The End Is Nigh! Apocalyptic Visions In East London

A recent trip along the Regent's Canal to two of East London's best contemporary art spaces led me into two dark, apocalyptic video installations filled with the terrors of imminent catastrophe: Jennet Thomas's All Suffering SOON TO END! at Matt's Gallery (currently in its final week) and Melanie Gilligan's Popular Unrest at The Chisenhale.

Jennet Thomas All Suffering SOON TO END!
Matt's Gallery
42–44 Copperfield Road, London E3 4RR
April 14th - June 6th 2010
Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm
Screenings begin on the hour and at 30 minutes past

Jennet Thomas's All Suffering SOON TO END! is a two-part installation based around the end-of-world predictions disseminated in an evangelical Christian pamphlet delivered to the artist. Extrapolating from the Revelations-esque Last Days prophecies, Thomas has created a menacing character in the form of The Purple Preacher - a combination of an imagined embodiment of the writer of the pamphlet and the Marvel Comics villain, The Purple Man, a character who possesses the ability to control enemies through incredible powers of persuasion.

The 30 minute video features The Preacher paying a visit to an elderly couple and detailing the evidence that our increasingly secular world has lead to an enormous increase in the amount of suffering experienced by humankind, that we have angered God by ignoring Him and that he is punishing us for this. But do not worry - for all this suffering is to end very soon, thanks to His salvation. Following this, a car journey and a rather unnerving trip to a model village with a stern Green Nun character, and a few poorly performed musical numbers act as features of The Preacher's evangelical repertoire, before life-sized living dolls of Adam and Eve wreak havoc in the pensioners' home and attempt to recruit school children to the cause.

Strangely (probably unintentionally?) reminiscent of absurdist left-field comedy sketch shows such as Big Train and Chris Morris's Jam, the video is blackly comic and by turns quite unsettling and somewhat endearing. Spliced with flashes of destruction and doom, the video meanders through repeated scenes of the purple figure preaching his message, edited to a soundtrack of pulsing glitches, ambient electronics and reverberating dialogue. Images of a hypnotic TV screen featuring an animated motif reminiscent of both a cross and that biblical root of sin, the Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil. The image becomes central to the work's visual language when it recurs in filled-out sound-emitting three-dimensional form as the centre-pieces of the adjoining installation.

The film is compelling and at its heart thoroughly enjoyable, creating a comical parody of these doom and gloom religious ramblings. It manages to do what good satire does best, and subverts what is actually in real life a scary and sinister practice (frightening the elderly and indoctrinating the young) into a ridiculous and bizarre farce.

Melanie Gilligan Popular Unrest

Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ
7th May - 20th June 2010
Wednesday to Sunday 1 – 6pm
Thursday 3rd June until 9pm

And online at http://www.popularunrest.org/

Melanie Gilligan's Popular Unrest is a 5 part film-installation with a total running time of 75 minutes. Spread across 5 flat-screen monitors divided by office screens, visitors are presented with wireless headphones and may move between the various episodes playing in sync, tuning in to the sound from each as they go.

Taking on the form of an episodic drama the series tells the tale of a not-too-distant future in which a digitised system known as The Spirit monitors and manages human life the world over. As the plot unravels we learn of a mysterious spate of killings being carried out across London by a seemingly super-natural force, and of a bizarre phenomenon arising across the country in which groups of people are mysteriously drawn together by an uncontrollable urge to be with one another. I won't say any more about the plot for fear of spoiling the suspense of the work for you if you see it yourself.

Reference points claimed in the accompanying literature fail to gel with me - claims of allusions to David Cronenberg's Body Horror films don't wash; while the first death we see is remarkably violent and genuinely quite shocking I'm wondering if they blew the budget on it. The remainder of the film's fatalities seem to be made up by repeatedly using one technique (knife stabbed through clothing into dummy/blood bag) to unconvincing effect. Again, the claim of taking cues from American crime dramas such as CSI, Dexter and Bones doesn't really work for me, the final effect, I must say, is more like the BBC's poor cousin of these (think more Spooks than HBO). I can't help wondering, however, if these reference points were Gilligan's own, or were added by the gallery as their reading of the work.

While I understand that realism is not the aim here, and this exhibition was clearly not produced on a Hollywood budget that ran into the millions of pounds, the work requires a certain suspension of disbelief in order to achieve some of the effects it seems to be trying to get to. The wooden acting doesn’t help, and blatant staging of the filming in the gallery (complete with Florian Hecker’s speakers from the last show) doesn’t either, and comes across as poorly done rather than knowingly flat.

