Relics of Attachment - Preview Tonight!

Come to the preview of an exciting new project.

Relics of Attachment Part I 

PREVIEW: Thursday 31 January 4.30-6pm

Exhibition:  February 1 - February 16 

Recess Cabinet, Level 5, Matthew Building

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

- Walter Benjamin

The term nostalgia describes a sentimental longing for the past, often linking to a period or a place that usually has happy associations to the individual. In our common use of language, nostalgia sometimes includes an interest in past eras and their individual personalities and events, especially the “good old days”, such as remembering a sudden image, or a moment from one’s childhood.

Part I is a small exhibition to introduce the idea of 'Relics of Attachment'. The project explores the nostalgic feelings we all have to personal objects and remnants. This exhibition juxtaposes a collection of items with their sentimental connection to the artists.

We tend to relate to objects in their usefulness, as necessities or even as passing indulgences. Personal relics, on the other hand, are objects divested of their original utility. They are embedded with an intimate narrative and significance, attached to personal microcosms.

For information on how to get your work involved in Part II, come to our meeting at 1pm on Friday 1^st February, Green Seats Matthew Building.

Relics of Attachment

Relics of Attachment - A project exploring ideas of nostalgia

A group of Exhibitions' Student Curatorial Team members are working on a new project entitled Relics of Attachment which starts at the end of January.

Part I will be a small exhibition in the Recess Cabinet on Level 5 of Matthew Building, DJCAD. This will form a talking point and introduce the ideas held within the project. Everyone is invited to a meeting shortly after the preview of the exhibition to hear how they can get involved and show their own work in Relics of Attachment Part II which is an exhibition in Cooper Gallery Project Space.

More info to come shortly on this post.

Part two

Of notes and thoughts from interactions with Edgar Schmitz’s Hubs and Fictions, A touring forum on Current Art and Imported remoteness, curated by Sophia Hao which traveled from the Cooper Gallery Dundee, to Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Newcastle terminating in Goldsmiths, London.

A hub: a device for complex remote meanderings.

Guy Brett (Writer/Curator, London)          Tom Morton (Writer/Curator, London) 

                                 

                             
                      Vanessa Joan Müller (Curator, Cologne)

                      

      
         Wang Nanming                                 (Critic, Shanghai) [1]

At the final event of Hub’s and Fictions at Goldsmiths in London, Vanessa Joan Muller (Curator, Cologne), spoke of various projects undertaken by the European Kunsthalle, of which she is academic director. The European Kunsthalle operates as a forum for the production of art work, in which the production of work is assigned as much importance as the presentation of the art work. She spoke of the ethos of the forum and how it strives to adopt some of the positive aspects of art in public space and use them to create something which acts as a new public space. The reasoning to this ethos struck home to me. Muller reasons; ‘there is no public space in big cities anymore, it is semi-public space, it’s all commercialised space, and (through their projects) people also get an awareness of what an art institution could function like, because most art institutions are some of the few spaces where people actually meet and talk, but most art museums are transformed into something shopping mall like, with a huge shop in the front, a cafe, a book store and then somewhere in the back you find the actual exhibition space.’  [2]

This idea of conceiving an institution, or a public space, for that matter, without an allocated physical space is highly provocative. It is difficult for a cultural institution or space to exist without all the trappings that usually sustain it financially, trappings which evolve to become the makeup of the institution itself.  But in disregarding this, individuals could be enabled to communicate and organise remotely and collectively thereby existing in and of this world. Perhaps you could conclude that the only actual public space remaining is this virtual one from which you are reading- albeit a somewhat ephemeral and intangible one- which incidentally brings us back to Hub’s and Fictions.

The question put but not asked:

When cultural Hubs are increasingly suspended between local situations and broader milieus of displacement in a globalised setting, what is the potential of fiction? How do we articulate the relations that play out between gallery presentations, institutional aspirations and the ways they intersect with fantasies of elsewhere? And if exhibition making is inherently a form of narrative, what kinds of fiction or realities can it stage?[3]

For Hubs and Fictions the invited contributors were given this elusive, open-ended question as a starting point in considering what area of their interests they would talk about at the event. Email invitations detailing the area of interest with which the forum was concerned were sent, but not intended to hold the speaker to a decided response.  The diverse array of speakers and their differing approaches to the questions that were put in email prior to the events - but interestingly not put again in public at the actual event - relates directly back to the exhibition Surplus Cameo Decor. In that the wide range of Cameo contributors from within the spheres of art, curation, criticism and film were invited to be present and just be themselves in the space, not particularly directed in which way to act.

