Brick Project in Art Vehicle 61

Artvehicle 61/Review

21st January 2012 — 21st January 2012

Photo by Emma Peascod

Curated by Ali MacGilp, this evening of performance featured six London-based contemporary artists whose individual pieces were created in response to the unique culture of Amsterdam and its seedy central distri

ct. A bizarre conglomeration of prostitutes in windows, beautiful wonky old buildings, notorious coffee-shops and stoner tourist trade, the red-light district of Amsterdam provides the perfect background to this exploration of a place, its identity and the elements of its world that we may ordinarily overlook.

What was really interesting was the sheer scope of the exhibition; for each artist's response to the environment was so completely different, as was the way in which they chose to present their work and engage with the audience. On the one hand we had the domestic intimacy of Rhiannon Armstrong'sEverything You Ever Wanted To Say But Didn't, and on the other the formal lecture set-up of Laura Wilson's Brick Project. We had Mark Wayman playing a kind of pseudo tour-guide in Re-Occupy and Adrian Lee confusing / amusing both gallery visitors and passers-by with his comic, provocative one-man protest. Adam James and Andrew Graham took the actual audience as their subject matter and re-played it to them in their piece Vlo, whilst Tobias Collier presented a continuation of his self-branding project in a way that was both intimately engaging and epic in its projected form.

There was no official 'start' to the proceedings (which seemed to baffle some of the audience) and it was fascinating to observe how the crowd appeared to engage or disengage with the performances, depending on how they were presented.

Taking to extremes the maxim that 'no publicity is bad publicity', Lee loitered around the gallery entrance, taunting passers-by with his "wanton self-promotion" posters, "Ban This Filth" placard and blacked-out leaflets of banned books. Dressed in his finest 'disgusted from Tunbridge Wells' attire, his calls to the local crowd to "walk away from this muck" led to much confusion, mirth, a brief encounter with the local constabulary and the odd pervy drunk who couldn't wait to come inside to find out just what kind of filth was on offer (no doubt disappointed to only find a bunch of arty types hanging about watching stuff). The irony of this publicity protest may have been lost on some of the Saturday night crowd on the Warmoesstraat, but it certainly was not on most of the gallery goers inside.

Mark Wayman's Re-Occupy similarly sought to engage passers-by as well as those who were deliberate participants from W139. Taking place in the middle of the former Occupy Amsterdam site (just a stones-throw from the gallery) he led the crowd on a virtual tour of the now largely defunct camp; re-imagining (and thereby temporarily re-occupying) the square. Carefully putting back all the tents into the exact same spaces they had actually occupied by engaging our imaginations with his highly detailed descriptions, his ability to make us see what was no longer there exposed the way in which we take our public spaces or experiences for granted, and how we often fail to notice the obvious until it is gone.

To those in the know (and the locals of Amsterdam) this was a highly accurate oral replication of the actual Occupy site, but to the visitor there was the added dimension that this may indeed have been merely Wayman's vision of what the protest camp may have looked like, and that his 'performance' as a virtual tour-guide was no more than a carefully orchestrated fictional charade.

Back in the gallery, both Armstrong and James/Grahams' performances sought to engage the audience in a dichotomy of personal encounter and observational distance; allowing people to dip into and out of the performances (in the case of James/Graham without necessarily being aware of the role which they were playing), whilst relying on their participation to create the very works themselves. This dual experience was beautifully achieved in Armstrong's Everything You Ever Wanted To Say But Didn't Part 1 and The Archive Of Things Left Unsaid.

