Cubitt Events

DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT: 1942 – 1972

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:01:39 +0100

Cubitt announces a national touring exhibition about the history of the Design Research Unit.

Formed in London in 1942, the Unit was responsible for some of the most important design produced in post-war Britain. It pioneered a model for group practice, being the first consultancy in the country to bring together expertise in architecture, graphics and industrial design. By the 1970s it was one of the largest and most established design offices in Europe. This exhibition will be the first of its kind, mapping the history of the group and the currency of their designs. It will identify key examples of their work and document an approach that was shaped by inter-war developments in artistic discourse and post war trends in industry and communication; in particular the accelerated demand for corporate design.

Initially under the charge of the poet and art critic Herbert Read and operating from offices shared with Mass Observation, the Design Research Unit was founded by advertising entrepreneur Marcus Brumwell with designers Misha Black and Milner Gray. Following Read’s essay, Art and Industry (1934) and the literature of International Constructivism the group outlined an intent to combine creative intelligence with technical research into materials and markets, seeking to bring ‘artists and designers into productive relation with scientists and technologists.’

This exhibition will span over four decades of their work, focusing on some of their most significant projects and charting their ambition to bring elegant and functional design to all sections of society. It will cover three phases of activity; the group’s early origins and founder members, initial work in exhibition design and the Unit’s role in devising some of the first and most comprehensive corporate design schemes commissioned for British industry.

Highlights of the exhibition include: Documentation of an initiative to commission the sculptor Naum Gabo to design the body and interior of a car for the Bradford-based company, Jowett (1943). Photographs relating to exhibitions for the wartime Ministry of Information, the Council of Industrial Design’s Britain Can Make It (1946) and their major contribution to the Festival of Britain (1951). There will be substantial material relating to experimental work for the Watney Mann brewery that resulted in a total scheme to ‘update’ the traditional English public house (from beer bottles to interior furnishings). Other iconic corporate identities include their work for British Rail (1965), the London Transport network, photographic company Ilford and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Amongst the architectural content, the exhibition will feature the Piano & Rogers extension for the company’s Aybrook Street offices (1972), that Richard and Su Rogers began working on whilst they were associates of the Design Research Unit (1967–71).

The Design Research Unit became part of the architectural practice, Scott Brownrigg in 2004 and this exhibition and forthcoming publication is realised with their generous support.

Exhibition Tour 
Norwich University College of the Arts Gallery, 30 October – 27 November, 2010
International Project Space, Bournville, 13 January – 12 February, 2011
Tate St Ives, 5 February – 2 May, 2011
Liverpool John Moores University, 4 March – 1 April, 2011
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, 15 April – 13 May, 2011

Publication
The exhibition is based on original research to be published within a new book designed by APFEL - A Practice For Everyday Life and published by Koenig Books later this year.

Acknowledgments
The exhibition is funded by Arts Council England, The Graham Foundation, The Henry Moore Foundation and supported by Birmingham City University, John Moores University, Norwich University College of the Arts, Nottingham Trent University, Scott Brownrigg and Tate St Ives. The exhibition is sponsored by Courage, Wells and Young’s Brewing Company. We wish to thank the Design Archives University of Brighton, the Design Museum, Leeds University, London Transport Museum, National Railway Museum, RIBA, Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum for their assistance with the research.

Paul Sietsema

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:54:31 +0100

Paul Sietsema’s sculpture, drawing and 16mm films explore the basic mechanics of aesthetics; how information is formulated in images and objects and the way in which ideas are filtered through representational structures that have evolved over time.

Photographs, printed media, objects that resemble museological artifacts and other cultural fragments are recurrent subjects. Such items are processed through the activity of his making or re-making, gradually becoming redefined by the syntax of the medium itself. Within his films, they provide the focus for exhaustive enquiry. Historical working methods, such as the fixed-camera techniques associated with Structuralist cinema wear-out fascination with the subject on screen and redirect attention to the apparatus. As such, the physical character of film; the grain of the image, sound of the projector and periods of overexposure punctuate the experience and interrupt the sequence of immersive representation.

At Cubitt, Sietsema will show a new version of his most recent film, Anticultural Positions that was made in response to an invitation to give a public talk about his work. The film takes its title from a 1951 lecture by the painter Jean Dubuffet in which the artist readdressed the subject of Primitivism aligning its expressive qualities with painting as a cultural form. Dubuffet discusses ‘unintentional’ mark-making as the most ‘real’ or factual type of mark, regressing to acultural or anticultural status, uncorrupted by reason and linguistic thought. Sietsema’s film alternates between sections of imagery and a reconstructed version of Dubuffet’s text, forming a fragmented but eloquent monologue that both resembles and eschews the standard format of the artist lecture. Rather than adopting conventions of anecdote or explanation, Sietsema’s ‘lecture’ attempts an intimate view of practice, pairing Dubuffet’s discourse on painting with the abstract accumulation of materials such as paint, ink, plaster and cement on the work surfaces in his own studio.
This will be Paul Sietsema’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Paul Sietsema was born in Los Angeles in 1968 and studied at the University of California in Berkley and Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, New York. ‘Anticultural Positions’ is also currently on display at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. Sietsema is currently in receipt of a DAAD fellowship in Berlin. He lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Supported by Arts Council England, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, and Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst.

Education: Cubitt People's Republic

Mon, 24 May 2010 20:34:42 +0100

Cubitt Education presents an exhibition of work created during our programme of enriching and inspiring activities in partnership with local schools.

At: Islington Museum,
245 St. John's Street,
EC1V 4NB

Open Daily EXCEPT Wednesday and Sunday: 10am - 5pm
Tel: 020 7527 3235

The projects on display include:

Picturing Democracy / Picturing Community: a series of photographic portraits of Councillors and local people who play important if often overlooked roles in the Borough, taken by young people at the weekly Photography Club at Elizabeth Garret Anderson Secondary School.

Cubitt Creative Mentors is a scheme that brings together professional arts practitioners with children and young people at key points of transition in their lives. The mentors include Cubitt Artists Sarah Pickstone, Anne Ryan and Frances Burden. The exhibition will feature artwork by mentor and mentee side by side.

Photoshop Club runs weekly at EGA School, and each session professional artists, designers, animators, photographers meet pupils informally and share their skills in a peer-led learning environment.

CUBITT PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC is an ongoing project, inspired by Finsbury People's Republic: a unofficial nickname for the radical Finsbury Borough Council of the 1930s. The council built the Finsbury Health Centre and embarked on the creation of a welfare system that valued and provided for everybody as equals and individuals. Cubitt Education shares similar goals, and aims to explore issues of active participation, creative freedom, and social responsibility within an enriched community setting.

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:08:39 +0100

Christodoulos Panayiotou's work explores forms of pageantry and spectacle. He describes his practice in terms of an archaeological study; an attempt to recover fragments of information that can make tangible something absent or lost.

Works adopt a literary structure; narratives emerge, themes are developed, motifs recur. Stories and images are re-enacted or recovered. History; political and personal, traced in the residual ephemera of past lives and events, is established as a central concern and contextual references shift between the locally specific and globally familiar. Objects and images that commemorate, document or monumentalise become the focus for research that seeks to identify and examine the role of archetypes and tradition in modern society.

For his exhibition at Cubitt, Panayiotou will show a series of works developed using various photographic libraries in his native Cyprus. Shown sequentially on slide projectors, two pieces from 2008, Wonder Land and Never Land will be presented alongside a newly commissioned work, I Land (1960–1977). Each work presents images originally captured for official public records or reports.

Wonder Land employs images from the Municipal Archives of the City of Limassol. The selection of material – covering four decades dating from the late 1970s – shows the adoption of Disney characters within the town’s annual carnival parade. Never Land employs photographs taken for the national newspaper, Phileleftheros, during the 1990s, a period of significant political change when Cyprus was moving towards European Union membership. Panayiotou’s most recent work, I Land (1960–1977), is the first part of a new series of works being researched at the Press and Information Office in Nicosia, a library administered by the state to document the activity of the President and government ministers. 1960–1977 covers the period when Archbishop Makarios III, who was the first President of Cyprus, held office.

This will be Christodoulos Panayiotou’s first solo exhibition in London.

Christodoulos Panayiotou was born in Limassol in 1978 and studied dance and performing arts in Lyon and London. He was awarded the 2005 DESTE Prize and has been artist in residence at institutions including Platform-Garanti Center for Contemporary Art Istanbul, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin and IASPIS Stockholm. He has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art Oxford, The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Taipei Biennal (2008), Busan Biennale (2008), MoCA Miami, Rodeo Istanbul and Künsthalle Zurich.

Supported by Arts Council England and the Ministry of Education and Culture Cyprus and produced in partnership with Witte de With, Rotterdam.

For further information and images please contact us.

Image credit: Christodoulos Panayiotou, I Land (1960 – 1977), 2010, 160 black and white slides. Photograph sourced from the Press and Information Office, Republic of Cyprus, Ministry of Interior.

Education: The Enchanted Gardens

Mon, 03 May 2010 19:08:22 +0100

Corner of a Cornfield

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:09:01 +0100

Henning Bohl's practice explores traditions, conventions and their limitations in making and displaying art. Working on primed canvas with a restricted palette of coloured paper, he produces collages that recombine elements from a lexicon of graphic motifs. These pictures refer to both painting and sculpture. They function as ‘props’, resembling theatrical scenery. Large-scale canvases are often stacked or leant in a manner that acknowledges their temporary occupation of the space. His installations frequently operate against the architecture of the gallery, creating obstructions or interruptions and directing paths.

Bohl's exhibition takes its title from a nineteenth century landscape painting by William Davis. Once referred to as ‘loving depictions of utterly insignificant subjects,’ Davis’s compositions are oddly prosaic in comparison with the more intense work of his Pre-Raphaelite peers. A hunting scene entitled View from Bidston Hill (1865) depicts a distant figure on horseback and a hare in the foreground almost camouflaged within the heath. This discreet treatment of the hunt caused one critic to describe the hare as ‘an eccentric intrusion.’

Bohl's title refers to Davis’s tendency to invert perspective and reduce conventional points of focus to marginal details. This shift in emphasis is echoed by Bohl's decision not to hang pictures on the existing walls but construct temporary architecture for the exhibition in the centre of the space. His installation takes the form of a three-dimensional composition employing a modular structure bearing two new collage works. Bohl's construction employs sculpture that takes the form of tables with surfaces made from plasterboard, transferring the vertical white planes of the gallery to a tiered, horizontal format.

This will be Henning Bohl's first solo exhibition in the UK.

Henning Bohl was born in Oldenburg in 1975 and studied at Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His recent projects include solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Baden Baden, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Johann König, Berlin and Casey Kaplan, New York. Bohl lives and works in Berlin.

For more information about this exhibition please contact Judith Carlton by ringing +44 (0)20 7278 8226 or by visiting the Contact Us page on our website.

Supported by Arts Council England and the Goethe Institute London.

Cubitt will be closed for the public holidays Friday 2 April and Sunday 4 April 2010.

Wolfgang Breuer

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:43:18 +0100

Wolfgang Breuer’s practice considers industrial design and what it discloses about its environment. His exhibitions frequently refer to outdoor situations, incorporating objects that are usually found fixed to street pavements such as bus shelters, recycling bins, benches and fences. Employed as materials for large-scale mixed media compositions, Breuer’s painterly attention to the character of surface, detail, colour and form enacts an aesthetic analysis that distances these objects from their primary function and advances ideas about the conditions that determine their design and misappropriation.

Breuer’s interventions are informed by general principles about the organization of space and colour in graphic design and fine art. His work is situated within a circuit of production and interpretation, often employing materials to act simultaneously as components for abstract assemblage and articles selected for formal deconstruction. Given this treatment, found elements with associations of control can be transformed by simple modifications and become the basis for decorative experiments. Breuer’s work considers the psychological operation of visual information and the inherent decisions and possibilities it presents.