The speakers differing reactions to these carefully considered words, thrown at a wall, are intriguing.  They knew little of the physical exhibition Surplus Cameo Decor it seems, but for those who have experienced the exhibition, their discussions relate back to it.  Here the speakers have responded to this invitation and spread out in their own directions of interest.  We form the connections. 

The audience knows nothing of the content of the exhibition either and their reaction to the events evolves as the juxtaposed speakers proceed in their musings. The audience probes in asking ‘did Hao and Schmitz as curator and artist want people to come and respond to the questions put by Hubs and Fictions or did they want them to come and respond as themselves?’ 

The invited speakers have already grappled with this problem.  They frequently ask Schmitz ‘Am I answering your question?’ They each developed a way to react to the illusively suggested subject matter by drawing on their own practice and experience, sometimes unsure if that was the direction Schmitz wished them to proceed. In Schmitz’s deliberate juxtaposition of terms, people and disciplines, he highlights how interchangeable these understandings are.

Similarly I know little of the cameo performances.  They were closed to the pubic - separate from the exhibition openings. I like the intimacy within this, it mirrors how often private conversation informs your own work. It is a continuation of an ongoing, private art-making process, continued in the open installed exhibition, generating future thoughts. The intangibility of this is intriguing. I orbited around, but was not privy to the event. It is as when one would wish to keep some things private- a conversation between those you are dying to talk to- these conversations were kept among the few invited to collaborate with the artist and curator. As if something important was needed to be said without the risk of diversion or being overheard. Talk freely.

 At this final Hub’s and Fictions event we were given a glimpse of what went on in these Cameos-documentation of an event, not the same but hints, however the outcome of this is not known. The cameo events are exposed in a slide show of photographs projected on the wall of the lecture theatre in Goldsmiths. In it we saw the artist and cameos, in discussion, fervid then laughing, playing in the space.

The audience’s reaction to this not knowing is thought-provoking. Oddly Mark Twain’s novel ‘The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn’ springs to mind, particularly the chapter during which two con men convince people that they are the Dauphin and the descendant of the King of England.  They convince the assembled crowd, gathered to view a performance, of this magnificent fiction because there is no way for them to perceive fact- no readily available historical certainties to disprove the con men. In their meanderings the audience gathered at Goldsmiths, questioning as they try to piece together this complicated Hubs and Fictions evokes for me the various complications of constructed narratives as in this scene from famous fiction.

There are no con men here but artists; so what is the truth to be exposed? It seems only that we wish to expose more truths; however, what are truths but fictions on which a consensus has been decided?

---

[1] List of speakers for the final event, carefully chosen to provoke discourse, as one would throw words at a wall, here presented as a wall structure.

[2] Vanessa Joan Muller, transcriptions from Hubs and Fictions, Goldsmiths, London Dec 6^th 2012.

[3] Question emailed to the invited speakers by Sophia Hao curator of Hubs and Fictions and the exhibition Surplus Cameo Decor, by the artist Edgar Schmitz, Cooper Gallery 2012. 

A former MFA student at DJCAD, Sinéad Bligh is an artist currently based in London. https://twitter.com/SineadBligh

Happy New Year from Cooper Gallery

Image: Edgar Schmitz, Surplus Cameo Decor, Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, 2012, (detail). Photo: Ross Fraser McLean.

outskirts of the real thing.

Part one

Notes and thoughts in two parts from interactions with Edgar Schmitz’s Hubs and Fictions, A touring forum on Current Art and Imported remoteness, curated by Sophia Hao which traveled from the Cooper Gallery Dundee, to Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Newcastle terminating in Goldsmiths, London.

   “Sited. Orchestrated.    

                                                                                   Experienced. 

                Performed.                                           Remote.                                                       

                                                 a choreography.                                                                 

                            Props.                                 Stand-ins. Cameos.” [1]

                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                          

Throw words at a wall, and see which sticks, it seems this is often how we learn, how we build our narratives and points of view. This tool was often the prompt we were given, in English class at school, as a starting point for creative writing. It is meant to give us  agency, and often gives so much, without the usual framework, the paragraph around the word gives, we are left confused, disorientated, and so go off in our own  terrible and wonderful tangents as we ourselves build a narrative of understanding into something or nothing.

