Qwaypurlake

Hauser and Wirth Somerset

15^th November – 31^st January

David Wojtowycz, The Lake (2012)

There is nothing more unsettling in our tumultuous times, than images of nature appearing to act naturally. In the age of the Anthropocene, a trip to the Somerset countryside no longer has the same picturesque, nostalgia-inducing appeal that once enticed caravaners and watercolourists out of the suburbs. Landscape is no longer witness to the dream of reason. Sublime and technological sublime are now entangled in a romantic embrace of slow-death; locked in the mutual chokehold of the forever undead. The hills really do have eyes, but this time not those of alienated savages but of an alien landscape – the nature once feared before it was tamed and refashioned in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Or perhaps these are the eyes of surveillance, following us from the city. A gaze that follows us from within and without our bodies, oscillating between perceived unity and abject thingness, as we peer from behind ourselves. Hidden in the foliage the gaze that watches identifies both with the unknown threat of horror cliché and Benjamin's camera operator but never with the zombie actor whose sightseeing corpse is framed. It is the familiar yet unidentifiable gaze that surveils us in our endless work lives as we chase the next project or tweet another opinion, and as we check-in with our fictions of how best to promote ourselves online or how the world perceives us. It is the blind reptilian gaze of neoliberalism, which doubles as our own, dreaming our dreams and enabling the reconfiguration of power and control around our CV careers; tightening around everyday life with every breath – every blog post – like a vast boa constrictor. It watches us mockingly as we hopelessly try to reconcile the rift between self and world with the sheer will and conviction of our Gore-Texed rural perambulations. It is the GPS that pinpoints our exact location as we scan the view for signs of life. It is the faint intangible atmosphere that haunts us as we attempt to stop the buzzing swarm of me-ness and penetrate the smug mimesis of the landscape before us that withholds its materiality from representation.

Approaching Hauser and Wirth Somerset by car is a reminder that middle class mythologies still hang like an opulent damask veil over our disquieting new landscape. My friends and I debate whether or not wellies will be needed for the short walk from the visitor car park to the lavishly refurbished farm buildings. We glimpse the bistro in which we have a table booked for lunch. We peruse the selection of art theory books including, unironically, Clare Bishop's critique of participatory art, 'Artificial Hells'. On entering Qwaypurlake, a group exhibition curated by Simon Morrissey, what strikes you is the apparent tameness, even conservatism, of the works included. The seeming mundaneness of some of the photographic images, for example, and the reassuring familiarity of the landscape images, lull us into a false sense of security. Look again. These are not the landscapes you're looking for! The works here are representations of an older landscape – the pagan landscape of soil and life-cycles, geology and 'deep time', pantheism and animistic energies – that is hidden just below the septic aberration of space and time we call capitalism. The strange resonances that come from many of the works are like clarion calls from our planet, not in the egotistical sense of it asking us to save it but a deeper tone. The voice of landscape as a primordial echo – a shrug of knowing acceptance or an earthly stirring to shake off the sedimented crust of scar tissue we call human culture.