Cubitt has commissioned Breuer to develop a series of new sculptures that will be displayed within what he refers to as a ‘stained glass window’ installation formed of steel security shutters.

Wolfgang Breuer was born in Augsburg in 1966 and studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Previous exhibitions in London include a solo presentation at Between Bridges (2006). More recently, he has had solo exhibitions at Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt (2008) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2009). Breuer lives and works in Berlin.

Supported by Arts Council England, the Elephant Trust, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and the Goethe Institut.

Stephen Sutcliffe Tate Modern Screening

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:51:28 +0100

Recently completed and the most ambitious of Sutcliffe's works to date, Despair, is inspired by and titled after the 1934 Vladimir Nabokov novel, a story of mistaken physical resemblance, murder and identity theft. Sutcliffe's film features a parade of society portraits and a sequence of photocopied handouts for lectures entitled Theories of Montage amongst references to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 adaptation of the novel and baroque music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully for the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV. Nabokov's themes of power and delusion, doubling and gameplay are anchored in a prismatic treatment of visual material and sound.

Sutcliffe's film is followed by a screening of Laughter in the Dark (1969, 101 min) by Tony Richardson, one of the iconic directors of Britain's Free Cinema movement. Richardson's adaptation of Nabakov's novel presents Sir Edward More, a wealthy art dealer, who becomes infatuated with a young cinema usherette, Margot, and tries to initiate a discreet affair. His fascination with the young girl backfires at every turn.

"One reason for making my version of Despair was my inability to track down a copy of Fassbinder's version. In the spirit of this I have chosen a film to accompany my video that I also haven't seen. The idea of Tony Richardson directing Nabokov is very interesting and almost impossible to predict. A somewhat mercurial director adapting an author who was notoriously spiky about interpretations of his works."
— Stephen Sutcliffe

Free. First come, first served. Visit the Tate website.

Presented in conjunction with Sutcliffe's exhibition at Cubitt. Open Wednesday to Sunday 12 - 6PM until 10 January 2010 (gallery closed 21 December to 5 January).

Stephen Sutcliffe

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:23:58 +0100

Stephen Sutcliffe’s work draws upon a personal archive of broadcast material and printed ephemera. Recordings made from the television or radio, clippings from newspapers or books are run together to contradict each other or find an unlikely common ground. His short films often employ several sources simultaneously, obscuring part of the footage or layering soundtracks to undermine the integrity of the original and instill a notion of doubt.

Public figures become linked by biographical detail or anecdote. Diverse genres find association in the character of their language or motifs. Sutcliffe fragments sound and imagery, making slight, often imperceptible edits and disrupting linear progression. His work operates as collage; acting upon an array of information, brokering strange marriages and revealing traits of neuroses in its raw material.

For his solo exhibition at Cubitt, Sutcliffe has developed a multi-channel video piece that will be shown alongside a series of wall drawings based upon comic illustrations collected from books and magazines.

Stephen Sutcliffe was born in Harrogate in 1968 and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and Glasgow School of Art. Previous exhibitions in London include Nought to Sixty at ICA, Ritual in the Dark (with Alan Michael) at Hotel (both 2008) and Tate Art Now: Lightbox (2005) other recent projects include a solo presentation with Galerie Micky Schubert at Frieze (2009). Sutcliffe is based in Glasgow.

Screening of Despair (2009)

Wednesday 9 December 6.30pm, Tate Modern Starr Auditorium

Recently completed and the most ambitious of Sutcliffe’s works to date, Despair, is inspired by and titled after the 1934 Vladimir Nabokov novel, a story of mistaken physical resemblance, murder and identity theft. Sutcliffe’s film features a parade of society portraits and a sequence of photocopied handouts for lectures entitled 'Theories of Montage' amongst references to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 adaptation of the novel and baroque music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully for the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV. Nabokov's themes of power and delusion, doubling and gameplay are anchored in a prismatic treatment of visual material and sound.

Booking required, click here for details.

For further information and images please contact us.

Supported by Arts Council England and the Hope Scott Trust with the kind assistance of Timothy Taylor Gallery and FormContent.

Image credit: drawing by Alan Michael.

The Source

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:28:11 +0100

"A man found that when he went to the cinema he would suddenly feel an irresistible impulse to strangle the person next to him; he never did actually throttle anyone, but came to himself with his hands around his neighbour's throat. The impulse was not dependent on upon the subject of the film, but occurred most often if he moved his head suddenly while the film was on. When subjected to artificial flicker he developed violent jerking of the limbs when the flash rate was high — up to fifty per second — about the flicker rate of the cinema projector."
— William Grey Walter, 'The Living Brain' (1953)

The Source is a lecture on light, based on an essay written for Jahresring 55: Psychonauten Kunst in Ekstase / Art in Ecstasy (Veit Loers ed. Walther Koenig: Cologne, 2008).

Featuring work by artists Andreas Bunte, Mary Ellen Bute, Làszlò Moholy-Nagy, Paul Sharits, Mark Titchner and Jennifer West, with literature by Aldous Huxley, Robert Lynd, Lewis Mumford, John Ruskin and William Grey Walter.

Limited capacity, no booking required.

Download The Source essay here.

With kind assistance of LUX, Matt's Gallery, Royal College of Art, Loughborough University, University College London, and the Design and Artists Copyright Society.

Kalin Lindena: Names Bridged

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:41:19 +0100

Late Night Opening: Saturday 17 October 12-9pm

In 1907 Wenzel Hablik approached a timber merchant holidaying in the German archipelago of Helgoland and offered to decorate his kite. The merchant would become Hablik’s patron commissioning him to redesign the entire interior of his 19th century home including wall panels, floorboards, window frames, furniture, furnishings and paintings for the walls.

Kalin Lindena’s abstract figures and architectural constructions are informed by such applications of art towards a total scheme of design. Found objects are incorporated within assemblages fashioned from traditional sculptural materials. Rough-hewn fragments of textiles, wood, metal, glass or stone are combined with mass produced articles that evidence industrial processes and their foundation in science and technology. Lindena’s work conjoins spheres of consumption and production. Her objects are configured with reference to the histories of art, craft and design, working within these traditions and alluding to existing cultural forms and their social, economic and ideological heritage.

Lindena’s work is embedded with ideas, anecdotes and images. Her figurative ‘extra’ sculptures draw upon Bauhaus artists Oskar Schlemmer and Paul Klee’s respective designs for theatre and puppetry. Other details refer to German Expressionism; Hablik’s crystalline architectural designs or stone relief work by the sculptor Bernhard Hoetger. Lindena invokes the social function of applied art and the role that it plays in the construction of narrative. Patrimonial sources are collaged with original video and photography that documents improvised dance, costumes and sets. Her work infers the notion of the 'gesamtkunstwerk'. It enacts a process of translation; breaking up information, isolating detail, repeating and reworking her subjects within a practice that incorporates processes in sculpture, drawing, performance and the moving-image.

This will be Kalin Lindena’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Kalin Lindena was born in Hanover in 1977 and studied at HBK Braunschweig. Her recent solo exhibitions include Oldenburger Kunstverein, Artothek Cologne, Kunstverein Heilbronn, Galerie Nagel Koln and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden Baden. She was awarded the Art Cologne Prize for young art 2007 and is currently the Deutsche Bank artist in residence at the Villa Romana in Florence. Lindena is based in Berlin.

Supported by Arts Council England, Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen, and Goethe Institut London.

Cubitt Education: Get Green, Get Creative

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:51:27 +0100

The ‘Get Green, Get Creative’ Green Fayre is a one-day event at Claremont Project (an arts and personal development centre for people aged 55+) that seeks to help us answer these questions. During the afternoon visitors will be invited to participate in arts activities and learn about new ways to be ‘green’: exploring the links between creativity and sustainability.

The day will feature talks from:

Andrew Ford from Islington Council’s Green Living Centre
Transition Towns: Tom Hitchman will talk about this growing movement, which seeks to inspire community groups to develop ways in which we can all respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Islington TimeBank Networks: a national movement inspiring a new generation of people to volunteer in their communities.
London Foragers: Tom Parkinson and Roland Phillips will introduce their ‘urban foraging’ methods, inspiring us to create nettle pesto and elderflower champagne: opening our eyes to the crops available to the Londoner, almost all year round.
Capital Growth: Seb Mayfield will talk about how Capital Growth aims to support 2,012 new community food growing spaces in London, by 2012.

Talks will be followed by a series of artistic and creative workshops and stalls, designed to mix sustainable thinking with imaginative activities:

Recycled Writing: recycle words, poems, metaphors and stories in this interactive installation.
Urban Foraging: Learn about finding and cooking the fresh, healthy wild foods we all have on our doorsteps.
Recycled Images and Materials: Recycle images and mix landscapes with portraits, new worlds with old, and explore urban and rural themes through creative collage with artist Darren Marshall.
Crafty Skills-Sharing: Share thrifty skills and ‘make-or-remake’ with crafty enthusiasts young and old.
Energy Saving Surgery: Speak to an energy expert on how to save and conserve energy and resources in your own home and daily life.

The event is free, and will run from 1-4pm at Claremont Project, 24-27 White Lion Street, London N1 9PD

MICHEL AUDER at CUBITT: PARTS 1, 2 & 3

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:25:04 +0100

Following the close of Michel Auder’s solo exhibition at Cubitt all three programmes of film will be shown in the gallery on Saturday 1st August as a series of timed screenings (booking not required).

2.00pm: PART 1

Rooftops and Other Scenes, 1996, 48’ 51"

Rooftops and Other Scenes is comprised of footage shot over ten years, much of it filmed from a studio that Auder occupied on the 12th floor of a building on Broadway from 1986–1996. This nomadic essay combines detail observed at close range with scenes filmed from a distance. Auder’s unwitting actors appear on the rooftops and through the windows of SoHo apartment blocks within a collection of images that describe an act of stealth photography or scrutiny through the camera lens.

Polaroid Cocaine, 1993, 5’

Composed entirely of still images, Polaroid Cocaine is a film about photography, printed media and the addiction to spectacle. The title song and soundtrack to the film is from a cassette recording made by two of Auder’s friends during a visit to New York in the 1990s. The song is written by the French author, Jean‐Jacques Shuhl and performed by the German actress and singer, Ingrid Caven.

Made for Denise, 1978, 3’ 5"

Featuring music by Philip Glass, whose acquaintance Auder made in the early 1970s, Made for Denise is dedicated to a woman who appears in a photograph held in the palm of a hand. This film was the first of Auder’s ‘video letters’, addressed to a single person, hand delivered to her apartment and left with the concierge.

Total runtime 57’

3.30pm: PART 2

Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol 1971‐76, 1994, 72’ 39"

Edited some twenty years after it was filmed, Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol is comprised of footage from the 1970s when Auder was living with Viva and their newborn daughter in the Chelsea Hotel. Material from Auder’s archive is gathered in a series of ‘chapters’ that focus on Warhol and the complex relationship between the artist, his actors and others who worked with him at The Factory. Much of the video is shot at the Chelsea Hotel and includes several scenes with Brigid Polk (Berlin), who appeared in Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls, also made in various rooms across the building.

Other sections include the curator Henry Geldzahler with Taylor Mead, the reception for the 1970 Andy Warhol exhibition at The Whitney Museum, a summer party at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s house and Warhol being interviewed by Larry Rivers at The Factory. The film ends with Warhol speaking into a microphone to give a running commentary on the people around him and their immediate activities. Auder’s camera follows Warhol’s impromptu direction as he attempts to keep pace with the narrator’s observations.

Chelsea 1990, 2008, 6’

Filmed from the driving seat with a soundtrack played on the car radio, Chelsea is a short film observing life on the sidewalks of this West Side neighbourhood of Manhattan in 1990.

