Last week, half term break with family...driving through the Lake District...I am reminded of a meme seeded in my head by Gordon Faulds. Gordon posts many images of the countryside on a well-known social networking site. Seen from a slightly elevated position behind a wheel and in chronological order, he posts images taken during his other job as a delivery driver for a well-known supermarket. More about that later...
These graphic cultural worms kept surfacing & coax me to begin an online conversation resulting a few months later in a show in 75A, my studio-come project space in Brighton. I immediately see a book project resulting from this sequence of rural Britain & I'm sure he has had this same thought... in sun, rain, mist, moonlight spring & winter...one stitches the images & the narrative becomes familiar to all who commonly view the countryside from the comfort of the faraday's cage of the car, no matter how much we walk into the countryside for our morning/evening constitutionals, or day's out. On a walk up Skiddaw with my eldest son Archie, even at the summit we can pick out the road to Keswick and even the track up Skiddaw from the south begins to resemble a road, the result of too many mountain bikes rushing down from the summit as they attempt emulate the legendary mountain biker Danny MacAskill (check out him 'conquering' The Cullins in Skye on two wheels).
He mentions to me that these images are a part of the a new (ish) practise where connection and process is the whole point of the exercise & I quickly realise that this could be the underlying rational for curating a series of informal but significant projects in 75A...the strengthening of personal connections, through social media. A digital call and response, a vehicle for cultural quickening (in this instance).
The fact is that I now realise that as an artist myself who shape shifts my practise as a matter of course, I am just as interested in the person than the work, although of course we both hope the work will be evocative and realise it's potential within the short time-frame. Marney Walker last month ('Change your view') offered us a filtered view of the high street through the eyes of a Design Researcher and that of an experienced and valued occupational therapist. This duality in approach IMHO offers an audience a richer experience.
London
Wind back the clock nearly twenty years (mid 90's) and I encounter Gordon DJ'ing as one of his other personas 'Strictly Gordo'. The location is perhaps the infamous late night Charlie Wright's in Shoreditch where in regular slots he plays a rich mixture of rare grooves, classic funk, sleazy disco and new electronica. "Music was my way in.." Charlie Wright's was/is one of those places that one went when a late night cocktail of oblivion and dancing seems an obvious & welcome choice.
I meet him again, but now laying down 78 rpm recordings on a wind-up gramophone for Jibby Beane's Arts Club nights in various venues in Soho and central London. I have a regular performance slot, responding to venue, situ or to test an idea.
Dj'ing...a process of enquiry, selection and curation...I ask him who he thinks Strictly Gordo is...
"a dance of awareness with the audience, points of reference, it's always a puzzle, in that way it has parallels with art making... art making needs to be felt, personally, needs to come from some deep resource pool within us, but has also to find common frames of reference, in order to connect, and to be understood as part of a lineage, that reaches right back to the beginning of it all... the first fetishised axe head"
This week I have spent hours on a homework project for my son archie who is ten. It used to be that the kids did the homework. The subject, chosen by him is Charles Darwin (a significant scientist!). I have fashioned a box inside which the evolution cartoon of 'man' from ape to Homo Sapien is depicted as a film strip. It has took a homework project with my son for me to realise that this was a gross misinterpretation of Darwin's theories. Also, we never see woman depicted (masculine, feminine, chicken versus egg?).
Now, years on I meet Gordon as an artist, we have a rapport & it is nourishing..., neither of us having driven the traditional route of galleries and agents and by hook or by crook, we are still working. The art world and it's system is one which I seldom relate to. I believe the major purveyors of art have become too powerful, in parallel with the banks who drove us to near oblivion and have yet to be reined in. I feel the need to re-visit why artist's do what they do and the myriad of ways they find to do it. (I recently enjoyed Grayson Perry's accessible yet fair take on the art world in his book 'Playing to the Gallery').
I also employed Gordon for a gig in the 291 Gallery as Strictly Gordo, DJ'ing for a few hundred Italian employees of British American Tobacco. I fed them Keralan Indian cuisine and subjected them to an extended live set by Barb Jungr that went on far too long...(no offence Barb). This is a longer story but the long and short of it is that I thought it only polite to take the money and run as B.A.T. did kill my father after all (probably).
Gordon now lives in Somerset.
fem|mas
Gordon collects stuff. A lot of artists do. So, he thinks it would be interesting to somehow evaluate, select, codify, arrange and re-arrange these objects to create a narrative that somehow makes sense of his collection. I react to this idea by talking about how beach-combing by artists seems such a stereotype as they moonwalk from middle to old age, creating assemblages of drift wood softened by the sea, frayed coloured nylon rope from all parts of the known universe intermingling with the odd mermaid's purse. This common artist affliction is brought on the closer one resides to the sea. I also understand that my fatuous comment is somehow a simplistic reaction to an idea that attempts to both analyse why objects are chosen and kept and also to attempt to explore the narratives that they weave when selectively placed together, harmony or dischord?
We also reference Beuys, Tapies and other artists that influenced us down the years...Rebecca Horn, Judy Chicago?
I don't yet know the result of his determined work yet, spurred on by yet another show scheduled for the Venice Biennale. I know there is an underlying wish to explore the notion of the feminine and masculine qualities inherent within objects...cue a late night excursion into the land of wikipedia to attempt to glean at least a smidgen of an understanding of how pronouns and nouns became masculine or feminine in languages around the world (or even gender neutral). Why is a table in french 'La'?