I remember an interview with Paul McCarthy which I saw online (maybe this one?) in which he discussed the increasing scale of his installations and the enormous budgets he is able to command for their production. To paraphrase, he argues that if you really want to critique Hollywood and Disney, you need to work at their level. I’m wondering if Gilligan bit off a little more than she could chew with this piece, if the ideas she wanted to get at might have required a bigger budget to execute well. I was left feeling that work failed to establish a strong sense of critical distance from the medium it emulated. A fairly interesting (and compelling) narrative it was, a thought provoking and artistic exercise? I'm not so sure.

While the similarities between the two exhibitions are really fairly few - both are video installations, both deal with a prevailing sense of impending catastrophe present within contemporary society, and both seem to be more inspired by televisual language and devices than those of the cinema or video art - it is interesting that two galleries located in such close proximity should have concurrent shows exploring this terrain in this medium. If art is indeed a mirror to the world, then looking at these pieces you might think we are living in bleak and frighten(ing? ed?) times. Let's take the cue from Jennet Thomas and laugh at how ridiculously over the top all the doom, gloom and worry really can be.

Susan Collis, Since I Fell For You, Ikon, Birmingham

Enter, us 2009

Susan Collis Since I Fell For You
Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham, B1 2HS
31st March - 16th May 2010
Tuesday - Sunday 11am-6pm

Susan Collis's Since I Fell For You is her first show in a public gallery and brings together a collection of works spanning from 2002 - 2010. The show occupies one floor of the 3-storey space - one of the Midland's longest-standing and best-respected contemporary art spaces, which has in recent years played host to the likes of Martin Creed, Ryan Gander, John Wood & Paul Harrison, Lisa Milroy and Richard Deacon.

Entering the show uninitiated, the viewer could not be blamed for believing the gallery was still installing - Collis's work appears like the incidental ephemera of exhibition installation and the supports that are usually concealed by the exhibited artwork. This Too Shall Pass is a new work in which the artist has painstakingly recreated a wall from her studio - scratches and scrapes in the paint work, bent nails, Rawlplugs, a missing door and it's paint-stained frame. Upon closer inspection of the pieces (and the exhibition guide) the scratches and scrapes are revealed to be not the products of wear and tear, but an immaculately produced simulacra comprised of precious wood veneers and mother of pearl. The Rawlplugs are precious stones, the screws and nails, white gold or platinum. Enter, Us, above, is made of 18 carat white gold, white sapphire and turquoise.

While signaling the support materials and detritus of a typical exhibition set up on one hand, the work also nods towards a certain Lo-Fi aesthetic prevalent within contemporary art in which pieces of refuse and detritus are carefully selected and imbued with a sculptural quality (think Ian Kiaer, Sara Mackillop or Sean Edwards for example). Created using craft techniques of incredible skill, there is a double-play at work in the laborious creative process set to work to ultimately create an illusion of utter banality to be found throughout the exhibition - what the artist has described as being in a state of 'it is and isn't'. 1

There is a sensual, aesthetic delight in witnessing such cleverly chosen materials so expertly manipulated. Pieces such as Continue Whispering 2010 have the appearance of piles discarded timber (bent nails and all), broken door frames, and bent and misshapen carpet grippers disregarded while screws poke out from under the walls. It's also nice to see an early precursor in the shape of Work On It, 2002 - a sourced and purchased table with imitation stains and smudges akin to those of a painter's table rendered in vinyl upon its surface.

I am, however, left wondering where it all goes. Beyond the surface and the trompe l'oeil, what is there left? It's easy to see why these works have become popular in art collections - a perfect blend of cultural and material capital that's sure to grab the attention of the magpie-eyes of the contemporary art market's elite. Beyond the sheer spectacle of such ornately made objects and attention to detail, there is little left for the mind to work on.

A previous project, SWEAT 2008, at Seventeen Gallery, London, involved a sweatshop-style scenario in which a gallery full of assistants slaved to create Collis's beautifully crafted ink-patterned paper laundry bags (below). Laying bare the production behind the work hints towards a form of critique that I do not find present in the pieces here. Having first seen these pieces at last year's Frieze Art Fair, I am left wondering if they are more than quirky fetish objects to be prized by super-rich art collectors.