The Cockettes, New York City 1971, 2002, 28’

Forming in 1969, The Cockettes were psychedelic drag queen troupe that gained a cult following in San Francisco for their outrageous parodies of show tunes (and original songs). The ensemble choreographed dance routines and designed sets and costumes for LSD‐influenced shows including Gone With the Showboat to Oklahoma, Tinsel Tarts In A Hot Coma, Journey to the Center of Uranus, Smacky & Our Gang, Hollywood Babylon and Pearls Over Shanghai.

In 1971, The Cockettes split into two groups, The Cockettes and The Angels of Light. Later that year, The Cockettes were booked for performances at the Anderson Theatre in New York, the audience included John Lennon, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Andy Warhol. The show was not well received and Vidal quipped that “Having no talent is not enough”. Auder’s film opens with the welcome party assembled for their arrival at JFK Airport. The film chronicles their late night reveling in the local convenience store and Auder’s room at the Chelsea Hotel.

Total runtime 106’

5.30pm: PART 3

Annie Sprinkle, 1981‐84, 32’ 52”

Auder began working on Annie Sprinkle shortly after they met in 1980, it is one of several film portraits (other subjects include the painter Alice Neel, photographer Cindy Sherman and Viva’s co‐star in Warhol’s 1968 Blue Movie, Louis Waldon. Structured around a series of informal interviews, Sprinkle discusses the background to her career as a performance artist and sex educator. As she talks about her experiences and attitudes towards her work the camera takes in details of the costumes and photographs that surround her.

Money is a recurrent theme and a series of anecdotes raise questions about exploitation and power within the sex industry. Sprinkle slips in and out of a ‘stage’ persona, dressing in costume, performing songs, reading fan mail, promotional material from her mail order business and articles she has written for pornographic magazines.

Brooding Angels, Made for R.L., 1988, 5’ 25"

Originally made as an intermission piece for a performance event organized by the artist Robert Longo, Brooding Angels, Made for R.L. was initially presented via a video wall comprised of a bank of twenty‐five monitors wheeled onstage for the duration of the piece. This dystopian montage combines detail observed from life, the printed image and the television screen. Scenes of chaos and destruction appear within a series of nocturnal images that create a densely claustrophobic collage. The soundtrack to the film uses an edited excerpt from an earlier work, A Portrait of Alice Neel (1976 – 1982), that features footage of the cellist David Soyer.

My Love, 1978, 4’ 40"

My Love is made with text and drawings by Niki de Saint Phalle. Alongside Made for Denise, from the same year, it is one of Auder’s first ‘video letters’. These early montage sequences with their associative structure, layered soundtracks and sequence of imagery are essentially literary in character and show the influence of poetry on Auder’s work.

Total runtime 43’

Cubitt Education: The Creative Conference

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:51:14 +0100

On the 9th of July 2009, as part of Children's Art Day, Cubitt Education is organising a major event at Islington Town Hall. The Creative Conference is led by pupils from local primary and secondary schools, they are the organisers and delegates at the Conference and will be:

Developing their own open-ended and ambitious creative projects, in collaboration with Cubitt artists, Councillors, and local people.
Organising a series of EVERYBODY draw activities for their schoolmates who will be visiting throughout the day.
Exploring the Town Hall, including the Mayor's Parlour and the Council Chamber
Taking portraits of local Councillors, as part of the Picturing Politics project.

The Creative Conference is a major event in Cubitt People's Republic and aims to enable a variety of projects by young people in collaboration with artists: it is the children who lead; taking us on vivid imaginative journeys, and exploring the connections between creative learning, artistic practice and active involvement within a community.

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Cubitt Education: View It...Cubitt...Do It

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:09:28 +0100

From 17th-27th of June 2009 Cubitt is hosting a community festival curated and promoted by pupils from Elizabeth Garret Anderson Language College. The team of festival organisers (all aged 14-16) decided they want a festival that calls out for local people to get away from their computers, playstations and televisions and: ".....Leave the screen and join a new scene!" to get involved in 10 days of activities that celebrate hands-on creativity.

The festival will include:

A series of performances of Winner Takes All, by The Angel Players, a popular local theatre group (recently the recipients of an O2 It's Your Community Award)
An outdoor performance by the Claremont Singers
An audioguide of music by pupils from Elizabeth Garret Anderson
An exhibition of artwork by local young people, pupils from Winton Primary School and a Somali community group
A free workshop at Islington North Library (also part of Holloway Arts Festival).

The festival has been generously supported by Islington Council, and is part of Cubitt’s newly expanded education programme, which is supported by Deutsche Bank, in partnership with Arts and Business and the Arts Council.

Download the programme for full info.

Michel Auder

Fri, 08 May 2009 14:59:28 +0100

Cubitt announces a solo exhibition by French-American filmmaker, Michel Auder.

Michel Auder

Part 1: 27 May to 7 June
Part 2: 1 to 12 July
Part 3: 15 to 26 July

Previews: 26 May, 30 June and 14 July 6.30 – 8.30 pm
Exhibition: Wednesday to Sunday 12.00 – 6.00 pm

In the early 1970ʼs Auder adopted a continuous approach to filmmaking, recording the people and scenarios he encountered and amassing an extensive archive of video footage. His work has been shaped by the informal character of his method and a collection of imagery that is constantly updated, revisited and reworked. This exhibition surveys four decades of his practice in a series of programmes that will run continuously in the gallery over two months.

Auder has made the camera and editing apparatus both the tool and subject of his work. Initially associated with the Zanzibar Group of independent filmmakers in Paris he began with extensive, unscripted 16mm films. Following a move to New York in 1970, he experimented with domestic formats, using a portable video camera to film directly from the television screen or record improvised action, interviews and document his observations.

His early films collide with narratives in art history and popular memory as artists, writers, and musicians make repeat appearances. Auderʼs subjects include actors familiar from Andy Warholʼs Factory alongside extrovert characters such as performance artist, adult film director and former sex worker Annie Sprinkle and the psychedelic drag queen troupe, The Cockettes. More recent films include montage sequences that revisit earlier footage, recataloguing imagery within collages and fashioning non-linear, associative essays. In Auderʼs work the camera both witnesses and directs social exchange. It describes a highly subjective position, moving about his environment, recording its soundtrack, admitting incidental drama, autobiographical detail and the real-time incursions of broadcast media.

Michel Auder was born in 1945, in Soissons, France. His films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Exhibitions include the 6th Berlin Biennial, the forthcoming Athens Biennale and solo presentations at Newman Popiashvili Gallery New York, Aurel Scheibler Berlin and Galleria Fonti, Naples. His films are distributed by Anthology Film Archives. He lives and works in New York.

This will be Michel Auder’s first solo exhibition in the UK since 1999.

Q & A with Michel Auder: 6.30 pm, Thursday 2 July, Ciné Lumière, South Kensington, 17 Queensberry Place, London £5 (£3 concs).

Booking required: Box Office: 0207 073 1350 www.institut-francais.org.uk

For further information and images please contact Judith Carlton: info@cubittartists.org.uk

Supported by Arts Council England and the French Institute in the UK.

Part 1:
Rooftops and Other Scenes, 1996, 48’ 51"
Polaroid Cocaine, 1993, 5’
Made for Denise, 1978, 3’ 5"

Total runtime 57’

Part 2:
Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol 1971-76, 1994, 72’ 39"
Chelsea 1990, 2008 6’
The Cockettes, New York City 1971, 2002, 28’

Total runtime 106’

Part 3:
Annie Sprinkle, 1981-84, 32’ 52"
Brooding Angels, Made for R.L., 1988, 5’ 25"
My Love, 1978, 4’ 40"

Total runtime 43’

Saturday 1 August from 2.00PM: Michel Auder Parts 1, 2 & 3. Programme notes are available to download via this link:

Michel Auder Programme Notes

Cubitt Education: Picturing Democracy

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:01:25 +0100

EVERYBODY click: The Exhibition

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:22:33 +0100

Cubitt is proud to present two exciting events in our innovative and expanding education programme: an exhibition of photographs taken and curated by young people; and the launch of a new education space at Cubitt Studios.

EVERYBODY click: The Exhibition

Following the closing show of Bart van der Heide's programme, Cubitt presents our youngest ever curators:

Callum Thomson, Mia Lieberson, Eden Buckley, Abel Masho, Liam Callanan, Ursula Meyer, Ivy Rogers, Lucy Gill, Zoe, Eliza, Griffin and Solomon are all aged between 9-11. They have curated an exhibition of original work by their peers: portraits of young people taken by young people.

The photographs are from EVERYBODY click: Cubitt's weekly collaboration with Canonbury Primary School. Throughout EVERYBODY click the pupils are in charge: they take the photographs and define their goals. They decide how they want to be represented, and represent each other. It is an opportunity for them to express their view of the world, with the same creative freedoms as professional artists take forgranted.

This process is at the heart of Cubitt's education programme: we have a strong belief in creative freedom for all, and through our varied weekly projects with local people we aim to empower individuals to take control of their own learning within a supportive and enriching environment.

There will be tours of the exhibition, led by the young photographers themselves, and family photography workshops in the gallery, during the Easter holidays. For further details contact us, or click here to sign up for a tour.

EVERYBODY click: The Exhibition is supported by Snappy Snaps, Angel.

See the slideshow below of photographs taken by the pupils of the curating process.

The launch of studio two

Following the growing success of Cubitt's innovative education activities, Deutsche Bank has initiated a three year creative partnership with us, as part of its new Arts and Education programme. This financial support will enable Cubitt to develop new education projects with local secondary schools: substantially broadening our creative community and reaching out to more local people. In the first year of this new partnership, Cubitt has recieved financial support from Arts and Business and Deutsche Bank, to initiate and develop the programme. The Arts and Business Investment Programme is funded by Arts Council England.

studio two is the hub of our newly expanded programme, which has been made possible by this exciting new funding. The ethos of studio two is open, inclusive, and experimental. It will provide the space for creative experimentation, discussion, and shared learning for our education community. Cubitt is a studio‐based organisation: a community of artists who develop their creative practice in the freedom of their studio spaces, within a dynamic social setting. Through studio two we are expanding this provision to local people.

studio two has been carefully designed, and equipped with specially commissioned furniture, made from eco-friendly materials (mirroring the sustainable, and responsive, aims of our community‐focussed programme). It will serve as a multi‐functional, shared space for the individual and collaborative projects of our broad and varied education community: bringing together local people from different generations and backgrounds.

Please join us on Friday 3rd of April, between 4-8pm for an event to celebrate these two significant developments for Cubitt.

EVERYBODY click: The Slideshow

Stonecarving at Elizabeth Garret Anderson

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:54:04 +0100

A mini exhibition is being held in the main school reception at Elizabeth Garret Anderson Language College to mark the end of the first term of our new stonecarving project. EGA is our first partner secondary school in our newly expanded education programme, which has been made possible by funding from Deutsche Bank, in partnership with Arts and Business and the Arts Council.

Through the spring term a pilot year seven class have been working with Cubitt and artist Daniele Genadry on an innovative participant-led stonecarving project. Throughout the weekly sessions the pupils have been able to decide their own creative route: they are given complete freedom to decide what they want to do, how they work with the material, and whether they use a range of available related forms: drawing, clay and photography.

The project has produced some unexpected and highly original results, through an approach that goes against the grain of traditional teaching methods. The pupils have invented ways to paint with stone by mixing the dust with PVA; use it to make imprints on clay; draw the sounds of the classroom at work; create illustrations of the tools used in stonecarving (pictured above), and all of this has arisen spontaneously from their own creative freedom.

The classes have been documented on an ongoing blog, the content of which is provided by the pupils themselves. It showcases the diversity and energy of the unusual project, and reflects the focus on process, not outcomes, and the importance of learning through independent inquiry and experimentation. The final mini exhibition is a display of work produced during the sessions, and it was put together entirely by the pupils, who also wrote their own explanatory text. It will be on display in the public entrance to the school from Tuesday 31st of March to the end of April.