Why is a bicycle 'un vélo',or 'une bicyclette'? Both Masculine and feminine simultaneously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns
These graphic cultural worms kept surfacing & coax me to begin an online conversation resulting a few months later in a show in 75A, my studio-come project space in Brighton. I immediately see a book project resulting from this sequence of rural Britain & I'm sure he has had this same thought... in sun, rain, mist, moonlight spring & winter...one stitches the images & the narrative becomes familiar to all who commonly view the countryside from the comfort of the faraday's cage of the car, no matter how much we walk into the countryside for our morning/evening constitutionals, or day's out. On a walk up Skiddaw with my eldest son Archie, even at the summit we can pick out the road to Keswick and even the track up Skiddaw from the south begins to resemble a road, the result of too many mountain bikes rushing down from the summit as they attempt emulate the legendary mountain biker Danny MacAskill (check out him 'conquering' The Cullins in Skye on two wheels).
He mentions to me that these images are a part of the a new (ish) practise where connection and process is the whole point of the exercise & I quickly realise that this could be the underlying rational for curating a series of informal but significant projects in 75A...the strengthening of personal connections, through social media. A digital call and response, a vehicle for cultural quickening (in this instance).
The fact is that I now realise that as an artist myself who shape shifts my practise as a matter of course, I am just as interested in the person than the work, although of course we both hope the work will be evocative and realise it's potential within the short time-frame. Marney Walker last month ('Change your view') offered us a filtered view of the high street through the eyes of a Design Researcher and that of an experienced and valued occupational therapist. This duality in approach IMHO offers an audience a richer experience.
London
Wind back the clock nearly twenty years (mid 90's) and I encounter Gordon DJ'ing as one of his other personas 'Strictly Gordo'. The location is perhaps the infamous late night Charlie Wright's in Shoreditch where in regular slots he plays a rich mixture of rare grooves, classic funk, sleazy disco and new electronica. "Music was my way in.." Charlie Wright's was/is one of those places that one went when a late night cocktail of oblivion and dancing seems an obvious & welcome choice.
I meet him again, but now laying down 78 rpm recordings on a wind-up gramophone for Jibby Beane's Arts Club nights in various venues in Soho and central London. I have a regular performance slot, responding to venue, situ or to test an idea.
Dj'ing...a process of enquiry, selection and curation...I ask him who he thinks Strictly Gordo is...
"a dance of awareness with the audience, points of reference, it's always a puzzle, in that way it has parallels with art making... art making needs to be felt, personally, needs to come from some deep resource pool within us, but has also to find common frames of reference, in order to connect, and to be understood as part of a lineage, that reaches right back to the beginning of it all... the first fetishised axe head"
This week I have spent hours on a homework project for my son archie who is ten. It used to be that the kids did the homework. The subject, chosen by him is Charles Darwin (a significant scientist!). I have fashioned a box inside which the evolution cartoon of 'man' from ape to Homo Sapien is depicted as a film strip. It has took a homework project with my son for me to realise that this was a gross misinterpretation of Darwin's theories. Also, we never see woman depicted (masculine, feminine, chicken versus egg?).
Now, years on I meet Gordon as an artist, we have a rapport & it is nourishing..., neither of us having driven the traditional route of galleries and agents and by hook or by crook, we are still working. The art world and it's system is one which I seldom relate to. I believe the major purveyors of art have become too powerful, in parallel with the banks who drove us to near oblivion and have yet to be reined in. I feel the need to re-visit why artist's do what they do and the myriad of ways they find to do it. (I recently enjoyed Grayson Perry's accessible yet fair take on the art world in his book 'Playing to the Gallery').
I also employed Gordon for a gig in the 291 Gallery as Strictly Gordo, DJ'ing for a few hundred Italian employees of British American Tobacco. I fed them Keralan Indian cuisine and subjected them to an extended live set by Barb Jungr that went on far too long...(no offence Barb). This is a longer story but the long and short of it is that I thought it only polite to take the money and run as B.A.T. did kill my father after all (probably).
Gordon now lives in Somerset.
fem|mas
Gordon collects stuff. A lot of artists do. So, he thinks it would be interesting to somehow evaluate, select, codify, arrange and re-arrange these objects to create a narrative that somehow makes sense of his collection. I react to this idea by talking about how beach-combing by artists seems such a stereotype as they moonwalk from middle to old age, creating assemblages of drift wood softened by the sea, frayed coloured nylon rope from all parts of the known universe intermingling with the odd mermaid's purse. This common artist affliction is brought on the closer one resides to the sea. I also understand that my fatuous comment is somehow a simplistic reaction to an idea that attempts to both analyse why objects are chosen and kept and also to attempt to explore the narratives that they weave when selectively placed together, harmony or dischord?
We also reference Beuys, Tapies and other artists that influenced us down the years...Rebecca Horn, Judy Chicago?
I don't yet know the result of his determined work yet, spurred on by yet another show scheduled for the Venice Biennale. I know there is an underlying wish to explore the notion of the feminine and masculine qualities inherent within objects...cue a late night excursion into the land of wikipedia to attempt to glean at least a smidgen of an understanding of how pronouns and nouns became masculine or feminine in languages around the world (or even gender neutral). Why is a table in french 'La'?
Why is a bicycle 'un vélo',or 'une bicyclette'? Both Masculine and feminine simultaneously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns