Schwartz Projects

2009-05-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

Impromptu Schwartz Gallery, London
5 - 29 March

Reviewed by: Heather Phillipson

Marimbas and songs of praise carry across the Schwartz gallery in London's Hackney Wick. 'The Cherub Voices', balanced on rough-hewn high wooden chairs, form a circle amongst the other artworks. Their unexpected tropical harmonies are a summons: an invitation to walk inside their ensemble to inhabit their attractive sound. But the sound fragments with proximity ß the voices emanate from four phonograph record players arranged to face each other. Each stylus is set on the same B-side so that their multiple pitches occasionally coincide. Mostly, however, they are in counterpoint, with each record contributing a distinct part.

This piece, Evolution by Luke Brennan, provides an apposite image for 'Impromptu', which brings together six artists on the premise of re-working the model of the group show. Key to this premise is the idea of dialogue and interaction – between the curator, the artists, the site, and the evolving work and group dynamic. ''mpromptu' did not arise from curatorial decisions about extant artworks or particular artists and nor are the works responses to specific themes. Rather, what holds the exhibition together is, as the title states, a desire for the unexpected, provisional, and improvised.

To this end, the strategy of the curator, Patrick Michalopoulos, was to invite a group of six artists into the gallery for a month preceding the exhibition. The artists, who had not met previously, shared the space as a kind of studio – as a site of making, exchange, and, ultimately, public display. To organise a group exhibition on the basis of unmade work and unknown relationships is undoubtedly a risky strategy. And to do so in such a short time and in the gallery space in which the work will be viewed is perhaps even more so. But it is also bold. It is an act of resistance against the prevailing institutional control and rigidity both within the art world and outside of it, to which the Olympic blue wall almost immediately on the gallery's doorstep stands as a pertinent reminder. And, most importantly, it is a strategy that allows for unpredictability. It allows for the artists to be surprised and, in turn, the audience. This is critical for the production and reception of new and exciting artworks.

According to the accompanying information, one of the curator's primary visions was for the space to become a "lived environment", and indeed, what is immediately striking about this show is its energy. As an audience we are called on visually, aurally and, less common in the visual arts, also through our sense of smell. From Luke Brennan's singing record players and the crescendos of Simon Head's looped video constructed from images and noises recorded during his month in the gallery, and from Jonas Ranson and David Murphy's sculptural/print collaborations and Rob Kessler's glass houses to Christina Mitrentse's installation with fungi and incense, the gallery as a living and vital space is achieved both in the dynamic use of the site prior to the exhibition and in the exhibition itself. Although the works differ superficially (and succeed to greater or lesser degrees taken on their individual merits), they are all underpinned by a shared vigour brought about, perhaps, by the speculative and rapid processes of their making. The kind of cohesion that most group shows seek to achieve through a singular curatorial vision is re-enlivened in this show through its serendipitous interplays.

As in a festival, 'Impromptu' gives the impression of entering a slightly warmer, vibrant and more colourful world. Stepping off the street in Hackney Wick to be greeted by Brennan's multiple female vocalists, the crocuses and yucca plants he is growing under lightbulbs, the spiced smoke of Mitrentse's incense, and the six brightly painted central columns (one for each artist), it as if some key part of the Caribbean, the British springtime, North America and Asia have been brought into the gallery simultaneously. And as with a festival there is a sense of community – of sharing, coming and being together. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer noted that a festival is an event that lifts its participants from everyday existence, drawing a parallel between celebration and art. Both initiate a community gathered together for something, although they are unsure precisely what. A celebration, he suggested, is not about setting out in order to arrive somewhere and neither has it any fixed goal to be attained. Still, its participants are united by intention.

Brought together for an unforeseeable outcome, the six artists and curator in this show occupy precisely this site of 'festival'. United by their intention to make art in dialogue with one another and with a space that blurs, interestingly, any distinction between studio and gallery, they are also, in distinctive and personal ways, celebrating not only the results but also the processes of making. And by drawing attention to the importance and vivacity of the making process, and a shared making process at that, 'Impromptu' questions notions of galleries as the site of singular final works. In fact, 'Impromptu' raises many more questions than it answers – the mark of an interesting and challenging exhibition.

Writer detail:
Heather Phillipson is an artist and writer based in London.

heatherphillipson1@yahoo.co.uk |

Venue detail:
Schwartz gallery
White Post Quay, 92 White Post Lane, London E9 5EN

evolution

2009-05-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

Post private view shots

2009-03-24T00:43:00.000-07:00

Components Separated

2009-03-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

IMPROMPTU p.v

2009-03-06T11:14:00.000-08:00

All Coming Together

2009-03-05T05:54:00.000-08:00

Sightings . Updated 18.55 Wed Mar 04 2009

2009-03-04T16:04:00.000-08:00

Weird UFO sightings: Triangle formation
In Peru, in America and in the UK, UFOs have been spotted this year,
apparently flying as a team. Keywords: triangle, triangular, ufo, ufos, formation, flying, together, unidentified, object, unidentified flying object, sky, camera, footage, real, genuine, hoax, fake, incredible, new, 2009, march, february, filmed, caught on camera, seen, sighted, peru, uk, england, america, washington,

تابوتِ ﻓﻴﻪ سکینہ

2009-02-28T17:29:00.000-08:00

From one to all

2009-02-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

aide-mémoire II

2009-02-21T13:26:00.000-08:00

aide-mémoire

2009-02-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

LYCOPHRON, Alexandra

2009-02-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

LYCOPHRON of Chalcis was a Greek poet and scholar of the Library of Alexandria who flourished in the C3rd BC. His cryptic poem, the Alexandra, tells the stories of the heroes of the Trojan War in the riddling, prophetic words of the Trojan princess Cassandra.

ALEXANDRA, TRANSLATED BY A. W. MAIR
The speaker is a slave appointed to watch Cassandra and report her prophecies. He addresses Priam.

[1] ALL will I tell truly that thou askest from the utter beginning, and if the tale be prolonged, forgive me, master. For not quietly as of old did the maiden loose the varied voice of her oracles, but poured forth a weird confused cry, and uttered wild words from her bay-chewing mouth, imitating the speech of the dark Sphinx. Thereof what in heart and memory I hold, hear thou, O King, and, pondering with wise mind, wind and pursue the obscure paths of her riddles, whereso a clear track guides by a straight way through things wrapped in darkness. And I, cutting the utter bounding thread, will trace her paths of devious speech, striking the starting-point like winged runner.

Continued at http://www.theoi.com/Text/LycophronAlexandra.html

Greek Bucolic Poets

2009-02-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

THE PATTERN POEMS are ancient Greek poems composed in the "bucolic" tradition with verses designed to form a specific shape (such as a pipe, an egg, wings, altar, etc.) and with complimentary theme. The few surviving examples of the genre date mainly from the Hellenistic era (C3rd to 2nd BC) and are preserved in a section of the Greek Anthology of texts.

Since the structure of these poems is completely lost in translation, I have included the Greek texts here to illustrate the form. Several of the works are also mythological riddles along the lines of Lycophron's Alexandra.

SIMIAS II. THE WINGS

This poem seems to have been inscribed on the wings of a statue – perhaps a votive statue – representing Love as a bearded child. The metre is the same as that of the Axe with the difference that the lines are to be read in the usual order. The poem also differs from the Axe in making no reference, except by its shape, to the wings of Love. Moreover it contains no hint of dedication. (Anthology XV, 24.)

Behold the ruler of the deep-bosomed Earth, the turner upside-down of the Son of Acmon,1 and have no fear that so little a person should have so plentiful a crop of beard to his chin. For I was born when Necessity bare rule, and all creatures, moved they in Air or in Chaos, were kept though her dismal governance far apart. Swift-flying son of Cypris and war-lord Ares – I am not that at all; for by no force came I into rule, but by gentle-willed persuasion, and yet all alike, Earth, deep Sea, and brazen Heaven, bowed to my behest, and I took to myself their old sceptre and made me a judge among gods.

1. "Son of Acmon" : Heaven.

Palatine Apollo

2009-02-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

Tetraktys

The name Pythagoras comes from: "pithia", Apollo's temple, and, "agoras", the [people's] place.

Xu Bing: 'Book from The Sky'

2009-02-18T11:13:00.000-08:00

Institution: The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Materials: Mixed media installation / Hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ''false'' characters.

An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ''false'' Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.

Vetula

2009-02-17T07:02:00.000-08:00

2009-02-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

Before Christianisation, in traditional pagan European culture it was believed that the spirit of the "corn" (in modern American English, "corn" would be "grain") lived amongst the crop, and that the harvest made it effectively homeless. J.G. Frazer devotes chapters in The Golden Bough to "Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden in Northern Europe" (chs. 45-48) and adduces European folkloric examples collected in great abundance by W. Mannhardt. Among the customs attached to the last sheaf of the harvest were hollow shapes fashioned from the last sheaf of wheat or other cereal crops. The corn spirit would then spend the winter in this home until the "corn dolly" was ploughed into the first furrow of the new season. "Dolly" may be a corruption of "idol" or may have come from the Greek word 'eidolon' (that which represents something else as does the word 'idol').

Hoe's One Cylinder Printing Press

2009-02-15T11:56:00.002-08:00

Valentine's Day Workshop

2009-02-14T16:32:00.000-08:00

Source

2009-02-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

Form

2009-02-14T16:16:00.000-08:00

Lupercalia

2009-02-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

http://jumpinginartmuseums.blogspot.com/

2009-02-13T16:40:00.001-08:00

2009-02-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

Dr Nathaniel Ward (1791-1868) Botanist, and resident of East London.
Inventor in 1829 of the Wardian case, a portable greenhouse in which plants could be propagated and transported across the world and used at Kew until the 1940's. Particularly successful for housing luxuriant ferns the cases became fashionable household items following the great exhibition of 1851. However, Ward's intention that they might be used to grow fresh salads in poor smoky cities never really took off.