Birds

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:12:28 +0100

Throughout March 2009, Cubitt Gallery welcomes a specially commissioned installation by Dutch artist Willem de Rooij (b. 1969), entitled 'Birds'. De Rooij's thoughtful research on the cultural resonance of artifacts and the afterlife of visual mass-distribution have lead to successful solo projects and collaborations (as part of artist-duo de Rijke / de Rooij), along with acclaimed exhibitions at international institutions, such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, K21 Düsseldorf and MAMBo museum for Modern Art, Bologna. De Rooij is a professor at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
The installation 'Birds' at Cubitt marks the third leg of a triptych of temporary installations, constructed by De Rooij over a period of two years at galleries in Paris (Chantal Crousel, 'The Floating Feather', 2006) and Cologne (Gallerie Buchholz, 'Birds in a Park', 2007). Each of these three projects is inspired by another work of 17th century Dutch painter Melchior d'Hondecoeter (1636-1695). In these recent productions of De Rooij, d'Hondecoeter's paintings_were the starting point of different spatial compositions that each combine a variety of contemporary artistic practices and historical artifacts, resulting in a compelling series of temporal groupings that express a personal account on the distribution of the cultural identity and memory, collecting and display.

D'Hondecoeter's œuvre consists almost entirely out of portrayals of birds and the painting that initiated de Rooij's Cubitt installation is no exception. Despite originally being acquired by the Crocker Art Collection (Sacramento, USA) as a painting by d'Hondecoeter's hand, Birds (n.d.) is currently attributed to one of his contemporaries. This paintings composition is rather unusual: not only does it depict a curious group of birds that are both alive and dead, these same birds look as if they are cut and pasted onto an arbitrary rural setting. The plumage of all the birds seems to reflect an unnatural lighting with equal intensity, illustrating the feathers in extreme detail. Compared to their surroundings, which are painted with much less inspiration, lacking convincing depth and shadow, 'Birds' therefore reflects two different entities - context and subject - each alienating the other.

Interpreting 'Birds' as a collage 'avant la lettre', aligns the painting to the conceptual discourse of Appropriation Art. De Rooij takes up this analogy and continues to extend it into the third dimension. The Cubitt installation 'Birds' is equally comparable to a visual assemblage, but instead of using a flat surface composition De Rooij appropriates the temporary exhibition as his artistic means of negotiation. A diverse anthology of artifacts that De Rooij has collected over the last year are combined with the abstract paintings of Dutch artist Vincent Vulsma (b. 1982). Thus 'Birds' joins a multifaceted collection of artworks, high street fashion and printed matter. All these items however have one vital element in common: they operate in a context that is not their own, hence illustrating the line of reasoning of one single artist. In so doing, Willem de Rooij succeeds in showing us a collage that is time based, highly seductive and remaining hauntingly active in one's mind after visiting.

Vincent Vulsma's first solo exhibition in Germany will take place in July 2009 at Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender in Berlin.

'Birds' is generously supported by Arts Council England, The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Mondriaan Foundation.

Q&A with Harun Farocki

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:32:33 +0100

Informal Q&A with Harun Farocki at the Cubitt Gallery

Friday 20 February, 2009

1pm - 1.30pm

Admission is free, but booking is essential.

The Image in Violence

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:26:57 +0100

THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT

Thursday 19 February 2009; 7pm - 9pm
Goethe-Institut London
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2PH

Acclaimed German filmmaker and artist, Harun Farocki, will discuss his work-in-progress, Immersion, with artist and critic Kodwo Eshun (co-founder of the Otolith Group). In Immersion, Farocki explores how virtual reality is deployed within a sobering military reality -- how the artificial images of computer games are deployed beyond their self-contained fictional universes, both in the training of U.S. troops prior to their deployment to combat zones, and in psychological care for troops suffering battlefield trauma upon their return.

Presented in association with The Centre for the Production and Research of Documentary Film at the University of Westminster, and in collaboration with Michael Uwemedimo, Lecturer, School of Arts, Roehampton University.

What Farocki Taught

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:55:19 +0100

A screening of What Farocki Taught (Jill Godmilow, 1998), with special introduction by Lucy Reynolds and synchronized screening of Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969).

Saturday 7 February, 4pm - 6pm

Education Image

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:28:52 +0100

Critic Tom Holert and curator Marion von Osten will elaborate on their research project at the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Vienna), entitled the Education Image. Education Image explores the different ways in which pedagogy appears in visual culture and how, in turn, visual culture is used as an educative tool.

Harun Farocki

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:38:15 +0100

Three Early Films will not have a private view, but instead four public events that are organised throughout the course of the exhibition.

↓See below for Dates and Times↓

With Three Early Films, Cubitt Gallery is proud to host a selection of early works by the renowned German filmmaker Harun Farocki (b.1944). From 17 January through 22 February (2009), the exhibition features four public events and consecutive screenings of Inextinguishable Fire (1969, 16mm, 25 min.), Between Two Wars (1978, 16mm, 83 min.) and Industry and Photography (1979, 35mm transferred to video, 44 min.). This modest selection from an otherwise extensive career of writing, publishing, television production, installations, feature movies and documentaries, underlines Farocki’s unique influence on moving image practice throughout the last 4 decades. Farocki continuously succeeds in abstracting the cultural and political representation of labour and combat from its matrix of production and perception.

In order to generate a singular contemporary interpretation of Farocki’s oeuvre, Three Early Films opens up the question of the representation of pedagogy within visual culture. In association with Kodwo Eshun (London based writer and artist from The Otolith Group) and Antje Ehmann (Berlin based artist and curator), a discursive context is constructed that takes its cue from the ongoing research of the critic Tom Holert and the curator Marion von Osten (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna), entitled the Education Image. Education Image explores the different ways in which pedagogy appears in visual culture and how, in turn, visual culture is used as an educative tool.

Four public events will be organised throughout the course of the exhibition with the participation of Tom Holert, Marion von Osten, Harun Farocki and Lucy Reynolds. For Three Early Films, Cubitt is proud to announce the premiere of a new film montage by Antje Ehmann, which explores the trope of education in the work of Harun Farocki and the new translation and subtitling of Industry and Photography which is presented in London for the first time.

Overall, Three Early Films is more than an exhibition; it constitutes a critical playing field that is suggestively described by Ehmann and Farocki as a cutting room (‘a laboratory for cinema’). “The cutting room is the place where film is examined; where each individual film-take is meticulously weighed and evaluated”, note Ehmann and Farocki. With this in mind, Three Early Films features a diverse program informed by the imperatives of examination, selection and critical assessment; the exhibition features a differentiation in timing (combining video loops with special screenings), media (video and 16mm-projections) and public discussions in partnership with the Goethe Institute, London and the University of Westminster’s Centre for the Production and Research of Documentary Film, London.

Public Events

Education Image — Sat 31 Jan, read more
What Farocki Taught — Sat 7 Feb, read more
The Image in Violence — Thu 19 Feb, read more
Q&A with Harun Farocki — Fri 20 Feb, read more

Exhibition Screenings

Inextinguishable Fire (1969, 16mm., 25min.) see times below
Between Two Wars (1978, 16mm, 83 min.) see times below
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.) see times below

'Three Early Films' by Harun Farocki will be followed by 'Harun Farocki. Against What? Against Whom?' in November 2009, the most substantive exhibition of Farocki’s work to be presented in London, curated by Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group, Alex Sainsbury, Antje Ehmann and Stuart Comer. Works made for exhibition will be presented at London’s Raven Row (www.ravenrow.org) while a season of Farocki’s films, ranging from his early work in the late 1960s through to contemporary films as yet unseen in the UK, will be screened at Tate Modern (www.tate.org.uk/modern) throughout November.

Public Program — Screenings and Discussions

The exhibition Three Early Films of Harun Farocki features a daily loop-projection of Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.) plus a selection of 16mm film screenings and pubic events throughout the course of the exhibition.

Week 1

Sat 17 Jan, 1:00 to 1:25PM — Screening
Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, 16mm., 25min.)
Sun 18 Jan, 4:00 to 4:25PM — Screening
Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, 16mm., 25min.)

Week 2

Wed 21 Jan, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Thu 22 Jan, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Fri 23 Jan, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Sat 24 Jan, 1:00 to 2:23 PM — Screening
Between Two Wars (Harun Farocki, 1978, 16mm., 83min.)
Sun 25 Jan, 4:00 to 5:23PM — Screening
Between Two Wars (Harun Farocki, 1978, 16mm., 83min.)

Week 3

Wed 28 Jan, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Thu 29 Jan, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Fri 30 Jan, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Sat 31 Jan, 4:00 to 6:00PM — Cubitt Event
Education Image — a lecture by Tom Holert and Marion von Osten on the Education Image. Location: Cubitt, London. read more
Sun 1 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)

Week 4

Wed 4 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Thu 5 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Fri 6 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Sat 7 Feb, 4:00 to 6:00PM — Cubitt Event
What Farocki Taught (Jill Godmilow, 1998) — with special introduction by Lucy Reynolds and synchronized screening of Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, 16mm., 25min.). Location: Cubitt, London. read more
Sun 8 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)

Week 5

Wed 11 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Thu 12 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Fri 13 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Sat 14 Feb, 1:00 to 1:25PM — Screening
Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, 16mm., 25min.)
Sun 15 Feb, 4:00 to 4:25PM — Screening
Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1969, 16mm., 25min.)

Week 6

Wed 18 Feb, 12:00 to 6:00PM — Daily-loop Projection
Industry and Photography (1979, video, 44min.)
Thu 19 Feb, 7:00 to 9:00PM — Goethe Event
The Image in Violence — Harun Farocki and Kodwo Eshun discuss Farocki's latest work on virtual reality and trauma for Iraq War veterans. Presented in collaboration with the Westminster University and the Goethe Institute. Location: Goethe Institute, 50 Princes Gate Exhibition Road, London. read more
Fri 20 Feb, 1:00 to 1:30PM — Cubitt Event
Q&A with Harun Farocki. Location: Cubitt, London. read more
Sat 21 Feb, 1:00 to 2:23PM — Screening
Between Two Wars (Harun Farocki, 1978, 16mm., 83min.)
Sun 22 Feb, 4:00 to 5:23PM — Screening
Between Two Wars (Harun Farocki, 1978, 16mm., 83min.)

Cubitt's Christmas Festival

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:31:46 +0100

Since 2006 Cubitt Education has developed a close partnership with Claremont Project, a local day activity centre for over-55's. We have been running weekly art workshops on different skills at the centre — from clay modelling to textiles, and monthly drawing sessions for Claremont members in Cubitt studios with tea and cake (Inside Art).

On Thursday the 11th of December, from 4.30pm to 9pm Cubitt Education will be opening an exhibition of oil paintings created during a recent six-week course at Claremont Project, with an accompanying Christmas festival including:

A book launch for 'Forty Days of Bullseyes' by Deirdre Weir, a regular to Cubitt's art classes — "A poignant and funny memoir of a childhood in Dublin."
Another art workshop regular, Maggi Adams AKA The Phat Controller, will be spinning Christmas tunes, and 70's RnB, with her Wheelybag DJ contraption.
Everybody's A Superhero — Drawings and photographs from a series of workshops, run by Cubitt Education for mentoring partnerships from Chance UK.
A sale of Christmas gifts made with Canonbury Primary School: as part of Everybody Draw.
The launch of the Everybody Draw Cotton Bags, in three wonderful designs, all by primary school pupils. (pictured below). These bags are only £3 each and all profits will go to Everybody Draw.

And of course, wine and mince pies!

The joint exhibition of Dreams and Mysteries and Everybody's a Superhero, will continue in the Education Studio, until the 11th of January 2009. (Normal gallery opening hours: Wed-Sun, 12-6. Closed 22nd Dec. - 2nd Jan)

Everybody's A Superhero

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:31:42 +0100

In November and December 2008 Cubitt Education ran a series of workshops for mentoring partnerships from Chance UK. They were led by Giulia Ricci, an artist and educator, who was joined by Roger Mason, a professional comics and storyboarding artist, and the young participants worked over three sessions to create a life-size superhero version of themselves. During the workshops they explored their good qualities, talents, and skills, and transformed them into the superpowers of their invented character.