The landscape of Qwaypurlake, a title taken from the road leading out of Bruton in the direction of Frome called Quaperlake Street, is a sentient one. The exhibition most obviously draws inspiration from of Stanislaw Lem's novel 'Solaris' (1961), which is centred on a conscious oceanic planet. As global sea levels rise, this vision offers a glimpse of a very possible dystopian future. Indeed, the first work we encounter is a film by David Wojtowycz that depicts a familiar yet alien seascape centrally divided by a pier. At first, the scene seems oddly mundane, until the viewer becomes aware that the waters on either side of the pier behave in strange and unnatural ways. To the right the sea is choppy and convulsing, as if broken by jumping fish, and to the left the water surface is still as a pond, pulled flat as if by some unknown force. A sonic resonance burrs from the well-like forms of Kit Poulson / Alex Baker's 'transmitters'. Jem Southam and Aaron Scuhman's sparse, bleak landscapes focus on dew ponds, and smouldering wood and ashes, respectively, to produce eerie post-human narratives of absence / presence. The tree spirits are tangibly present in the dense boscage of James Ravilious' black and white photographs and Ben Rivers' mud-daubed pagan ancestors watch us from the undergrowth. An undercurrent of primitivism runs through the exhibition through Michael Dean's large standing forms, Elizabeth Frink's mutant creatures and Han's Coper's Cycladic forms. Likewise, Daphne Wright's workaday beasts, echo both the harsh realities of our rural past – enclosures, hunting rights, poaching – and the neoclassical spender of the landed gentry. Indeed, 'Stallion' (2009) is a particular startling sculpture, whose grandiose classicism, fuses power and status with the brutal realism and mundane functionality of an equine autopsy. Heather and Ivan Morison's sculptures play in the archetypal landscapes of British surrealist tradition, mixing Nash's rural 'equivalents' with monstrous sublimatory forms. Ian McKeever's thingly paintings have a presence reminiscent of Rothko's Segram Murals, and are slightly menacing. The interplay of light and dark dances on the canvases like daylight from a rock crevice catching the torrential flow of an underground river. The thickness and darkness of the paint is deceptive as there is a gentle melancholy to the gesture and movement of the paint. There is a filmic quality to these paintings. As my eyes panned across their huge surfaces and inky root-like forms, I was reminded of the murky painted backdrops for the subterranean scenes in the 1978 animated adaptation of Watership Down. Of course, the inclusion of Frink and Coper, together with Peter Lanyon and Richard Deacon, remind us that British modernism has always looked beyond the human and engaged with the affective nature of landscape: attentively slowing down human temporal experience to the 'deep time' of geology and nature, and listening to animistic objects and sentient landscapes that speak to us from a time before we were here to listen and will continue to resonate long after we are gone. 

 

Aaron Schuman, Untitled (Bonfire), from the series Summer Set (2012)

Shezad Dawood: Towards the Possible Film

 Still from Towards the Possible Film (2014)

By his own admission, Shezad Dawood has a habit of naming shows after his films. On reflection, the reason for this becomes self-apparent in his wider practice. Dawood feels that studio work is an intrinsic part of the reflective process of film-making. His diverse studio practice, which also includes, painting, sculpture, digital animation and neon works, happens alongside his films. Long production schedules provide an important gestation period for his work – a time the artist describes as “whilst the film is cooking”. Even after works are finished, there is still the process of responding to different exhibition contexts. The dialogue between 'finished' pieces is as much a part of the conceptual process as his research. For Dawood, “the work takes place between the work”. Whilst the film is the sun around which the planets turn, the other works speak with equal clarity about their shared multi-dimensional worlds. Paintings made on canvases of vintage fabrics produced by nomadic Pakistani women in the 1970s (prior to the military coup of '79), are evolving hybrids. These textiles can be viewed in a similar way to art cinema – as experimental media. They once operated as open and destabilising forms of cultural production that sat outside of the dogmatic religious and ideological structures that finally put an end to them. They are culture as, what Bhabha (1994) terms, 'empirical knowledge'. The neon works are both modern and mystical – a balancing act between formal and spiritual meditation. A digital animation of the head of novelist and scientific philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, uses photos taken at different angles and ages to produce a multi-dimensional “quantum portrait”. The exhibition also includes another film, A Mystery Play (2010), to make comparisons between three types of magic – stage, screen and the occult. Here, Dawood continues to explore his interest in Buster Keaton and silent film. He does this via Keaton's links to Houdini, together with the twin histories of Vaudeville and the Occult in the city of Winnipeg – a city whose masonic architecture becomes a metaphor for the loss of progress and the embeddedness of power structures.

The film at the epicentre of Dawood's (re)collected body of work, Towards the Possible Film (2014), opens with a series of powerful images – the pyramid and winking eye of canary wharf, a jaguar, a Mayan pyramid – totems of power, mastery and sacrifice. As the jaguar passes across the screen, it seems to connect two seemingly very different kinds of power, the mystical and the mystifying; magic both ancient and modern. From Spanish colonised Central America we travel to the Moroccan coast with its similar legacy of occupation. We then see a close-up of a blue-skinned astronaut uttering a Marcusian commentary in Berber dialect. The subtitles read: “The  old sense  of  alienation  is  no longer possible. When  individuals identify  with a lifestyle  imposed  on  them, and  through  it  experience gratification and satisfaction,  their alienation  is  subsumed  by  their own alienated existence”.