On Vacation 2008 (Detail)
Biro inks and pencil on paper

1 Susan Collis, exhibition guide.

Crash, Gagosian Gallery, London

Rachel Whiteread Demolished 1996

Crash
Homage To J G Ballard

Gagosian Gallery

6 -24 Britannia Street, London, WC1X 9JD

Februaury 11th - April 1st 2010

Tuesday - Saturday 10 am - 6 pm

Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of a mixture of relics, influences and works inspired by the dystopian ficiton of J G Ballard, in particular his most famous novel Crash. The novel - made into a film in 1996 by David Cronenberg - is a psycho-sexual tale of car-crash fetishism (Symphorophilia). We are treated here to an all-star line up of artists in an expertly curated exhibition that moves between pieces that by turn inspired Ballard (Dali, early British Pop Art), or reflect his concerns and fascinations - autophilia, crashes, accidents and disasters, high rises and suburban wastelands, destruction, and an often sexually charged mixture of the organic and the mechanical.

Installation view Crash, Gagosian Gallery, foreground: Adam McEwan Honda Teen Facial 2010

Upon entering the gallery we encounter the disembodied undercarriage of a Boeing 747 - Adam McEwan's Honda Teen Facial (2010 above). The piece resonates with a sense of disaster and sets the tone for the exhibition. The rooms are arranged thematically, begining with a selection of surrealist works that inspired Ballard to find a "fiction for the present day"1, works that traverse similar territory to his writing in the main galleries and a 3rd gallery of works inspired by or made in honour of the writer. Against the somber grey walls of the 3rd gallery, Rachel Whitereed's Demolished (1996 above) stands out, activated and invigorated by the context.

Jane and Louise Wilson's Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard (2000), a 4 screen video projection, depicts shots of the abandoned sites of the former USSR's space program - a depopulated mixture of desolate wilderness and awesome technological construction. The bassy rumble of the soundtrack permeates the entire exhibition intermittently.

The list of artists included (below) is an undeniably impressive one and the pieces selected are all fine examples of their work, arranged in a structure that creates a looming and prolonged discord. Locked within the visual language of a show loaded with associations, the works function to create a fractured, rhizomatic network of signs, informing one another in counterpoints and harmonies in order to extract the dark, foreboding, and perverse terrors of Ballard's vision of society. The powerful sense of narrative allows the work to operate in interesting new ways, generating new readings of familiar practices. Damien Hirst's arrangements of surgical implements, Jenny Saville's grand-scaled, expertly daubed images of mutilation (below), and Roger Hiorns' crystaline BMW engines are cases in point. Paul McCarthy's Mechanical Pig (2003 - 2005) was perhaps the most striking example of a piece to under go this transformation for me; it's combination of the mechanical and organic, the maternal and the monstrous, with it's working parts laid bare, is so perfectly situated within this context, it's almost as though it were created with this exhibition in mind. Jeremy Deller's Another Country (The Mall London 3/9/97) 1997 was one of the more surprising inclusions in the show. A collection of photographs of floral tributes and a poem to Diana, Princess of Wales, taken in the aftermath of her death in 1997, it was a somber and poetic record of a moment in the collective consciousness, that abounds with associations of an underlying widespread public fascination with death.

Jenny Saville Witness 2009

One of the best contemporary art shows I've seen in London this year, Crash is at Gagosian, Britannia Street, until April 1st. The full list of artists included is as follows:

Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

Images here.

1. http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-02-11_crash/

Amanda Beech, Sanity Assassin, Spike Island, Bristol

Amanda Beech Sanity Assassin, 2009, installation views.
Photos: Stuart Bunce, courtesy of Spike Island.

Amanda Beech Sanity Assassin
Spike Island
133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6UX
23.01.10 - 11.04.10
Tuesday - Sunday, Screenings every 20 minutes, 11 am - 5 pm

Sanity Assassin is an installation in 2 parts with an accompanying publication, produced by British artist Amanda Beech during Spike Island's 2009 main production residency. Beech's practice often grows out of research visits to sites in which exercises of power and law are manifested in architecture and manipulations of social space; Sites such as Los Angeles - the source for this piece - and Harlow New Town, which features in Statecraft, one of a number of earlier works on show alongside the new project.

The audience are encouraged to enter the first room at 20 minute intervals in order to take in a dazzling sculptural installation, followed by a intense and enthralling 3-screen video installation.

The sculptural element (photographed above) is an immaculately presented set of bright yellow chain-saws, at first glance all identical, yet on closer inspection all subtly different models. Arranged atop a mirrored plinth and lit from above with floodlights, the piece is a spectacular piece of 'pure display' 1. It is an explicit comment on commodity fetishism, with a substrate of suppressed violence and a nod towards horror movie cliches. Apparently based on the corporate lobby of a real Los Angeles showroom, it sets an ominous tone for the coming video work.