Chance UK is a charity that matches adult volunteers with primary school children with behavioural difficulties who are at risk of developing anti-social or criminal offending behaviour in the future. Chance UK works closely with schools, parents, and social workers to deliver solution-focussed approach, over a year in which the children have access to a range of activities and visits, and are guided by a suitable role model. For more info visit their website: www.chanceuk.com

Cubitt Education has been working with Chance UK to develop our own Creative Mentoring Scheme, in which we are pairing professional artists, or arts graduates with young artists, in Year 6 or Year 11. The scheme is designed for pupils who show talent and and interest in art and who would benefit from enrichment through gallery visits and access to creative professionals and resources.

Our first partnership was launched in 2008, and in 2009 we will be launching 6 more partnerships (3 from Year 6 at Canonbury Primary School, and three from Year 11 at Elizabeth Garret Anderson English Language College).

Speicher

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:18:26 +0100

With Speicher, Cubitt Gallery, hosts the international debut of German artist Michaela Melián's (Upper Bavaria, 1956). The German noun "Speicher" covers a range of mutually related meanings: it stands for 'memory' or even the physical storage space of an attic. One can say that the Cubitt exhibition features Melián's interest in the politics of memory and reflects her intrepid curiosity for the forgotten attics of Europe's Modern history.

In this vein, Speicher retraces the steps of VariaVision-Unendliche Fahrt, an ambitious multimedia installation of sound, film and text, which disappeared shortly after it's failing display at the 1965 International Transport Exhibition in Munich. Despite this disappointing outcome, the installation represented one of the first attempts in Germany to rejoin art with the avant-garde, after the Nazi regime had separated the two. Melián's re-enactment, through empirical research and artistic interpretation, casts a light on this specific moment in history when a promising development was nipped in the bud. Speicher aims to revive the first installation by accessing some of its original components in a compelling narration: interviews with the people involved and a specially commissioned film; strengthening German art critic Jan Verwoert's view in the accompanying catalogue: 'Every past has its own future' (Speicher, Koenig Books, 2008).

VaraVision was commissioned when it's prime contributors, Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz, taught at the School of Design in Ulm. In the short period of it's existence, from 1953–1968, the Ulmer school exerted a strong influence on German and international design, art, and media history. It resumed the forcibly terminated tradition of the Bauhaus, defining the concepts of modernism, utopia, design, everyday culture, education, sciences and early digital culture in the spirit of a democratic and aesthetic new start in Germany after 1945. For the project, Kluge and Reitz were seconded by Josef Anton Riedl, who introduced the project to one of the first electronic studios in West Germany, constructed in 1959 by the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music (Munich).

Addressing this historic condition again in 2008, opens an inspiring polemic on the construction of an avant-garde identity and its ethical, political and social influences. Michaela Melián returned to the Siemens Studio (currently housed in the Deutsches Museum Munich), recorded the studio's sounds, tones, and noises, and made them the basis of a new composition. Embedded in them, a polyvocal collage of texts can be heard, addressing the original topic of VariaVision ('the subject of traveling'). Personal interviews with all the participants involved in VariaVision (including the technicians) provide a context of first-hand experiences, anecdotes and personal reflections.

Speicher is realized in partnership with the Ulmer Museum (Ulm) and The Lentos Kunstmuseum (Linz).

A collaborative publication was produced by all partners and published at Koenig Books. The publication includes texts by German art critic Jan Verwoert and will be available at Cubitt and all Koenig book stores.

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection, the Free Rein Foundation and others.

Watercolour Workshops

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:29:54 +0100

As part of Cubitt's series of workshops for over-55's (funded by Cripplegate Foundation), Allison Maletz (currently showing in New Contemporaries) ran a series of workshops exploring techniques of watercolour painting.

The participants developed skills in colour mixing, developing sketchbook use, using different types of watercolour, observational drawing, and painting still-life. They produced over 60 watercolours between them during the workshops, and Cubitt aims to hold an exhibition of the artwork in 2009.

Drawn Together

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:14:49 +0100

Claremont Project, in conjunction with Cubitt Education, participated in this year’s BIG DRAW!

Claremont members, locals, and their friends and family, joined us, and artist Darren Marshall, for an event that was inspired by local and historical images. The drop-in session was lively and full of chatter, and collaboration, as people of all ages and abilities mixed and shared memories, ideas, and responded to the inspiring images of Islington and London that were provided by Cubitt Education intern Kate Liston.

The Big Draw is run by the Campaign for Drawing.

The Big Everybody Draw 2008

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:17:52 +0100

Cubitt Education ran a full day of creative activities for the Big Draw at Canonbury Primary School. From Reception to Year Six, the whole school, including teachers, parents and helpers, were engaged in a variety of drawing-related projects for the whole day.

Activities included: making experimental architecture from paper; inventing, drawing and playing games in the playground; making and decorating paper clothes; a garden menagerie of animals from newspaper and paper plates; a giant map created by over a hundred children; almost-lifesize superheroes; drawing with string; watercolours out in the landscape; surrealist collage.

The workshops were facilitated by a number of Cubitt Education interns and artists: Carali McCall; Giulia Ricci; Pernille Ramfelt; Ginny Jory; Adam Murray; Allison Maletz; Janne Malmros; Emma Kay; Kate Liston; Daniele Genadry; Rachael MacArthur; with tremendous, help, support, and creative input from parents, teachers, office and support staff.

The event was part of the Campaign for Drawing's annual Big Draw.

Henri Chopin

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:24:11 +0100

The avant-garde poet and publisher Henri Chopin (Paris, 1922 - Norfolk, 2008) is widely considered to be a pioneer in the recognition and distribution of sound-poetry. Since the 1950's his prolific independent production has featured collaborations with avant-garde notables such as Raoul Hausmann and William S. Burroughs, whilst establishing an audience for an artistic practice that was yet to find one. His personal production — consisting of typewriter-poems and sound performances — is an inspired attempt to open the medium of poetry into a form described by Chopin as 'a poetry of spaces': demonstrating ‘the sensory superiority of sound as opposed to normal speech, and […] free man from the straightjacket of words and letters and from his obedience to didactics.’

As part of the exhibition 'Three Minutes', Cubitt Gallery is proud to be host to the private archive of Henri Chopin (from October 10 through November 9 2008 only), which includes a large selection of his printed matter, typewriting-poems and records. The conceptual function of this exhibition is to represent the first three minutes of a proposed documentary production on Chopin by British artist Tris Vonna-Michell. During his lifetime Henri Chopin has been an important part of Vonna-Michell's production, featuring as one of the protagonists in the installation he conceived for Cubitt in October 2007. Exactly one year later, Cubitt and Tris Vonna-Michell join hands again to shed light on the extraordinary Henri Chopin and extend his unlimited drive and curiosity into the realm of a contemporary production. The exhibition takes two parts: Vonna-Michell’s gallery installation which combines his own work with Chopin’s and the archive, fully accessible and readable for the first time in a public space.

The archive on Chopin will include a complete collection of his magazines Cinquième Saison and OU, which feature unique collaborations with Dadaists (such as Raoul Hausmann), Surrealists (such as Ladislav Novak and Brion Gysin), Lettrists (François Dufrêne), Fluxus and Concrete Poets (such as William S. Burroughs and Bob Cobbing). In retrospect these magazines can be seen as unique 'hard drives' of early modernism which continue to influence and inspire the making of writing, performance and poetry. The individual publications are exhibitions in themselves, comparable to Marcel Duchamp’s 'Boîte-en-valise': housing an entire oeuvre in small models of different format, medium and style. They consist of posters, prints, drawings, objects and phonetic records by all the aforementioned collaborators and many more.

This emphasis on the re-presentation of artistic production is addressed through the Cubitt installation by means of material relating to events long past: posters advertising performances and silk screen prints depicting Chopin’s typewriter-poems, in such a way linking his practice with Vonna-Michell’s. This will be combined with a large format image documenting Tris Vonna-Michell's installation at Bozar Center for Fine Arts, Brussels (October, 2006). This work, largely based on Chopin, was stolen in its entirety from the gallery.

Archive open for consultation from October 11, 12:00PM. The archive will be available on demand during exhibition opening hours (for insurance purposes we must ask that you bring ID if you wish to view the archive).

The exhibition is organised in association with London based curator Caterina Riva. Special thanks go out to Frédéric Acquaviva, Gianni Morghen and Brigitte Morton.

Henri Chopin 'Three Minutes' is supported by the Elephant Trust.

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection, the Free Rein Foundation and others.

Cubitt is funded by Arts Council England.

The Cut of the Cloth

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:20:52 +0100

As part of Cubitt's series of workshops for over-55's (funded by Cripplegate Foundation), Wendy Helm, an artist and fashion designer, ran a series of workshops around the theme of art and fashion.

Each of the participants embarked on an individual textiles / art project, such as making a bag, transforming an existing garment, or experimenting with crochet and knitting. The projects were facilitated by Wendy, and assisted by volunteer Kate Liston. One of the group, Maggi Adams, created a costume for her dj-ing alter ego, The Phat Controller, and she went on to perform at Cubitt's Christmas Festival in the costume.

Noise Room

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:04:45 +0100

With the Noise Room, Cubitt is proud to join the line of artificial listening sites created by Jan St Werner (Mouse on Mars) since 2005.

From 29 August to 28 September, Cubitt's exhibition space is transformed into a 'sound studio sculpture': supporting a unique survey of works by contemporary music producers and composers. The Noise Room provides a total of eight hours of specially commissioned sound experiments by Black Dice, Stereolab, Sun Ok Papi K.O., Mouse on Mars, Lee Ranaldo, David Grubbs, Jason Forrest, Jeff Carey, Daniel Schorno, Robert van Heumen, Kevin Blechdom, Michel Waisvisz, Casey Rice, Adam Butler, Hrvatski, C-Schulz & F.X. Randomiz.

The Noise Room turns its attention to the 'creative listener' as recipient as well as producer. Not only does it stage a variety of contemporary (professional) sonic interpretations, it also provides a space for sonic imagination. The Noise Room features compositions that are specially produced for a multi-channelled (5.1) surround speaker system: calibrated to the room's spatial acoustics and therefore creating a sonic landscape in which the visitors can dedicate themselves to a maximum listening experience. Acoustic phenomena meet the private sensorial experience, making the Noise Room illustrate as well as generate the private act of listening.

After having been previously performed at two major sound podia in The Netherlands (STEIM and Melkweg, respectively), Cubitt hosts the Noise Room's international debut. To mark this event, a CD has been produced (Sonig) with stereo edits from the Noise Room pieces which will be available at Cubitt. Please contact Cubitt for further information.

[click for program]

Many thanks to STEIM, Amsterdam and ELECTRA, London.

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection, the Free Rein Foundation and others.

Trip to the Ramayana Exhibition at the British Library

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:45:20 +0100

Cubitt Education led a trip to the British Library, for Year One pupils from Canonbury Primary School, to see the Ramayana Exhibition.

The trip involved two activities:

A big drawing project in the Poet's Circle, in which the pupils occupied the entire Circle, with numerous sheets and rolls of paper. They were given a selection of different sized frames to create drawings inspired by the exhibition;

An extended exploration of the exhibition, led by Cubitt artists, Canobury Primary School staff, and volunteer parents.

Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:26:35 +0100

Over the last four years, Berlin-based artists Jay Chung (1976, Madison, USA) and Q Takeki Maeda (1977, Nagoya, Japan) have established quite a reputation with their unpredictable and elusive collaborations: they often depart from a dubious mystification or even a veritable lie.

In so doing, Chung and Maeda have successfully established clandestine ways to take on board the aesthetic responsibility of Conceptual Art and challenge bourgeois notions of classification, private labour and style. The Cubitt exhibition Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls aims to continue this line of thought, while directing it at the same time to a particular case.