I have been asked on many occasions during the course of facilitating for these events, what is the exhibition about? What is the point? It’s all a bit vague isn’t it? These questions I regularly found difficult to answer, so without a hard fast manifesto attached to the work, I would revert to my own narrative of connections. Drawing on my own points of interest which I read from the work; such as how we engage with art, art and reality, art and knowledge, the process of exhibition making, the processes of thoughts leading to an artwork  and the numerous collaborations which this entails - collaboration that contentious word.

This idea of a semi fictional hub, as discussed during the forums, was never at the forefront of my mind while describing this event, although asserted as being the central concern – one of the few assertions. However I found this to be most interesting in the work. In Hubs and Fictions, we see the often intangibility of an artwork which sets your mind off in your own direction of interest, only to bring you around again to form new conclusions. Or not if you so choose. So I began thinking about fictional hubs, or hubs in general. What is an artistic hub? A cultural hub? About how contemporary art for good or for ill, connects those who are geographically remote, in smaller spheres of the art world with those in the massive - within global and personal scales.

Tom Morton: London based Curator & Writer. 

Contributing Editor of Frieze magazine works include 'Man in the Holocene' with Catherine Patha

Girl:“She’s pretty”

Boy:“You think?”

‘Tom Morton – Cubitt Gallery ¬  Junction:

North London Cultural Consortium

Walks around rings cross’

‘London is  now a truly international city, home to a global array of artists and curators who effortlessly draw on modes, styles, technology and influences from across continents in the creation and

“the beat of destiny yeeaaah”

mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble

click click BANG

presentation of art.’

London in 6 easy steps.

“Do you want to buy some....I’m not from around here you know?”

“Got any spare change?”

“Want to buy a phone?”

...shifting relations that make up the city from their particular perspective’ [2]

Then of course there are those sphere’s in which we inhabit, in which we dwell, those which we draw from in order to make. Our personal social structures, our environment, our lives – fictitious  futures and memories.

A cultural hub is a fictional thing. Something decided to be by a group of people, believe yourself to be something, convince others and then it will be so - Always subjective and liable to flux. Hubs move, evolve and change, go bust and so emigrate elsewhere. It is the infrastructure which enables a hub to develop. Intellectual and monetary - it is a nomadic thing, always interchangeable.

So is there the potential within art to imagine the sphere in which you produce as a component of a larger cultural hub, and utilise that, though you may be geographically removed from a supposed physical hub. In doing so do you create a new hub in your own sphere?  Or equally does this mean within your own modes of working, where people meet and communicate, either with or without a particular physical area around them, become a Hub – a facilitator for the production of work. 

Is a hub a place where work is produced? This suggests the Hub as a place, and the cause of the production of work.  The term Hub is frequently used in a technical sense to describe a device that connects a computer to the internet, or a computer to another computer. Connecting the remote - therefore borrowing this definition you could suppose that remoteness is an inherent component for the function and maybe a constant re-invigoration of a supposed Hub. 

A hub - a device for complex remote connections.

---

Title note; taken from comments made by Edgar Schmitz, Hubs and Fictions Forum, Goldsmiths, London 06/12/2012. 

[1] Edgar Schmitz: List of adjectives often used by Schmitz in describing Surplus Cameo Decor  and Hubs and Fictions; final Hubs and Fictions Forum, Goldsmiths, London, 06/12/2012.

[2] Research notes made in preparation for the forum Hubs and Fictions, in Leyton Library London.  Points of speech made by others using the library, which interrupted the writers train of thought are indicated in blue.

A former MFA student at DJCAD, Sinéad Bligh is an artist currently based in London. https://twitter.com/SineadBligh

exhibition in three episodes: review in three parts by Claire Briegel

Edgar Schmitz – Surplus Cameo Decor

18 October 2012 – 14, December 2012

Cooper Gallery

exhibition in three episodes: review in three parts

episode 1: palasthotel, 18 October – 6 November

Before seeing Schmitz Surplus Cameo Decor in reality—in as much the setup of palasthotel can be termed as such—I began talking to someone who had already been to the preview, commenting upon the discrepancy between the sparsity of the set-up and the apparent superfluity of information encircling it. The conversation that ensued streamed into questions of encounters and experiences of art, the role of art in relation to the institutions that circumscribe it, and the responsibility of the complex discourses surrounding art to reflect it rather than support or even swallow it (or is it art's responsibility to fulfil its promises?)