Set up in a corner of the gallery, Armstrong had recreated a cosy and very British sitting room space, complete with handmade crocheted blankets, doilies and homemade biscuits. In this cordoned off area, she held as series of brief one-on-one encounters with a number of different voluntary participants. These encounters were based around a collection of deeply personal stories taken from her long-established archive of things left unsaid; an archive which audience members were encouraged to add to in the other half of the piece. The playing out of these intimate conversations, however, remained in the public space; enabling other members of the audience to observe the exchanges but not necessarily hear what was going on, and providing an interesting experience of public versus private space and personal versus public information. It was fascinating to watch both the behaviours and reactions of the people participating in the conversations and those contributing their stories to the ever-growing archive. I was left wondering though whether the stories from Amsterdam would then change the feel and presentation of the piece in its future incarnation. Maybe next time there will be a typically Dutch sitting room set up in the corner of a Japanese gallery taking these (universal) stories from a specific place to another space?

Wilson's fascinating lecture on the history and geography of bricks and brickmaking held particular resonance for the setting as much of old Amsterdam (and its curiously wonky buildings) is constructed from this ancient material. Her formalised talk gave the audience yet another kind of performance/engagement experience, as well as providing a new layer to this story of the city; a story which refuses to pander to the global stereotype of Amsterdam as merely the scuzzy mecca of European sex and drug tourism. Instead, Wilson's piece helped to reiterate the strong history of craft and engineering skill behind this picturesque and beautiful place, whilst celebrating the universality of the common brick.

Collier's Anthropic Principles added perhaps the final dimension to this experience of a place by linking the local penchant for tattoo parlours with the greater cosmos. Inviting the audience to closely observe as he tattooed himself under lamplight whilst the giant projection screen followed this process in negative format; making his arm and former brandings look like the Milky Way. There was also an element of the experience which mirrored the kind of exchange taking place in the windows of the local brothels, for we, the audience, watch in complicity as his body is branded and put on display for public consumption.

The evening ended with the movement-based conclusion of James/Graham's observational foray into the behaviours of certain characters from the local area (collected in the week prior to the show) and members of the CLIMB LIKE A CUCUMBER audience (collected on the night by way of a live-feed and a kind of brainstorm drawing undertaken by the pair throughout the evening). The duo then acted out and mimicked elements of movement, and snippets of conversations, based on the behaviours they had observed both from the gallery and from the streets; again exposing the contrast between the private and the public, the internalised and externalised behaviours of the local people, and the different roles played by the audience as both participant and observer.

From the personal to the universal, from contemporary culture and politics to the historical grounding of a city, this ambitious evening of performance touched on many of the different aspects that contribute to the notion and identity of a place. Leading the audience through a mix of observational/participatory experiences, and revealing aspects of the city no doubt frequently overlooked by the outsiders' eye, the success of CLIMB LIKE A CUCUMBER, FALL LIKE AN AUBERGINE lay in its ability to expose and question, in a diverse variety of forms, our sense of the city and its myriad experiences.

For more information on the individual artists involved, please follow the links below:

Tobias Collier www.tobiascollier.com

Adam James and Andrew Graham www.mradamjames.com or on Twitter @adamjamesstudio

Adrian Lee www.inquino.com / www.bunnycigarettes.com /www.perfectmother.com

Laura Wilson www.laurawilson.me or on Twitter @Laura_wil

Caroline Darke

Brick Lane Bricks

Olympic Games take the bricks out of Brick Lane

7th Feb, East London Lines

Photo: Adelle Kalakouti

Residents are split over a plan to resurface Brick Lane with tarmac in preparation for this year’s Olympics.

The controversial face-lift will include new lighting and the complete resurfacing of its famous underfoot bricks.

Tower Hamlets cabinet member for the environment Shahed Ali said: “The new asphalt surface on Brick Lane will be smarter, easier and cheaper to maintain and will help distinguish space for pedestrians from traffic.”

But Brick Lane businesses have greeted the council’s decision with mixed feelings.

Anna Sims of Heba vintage clothes shop told EastLondonLines: “It is a good thing, it needs modernising and repairing. Brick Lane has its history but it is renowned for being grubby. It will still pull the vintage crowds, a road is just a road at the end of the day.”

But Mohammed Maksudul Kabir, owner of the Banoful Cake House, disagrees: “Before, when the road was made of brick it was nicer. Now it is going to lose its character and tradition, it’s going to be like a normal road. There is no need to waste money on that.”