Beyond setting the scene, description is useless in communicating the sheer complexity of the film's references: pre-Islamic animist cultures in Morocco, the animistic landscape as witness, the triad of ancient religions in Mexico, India and north African connected via Phoenician trade routes and centred on myths originating from visitations by alien astronauts. Dawood problematises postcolonial narratives in the face of the complexities of globalisation – the accelerated violence of neoliberal global capitalism, paradoxically both atomising and uniting us. Persecutor becomes persecuted and coloniser becomes colonised. Obtuse allegorical references act as both pinpricks of ethical reflection and dystopian omens. A piece of lemon rind in seaweed connotes the carrion-eating low-impact lifestyles of those who choose decent from capitalism. How do we reconcile the smallest actions with their incomprehensible global consequences? Pre-Islamic natives stomp their feet, perhaps asking the landscape for answers. They face the sea, waiting for it to speak, like the sentient oceanic planet in Solaris. What emerges are two blue-skinned visitors from another world who see this world as overlaying multi-dimensional fragments. An act of extreme violence perpetrated by a 'native' to one of the alien colonists / tourists / gods, becomes a question – like that of Meursault spoken through his killing of an Arab in Camus' novel. Where is the subject in subjectivity? God is everywhere and nowhere, the greater forces hold us in their gravitational pull.

Ultimately however, it is pointless to endlessly dissect Dawood's post-human parafield because to theorise is to close-down, and for him, art is like “shattering the bedrock of culture” to reveal new layers, new openings. Dawood's practice is an empirical process of opening out – of making “successive openings” in the binary landscape, through which, in Barthes' terms, we can 'outplay the paradigm'; to reveal 'obtuse meaning', or even 'post-meaning' (Barthes, 2002). After all, as the artist suggests, “we are all just objects thinking we're subjects”.

Being in Love is Dangerous

"Being in Love is Dangerous" (2015) is a project in which I took the habitual field of DIY as a starting point, in order to interrogate the relationship between material and immaterial labour, work and leisure, in neoliberal society. In isolating material labour from the creative act of art, I was able to explore the potential of making and embodied geographic relations to disrupt flows within the habitual discources and representations of capitalism, and to attempt to produce - through practice, performance and performativity - alternative modes of being and becoming.

The room interior was designed the youngest member of the host family and all materials were bought from corporate owned DIY stores. I walked from the host family's house in Southbourne to Castle Point retail park, Bournemouth, on three consecutive days to collect materials including three 15kg bags of Homebase 'beach pebbles'. One of the journeys was documented in the following video, which plays with the idea of slowed-down 'zombie' walking, attentive engagement with non-human objects, and fissures and disruptions in the spatial and temporal flows of late-capitalist geographies. The video includes music by Pink Turns Puke. 

 

The title for the project is taken from David Salle, who argues that “being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you’ve never had it so good”. This statement can be taken literally as a warning towards the mythologies of romantic relationships and their embeddedness within the power and property structures of late-capitalism. However, the statement also allows us to consider the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by capitalism as we engage in everyday creativities such as DIY as part of the endless work of self-making and the 'affective labour' of disseminating our efforts within networks of humans and non-humans. Thus, the home becomes a shop front for the self and its wider habitus. Individualism places identity solely in the hands of the markets, it focuses our attention on the material and symbolic property required to shape who we are rather than what we can become. Yet, the power and property relations of subjectivity are rarely just our own. For Foucault (1998), 'technologies of the self' work as a dispositif, or apparatus, through which power is exercised upon individual bodies within the biopolitical structures of late-capitalism. 

Fire surround clad in 'beach pebbles' bought from Homebase, near Castle Point retail park, and brought back on foot, despite house being a few minutes walk from the sea.

Wood cladding 'trompe-l'œil': I wanted the gifting of labour to be a gifting of skilled labour to oppose the deskilling of the neoliberal workplace and the economic rationalisation of skill and craft as entrepreneurial capital in the creative economy.  

 

Recomposition of the total amount of masking tape used to create divisions between planks on mural.

The initial aim of this project was to take a phenomenological approach to the performance of 'work', in order to critique the relationship between material and immaterial labour in everyday production. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri (2011) suggest, ‘[w]hen immaterial production becomes hegemonic, all the elements of the capitalist process have to be viewed in a new light’ (Hardt and Negri, 2011: 25). In the everyday structures of neoliberalism, labour and work are the same thing! Immaterial labour becomes a productive force, that proliferates – when aligned with the big data revolution – increasingly quantifiable surplus value through the unpaid work of everyday life. On these terms it becomes increasingly difficult to mobilise a critique of work. The immaterial labour of everyday production blurs the boundaries between work and non-work to such an extend that work is prevalent both in and out of the workplace. A further aim of this project, therefore, was to make visible the immaterial work of everyday life and to use performance as a way of “doing” work, phenomenologically, in order to isolate its affects. Methodologically, I have attempted to articulate a series of affective relations by using practice and performativity as a means of opening up to – and feeling – the process of becoming in order to critique the conditions of work and leisure in neoliberal society. 

My 'work' became problematic, as neither skilled labour nor the creative act could be rationalised in economic terms or exchanged as capital or labour value.

The 'soft touch' rug.

The performance took place, in (and on) several stages. The first stage involved walking to a large “out-of-town” retail park, over several days, to purchase decorating materials and bringing them back to the host's house. This process reconnected the act of labour with material and spatial ways of thinking – for example the difficulties of carrying 'beach pebbles', bought from a large DIY store, to their destination – the house, which is, unironically, a few minutes walk from the beach. On the second day I began the work of cladding a fireplace in the pebbles, and on subsequent days completed this task along with the rest of the decorating – including the creation of a 'trompe-l'œil' of wood panelling on one wall. This process highlighted the nature of skilled work in an age where the de-skilling of the workplace is a neoliberal trick to perpetuate low wages, precarity and interchangeability employees. Likewise, the possession of hard skills and creative talent, leaves individuals vulnerable to the insecurity of the marketplace. It is not enough to possess a skill or creative propensity, tradespeople and creative workers must also be “front-facing” affective labourers – ceaselessly smiling, eternally grateful and polite self-publicists, tirelessly working their magic on others to stay ahead in the marketplace. 

Absolute Radio: a stupefying mix of masculine melancholy, nostalgia and normative advertising. A false haven from the turbulent seas of 'crisis capitalism'.

The receits: all time-stamped as evidence of my presence 'within' systems of immaterial labour and capitalist exchange.

 

As the performative engagement with the work wound-down, and the space was re-staged as an installation, the performance took to a new stage, upon which I became a 'tour guide', explaining the project to visitors and justifying this 'work tourism' to myself and others. This was perhaps the hardest part of the project – to break away from performative mediation of the habitual and embodied, and to justify the gap between intention and reception, artwork and context, rather than simply occupying that gap. The work itself allowed for the opening up of meaning and I did not want to close down the material and imaginative dialogue. Instead of defending the work as 'art', I used the opportunity as an exercise in 'commoning' – to talk with audiences about the work and to enable them to connect ideas emanating from the 'work', with their personal experiences – bringing things back to the material and ontological. One visitor, for example, said that the discussion enabled him to value DIY as a way of connecting with his home, when he had previously begrudged the fact that his labour was a consequence of not being able to afford to pay for professionals to do it for him. He was able to reflect on the development of skills and creativities based in materiality and outside of immaterial demands of work. Here work becomes play, as it is without consequence. Moreover, in engaging with materials and spaces, the labour of DIY becomes a poetic act, allowing memory and embodiment to collude, and giving birth to poetic images in the unlearning of habitual objects. Indeed, Bachelard (1992) characterises the phenomenological exploration of the poetic image as being fruitful by virtue of fact that it has ‘no consequences’. He argues that the poetic image is ‘the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression a youthful language’ (Bachelard, 1992: xix). The visitor also articulated the way in which his labour was imbued with a sense of care for his family and for place, and was a way of becoming at home in the world (Ingold, 1995). In this direction, phenomenology offers a way to move beyond transcendental critique, to the immanent and its affects on body and imagination. Here, practice-based research is used as what Crouch (2010) calls a 'gentle politics' – a way to explore becoming from within the conditions of late-capitalism, in the recognition that there is no outside.