"Louis Vuitton was born in a tiny village, around 1820. His father was the proprietor of the village mill. He was very exceptional as a boy..." begins the main sound piece in Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls. The simplified narrative tells the life story of the 'founding father' as a self-made man during the rise of the middle class in 19th Century France. Now, as the world's largest luxury-goods maker, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy [tm] is France's most visible exponent of arts patronage – 'inscribed under the sign of creative passion, and a profound love of human values'.

A framed sketch hung in the gallery represents Chung and Maeda’s proposal to house this narrative in an auditorium based on the brown canvas interiour of a Louis Vuitton ‘Alma’ handbag. In their proposal, the purse is enlarged by a factor of 25 in order to form a small chapel. From a speaker system in the giant bag’s zippered ceiling, the viewer would hear several audio narratives, of which this Cubitt piece is the first to be realised.

Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls doesn’t point its finger solely in one direction; it mirrors the views of Chung and Maeda on today’s state of artistic production as well. In a neoliberal economy in which a proliferation of freelance professionals need to secure their economy on a continuous basis, the visibility and representation of labor has become significant capital. Chung and Maeda clearly refuse to take part in this development and instead make way for a plethora of invisible and dysfunctional forms of practice within their installations.

Previous shows of Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda were featured in Otra de Vaqueros, Laboratory Arte Alameda Mexico City, the 1st Moscow Biennale (2005), CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2005 and 2006), MAMbo, Bologna (2006) and ZKM, Karlsruhe (2007). The Cubitt exhibition Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls is a continuation of their exhibition (under the same name) at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2007/2008).

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection and others.

Did I Do That?

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:40:57 +0100

Cubitt Education presents our Summer Exhibition of artwork produced in all our projects: delicate heads made from paper, clay body parts, giant collaborative drawings, and gold-leafed ceramic portraits.

Everybody Click and Everybody Draw workshops at Canonbury Primary School in North London, both run on Mondays, and give pupils valuable opportunities to experiment freely with photography techniques, and on huge collaborative drawings. Our partnership with the school is developing in exciting new directions: we are currently piloting a Mentoring Scheme, and in recent months our Artists in Residence at Canonbury Primary School took a group of pupils on A Trip To The Slade,

Inside Art is our monthly art session with a small enthusiastic group of over 55's. In April and May 2008 we ran a set of six weekly workshops, in partnership with Claremont Project, for our Inside Art participants and other over-55's from the local area. The workshops, Working With The Head, were an introduction to clay modelling techniques, led by artist Christy Symington.

For more information about this exhibition or other Cubitt Education events please contact Daniel Baker or Bettina Brunner at on +44 (0)20 7278 8226 or by using the Contact Us page.

Seven Times Two or Three

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:53:31 +0100

A one-week long series of events featuring works and research by over 30 artists, designers, musicians and writers in the form of live performances, lectures, dialogues and appropriations.

Cubitt is pleased to host Seven Times Two or Three/on and beneath communication, an intense series of installations, presentations, performances and dialogues, taking place over a period of one week for no more than two or three hours a day. Developed in association with Electric Palm Tree, Seven Times Two or Three aims at challenging the dominant shape of contemporary culture where communication has regressed into one-sided, 24-hour public noise.

According to social research, one "spends 3.5 years of his/her live answering irrelevant emails", while only 2 percent of all information raining down on us can be consciously processed. From this starting point, Seven Times Two or Three features presentations that explore today’s situation of overflowing public (private) information and its narrative of superficiality (with presentations by art critics and authors Jan Verwoert and Sven Lutticken), or, going a step further — Marcus Steinweg, Haegue Yang and Sung Hwan Kim — break through the ever-expanding verbal surface in order to generate a constructive state of miscommunication and dys-functional time. Together with artists such as Mariana Castello Deball and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, who approach the (neo-liberal) regime of time from an historical angle, Seven Times Two or Three aims to set out a playing field in which the transparency of communication is appropriated and subjected to alternatives.

Situating this week-long series of events at Cubitt, the gallery will feature a selection of historical and contemporary references, including works and retakes of works by artists Lawrence Weiner, Bernadette Corporation and Phillip Lai. The opening event will present a musical experiment by Amsterdam-based musicians Byungjun Kwon and Min Seok Kwon entitled Hypermetropia: a physical defect of vision causing an inability to focus on near objects. The seven day running series will complete with a screening of the film Tokyo Story (1953) by Yasujiro Ozu, which depicts post-war Japan's modern life in a leisurely tempo, and a performance by Pil and Galia Kollectiv entitled Better Future-quad-shaped.

Workshop with Manuel Raeder “In the Land of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King”

Monday 16 June, 4-6 pm

On Monday June 16, renowned graphic designer and conceptual thinker Manuel Raeder will host a public workshop on ‘folding narratives’. Known for his collaborations with the fashion label BLESS and for numerous institutional interventions and artist collaborations, Raeder will give the construction of narrative a physical shape. The outcomes of the workshop will join the other works in the gallery. In order to take part in the workshop, please contact info@cubittartists.org.uk.

Programme

Setting (a week-long installation)

Retake Atsuko Tanaka’s Work(Bell) (2008)
Evoke Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (1980–81)
Listen Lawrence Weiner’s Nothing to Lose (1976)
Read Bernadette Corporation’s Wall Text (2005)
Occupy Phillip Lai’s Untitled (2008)

Opening Sunday 15 June, 7–9pm

Performance by Byungjun Kwon & Min Seok Kwon, Hypermetropia

Monday 16 June, 7–9pm

Installation & Presentation after workshop led by Manuel Raeder (see the above)
Screening of Eva Meyer/Eran Schaerf’s Flashforward (2004)
Runway of BLESS’s N°35 Automatica Remote Services (2008)

Tuesday 17 June, 6–9pm

Screening of Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s Maurits Script (2006) & No False Echoes (2008)
Conversation with Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Emily Pethick
Screening of Nobody was Tomorrow (2008)
Book presentation These Ruins You See by Mariana Castillo Deball with surprise guest

Wednesday 18 June, 7–9pm

Reading of Mladen Stilinovic’s The Praise of Laziness (1998)
Lecture & Presentation by Jan Verwoert, Yes, No & Other Options
YouTube Salon by Stuart Comer, There is No Cure for Curiosity

Thursday 19 June, 7–9pm

Screening of Jon Mikel Euba’s One Minute of Silence (2003-2005)
Video Installation of Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972)
Lecture & Multiple Projections by Sven Lütticken, Shock and Suspense

Friday 20 June, 7–9pm

Screening of Haegue Yang’s Holiday Story (2007)
YouTube Screening of Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub’s En rachâchant (1982)
Lecture by Marcus Steinweg, Marguerite Duras as a Philosopher

Saturday 21 June, 7–9pm

Reading by Sara De Bondt, Beatrice Warde-First Lady of Typography by John Dreyfus
Screening of Sung Hwan Kim’s Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 (2007)
Performance by Michael Hiltbrunner, Singing over a Voice Study

Sunday 22 June, 6–9pm

Screening of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953)
Performance by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Better Future-quad-shaped

Entrance: Free.
Every event starts sharp on time.
Light snack and drinks provided.
Feel free to visit the installed works during the day.

With kind support of Arts Council England.

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection and others.

Image Source: Hypermetropia.svg (SVG file, nominally 500 × 500 pixels, file size: 13 KB) Wikimedia Commons.

Thinking in Loop

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:42:55 +0100

Public talk by Boris Groys: Thursday 15 May, 5:30PM to 7:00PM
Location: A.V. Hill Lecture Theatre, UCL (see below for more information).

With the exhibition Thinking in Loop Cubitt is proud to host the installation of three video-collages by German philosopher Boris Groys. As a prolific contributor to current theoretic and cultural discourse Groys wouldn’t be at first associated with a visual practice. However Thinking in Loop shows that both means of public expression are compatible with each other. The three videos on iconoclasm, ritual and immortality were produced by Groys for several occasions between 2002 and 2007 and will have, as a group, their British debut at Cubitt. Each video combines a theoretical text — written and spoken by the author — with muted fragments from feature movies and film documentations.

Please click on the links above to download texts by Boris Groys. You will need Adobe Reader to view the files.

Boris Groys:

“One can assert that in our time video, instead of text, became the leading vehicle for transmitting information of any kind. […]

The three videos shown in the exhibition fit in this pattern because they give the impression that the text has a more prominent role than the image. But the film footage that is used in these videos has no direct relationship to the spoken text. There are associations and parallels between text and image, but also there are contrasts and breaks. The image is not used here as an illustration that has a goal to make the text more comprehensible, to make certain theoretical positions more evident. Rather, the videos produce a certain gap between what we hear and what we see – they even make it especially difficult for the spectator to follow the text and image simultaneously. In this way the presented videos problematize the relationship between text and image that usually seems to be guaranteed by the structuring of the video material. In fact, these videos transmit no information – rather they reflect on the difficulties of such a transmission. These difficulties are the main topic of all three texts – and these difficulties reflect themselves in the shape of the videos themselves. Text and image correspond to each other, but they remain heterogeneous.”¹

In this way Thinking in Loop subjects a cultivated tool of mass communication to the private act of appropriation and miscommunication. Groys challenges with his videos the regime of visibility within contemporary cultural production, which fuels a continuous demand and circulation of information. At the same time an intriguing reading of mass media is posed by Groys: a reading that surpasses their embodiment as temporary forms of ‘transmission’ and ‘representation’. In his argument Unter Verdacht (Under Suspicion) [Carl Hanser Verlag, 2000] Groys undertakes to break through the ‘mediatic surface’ of mass media in order to expose their inherent, yet concealed, materiality. A set of ideological, economic and technical histories form the point of departure for this definition of their ‘materiality’ and outline at the same time the playing field of the videos on show at Cubitt.

¹Thinking in Loop was shown at apexart, New York earlier this year. The paraphrased text parts are taken from an introductory text by Boris Groys for this exhibition.

Boris Groys is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruh and Global Professor at New York University. He is also a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and an internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet postmodern art and literature as well as on the Russian avant-garde. Dr. Groys' writing engages the wildly disparate traditions of French poststructuralism and modern Russian philosophy.

Public Talk by Boris Groys: Thursday 15 May, 5:30PM to 7:00PM
at the A.V. Hill Lecture Theatre, Medical Sciences Building, UCL (click here for a location map).
Boris Groys will talk about his visual experiments shown at Cubitt.

Booking is essential. Please contact us on 020 7278 8226.

In collaboration with the Slade School of Art.

Thinking in Loop is supported by Arts Council England.

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection and others.

A Trip To The Slade

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:10:15 +0100

Cubitt's Artists-In-Residence at Canonbury Primary School, Pernille Ramfelt and Giulia Ricci, took a group of pupils from year 6 to The Slade, the famous art school at University College London.

The day began with a tour of the school led by Bruce Mclean, in which the children met art students and explored their studios and art practice, the tour was followed by a collaborative drawing workshop directed by the Canonbury pupils.

Working with the Head

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:29:20 +0100

Cubitt programmed a series of six workshops, funded by Age Concern, to offer Inside Art participants the opportunity to learn new creative techniques. The workshops focussed on sculpting heads and portraits in clay, and were led by sculptor Christy Symington.

The workshops began with experimental drawings in charcoal, and ended with a mini exhibition at Claremont Project.

Lethal Love

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:14:06 +0100

Cubitt is proud to present Lethal Love, a new commissioned installation by Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang (Seoul, 1971).

With this ambitious architectural construction, Cubitt joins a group of international institutions that will individually host parts of a large group of installations by the artist over the course of this year. Together with Kunstverein Hamburg, Portikus (Frankfurt), Sala Rekalde (Bilbao) and Cubitt, Yang has developed a series of abstract portraits that take their inspiration from infamous public personas in Asian and European history. This evolutionary storyline will find its final form in a publication to be released late 2008 by Sala Rekalde.