With such questions in mind, as well as the shards of information that had already been presented to me, I did not enter the eponymous palasthotel as a distracted viewer. The initial encounter with Schmitz' gallery-come-backdrop was one of engulfment; the scene is both decor (setting the scene) as well as being tangible and (temporarily) inhabitable. This element of the decorative—coming across in the scene's ambient backdrop snapshots and the mesmerising bronze glow—is not something viewers normally experience in an embodied sense. Decor is either meant to indulge a certain sense of ambience without being an element in itself, or simply exist to be looked at. The scene that has been occasioned here allows the incomplete elements that normally become engulfed by the mastery of the whole to exist together in semi-real / fictional time. The ambience created by the interplay of these lofty super-signifiers—the seductive bronze two-way mirror taken from the Palasthotel in East Berlin, the neon reflection that is at once glamorous and sleazy, snippets of isolated conversation and suggestive filmic stills—creates such a saturation of stimuli, the viewer cannot help but be in some way immersed (albeit within the bitter-sweet reality of being in the German Democratic Republic of foreign travel under StaSi surveillance in the semi-fictional palasthotel).

This isn't to say that the viewer wouldn't leave the exhibition feeling slighted by the scene's persistent oscillation between suggestion and promise. I would say that the exhibition doesn't deliver completeness, and with regards to the conversation that pre-empted my visit, part of the pleasure of this exhibition is in the overlapping and intersection of 'remote' dialogues infiltrating the present scenario and the snippets of incomplete meaning within it. In the same way that Schmitz' manipulation of reality interrupts the fictional scene—the use of real, borrowed and notorious material, the references to veritable historical and political moments, as well as the durational existence of the exhibition in real time including real 'celebrity' appearances via Skype—I would say that the art work resonates beyond its material manifestation and 'ambient attitude', enveloping the discursive and fluctuating networks of understanding that surround it, and muddling the distinction between art and discourse.

Rather than making viewing arduous and confusing, I think the first episode of Surplus Cameo Decor allows its viewers (should they choose so) to indulge in and accept a certain level of mystification and incompleteness. The episodic duration of the exhibition itself makes space for an experiential process, which in turn affects the responses that ensue - in which there is a real and persistent sense of there being more-to-come.

Claire Briegel studies at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and is part of Exhibitions' Student Curatorial Team.

SCT: A Currency of Ideas, Afternoon 2

On Tuesday 13^th November, Holly Knox Yeoman and I returned to the Board Room at DJCAD to continue working with ExhibitionsDJCAD, Student Curatorial Team (SCT). The intention for the second part of our Workshop ‘SCT: A Currency of Ideas’ was to hear back from the students about the projects//exhibitions they would like to devise and to assist them to begin collaboratively developing their ideas as well as to consider their next steps.

To begin with, members of the team put forward their initial thoughts to the group. These ideas reflected their own diverse personal interests from investigating the artistic process in which the unintended is given room for creative development, to an ambitious interdisciplinary project, which would invite the viewer to more fully understand some of the craft and possibilities in printmaking. The SCT were encouraged to sketch//draw//write to help share and record their ideas during the discussions.

Morgan Cahn also told us of her plans for Fun-A-Day, which will return to Dundee in 2013, and invites participants to set themselves a simple//creative//fun//interesting project to undertake every day in January. These works will be installed for a new audience to investigate and enjoy, and is planned to take place in Roseangle Café Arts, early February 2013 (check out last year’s Fun-A-Day Wordpress here.)

Holly went on to discuss Fluxus and Richard Demarco’s involvement with members of the movement in Strategy-Get-Arts (1970), a ground-breaking “non-exhibition” taking over the Edinburgh College of Art. This led to discussion about Holly’s work at The Demarco European Art Foundation (DEAF), how Holly and I began collaborating on an on-going project barter and also introduced the opportunity for the current SCT to visit, research and possibly work in response to the archive housed within the Foundation. Last academic year’s SCT had a group visit and it is a dialogue Exhibitions DJCAD and DEAF are keen to continue.

 Dickie Webb's '12 x 9 x 9' (2011) installation at Demarco European Foundation

Strategy: Get Arts Catalogue and Joseph Beuys, 'What is Art?'

The SCT were encouraged to form smaller groups and barter their ideas – exchange//develop//remove//improve – to start to shape the curatorial projects they may undertake. Although still in the early stages it was excellent to hear how the plans evolved and to watch new working relationships begin to develop during the Workshop.

Once re-grouped we discussed general practicalities and asked them to consider the timeframe they envisaged for their proposals, the use of the DJCAD exhibition spaces and how to best go forward with their ideas as groups.   

We really enjoyed our experience of working with the SCT, we will be keeping in contact and cannot wait to see the projects discussed progress and become a reality!