References

Bachelard, G. (1992) [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Crouch, D. (2010). Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity. Farnham: Ashgate.

Foucault, M. (1998). 'The Birth of Biopolitics'. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Michel Foucault, 1954-1984). New York: New Press.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2011). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ingold, T. (1995). 'Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World'. Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, ed. Marilyn Strathern. London: Routledge. 

 

Staged Art Encounters and Artists on Pedestals

Art galleries – in particular ones that stage encounters between those who consider themselves to be artists and those who do not – often pose as a cultural laboratories in which the boundaries between 'common-sense' worlds are drawn and challenged. However, gallery art encounters are still culturally and geographically segregated from day-to-day life and as such are a problematic field for political action. For Bourriaud however, the simple act of facilitating such encounters is enough. The gallery becomes a liminal zone in the ‘arena of representational commerce’, which has the capacity to transform both art and the everyday by generating ‘free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 16). But this in itself is not enough. It’s the equivalent of saying that going on holiday once in a year is enough to transform life back home. Whilst, the 'free' experiences we have on tour might influence our perspectives on everyday life, what can two weeks away in the sun really do to transform the structures of everyday life? The answer, for Bourriaud at least, lies in the notion that the ideal of a wholesale transformation of society is illusionary, and that we must therefore deal with a micro-political process of 'tiny revolutions'. However, this too would seem to limit the potential for action in everyday life if we are expected to attend relational art exhibitions and artist’s workshops in order to know how to escape the alienating demands of consumer capitalism! The very idea that the artist knows better than the rest of us is absurd. Can art encounters alone really help us to lift the sheer weight of capitalism's oppression within the structures of everyday life? Indeed, the mythologies that venerate the post-YBA, artist as a kind of guru or touchstone of 'good' living, seem to be a crass perpetuation of the cult of the artist and indeed, the cult of the self. Something Marina Abramović's 512 Hours (2014) is testimony to. The preconception that artists are the only people with the privilege to stop time, or at least view it from afar in a practice akin to mindfulness meditation, suggests that the fundamental rift between work and leisure, has not gone away, and that romantic notion of leisure (and art) as 'time to stand and stare' as expressed by the poet W.H. Davies in 1911, still haunts our worldviews and convinces us that art practice is an activity of the leisure classes. Yet, despite the fact that the 'freedom' leisure is everywhere, the structures of today’s leisure still suggest that liberation is found elsewhere and if we want 'freedom' in everyday life, then we have to be either rich or unemployed, or to earn it through resourcefulness or entrepreneurialism. Thus, the artist is imagined as either aristocratic dilettante or subversive layabout, which perhaps accounts for why artists are rarely paid for their time, and that their work can only be evaluated in terms of productivity and output. Yet conversely, if we are to judge the power of artists to transform the world on basis of their actions rather than products, then aren’t we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Actions, in the case of Situationism, amount to, at best de Certeau’s pin-prick tactics and at worst, distractions akin to fascist propaganda or the very image of spectacle. Likewise, actions do not challenge the productivist logic of neoliberalism – that the pursuit of freedom is the catalyst of immaterial labour and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri, 2011). Rather than considering the art object to be the enemy of social transformation, perhaps it is better to suggest that the root of the problem is the notion that being an artist is a specialised activity, distinct from everyday life, in the same way as being a tourist. Indeed, both have equally negative connotations, depending on one’s perspective!