Local supermarket owner Junel Khalikue said: “The bricks go perfectly with the name Brick Lane. We like it.”

Restaurant and shop owners have welcomed the regeneration but say the works have had a negative effect on business since they began this week.

Others expressed satisfaction with their efficiency, saying works in the past had taken too long.

The resurfacing project, taking place over the next five weeks, will cost about £300,000. It is funded by Transport from London and developer contributions.

http://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/2012/02/brick-lane-to-lose-its-bricks-in-olympic-asphalt-repair/

Rebuilding History

Newspaper clipping kindly sent to me by Doug and Jane Eck from 'The Island Packet', Hilton Head Island.

The text below the picture reads, "Alan Frye of The Tradesmen Group uses a small saw Monday morning to remove the mortar between bricks on one of the historic walls surrounding original sections of the Beaufort National Cemetry. The work is part of the 850,000 Dollar project that will include rebuilding damaged wall sections and mortar joint and foundation repairs. the job will take about four months to complete."

Photo credits: Jonathan Dyer

What is sculpture?

Art Monthly 34, p45

October 2011, no. 350

Henry Lydiat

" Guidelines as to the legal meaning of 'sculpture' were handed down by the High Court Judge in the first trial, which were endorsed by the Court of Appeal, and were therefore subjected to argument and judicial review by the UK Supreme Court. They were approved and are summarised as follows:

- 'sculpture' can be things going beyond what one would normally expect to be art in the sense of the sort of things that one would expect to find in art galleries.

- no judgement is to be made on artistic merit

- not every three-dimensional representation of a concept can be regarded as sculpture

- the essence of a sculpture is that it should have, as part of its purpose, a visual appeal in the sense that it might be enjoyed for that purpose alone, whether or not it might have another purpose as well; the purpose of the creator, who may fail, but that does not matter (no judgements are to be made about artistic merit) because it is the underlying purpose that is important

- for example, a pile of bricks, temporarily on display at Tate Modern for two weeks, is plainly capable of being a sculpture; the identical pile of bricks dumped at the end of a driveway for two weeks of preparatory to a building project is equally plainly not; one asks why there is that difference, and the answer lies in having regard to its intention - one is created by the hand of an artist, for artistic purposes, and the other is created by a builder, for building purposes. "

From the Tate Archives...http://www.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm

Wall Text

From Issue 141 Frieze Magazine: September 2011

WEEKEND SPECIAL: The brick as metaphor in South African art and writing

I arrive early for a press briefing and sit outside Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. Flipping through a magazine, I pause on Vladimir Nabokov’s account of his 1942 lecture tour of South Carolina. ‘The photograph has not been sent here,’ he writes to his wife Vera, ‘so it’s no surprise that the college was expecting a gentlemen with Dostoyevsky’s beard, Stalin’s moustache, Chekhov’s pince-nez and a Tolstoyan blouse.’ I look up and see workmen busy installing a wall-sized canvas print of the Berlin Wall, more or less on the spot where the wall once stood. A wall resembling and remembering a wall: weird, I think to myself, and return to Nabokov.

