DY-66

29 Sept - 7 Oct 2007
Sat + Sun 1 - 6pm
Five Years Gallery
Unit 66 6th Floor, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Rd, London E8 4QN


Apparently there is something strange happening in and around the Five Years Gallery: the A.A.S. are investigating a ‘zone of instability’ and are trying to avert a disaster. The peculiar happenings seem to be originating from East End galleries. The A.A.S. believe that galleries are in fact fronts for highly illegal activities or head quarters for hostile organizations.

The A.A.S. is an undercover organisation carrying out various absurd but covert operations. It is formed from a changing collection of agents and “participants are absorbed into particular projects as required” but their suspicious behaviour may give then away. The members are given pseudonyms such as Mule, The Viking, The Philosopher, and the Shadow; their special skills, aims, and weaknesses are also recorded.

The Five Years Gallery is currently the A.A.S. control room. As a visitor you can riffle through their recent espionage activities.
The spy ring was mapped out on the wall with red string and pins – each linked to an area in the centre then linked to images and text produced from and for the spy event that had occurred at that geographical location. They do seem to be obsessed with poisoning, but I suppose this is the espionage vogue at the moment. The agents’ activities include taking ‘participants’ to different shops to spell out words from the first letter of each shop, code words most be exchanged before play can commence.

The participants’ notebooks contained information gleaned from surveillance activities in the form of notes, sketches and diagrams. Visual data was also presented mini photographs collected papers, perhaps evidence. These were quite beautiful. One of the A.A.S. participants read from this during the opening, but its content was still inaccessible to me. They also had the entire electrical grid of Birmingham on microfilm. How could I not respect these intellectual superiors now? I was in awe of the breadth of the data.

The A.A.S.’s underworld was accessible but so deep with layers of information that to truly comprehend in its entirety was impossible. What you saw was the surface of what appeared to be a total system.

Through the spying activities the protagonists respond to the signs systems and structures of the contemporary city but disregard their conventional meanings. They map out a sub system: one that questions the authority inherent within these signs and systems, creating their own, subversive to the core.

Their work reminds me of the absurdist Dadaist events where their actions appeared to be absent of any logic, in response to the barbaric First World War. This same bureaucratic, state sanctioned logic has again brought us to a war on terror where every third person could be a terrorist of some kind. Every time I go on the tube a disembodied announcer advises me to report unattended luggage and suspicious behaviour.

Julie Cockburn at Forster

I recently came across Julie Cockburn's work at Forster Gallery. Though the work wasn't displayed in a space that gave it room to breathe and the other artist work in this group show was of a completely different aesthetic which meant I was unable to appreciate the other exhibitors in 'Ten at One'.

Cockburn responds to pre-existing images including maps and whole books by various manual means, such as cutting, collage and sewing. Many include beautiful elegant scribbles - but stitched. I am interested in the relationship between the stitched lines on top of the existing ground. One work 'A Bird in a Bush' looked initially as if Cockburn had just rapidly scribbled on the ornithological book, but the lines were carefully hand stitched. The response wasn't 'off the cuff', but carefully considered and laboured. The stitching is more tactile than a pencil line across a page, this to handle nature is also found in the choice of working on a book, not just pages but the whole book, but open at chosen pages. Why this page? With Cockburn's work like many other artists the response to the work seems to be 'dumb' in terms of a complete blindness to the content of the text. In a way that a child draws in a book, they know the image is there and they know what the image is of but are adding to it in a way that seems to bear no relation to the image or content. The graffiti nature of Cockburn's practice is a loving one, not one of disrespect, but it maybe territorial.



Julie Cockburn is in the group show 'Ten at One' until 31st August 2007
1 Chapel Place, Rivington Street, London EC2A 4DQ


Copy link below to see image of 'A Bird in a Bush'
http://www.forstergallery.com/Julie-Cockburn/a-bird-in-a-bush

John Armleder: About Nothing. Works on Paper 1962 - 2007

South London Gallery
2 Feb – 25 Mar 2007

This exhibition of Armleder’s drawings fills almost all the wall space of the South London Gallery. It includes a snowflake wall paper, designed by the artist purposely for the show, running along the top half of the two long walls, in orange and green. The wallpaper itself reminded me of something I could buy in Habitat, and I disliked it. Though the exhibition is a survey of his drawings it does contain an awful lot of them. As so many of them were so high I could not look at them with any intimacy. I could not see how they were made. Can you have drawing without intimacy, without access to its means of production? Though the sight of all the drawings was impressive, I found myself frustrated by the limited access to the work and the sheer spectacle of the exhibition.

Tomoko Takahashi - Hales Gallery

When arriving at the private view for Tomoko Takahashi show, I was met by a long queue. I overheard that the work had to be viewed, curiously, by torchlight.

I had the opportunity of meeting Tomoko, last year at the Drawing Power event on Exhibition Road. Tomoko was extremely happy, enthusiastic and down to earth; it was a refreshing change to the pretentious cool of some artists.

When we finally came to the front of the queue the hand drawn wall map showing our route through the gallery was explained to us, and we were handed a wind-up torch. The best thing about seeing the collection of stuff arranged on the floor and the walls by torchlight was that we only saw a partial view, never the totality of the room. I found myself coming across collections and groupings of things. It reminded me of the viewfinder that I had to look through, at school art lessons, and only draw what was contained within the frame. We shared the torch between us, and we would intern look at from the perspective of each other; things I liked and things my friend liked. It reminded me of the adventurous dreams I had as a child coming across hoards of treasure in some dark catacomb. Though it initially looked like a collection of the leftovers from a jumble sale, without the clothes, motifs were repeated; arrangements of things clearly became a Tomoko arrangement, the deleted clocks, and the playing cards for example.

In the next room, this time fully lit, there was a catwalk along the centre and around on the floor were all her documentation, in boxes and photographs upside down covering the floor. On the walls were photographs of her work, but stapled and bent, curved, not flat and displayed in a conventional manner. With my own work I find the relationship between the work and the documentation, a curious problem.

We returned to the dark room and negotiated our way through to the next room on our journey through the Hales Gallery. In this room, where framed photographs of the floor, very beautiful multiple exposures, appropriately framed, simple. We then walked through the final room, the Hales Gallery office. Like Takahashi herself, her practice, and the gallery were completely open and uninhibited.