Lethal Love is inspired by the life of German activist Petra Kelly - the founder of Germany's influential Green Party - who was shot in her sleep in 1992 by her lover and supporter. Her tragic death is seen by Yang as a metaphor for Kelly's conflicted life: torn between her life as a public defender of pacifism and 90s European political moral on the one hand, and her obscure private life, depending on the protection of an ex-army general on the other.

The dramatic polemic of Kelly's still unsolved homicide generates a striking resemblance with Yang's artistic production which challenges the balance between private and public. The highly subjective interpretation of Kelly's story for instance, is executed within the gallery space in such an abstract fashion that a clear narrative relation to the story seems to be sabotaged instead of communicated: where the private life of Kelly stayed obscured for the public eye, the public form of Yang's installations mask their own conceptual points of departure.

Haegue Yang's artistic production has been strikingly described as the combination of the act of speech and the act of silence. The objects of mass production that define Yang's pallet (Venetian blinds, floodlights, mirrors and scent machines) are charged with an almost dramatic mythology that generates a plurality of interpretation. As an answer to a question that is still unknown, Yang's installations challenge the viewer's private engagement - intellectually and physically - through the use of light, scent and movement.

With kind support of Arts Council England.

Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) is supported by: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection and others.

Image Source: Alice Schwarzer, Eine tödliche Liebe, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001.

Figure de Style

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:47:19 +0100

With Figure de Style, Cubitt is proud to present the solo exhibition of Brussels-based artist Jimmy Robert (France, 1975). After graduating from London's Goldsmith's College in 1999 Robert's performances and installations have enjoyed a growing recognition in Europe. Figure de Style will show his rich artistic production in a condensed form, adding new works to a selection of existing ones. Robert has developed a new performance piece especially for Cubitt, which will be presented during the opening.

Figure de Style can be seen as emblematic of Robert's artistic practice. The title, translated into English, is understood as a 'literary device', for example, a metaphor. However, it also refers to dance, a sequence of steps by a group of people. In this way Figure de Style embodies the roots of Robert's interest in literature and gesture.

The films, prints, performances and publications by Jimmy Robert gravitate around a common sensibility, marked out by the temporary characteristic of time-based-acts (from private memory to dance and installations) and their appropriation into writing, photography and public media. The analysis of the image-object relation is fundamental to Jimmy Robert in this respect. It is by way of this relation that representation meets yet another time-based physical existence through the act of display and the perception of the spectator. Each of his works questions how a two-dimensional surface ceases to be an image and begins to reach out towards three-dimensionality and objecthood.

In Figure de Style one can see images that are sliced or folded into three-dimensional shapes; they are covered with masking tape, re-hung into wall-sized collages and finally scanned and reprinted as flat hanging pictures. It doesn't stop here: every artistic intervention that is added by Robert to an original image or story seems yet another introduction to possible future interventions.

This elaborate treatment creates a life of itself. With every added form of representation onto the image, its original act seems to be gradually masked - charging the material with its own history and creative act. In so doing the representation becomes a launching pad for multiple meanings instead of a single one, thereby challenging the cultural codes within language, taste and aesthetic judgment.
Robert's opening performance can be seen in a similar light. Using Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964) as a starting point, the work questions the discrepancy between memory and representation.

Cubitt Guest Event

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:07:57 +0100

Cubitt, Will Holder and Dexter Sinister invite you to a Double Launch:

A simultaneous launch of F.R. DAVID "The Stuff and Nonsense Issue"* and Dot Dot Dot 15** in London and New York. Both publications will be available for sale together for the special price of £12.50 or $25. and accompanied by a live lecture from the other location. According to the international dateline, Cubitt Gallery in London will launch at 7pm GMT with a live talk by Stuart Bailey, DDD editor, from New York, while Dexter Sinister in New York will also launch at 7pm GMT-5hrs with a live talk by Will Holder, F.R. DAVID editor, from London.

*
The second issue of F.R. DAVID, "The Stuff and Nonsense Issue" is concerned with the thing-ness (das Ding) of words, the materiality of language and its non-linguistic or extra-linguistic qualities.
With contributions by Goethe, Stephen Bann, Eugen Gomringer, John & Yoko, Experimental Jetset, Matt Mullican, Steven Shearer, Martin Borman, Marc Nagtzaam, Scott Myles, Barry Johnston, Bertrand Russell, Samuel Nyholm, James Lee Byars, Robert Ashley, Enrico David, Sue Tompkins, Jonathan Meese, Matias Faldbakken, David Thorpe. (a.o)
- F.R. DAVID is a journal, published by de Appel, Amsterdam, which focuses on writing as the core material of a number of visual artists but equally as a mode that exists parallel to or in service of the visual.

**
Since its conception in 2000 DDD has immatured into a jocuserious fanzine-journal-orphanage based on true stories deeply concerned with art-design-music-language-literature-architecture and uptight optipessimistic stoppy/revelatory ghostwriting by friendly spirits mapping b-sides and out-takes pushing for a resolution in bleak midwinter through late summer with local and general aesthetics wound on an ever tightening coil.

- Dot Dot Dot 15, produced on location at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneve, between 24 October and 7 November 2007 by Mai Abu ElDahab, Stuart Bailey, Walead Beshty, Sarah Crowner, Joyce Guley, Will Holder, Anthony Huberman, Polona Kuzman, David Reinfurt, Joke Robaard, Jan Verwoert and Jan Dirk de Wilde on Ricoh TC2, Ricoh JP8500 and Riso V8000 stencil printing machines in an edition of 3000.

Something Happened

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:21:32 +0100

Cubitt is proud to host SOMETHING HAPPENED, the first solo show in London of Israeli filmmaker, author and visual artist Keren Cytter (Tel Aviv, 1977).

Cytter's work reflects a talent for exposing the cultural choreography behind domestic trivia. Her work has been shown in renowned art spaces such as Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2004), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005), MUMOK, Vienna (2007) and the Biennial of Lyon (2007). Her Cubitt show features a recent movie SOMETHING HAPPENED (2007), which is used for the exhibition as a starting point for a new series of drawings.

Despite covering all corners of visual culture - from writing novels and puzzle books to the production of feature movies - the artistic production of Keren Cytter remains firmly bound to its linguistic point of departure. The majority of her work is script-based but shows an informal diversity in the means of its representation. Both poles - between 'being form' (the narrative) and 'having form' (its representation) - stay carefully separated and it is their non-compatibility that seems to determine Cytter's aesthetic playing field.

SOMETHING HAPPENED (2007), for example, is influenced by Natalia Ginzburg's novel É stato così (1947) but takes up neither the plain literary style of the book nor follows the plot accurately. Instead, Cytter's film gives way to an almost pathetic plea for empathy, comparable to the current interest within popular culture in dramatising the extremities of every day reality. The movie shows a domestic conflict between two lovers, but the main message that is conveyed is of the artificiality of their dialogue. The actors constantly have to repeat their lines and Cytter controls their behavior by being highly selective with the lines that are transmitted to the viewer and with those that remain obscure. Through a playful use of timing, editing and camera angles the narrative balances in its depiction between a Hollywood 'tearjerker' and a 'behind the scenes' documentary. Cytter leads it to a troubling climax.

In the exhibition a wall text denies the possible association between the movie and the extracts of Natalia Ginzburg's novel that are allegedly used in it, or between the installation and the present selection of drawings. In this way, Cytter de-mystifies the relationships that may occur when objects are placed together within an art context, simultaneously challenging the perception of the viewer as well as the didactic foundations of the exhibition.

SOMETHING HAPPENED is realised with kind support of Arts Council England and Elisabeth Kaufmann Gallery, Zürich.

Supporters of Cubitt's exhibition programme (October 2007 - March 2009) include: Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 176/Zabludowicz Collection and others.

Keren Cytter, SOMETHING HAPPENED, 2007.

Tall Tales and Short Stories

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:42:59 +0100

Cubitt is proud to present the first UK solo-exhibition by British artist Tris Vonna-Michell (1982, Rochford). Tall Tales and Short Stories presents a selection of the artist's energetic narratives, performances and installations which have gathered great international recognition.

In his work, Tris Vonna-Michell takes up the age-old tradition of storytelling. His use of a dense flow of words - somewhere between 'concrete poetry' and the rap-like quality of poetry slam - adds a captivating sense of speed to his narrative. Each narrative draws on a vast variety of sources, plots and references.

Vonna-Michell's storytelling reveals an intrepid curiosity about transmission of history and the representation of its lost 'objecthood'. With this in mind, every form of representation is subjected to playful distrust. Existing monuments, texts, historical figures - even the artist's own everyday objects and anecdotes - are placed under direct suspicion and are charged by Vonna-Michell with conspiracy theories, secret agencies and multiple identities.

In the exhibition at Cubitt for example, the destroyed files of the GDR's secret service, the Stasi, are retraced in the installation titled Leipzig Calendar Works (2005-2007). In hahn/huhn (2004-2007) Vonna-Michell speculates on possible secret tunnels in Cold War Berlin; and in Down the Rabbit-Hole (2006-2007) he tackles his own amnesia in his search for the obscure French sound poet Henri Chopin (Paris, 1922).

The selection of artefacts, light projections and sound recordings which construct these installations bear witness to the embodiment of Vonna-Michell as a self-proclaimed detective. However, in relation to his narratives, the installations seem to contradict their apparently illustrative features and instead generate a variety of new questions. In this way Vonna-Michell shifts the focus of his suspicion to consider the significance and representation of his own oeuvre and the aesthetic regime behind a work of art in general.

Recent solo-exhibitions by Tris Vonna-Michell include Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2006), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2007) and Kunstverein Braunschweig (2007). Future projects include Performa, New York (2007), Kunsthalle Zürich (2008), Berlin Biennial (2008) and Yokohama Triennial (2008).

During the exhibition Tris Vonna-Michell will perform on the following dates:
Act 1: October 26
Act 2: November 10
Act 3: November 24
(Booking is essential. Please contact Cubitt for further information.)

Tris Vonna-Michell Tall Tales and Short Stories is curated by Bart van der Heide. It is his first exhibition as Cubitt's curatorial bursary holder.

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Artist-Run Spaces So Different, So Appealing?

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:22:56 +0100

PANEL DISCUSSION ON SATURDAY, 13th OCTOBER, 3PM

Established in 1990 as artist-run studios and gallery in Kings Cross, Cubitt has played an important role as a site for exhibiting progressive international art projects for the last 17 years. Cubitt has re-located four times, realised over 90 exhibitions and projects and supported dozens of curators and artists.

Cubitt's first exhibitions were organised by the studio artists whose ambition was to show work by their peers amid a conservative London gallery scene. As artists took on the role of the curator, the gallery established itself early on as an alternative to the institutional system and a place where dominant curatorial practices were challenged. In the mid-nineties Cubitt began to invite outside curators to organise exhibitions. This led to fixed-term funding by London Arts (now: Arts Council England), which was granted in January 2001 and helped to set up an 18-month curatorial bursary. Since then this bursary has supported five emerging curators. The realisation of the exhibitions and events is made possible by the studio holders' commitment to the idea that an artist-run space such as Cubitt is still important 17 years after its founding.

The archive weekend focuses on the period of 1993 - 2007, presenting visual documentation of the gallery programme and Cubitt's various locations as well as invitations, press releases, posters and publications of past projects. It also includes audio recordings of talks and debates.

PANEL DISCUSSION WITH CURRENT AND PREVIOUS CUBITT CURATORS:
MATTHEW HIGGS, STEFAN KALMAR, POLLY STAPLE, EMILY PETHICK, DAVID BUSSEL, TOM MORTON, BART VAN DER HEIDE SATURDAY, 13th OCTOBER, 3PM

Through personal experience with Cubitt the panel will address the past, present and future role of Cubitt in the changing climate of the London art scene.

Many thanks to Olivier Castel, Cubitt's archive researcher.

Cubitt Archive Weekend is supported by Arts Council England.