The press briefing for André Kertész’s retrospective is in French and German; his photographs, however, need no translation. One work in particular intrigues: made in 1933, the black and white image shows a neatly stacked pile of bricks. The arrangement, which predates Carl Andre’s famous exercise in equivalence by three decades, and speaks across time to a landscape study with bricks made in suburban Tangier by Yto Barrada in 2003, which I will see later in the day, fills almost the entire picture plane; the only marker of place is the Eiffel Tower in the corner. The bricks make me think of Ivan Vladislavic. (No, he isn’t Hungarian, nor does he have a Stalin moustache.) ‘The name is Croatian,’ explained the Johannesburg-based novelist and essayist in a 1999 interview. ‘My grandparents on my father’s side were Croatian immigrants.’ Vladislavic is one of contemporary South Africa’s most distinguished literary figures. His 2001 novel, The Restless Supermarket, a story about cosmopolitan entropy and the travails of proofreading, won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. His most recent novel, Double Negative (2010), has been similarly fêted. The outcome of a collaboration with photographer David Goldblatt, the novel tells the story of Neville Lister, a morose youth whose encounter with a taciturn documentarian, Saul Auerbach, prompts him to become a photographer. Like much of Vladislavic’s writing, Double Negative immerses its reader in the idiosyncratic physical and psychic geography of Johannesburg. Here’s Lister, a late-blooming artist – and participant in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s recent exercise in artistic subterfuge for the Krakow Photobiennial, ‘Alias’ – on his interest in photographing the city’s over-abundant walls: ‘As the walls go on rising, the character of the place grows more and more obscure [...] you think there is life behind one guarded façade or another, a mind behind the blank stare, but you cannot be sure.’

Walls and bricks have preoccupied Vladislavic since the get go. His first book, Missing Persons (1989), includes an amusing story of suburban paranoia, ‘Journal of a Wall’. Written at the fag end of apartheid, the unnamed narrator records seeing bricks being hurled at township buses on television; however, it is the immediate proximity of the brick wall across the road that compels him. ‘I went over just after midnight, in an overcoat, in a balaclava,’ the narrator tells. ‘I brought back with me a brick.’ Confronted by its ‘stony silence’ and ‘impenetrable skin’, he soon returns the pilfered building block.

Despite their standardized rectangular form and obstinate appearance, bricks are adaptable conveniences for Vladislavic. They can ‘inflict metaphor’, to repurpose a description he used in an early story. More prosaically, as he observes
in Portrait with Keys (2006), a collage of essayistic sketches of contemporary Johannesburg, bricks can function as ‘a doorstop, a weapon or a purse’.

The brick’s potential for violence, both actual and symbolic, should not be underestimated. ‘A passer-by had flung a brick through the plate-glass window and snatched some goods from the display,’ offers Vladislavic in Portrait with Keys, of a theft from a shop near his home. ‘The brick was still lying there among the dusty satin drapes, chrome-plated pedestals and handwritten price-tags. It was a wonderful brick, a model brick, with three round holes through it the size of coins, filled with chips of broken glass.’ The passage reads likes a deadpan description of an early work by Kendell Geers, Title Withheld (Brick) (1994–6).

Once you begin to look for them, bricks recur everywhere in South African art and writing. ‘He had been involved in a fight,’ writes photographer Santu Mofokeng in his 2001 monograph. Currently the subject of a touring European survey show, Mofokeng is recalling an incident from the 1980s, involving a Soweto friend, Vusi. ‘He stopped a brick with his head, knocked out cold.’ Goldblatt’s interest in bricks is more ideological than actual: apartheid was physically constructed into being. Unsurprisingly, the octogenarian photographer’s opus is packed with bricks. Sometimes they form a uniform backdrop for his portraits, other times they function as his explicit subject, as in his 1990 photograph of Abraham Thipe’s almost Andre-esque display of used bricks on a Johannesburg pavement. The photo predates by two years the action in Vladislavic’s short story ‘Propaganda by Monuments’. Boniface Khumalo, a tavern owner who has received news from Russian authorities that his request for a ‘surplus’ statue of Lenin has been approved, is walking past a demolition site in Pretoria. An old man is salvaging bricks. ‘Do you sell these things?’ asks Boniface. He is anticipating building a large plinth for Lenin’s head. ‘This rubbish belongs to no-one,’ the old man replies. ‘It is just lying here. You can see it yourself.’ Often, however, we don’t.

Sean O’Toole

is a journalist and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Stretcher in Thatcham

A brick from the show 'Header Stretcher Soldier Sailor Shiner Rowlock' at Vitrine Gallery (Jan 2011), was incorporated into a newly built brick porch at the Field Family home in Thatcham.

Flood Line on the Thames by Tate Britain

http://ow.ly/i/fQy8