After a few minutes in this space the lights drop and we are compelled by sound emanating from the adjoining room to move on to the second part - a multi-channel video installation projected across 3 large screens positioned at differing heights and awkward angles. Beginning with a CGI rainstorm reminiscent of a classic film noir device of mood-setting, the installation is permeated with an atmosphere of imminent violence.

The new video work is an abrasively composed edit of scenes of LA, pithy statements and digitally manipulated photographic elements, cut to a throbbing soundtrack of electronic noise; the buzz-saw pulses reminiscent of the installation we have just left behind. The vision of LA - portrayed through shots of a mixture of public and private spaces, by day and night, which bounce and repeat through an array of filters, effects and physical rotations across the screens - is a nightmarish, Lynchean one. Spliced in in a style that brings to mind both MTV and political sloganeering, are texts collaged together from a mixture of appropriated and original narratives - sources range from an interview with LA photographer Julius Shulman, a reworking of émigré German philosopher Theodor Adorno's Dream Notes, pulp literature, FBI files and song lyrics. For some reason I can't help but think of Brett Easton Ellis' dystopian visions of America throughout.

Sanity Assassin is divided into two distinct halves, each exploring the philosophy of a character of Beech's creation - Arnold Rottweiler and Artemis Star. Rottweiler's dialogue explores culture's alienation of nature and ideas of self-enforced seclusion, Starr's echoes with New World Order paranoia. In both we see beliefs that descended into psychosis, leading to suicidal despair and physical violence. The experience is submersive, dizzying and terrifying.

The accompanying screening and reading area serves as an introduction to Beech's highly idiosyncratic, polemical style, and penchant for aggressively electronic sound-tracking. Sparking myriad associations that coalesce around questions of the relationships between culture, politics and public space, and the rhetoric employed to espouse them, the works are exciting in tone and reinforced with deeply thought-provoking subject mater.

1. Spike Island exhibition guide.

Florian Hecker, Chisenhale Gallery, London

Florian Hecker
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ
11.02.10 - 28.03.10
Preview Thursday 11 February 2010 6.30 – 8.30pm
Wednesday to Sunday 1 – 6pm
Thursday 4th March until 9pm

Musician and sound artist Florian Hecker presents a new installation at one of London's best established and most consistently interesting contemporary art spaces, East London's Chisenhale Gallery. The public gallery undertakes 5 shows each year, each an ambitious newly commissioned solo project by an emerging international artist.

Hecker's installation at Chisenhale comprises of 4 separate works, displayed in a sequence which guides the viewer (listener?) around a sparsely empty gallery space, ornamented with slick, black, ceiling-mounted speakers. The collection of works utilise immaculately produced electronic noises to lead us aurally and physically through a shifting landscape of auditory experiences; At turns disorienting, intriguing and captivating, the largely multi-channel works give us an awareness of the physical contingencies involved in the process of listening, and invite us to explore modes of interacting with what we hear.

The most visually striking work is an untitled new piece featuring a single speaker pointing concentrated bursts of sound at a ceramic-tiled section of the gallery wall. Beautifully lit, the speaker casts a symmetrical shadow across the minimal white-on-white of the tiles on the wall, while the sound oscillates and reflects back to the on-looking viewer.

The pieces are durational works that, through a variety of approaches - sounds generated through the audience's movements, exercises in three-channel panning that alternate between clockwise and anti-clockwise rotations and works spread between speakers placed a gallery's width apart - form a continuation of the artist's exploration of sound in relation to the body and space.

Hecker's list of collaborators includes Carsten Holler, Cerith Wyn Evans and Aphex Twin. This exhibition of 4 new sound installations is definitely not to be missed.

Read more here.

Rachel Reupke, 10 Seconds or Greater, Picture This, Bristol

Rachel Reupke, 10 Seconds or Greater
Picture This
Corner of Sydney Row & Mardyke Ferry Rd, Spike Island, Bristol BS1 6UU
23.01.10 – 06.03.10
Thursday to Saturday 12 - 5.30pm

10 Seconds Or Greater, is a new video work by British artist Rachel Reupke. Her multidisciplinary practice employs video, text and sculpture to examine ideas of taste, status and social position as defined and expressed in the mainstream media.

Produced as part of Picture This' residency program, the video is made using a group of actors to construct scenes reproduced from royalty-free stock footage; Formally a composite of unrelated scenes, that are here tied together by the uniformity created through the film's limited cast and small set, it is a fascinating and novel take on the process of creative appropriation. The title suggests the arbitrary kind of search term one might use when browsing through the bank of sources utilised in the creation of these shots.