IMBOLC

2009-02-13T12:22:00.000-08:00

Living in the same house

2009-02-13T12:03:00.000-08:00

How to avoid self-fertilisation
One way that plants avoid self-fertilisation is by being dioecious (from the Greek, meaning 'living in separate houses') with separate male and female plants. Some species may be monoecious with separate male and female flowers on the same plant (from the Greek, meaning 'living in the same house'). Hazel (corylus avella) is a good example, with showy male flowers (catkins) and tiny, red, star-like female flowers.

Collected - Hackney wick community woodland, Friday 13th February.

Vendome Column

2009-02-13T08:37:00.001-08:00

Pre-Fab

2009-02-13T02:29:00.000-08:00

Re-hab

2009-02-13T02:04:00.000-08:00

The Dmitri Belyaev Experiment

2009-02-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

In a time when Lysenkoism was official state doctrine, Belyaev's commitment to classical genetics had cost him his job as head of the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow in 1948. During the 1950s, he continued to conduct genetic research under the guise of studying animal physiology. This was more acceptable to the Communist Party, which wanted to improve humans.

Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behavior; specifically amenability to domestication, or tameability. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tameability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among humans. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body's hormones and neurochemicals.

Belyaev decided to test his theory by domesticating foxes; in particular the Russian Silver Fox. He placed a population of them in the same process of domestication, and he decided to submit this population to a strong selection pressure for inherent tameness.

The result is that Russian scientists now have a number of tame foxes which are fundamentally different in temperament and behaviour from their wild forebears. Some important changes in physiology and morphology are now visible, such as mottled or spotted colored fur. Many scientists believe that these changes related to selecting for tameness are caused by lower adrenaline production in the new breed, which causes these physiological changes in a very small number of generations, thus allowing for these new genetic offshoots not present in the original species. Notably, the new foxes not only become more tame, but more dog-like as well: they lost their distinctive musky "fox smell", became more friendly with humans, put their ears down (like dogs), wagged their tails when happy and began to vocalize and bark like domesticated dogs.

The project also investigated breeding vicious foxes to study aggressive behavior. These foxes snap at humans and otherwise show no fear.

Happy Birthday Charles

2009-02-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

Fox On The Run

2009-02-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

2009-02-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

In a long-term experiment at a Siberian fur farm, geneticists created a new version of Vulpes vulpes, the silver fox, by allowing only the friendliest animals from each generation to breed. Having selected only the most ''tamable'' of some 45,000 foxes over 35 generations, the scientists have compressed into a mere 40 years an evolutionary process that took thousands of years to transform ancestral wolves into domestic dogs.

The original purpose of the breeding was to create a friendly breed less likely than wild animals to fight when put to death. But in time, geneticists saw that far-reaching changes they observed in the foxes' physical and neurological makeup merited scientific study. The scientists apparently underwent some changes, too. Close bonds developed between the tame foxes and their human wardens, and the staff at the fur farm is trying to find ways of saving the animals from slaughter.

The director of the experiment is Dr. Lyudmila N. Trut of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Novosibirsk. She reported in a paper that selective breeding to create genetically docile animals had resulted in a breed of ultra-tame foxes that make good house pets ''as devoted as dogs but as independent as cats, capable of forming deep-rooted pair bonds with human beings.''

Going For A Spin

2009-02-12T14:38:00.001-08:00

2009-02-12T14:31:00.000-08:00

LEARN TO SPIN AND JUGGLE PLATES

Getting Started

First, you will need a stick and a plate.

1.Hold your plate in your right hand. Take a stick in your left hand and put it underneath the top of the rim. Release your plate and let it stay on the stick

2.Commence spinning your stick in a circular motion -- slowly at first, then gradually speeding up.

3.The plate will be vertical when you start. As you spin faster, the plate will begin to move into a horizontal position. The faster you spin, the more stable the plate should be.

4.Once the plate becomes stable, you can gently guide your stick towards the center of the plate.

5.If the plate slows down, use the palm of your free hand to gently strike the side of the plate to speed it up. Do not strike it too hard, or you will destabilize the plate.

PLEASE NOTE : The tune Sabre Dance should be played in the background.

Heptagon Rose

2009-02-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

THE TWO BASES OF ART 2

2009-02-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

' I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible examples of the union of the graphic and constructive powers, - one of my breakfast plates . Since all the finely architectural arts, we said, began in the shaping of the cup and the platter, we will begin, ourselves, with the platter.
Why has it been made round? For two structural reasons: first that the greatest holding surface may be gathered into the smallest space: and secondly, that in being pushed past other things on the table' it may come into least contact with them.
Next, why has it a rim? For two other structural reasons: first, that it is convenient to put salt or mustard upon: but secondly and chiefly, that the plate may be easily laid hold of. The rim is the simplest form of continuous handle.
Farther, to keep it from soiling the cloth, it will be wise to put this ridge beneath, round the bottom: for as the rim is the simplest form of continuous handle, so this is the simplest form of continuous leg. And we get the section given beneath the figure for the essential one of a rightly made platter.
Thus far our art has been strictly utilitarian, having respect to conditions of collision, of carriage and of support. But now, on the surface of our piece of pottery, here are various bands and spots of colour which are presumably set there to make it pleasanter to the eye. Six of the spots, seen closely, you discover are intended to represent flowers. These then have a distinctly graphic purpose as the other properties of the plate have an architectural one, and the first critical question we have to ask about them is, whether they are like roses or not. '

John Ruskin, Aratra Pentelici, Lecture 1 1872

THE TWO BASES OF ART

2009-02-09T15:23:00.000-08:00

Menorah

2009-02-09T04:14:00.000-08:00

7 Conversations

2009-02-08T16:50:00.000-08:00

1.Thursday,18th December,2008,8pm.
2.Thursday,8th January,2009,7.30pm.
3.Saturday,31st January,2009,1pm.
4.Saturday,7th February,2009,12pm.
5.Saturday,14th February,2009,12pm
6.Saturday,21st February,2009,12pm.
7.Saturday,28th February,2009,12pm.

IMPROMPTU - Conversation #4

2009-02-08T10:02:00.001-08:00

Big Top Till Ya Drop

2009-02-08T06:12:00.000-08:00

Pyramid Scheme

2009-02-08T05:59:00.001-08:00

In the Round

2009-02-08T05:50:00.000-08:00

ROTUNDA

2009-02-08T04:35:00.000-08:00

Paleochristian and Byzantine Monument- Rotunda of St. George.
The Rotunda of Galerius is 125m northeast of the Arch of Galerius in Thessaloniki, north part of Greece. It is now the Greek Orthodox Church of Agios Georgios, better known as the Church of the Rotunda (or simply The Rotunda). It is centrally planned and owes its name to its shape. The cylindrical structure was built in 306 on the orders of the tetrarch Galerius, who was thought to have intended it to be his mausoleum. It was more likely intended as a temple, either as a Temple of Zeus or Kabeiros. The Rotunda has a diameter of 24.5 m. Its walls are more than 6 m thick, which is one reason why it has withstood Thessaloniki's earthquakes. In its original design, the dome of the Rotunda had an oculus like the Pantheon in Rome.

ICONS

2009-02-08T04:04:00.000-08:00

Reference to Byzantine icons to be used for IMPROMPTU artist's Icons

Delphi- Apollo Temple. Oracle of Pithia

2009-02-08T03:54:00.000-08:00

The shrine at Delphi was the workshop of one--Apollo. Delphi is an impressive archeological site, located near the Gulf of Corinth on the route to central Greece at the foot of the twin peaks of Mt. Parnassos. The ruin of the Temple of Apollo dominates the site, and is surrounded by a theater, a stadium and numerous tributes and monuments contributed by city states and kings. Unlike Athens or Corinth, Delphi was not a residential city; it was a religious and political (the two were really not to be separated) shrine.
From his temple Apollo dispensed his divine guidance through the Oracle to the many pilgrims seeking his wisdom in matters of war, worship, love, and business. The seekers (men only, no women allowed) paid a fee, sacrificed a sheep, goat or boar, went to a waiting room, and submitted their question on a leaden tablet to a priest. Then a priestess, a devout local village woman over 50 years of age called a Pithia, sat on a three legged stool over a hole in the temple floor and inhaled fumes from below until she went into a trance. A priest would interpret the sounds she made to the pilgrim in cryptic verse. The prophecies were frequently equivocal and always obscure, but they were also authoritative and sometimes determined the course of empire.

How old is Delphi? In mythology, almost as old as time. The story is that Zeus released two eagles at the ends of the earth, one in the East and the other in the West. Where they collided and fell to the ground, Zeus marked as the center of the world with a sacred stone, "the navel of the earth." Originally the Oracle was dedicated to Mother Earth (Gaia) and guarded by her son, the serpent Python. Hera, one of Zeus's wives, in her jealousy sent the serpent in pursuit of Leto, another wife of Zeus, while she was pregnant with Apollo. Leto fled to the island of Delos and escaped. After he was born and while yet a child, Apollo came from Crete in the form of a dolphin (i.e., Delphi) and slew the serpent, took over the Oracle and the worship of the Delphinos Apollo was established. Apollo was a superstar among the gods and the Romans did not change his name. He was the son of Zeus, the lord of light, truth, intelligence, healing and the arts. As he was also the god of prophecy, Delphi was his most impressive shrine.

The French School of Archeology began excavating Delphi in 1892 and celebrated a century of digging in 1992. Archeologists found a stone on-site with a hole through it and three small holes for a stool where Pithia sat to breathe the vapors.

Red, The Daughters of the Daughters, Blue The Sons of the Sons

2009-02-07T18:16:00.000-08:00

Sigil of Ameth

2009-02-07T17:52:00.000-08:00

The Sigil of Ameth was created in the 16th century for Queen Elizabeth I by Dr. John Dee, an advisor and astrologer. A regular heptagon, or a seven-sided polygon lies directly inside the outer circle.

A Romance of Many Dimensions

2009-02-07T15:27:00.000-08:00

2009-02-07T15:03:00.000-08:00

A complete digitized copy of the first edition of this book can be found at : www.archive.org/stream/flatlandromanceo00abbouoft

The story is about a two-dimensional world referred to as Flatland. The unnamed narrator, a humble square, guides us through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. The Square has a dream about a visit to a one-dimensional world , and attempts to convince the realm's ignorant monarch of a second dimension, but finds that it is essentially impossible to make him see outside of his eternally straight line.

The narrator is then visited by a three-dimensional sphere, which he cannot comprehend until he sees Spaceland for himself. This sphere, who remains nameless, visits Flatland at the turn of each millennium to introduce a new apostle to the idea of a third dimension in the hopes of eventually educating the population of Flatland of the existence of Spaceland. From the safety of Spaceland, they are able to observe the leaders of Flatland secretly acknowledging the existence of the sphere and prescribing the silencing of anyone found preaching the truth of Spaceland and the third dimension. After this proclamation is made, many witnesses are massacred or imprisoned (according to caste).

After the Square's mind is opened to new dimensions, he tries to convince the Sphere of the theoretical possibility of the existence of a fourth (and fifth, and sixth ...) spatial dimension. Offended by this presumption and incapable of comprehending other dimensions, the Sphere returns his student to Flatland in disgrace.
He then has a dream in which the Sphere visits him again, this time to introduce him to Pointland. The point (sole inhabitant, monarch, and universe in one) perceives any attempt at communicating with him as simply being a thought originating in his own mind (cf. Solipsism).

The Square recognizes the connection between the ignorance of the monarchs of Pointland and Lineland with his own (and the Sphere's) previous ignorance of the existence of other dimensions.
Once returned to Flatland, the Square finds it difficult to convince anyone of Spaceland's existence, especially after official decrees are announced - anyone preaching the lies of three dimensions will be imprisoned (or executed, depending on caste). Eventually the Square himself is imprisoned for just this reason.

Heptagon

2009-02-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

2009-02-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of another favourite book:

an anecdoted topography of chance
Daniel Spoerri
1966
Something Else Press Inc
New York, Cologne, Paris

....todays activity.

Friday 6th February, 5.20pm, 3 degrees, drizzle.

Pillar number 2 selected at random from bag.
Painted with Bromel vinyl emulsion purchased in 1986 from J.W.Bollom, Theobalds Road, WC2, but never used.
Paint No. JWB 73 POPPY 04-E-53

Painting completed 6.45.pm

Evolution

2009-02-05T17:33:00.001-08:00

Pillar Talk

2009-02-05T16:39:00.000-08:00

(NX 465815)

2009-02-05T16:18:00.000-08:00

(NX 465815) POINT OF THE SNIBE
The rocky south-eastern tip of Craignaw consists of a number of clean buttresses of premium-quality granite, unaccountably overlooked in the past. The crag is south-facing and all day sun (with a consequent lack of midges) and a lovely outlook are further bonuses. Wires are far more use here than on most other Galloway mountain crags.

The Point of The Snibe

2009-02-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

Wisdom Wall
This short wall lies on the far right of the crag, just right of The Seven Pillars.

Long Tall Sally 20m HVS 5b 2007
The obvious thin crack on the right of the wall has a hard move to get off the ledge.

Hooves of Fire 20m E1 5a 2007
Climb undercut flakes rightwards up the lower wall and then boldly into a scoop above. Exit up leftwards.

The Seven Pillars
The right edge of the crag is marked by a rib, steep at its bottom and with a series of pillars on its left side. The rock is excellent and the climbs are easier than they look.

Filling the Gap

2009-02-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

Opportunities requiring communication and improvisation may be stimulated by unexpected finds.

On such occasions a I often refer to a book I bought in the mid 80’s from the boot sale that used to be held at Hackney Greyhound track which is now becoming the Olympic village. The book has always proved an invaluable support in times when I did not know what I was doing and I would like to share an extract with you.

The book is:

How to overcome nervous tension and speak well in public.
Written by Alfred Tack and published in 1913

Chapter IV
The Price of Success
Filling the gap

“Choose two words – for example football and Eskimo. Now make a minute speech commencing with the word football and ending with the word Eskimo”.

Now see what you can do with the following sets of words:

Begin with Tibet and end with handkerchief.
Begin with sand and end with tomatoes.
Begin with rabbits and end with Stonehenge.
Begin with cinema’s and end with oak trees.
Begin with libraries and end with love.

"The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" at Wadi Rum (Arabic: وادي رم‎)

2009-02-05T15:55:00.000-08:00

Wadi Rum

2009-02-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

Wadi Rum (Arabic: وادي رم‎) is a valley cut into the sandstone and granite rock in southwest Jordan. Wadi Rum may be best known for its connection with T. E. Lawrence, who based his operations here during 1917–18. One of the impressive rock formations in Wadi Rum was named "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" in memory of Lawrence's book, though the 'Seven Pillars' referred to in the book actually have no connection with Rum.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

2009-02-05T14:08:00.001-08:00

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The title comes from the Book of Proverbs, 9:1: "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars" (KJV). Prior to the First World War, Lawrence had begun work on a scholarly book about seven great cities of the Middle East,[1] to be titled Seven Pillars of Wisdom. When war broke out it was still incomplete and Lawrence stated that he ultimately destroyed the manuscript.
Later, during the Arab Revolt of 1917–18, Lawrence based his operations in Wadi Rum (now a part of Jordan), and one of the more impressive rock formations in the area was named by Lawrence "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom". In the end, Lawrence decided to use this evocative title for the memoirs he penned in the aftermath of the war.
While the title might seem better suited to the former book than the latter, a line from the dedicatory poem at the start of the book helps explain Lawrence's interpretation of the Biblical "seven pillars" and their relevance to the Arab Revolt:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To gain you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When I came.
A variant last line of that stanza – reading "When we came" – appears in some editions; however, the 1922 Oxford text (considered the definitive version; see below) has "When I came". The poem originated as prose, submitted by letter to Robert Graves, who edited the work heavily into its current form, rewriting an entire stanza and correcting the others.

[edit]
Manuscripts and editions
Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey.
Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method.
So they allowed it to begin...
– Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Introduction
Lawrence kept extensive notes throughout the course of his involvement in the Revolt. He began work on a clean narrative in the first half of 1919 while in Paris for the peace conference and, later that summer, while back in Egypt. By December 1919 he had a fair draft of most of the ten books that make up the Seven Pillars of Wisdom but, in an act of monumental absent-mindedness and misfortune, lost it (except for the introduction and final two books) when he misplaced his briefcase while changing trains at Reading railway station.[2] National newspapers alerted the public to the loss of the "hero's manuscript", but to no avail: the draft remained lost. Lawrence refers to this version as "Text I" and says that had it been published, it would have been some 250,000 words in length.

Maybe we just found it !!

In early 1920, Lawrence set about the daunting task of rewriting as much as he could remember of the first version. Working from memory alone (he had destroyed his wartime notes upon completion of the corresponding parts of Text I), he was able to complete this "Text II", 400,000 words long, in three months. Lawrence described this version as "hopelessly bad" in literary terms, but historically it was "substantially complete and accurate".
With Text II in front of him, Lawrence began working on a polished version ("Text III") in London, Jeddah, and Amman during 1921. Upon completion of its 335,000 words in February 1922, Lawrence burned Text II. He then proceeded to have eight copies typeset and printed on the presses of the Oxford Times, and this private edition became known as the "1922 Edition" or the "Oxford Text" of Seven Pillars. He made painstaking hand-written corrections to six of these copies and had them bound. (In 2001, the last time one of these rough printings came on to the market, it fetched almost USD $1 million at auction.) This time, instead of burning the manuscript, Lawrence presented it to the Bodleian Library.
By mid-1922, Lawrence was in a state of severe mental turmoil: the psychological after-effects of war were taking their toll, as were his exhaustion from the literary endeavours of the past three years, his disillusionment with the settlement given to his Arab comrades-in-arms, and the burdens of being in the public eye as a perceived "national hero". It was at this time that he re-enlisted in the armed forces under an assumed name (first the Royal Air Force, then the Royal Tank Corps), in an attempt to "lie fallow" and develop a new identity. Concerned over his mental state and eager for his story to be read by a wider public, his friends persuaded him to produce an abridged version of Seven Pillars, to serve as both intellectual stimulation and a source of much-needed income. In his off-duty evenings, "Aircraftman Ross" – or, later, "Private Shaw" – set to trimming the 1922 text down to 250,000 words for what would be a very limited, exceedingly lavish subscribers' edition.
The Subscribers' Edition – in a print run of fewer than 200 copies, of which only 100 were for public sale, each with a unique, sumptuous, hand-crafted binding – was published in late 1926. Copies occasionally become available in the antiquarian trade and can easily command prices of up to USD $100,000. Unfortunately, each copy cost Lawrence three times the thirty guineas the subscribers had paid.[3] Intellectual stimulation it may have provided, but the cure for his financial woes it was not.
The Subscribers' Edition was 25% shorter than the Oxford Text, but Lawrence did not abridge uniformly. The deletions from the early books are much less drastic than those of the later ones: for example, Book I lost 17% of its words and Book IV lost 21%, compared to 50% and 32% for Books VIII and IX. Critics differed in their opinions of the two editions: Robert Graves and George Bernard Shaw preferred the 1922 text (although, from a legal standpoint, they appreciated the removal of certain passages that could have been considered libellous, or at least indiscreet), while E. M. Forster preferred the 1926 version.
Literary merits aside, however, producing the Subscribers' Edition had left Lawrence facing bankruptcy. He was forced to undertake an even more stringent pruning to produce a version for sale to the general public: this was the 1927 Revolt in the Desert, a work of some 130,000 words: "an abridgement of an abridgement," remarked George Bernard Shaw, not without disdain.
The public would have had to remain satisfied with Revolt in the Desert, however, were it not for Lawrence's death in a May 1935 motorcycle accident at the age of 46. "No further issue of the Seven Pillars will be made in my lifetime," Lawrence had said upon release of the Subscribers' Edition in 1926. Within weeks of his death, the 1926 abridgement was published for general circulation.
The unabridged Oxford Text of 1922 was not made publicly available until its UK copyright expired in 1997.

[edit]
References
. Wilson, Jeremy (hardcover). Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T.E. Lawrence. London: William Heinemann. pp. 1188. ISBN 978-0434872350.
. Graves, Robert (hardcover). Lawrence and the Arabs. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0786107810.
. "T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Publishing History". T. E. Lawrence Studies. Jeremy Wilson (undated). Retrieved on 2008-07-17.
. "Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Triumph and Tragedy". T. E. Lawrence Studies. Jeremy Wilson (2004, 2006). Retrieved on 2008-07-17.
. ^ The seven cities were Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, Aleppo, Damascus and Medina. Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs, op.cit.
. ^ Robert Graves (op. cit) refers to this incident not as a misplacement but as a theft: "[Lawrence] has never imagined a political motive for the theft, but his friends have. They even whisper darkly that one day the lost text may reappear in certain official archives." Jeremy Wilson, author of Lawrence's authorised biography, also describes it as having been stolen.[1]
. ^ "He was so keen to do things well that he actually spent £13,000 on the edition – the reproduction of the pictures alone cost him more than the subscriptions – leaving him £10,000 out of pocket." Graves, op. cit.

[edit]
Editions in print
. ISBN 0-9546418-0-9 Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1922 unabridged Oxford text.
. ISBN 0-385-41895-7 Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926 Subscribers' Edition text.
ISBN 1-56619-275-7 Revolt in the Desert, 1927 abridgement.

IMPROMPTU

2009-02-05T14:06:00.001-08:00

Christina Mitrentse said:

I would like to introduce a few new important terms in the conversation of IMPROMPTU that I think are vital elements in the project and derived from the notions of community and social structure. The living space and the home have the importance significance in contemporary life as a term associated with collection of human personal traces.
The notion of living SPACE but reversed from the one that Heidegger had spoken about. The contemporary notion of Living space according to Walter Benjamin. The culture of living has been derived from Heidegger in a crucial moment around the Second World War in a moment where the notion has been re examined and repositioned. Now days though we look at that notion in its reversed sequence so we see first the building of a space then we think of its environment and last we live in it.
But very important it has always been a collective practice. This has to do with a structural element of living space, which is the notion of collection as a mechanism of life and of existence. We collect vital things, which are important in order to live. Today everything is a collective process. Think about the Internet, The blogs the consumerism, the texts books the city and the living space is a collection. We are coming from a term with political connotations the multycollectivity, which if we look at it from an artistic point of view it reduces the critical ability is the opposite of critical ability. I collect everything without knowing why. If we look around us at now days life style model this logic of collective ability is dominate. This collectivity and the living have to do with the revitalizing of existence. There is a big gap in the concept of ‘collect’ the collective practice which is obvious in European countries during the industrial revolution in 19th cent. Where there is a middle space, a distinction between the internal and the external, which is the city. What the citizen is not able to get or find from the city he tries to collect it in the internal part, which is the home. This created a distinction between the working space and the living space. In reality what we all do as citizens is to collect traces in our living spaces. A huge pile of traces, memories and experiences or life experiences. In a way the notion of living contains the characteristics of piling information, which derives from this ‘relational’ community spaces. Like Freud ‘s surgery in Vienna was a memorial, includes everything that had bothered him and had dealt with. This gives us another reading/layer is that if we want to read a space we need to use the tools of an archeologist. To find out about the person the indiosigratic elements of the citizen etc. In some ways we in this project need to introduce the viewers to this living personal human traces as a group. So I think we need to consider and incorporate this idea/ problematic in terms of how we approach the gallery space. The museum space, the exhibition space becomes /reflects the city, becomes a living space.
I think the biggest project of erasing the traces of living space is Postmodernism. This notion of living space in society has become an non personal space visualized and highly represented in Mess Vaun De Roe architecture in the minimal cold ,glass, white cube houses the clinical archetype of a distant white cube hyper-space where no one lives but everyone. The notion of collection-.

So what do we have in common/community or what separate us /individuality?
We live /share time together through discussions towards the end product of this project but we should consider highly important that in this ‘ living space’ the living is the important – The actual collective exchange is the work itself. So we make sure we all live our personal traces and experiences both literally and metaphorically.

Christina Mitrentse

According to Felix Guattari:
In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical
Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.
The crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control?

Socially Awkward

2009-02-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

jonas ranson said...

Socially Awkward

The following text is taken from Art and Research, Journal of Ideas Contexts and Methods, Volume 2. No. 1. Summer 2008 written by Dan Kidner on the work of Chris Evans. I found it to be particularly relevant to the project when undertaking my initial research.

The text can be read in full at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/kidner.html

'Collaboration is a slippery notion in the context of art production, but one that when reflected upon opens up the possibility of understanding a great many contemporary practices that seek to conjoin social aims with aesthetic ones.

The ambiguous or unknown parts of a project become the content. The rumour, or the enunciation of the fact of the project, become the work.

Evan's destabilizes the very idea of collaboration as something that offers real social utility in contradistinction to the autonomous art object. The artist thus delivers what could be described as a critique of collaborative, or what Grant H. Kester terms ‘dialogic’, practices, by simultaneously ‘maximising the creative potential of a given constituency’ and subjecting that constituency to sustained critical scrutiny. This critical scrutiny doesn’t simply undermine the authority of that constituency or parody its function, but rather defines the limits of or possibilities for meaningful collaboration per se. Deconstructing the very notion of collaborative activity can reveal as much about the limits of current art practice in the UK as it can about the processes of co-optation of art and culture by state controlled public sector bodies and global corporations.

Deleuze

2009-02-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

I. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment.

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

Gilles Deleuze, Society of Control

L'autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.

2009-02-02T15:27:00.000-08:00

Hackney Wick field trip.

2009-02-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

Group dynamics.

2009-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

Beginnings

2009-01-31T13:03:00.001-08:00

This Blog has been created to act as a parallel communications interface between participating artists in IMPROMPTU, a collaborative project at Schwartz Gallery opening on March 5th 2009 as part of the EAST 09 Festival. The selected artists have access to the gallery space, a converted warehouse in Hackney Wick, for a month prior to the opening to use as a studio, the resulting activity forming the basis for the public viewing. Three areas that have been identified by the artists as the key ingredients to this project are their own practise, the gallery space and the group dynamic that is currently forming. Looking at the relationship between artist and curator, gallery and audience, private and public space, individual versus group dynamics, the project aims to re-install these relationships with a more speculative, open-ended dynamic of possibility. Please see full press release below:

IMPROMPTU

5-22 March 2009, Friday - Sunday 12-5pm
Private View: Thursday 5th March 6-10pm
5-10 March - East Festival | Artists in conversation - Saturday 7th March, 1.30pm.

Luke Brennan, Simon Head, Rob Kesseler, Christina Mitrentse, David Murphy, Jonas Ranson.
Curator/Co-ordinator: Patrick Michalopoulos

Schwartz Gallery introduces IMPROMPTU the first exhibition in a series of projects initiated by Schwartz Projects, a new exhibitions strategy which seeks out dynamic and more flexible models of exhibition-making in line with current debates about curatorial practice. The instigating premise for IMPROMPTU stems from a critical reaction to the first five exhibitions at Schwartz Gallery which followed more rigid exhibition-making practices. The ‘group show’ model has been re-worked by the absence of any concrete theme for IMPROMPTU, a month-long pre-exhibition period in the gallery made available to the artists to use as a studio and by the fact that the artists have largely never before met.

These strategies contest a multitude of ingrained practices surrounding the organization and staging of a group show such as the relationship between the artists, the manifestation of their practice which will in this case unfold in real time in the space, the role of the project’s curator and ultimately the role of the gallery as a ‘holder’ of and ‘presentation vehicle’ for contemporary art. Notions of organisation in society, institutional control and the production and consumption of ‘culture’ are thus brought to the fore and re-evaluated. The gallery becomes a ‘lived environment’ in which artists and curator improvise their own respective practices in response to the evolving group dynamic. The practice of separating ideas and activities into distinct categories is tested in a taxonomical blurring that draws many accepted communication models into question. A summary of the artists’ studio-time activity can be found at http://schwartzprojects.blogspot.com/

The following information is meant as a guide to each artist’s respective practice and does not necessarily constitute a statement of intent for the work developed as part of IMPROMPTU:

Luke Brennan’s work references the many hybridized subcultures in today’s world developed through evolving ritual. The confluence of these rituals, be they religious, superstitious or social, provoke him, his practice tracing the evolution of ceremony - the way it adopts and merges new practices, incorporates value into an object, a physical action or expresses itself in architecture.
Simon Head’s practice investigates dimensional shifts that occur for example when an abstract idea is drawn in two-dimensions. This shift is thought of by Head as the action between two dimensions. The force of this movement travels both forwards and backwards, alternatively referring to each dimension at an interface of the immaterial/material.
Rob Kesseler explores plants and the way in which they migrate into every aspect of our lives. His most recent work reflects current thinking that seeks to narrow the gap that has grown between the arts and sciences. The work lies somewhere between science and symbolism, in which the many complexities of representing plants are concentrated into visual statements.
Christina Mitrentse’s practice exists as a type of laboratory where the notion of interpretation and cultural construction is investigated. Mitrentse employs a variety of techniques from crafted sculptures to conceptual appropriation alongside processes of observation, collection and curation. Her practice oscillates between those of curator, storyteller, collector and archeologist.
David Murphy’s practice puts an emphasis on places that lack permanence, those located between a present very solid existence, and a certainty or probability that they will soon disappear. Generally these are peripheral spaces, islands, coastal areas, floodplains – contested, edgeless territory where the elements meet and morph.
Jonas Ranson’s more recent works are derived from observations and meticulous drawing of industrial and historical architectural sources. Hand drawn then manipulated and assembled with digital software, the final works represent Utopian/Dystopian structures, skeletal and cold, panopticons, architectural systems for surveillance and control.

www.schwartzgallery.co.uk