. With a large pink triangle in the middle. With a hammer and sickle in the middle of the triangle made from ripped up Union Jacks. We spent the rest of the money on hiring the female punk band The Dead End Dolls and 20 little girls from drama school dressed in Ejaculate Your Desires, Carpet Bomb The Rich and I Laughed When Lennon Got Shot T-shirts.
We vetted the models, a strange and unnerving procedure. Nick wanted to use a 16-year-old female friend from Halifax but her dad, the prat, said no.
The fun bit was walking up to hard rock women at Manics' gigs and saying "Hey babe, want to be in a video?" and getting beer thrown in our faces. Through this process we found Jackie and Carrie - two evil-looking 16-year-old fanzine editors and wannabe pop stars with Kylie haircuts, fluffy angora coats and stares so dumb and insolent that they freeze your blood.
The song was originally co-sung by ex-porno star Traci Lords. For the video we got Cindy Crawford lookalike Blanche to sit on a piano with Read My Lips scrawled on her leg in lipstick and peel and crush a banana, while handsome James, the singer, lip-synched in the background, "You are pure, pure as snow/ We are the useless sluts that they mould".
"Very average," said the man from the record company. And he was right. So we went back and stuck right at the beginning the bit with the black karate woman in Doc Marten boots kicking the camera and we juiced up the He-man doll in the liquidiser/splatter shot, the Stalinist hero peasant woman shot, the porn-storm shot, the zombie-children shot, the samurai-geisha girl shot, the little girl playing with the hand grenade shot and the bit where Blanche is washing LPs in the T-shirt with a woman clutching a tommy-gun and saying "This is the only answer to rape."
"Brilliant!" said the man from the record company. Huzzah! Nick, a martial arts expert, ex-bouncer and antiques dealer from Middlesbrough, has made videos before. His greatest claim to fame is the thumbs-up-for-Fonz doll enjoying oral sex with a Barbie doll in the Warholish Super 8 Rules And Regulations video for the pro-feminist, all-female hardcore punk band We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Going To Use It.
Them were the days, of course, when we didn't need to worry about getting the promo on kid's TV. Things you apparently can't show on kids' TV: flame throwers, chainsaws, decapitations, torture, homosexual intercourse, heterosexual intercourse, Tory cabinet ministers being dipped slowly into vats of bubbling battery acid, Ed the Duck and Gordon the Gopher applying the leads from a car battery to Phillip Schofield's genitals, little girls getting their heads stomped, women shooting themselves and graffiti. And you thought making pop videos was easy.
Nicholas and I sat and drank and discussed our favourite videos. The Beautiful South's Need A Little Time where a scowly ginger woman singer screams defiance in the face of the beefy male singer and stalks out after smashing everything in the house, covering the kitchen with flour and feathers and sticking his teddy bear's head on the end of a kitchen knife; Robert Palmer's classic Addicted To Love, made for pounds 895 billion, featuring racehorse-like models with identi-kit slap 'n' mini skirts just looking brain-dead gorgeous and pretending to be musicians while a decrepit Palmer decomposed in the foreground;
Sonic Youth's $ 12 cover versh of Addicted To Love shot in a cheapo walk-in New York Video Booth; Betty Boo's Where Are You Baby? Where spunky Bess danced like a white person with rickets in front of a space age set costing thruppence;
Lionel Ritchie's latest where intimidatingly muscular black female dancers in micro-mini skirts do their stuff while Lionel does something in the foreground.
It is time, we decided, to call ourselves Gob Video and punk rock the world of the pop promo while the art form is still hackish, unpretentious, unloved, prostituted, untrainspotted and stupid enough to be fun. All art under capitalism has a tendency to degenerate into either pretentious trash or mind-destroying dross. The pop promo biz will eventually go one way or the other. But for now there are only four rules:
1. Resist at all costs the temptation to censor yourself;
2. Don't go to film school;
3. Don't come cheap, and
4. Live fast, die old and leave a cute looking showreel.
We start shooting Homophobic Asshole for The Senseless Things next week. Any internationally known celebrities who want an unpaid cameo role in the greatest pop video ever made should contact us now.
Tuesday 8 January 2008
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