Set to a score that alternates between long draughts of silence and a specially written R&B soundtrack, the video presents a group of attractive young adults carrying out scenes of domesticity and sociability, channeled through interaction with a range of products. The tracts of silence create a situation in which our voyeuristic position gives us the sense having of an objective eye into this situation. The real effect is in fact far from objective. Inevitably when faced with a world that we do not take part in (nor want to take part in), we adopt a critical stance and begin passing judgement and examining opinion.

Reupke is an artist who 'engages in the artisanal production of the generic.' 1 The look and feel of the setting of this film - the kind of pristine interior we can imagine existing in a suburban new-build, punctuated with functional objects displayed with a designer's precision - is an exercise in blandness that appears like an advertisement stripped of its logos and slogans. Intentionally reminiscent of the language of the corporate promo, everything is utterly devoid of human touch and believable personality, everything contrived and paired down to portrayal of a kind of self-satisfied success that induces a cringing distrust bordering on disgust.

Through the formal act of gathering these unconnected scenes into a lingering gaze, Reupke creates an opportunity for us to reflect upon the kind of the world promoted in the ideology of consumer capitalism. Scenes of social interaction, the hand-shakes re-shot again and again, endless introductions and unheard conversations, are played out repeatedly by a succession of recombinations of the 5 or 6 characters. Lingering product shots, the occasional, unnerving, long look or smile into the camera, and the underlying banality of stylised acts such as food preparation and the use of communications technology, point us towards the language of aspirational lifestyle marketing. The scenes take on a hyper-reality that sits at an awkward intersection of the idealised and the vacuous - a misplaced or misguided ideal of aspiration and self-actualisation.

1 Marina Vishmidt, Reverting To Type (accompanying essay)

A clip from the new video can be seen here.

Michael Rakowitz, The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own, Tate Modern, London

Michael Rakowitz The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own
Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern
53 Bankside, London, SE1 9TG‎‎
22.01.10 - 03.05.10
Sunday - Thursday 10am - 6pm, Friday & Saturday 10am - 10pm

Michael Rakowitz's The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own coalesces around a series of bizarre and uncanny crossovers in American popular culture and Iraqi military history from the 1980s to the end of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. The stories, told through a series of drawings, texts, artifacts, found objects and sculptures, reveal unexpected links between the Hussein family's interest in George Lucas's Star Wars franchise, American Politics of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, the fantasy and history found in Jules Verne's adventure stories, physicist Gerald Bull's dream of building the world's largest gun, and the career of an Iraqi former WWF wrestler.

At times the stories seem simply too good to be true - the tale of a 15-year-old Uday Hussein's fascination with Star Wars, and subsequent design for his father's army's new uniform, complete with Darth Vader-inspired ski mask and helmet, would be unbelievable were it not for the collection of helmets that the artist has acquired on display in the nearby case.

The sculptures and framed works are executed with a handmade quality that adds an aesthetic delight to a narrative that is largely told through a straight-forward written prose. The pencil drawings that accompany these episodes have an illustrative quality that suggests appropriation, but we are left to wonder. Found and acquired objects, such as copies of magazines ranging from Wrestling editions to Time, toys, books, articles relating to those found in Saddam's palaces, soldiers' photographs and a video clip from YouTube are selected with curatorial precision, and serve as some kind of 'proof' for the far-fetched story the artist is telling us.

The exhibition is one of the best contemporary art shows I've seen at Tate in a long time. The Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde exhibition is well worth seeing while you're there, as is Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall, if you haven't seen that yet.

Harun Farocki, Against What? Against Whom?, Raven Row, London

Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom?
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane, London, E1
19.11.09 - 07.02.10
Wednesday to Sunday 11am - 6pm

Set in the beautiful rooms of 56 Artillery Row in East London, Raven Row is one of London’s newest exhibtion spaces. In this, their 3rd exhibition, curator Alex Sainsbury, has put together an exhibition of multi-screen video works by the highly respected German filmmaker, Harun Farocki.

Eliminating the traditional linearity of the documentary format by taking it out of the cinema screening context, and spreading the works over multiple screens in an environment where we can enter and leave at any point allows Farocki to make use of the juxtaposition and repetition we find in his older work to create dexterously edited montages. Rather than constructing a narrative with a dogmatic message, arguments are proposed and form through the associations allowed to occur by the engineering of a situation in which images are able to align, clash, conflict and inform one-another.

Through a mixture of found, filmed and appropriated imagery the artist’s themes of the eye, the nature of seeing, the functions of imagery, warfare, surveillance, power, the history of cinema and the virtual are able to weave, cross over, merge, slip away and resurface across the exhibition. The exhibition is excellently structured, Farocki’s use of the video installation medium is masterful.