Claremont Creates

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:55:28 +0100

Claremont Creates is an exhibition of work produced by Islington Residents over 55. Cubitt is proud to display their work to the public for the first time. All the exhibitors are regular members of Claremont Centre, adjacent to Cubitt studios.

Cubitt and Claremont have been working in partnership for the past year through the Inside Art project which has been run by Jane Simpson and Sarah Pickstone, two artists based at Cubitt. The monthly sessions have seen Claremont members visiting Cubitt and working alongside the artists in their studios. Some of the work on display comes out of these sessions, whilst others are works that the participants have made at home in their own time.

This is the first in a series of exhibitions showcasing work produced by local groups who wouldn't normally have access to a public gallery.

For more information on Claremont please contact Kirsty Wood on +44 (0)20 7837 3407 or visit www.claremont-project.org.

For more information about this exhibition or other Cubitt Education events please contact Daniel Wallis or Bettina Brunner at on +44 (0)20 7278 8226 or by using the Contact Us page.

Namespace

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:59:09 +0100

Cubitt are pleased to present Namespace, a screening of video works selected by London-based artist Carey Young. In each work, elements of performance, appropriation and re-enactment reframe originals familiar from our commercialised communications landscape, whether we see the Koran being 'performed' by the artist in a supermarket aisle (Wael Shawky's The Cave), a sequence of clips from news presenters on Korean TV edited to produce naive but vaguely utopian statements (Kim Beom's Untitled News, 2002) or Ant Farm's exuberant simulation of the infamous Zapruder tape, in which the artist collective re-enacts the Kennedy assassination before an unsuspecting Dallas crowd (The Eternal Frame, 1976.). Carey Young will introduce the works with a short talk before the screening.

Carey Young's work has been exhibited widely, including in A Short History of Performance Part II (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2003), British Art Show 6 (BALTIC, Newcastle and tour, 2006) and the Moscow Biennale 2 (Moscow, 2007.) She will shortly be showing in For Sale, Cristina Guerra Gallery, Lisbon (curated by Jens Hoffman) and in a solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. For more information see www.careyyoung.com

Handsome Young Doctor

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:22:07 +0100

Cubitt is proud to present Handsome Young Doctor: A Show About Trust, the final full-length exhibition in Tom Morton's Cubitt programme.

Handsome Young Doctor is a show in which trust – in manifest form and places of greater safety, in amorous encounters and visions of the future – is solicited, given, and now and then disgraced. Suffused with muted atmospheres of sex and sci-fi, the exhibition is concerned not so much with diagnosis as with bedside manner. The title Handsome Young Doctor does not necessarily denote medical subject matter (there are no pills or scalpels here), but rather the thing we seek in times of trouble, the thing that offers cure or comfort, the face that commands our needful faith.

General Idea's seminal, seldom-shown video Hot Property (1978-81), is a sci-fi movie in which a fictional museum, the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, is destroyed by fire on the evening of its opening. The piece concludes with the words "mystery will make the pavilion rise again", and we might imagine the other works in Handsome Young Doctor as artifacts salvaged from its ruined gallery spaces that, huddled together here, find a measure of solace in each other's company.

Saâdane Afif's Memory of Fire (2003) is comprised of a provisional piece of exhibition furniture (knocked up, perhaps, to hide a DVD player from view), on top of which rests the bibliography of a found PhD thesis-in-progress on Anarchist and Libertarian societies in science fiction. In this work, the thing that supports the future is a non-thing, an object so modest that it has no proper name.

Peter Newman's Metatron's Cube (2007), is named after a geometric pattern that contains all 5 platonic solids in orthogonally flattened form, which is said in early Kabbalist scriptures to have been created from the soul of the angel Metatron, the Voice of God . In Newman's work, this device is cut from a sheet of Space Blanket, a fabric designed by NASA is 1964 to protect spacecraft on their re-entry to the earth's atmosphere, resulting in a piece which echoes the sci-fi mysticism of the films Solaris (1972), Silent Running (1972) and Sunshine (2007).

Betty Tompkins was, until recently, an art historically neglected figure, despite the significant contribution she made to the late 1960s / early '70s Photorealist movement. Often sexually explicit, her paintings have been refused entry into France in 1973, and were held at Japanese customs in 2006 after being designated as 'pornography'. For Handsome Young Doctor, Tompkins has painted two new canvases, in which a genital piercing recalls the rings of Saturn, and a precarious threesome resembles the docking starships in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Rannvá Kunoy's paintings draw on both high Modernists such as Willem De Kooning, and anonymous sci-fi illustration. Flickering between abstraction and figuration, her work, shown here for the first time in a UK public gallery, seems to be caught up in a perpetual process of becoming. If there are ghosts in these paintings – of a face, of a sun, of some trembling cosmic placenta – they belong not to the past, but to a future that will never quite arrive.

Roger Hiorns' Untitled (2007) is comprised of a shoal of disposable contact lenses, scattered on the gallery floor in a manner that suggests a haphazard Felix Gonzalez Torres. Hardened by their exposure to the air, these protein-slicked objects bring to mind frogspawn, semi-precious stones, or scabs picked from the knees of a mineral God. The act of seeing, here, is invested with vulnerability, and maybe a serial ennui.

Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely have collaborated as writer and artists on numerous cult and mainstream comics, including The Invisibles (1994-2000), New X-Men (2001-4) and We3 (2004). Handsome Young Doctor presents an original penciled page from their current comics project All Star Superman, which shows the title character giving his lover Lois Lane his powers in liquid form as a birthday present. This scene takes place in The Fortress of Solitude , a museum built by Superman in the arctic wastes where this alien creature retreats to ponder his own apartness from humanity, and his attempts to overcome it.

For more information or images about this event please contact Tom Morton or Bettina Brunner at info@cubittartists.org.uk or on +44 (0)20 7278 8226.

Exhibition kindly supported by Arts Council England, Representation of the Faroes in London, Institut Français, and Mitchell Algus Gallery, NYC.

I & ME

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:36:14 +0100

I & ME, a project that bridges the gap between arts education and exhibition through collaboration, on a four-day project followed by a one-day event, all held in Cubitt's gallery.

The participants, aged 14-16, worked with a number of practicing contemporary artists in workshops that took an interdisciplinary approach to exploring aspects of contemporary culture and forms of communication.

By looking at different forms of exchange during the workshops the artists and young people had the opportunity to put their explorations to practice by creating a day of activities that invite exchange, both through dialogue and making. The one-day event took place in Cubitt's gallery on Saturday 30th June 2007 and was open to the public.

Through the process of looking at art from new and exciting perspectives and exploring communication between others and ourselves in new ways, the workshop participants and artists developed an appreciation of the importance of collaboration. The project also aimed to enable the participants to connect and establish a level playing field of collective understanding, and above all to have fun learning about art, each other and themselves.

Please see the image gallery below, and www.iandme.org.uk for further information.

Annika Eriksson

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:17:38 +0100

Cubitt is proud to present 'The Soundtrack', the first UK solo exhibition by the acclaimed Swedish artist Annika Eriksson (b.1956).

Comprised of a specially commissioned film and light-box work, 'The Soundtrack' presents us with a musician in search of a band, and the substitute he finds in the shrinking public spaces of London's streets. We see a young man sat at a drum kit placed on an anonymous thoroughfare, a potential stage actualized and particularized by his presence. Although he is unaccompanied by other musicians, he does not play alone. Instead, the sonic landscape of the city conspires in his performance, its trains, cars, and sirens driving and perhaps even responding to his improvised beats. We might imagine this urban concert as both a protest at disappearing freedoms, and a celebration of those that we eke out in the places we least expect. We might, too, see it as a meditation on the way in which a city might interact with its inhabitants, outside the authoritarian stuff of surveillance and zoning. Eriksson's drummer, we know, is in search of a band. Is the London of 'The Soundtrack' in search of a drummer?

Currently based in Berlin, Eriksson has exhibited in a large number of solo and group exhibitions across the world. Her recent shows and projects include: 'Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie', Gasworks London & Platform Garanti, Istanbul (2006/7); Berlin-Tokyo / Tokyo-Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin & Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); 'Games Machine', IASPIS at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); 'You Only Live Twice', Man in the Holocene, London (2005); 'Do You Want and Audience?', Frieze Art Fair Projects, London (2004). Her upcoming projects include a solo show at DADD, Berlin (autumn 2007), and commissions for Kings Cross Station (autumn 2007) and Regent's Park (summer 2008).

'The Soundtrack': Credits
Thom Driver: Drums, Chris Hooke: Camera, Ross Adams: Sound, Jes Benstock: Postproduction, Simon Möller: Technical assistance.

Thanks also to:
Ali Musa, Carey Young, Jane Simpson, Damien Roach, Mike Cooter, Tom Woolner, Lisa Rosendal, Stina Wirfelt, Dan Fox, Will Hunt, Aim Image, Jeanine Hofland, Bettina Brünner, Fritz Eriksson.

'The Soundtrack' is curated by Tom Morton.

Exhibition supported by Arts Council England, Modern Museet, Stockholm, and The Embassy of Sweden.

Mum and Dad Art Day

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:27:18 +0100

During the Mum and Dad Art Day people of all ages were invited to bring their parents, grandparents, children, or grandchildren into Cubitt Gallery. After looking around the Mum and Dad Show they worked with Cubitt artists to create their own artwork.

Mum & Dad Show

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:53:58 +0100

Cubitt Gallery is proud to present Mum & Dad Show, an exhibition of works by Rose Scott (b. East Bergholt, Suffolk, 1947) and Jack Morton (b. Boston, Lincolnshire, 1946). The artists studied together at Norwich School of Art and Goldsmiths' College, London, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where they were taught by figures including Richard Hamilton, Edward Middleditch, Claes Oldenburg and Colin Self. Scott and Morton married in 1970, and divorced in 1985. They have exhibited widely in the Cambridge area, and have taught art and art history at a variety of secondary schools and sixth form colleges since concluding their studies. Featuring work from the early 1970s to the present in a variety of media, this is the artists' first joint exhibition since 1982. Mum & Dad Show is curated by Tom Morton, the artists' son.

The exhibition is accompanied by an interview with Tom Morton by The Wrong Gallery (Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, Ali Subotnick). read it here»

Mum & Dad Show is supported by Arts Council England.

For more information or images from the event, please Contact Us.

Inside Art

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:39:50 +0100

Inside Art is a project run jointly by Cubitt and Claremont Project. During monthly sessions Claremont Project members visit Cubitt and work alongside Cubitt-based artists in their studios.

About Claremont Project

Claremont Project is famous for its friendliness and warmth, it’s hallmark is an atmosphere of respect and kindness. Claremont Project offers a wide range of activities and events, which can facilitate greater personal and social wellbeing. These include art therapy, creative writing, craft making, music therapy, yoga, dramatherapy, Tai Chi and much more. They also offer free, seasonal concert series, diverse dance performances and many other stimulating events. Membership is free and open to people over 55.

For more information on Claremont please contact Louise Lappin on +44 (0)20 7837 3407 or visit www.claremont-project.org.

For more information about this exhibition or other Cubitt Education events please contact Daniel Baker or Bettina Brunner at on +44 (0)20 7278 8226 or by using the Contact Us page.

Everybody Click

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:04:59 +0100

The Everybody Click sessions are organised by Cubitt Education, and run in conjuction with the Everybody Draw workshops at Canonbury Primary School in North London. The pupils are given the opportunity to experiment with photography: exploring portraiture; documenting their school grounds; and taking experimental and creative images freely.

Everybody Draw

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:59:26 +0100

Everybody Draw, is an undirected session for 300 plus children, staff and parents/carers drawing together every Monday morning for 20 minutes. Organised by Cubitt, at Canonbury Primary School in North London.

Matthew Day Jackson: Paradise Now! (Limbo)

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:49:24 +0100

Cubitt is proud to present 'Paradise Now! (Limbo)', the first European solo-exhibition by New York-based American artist Matthew Day Jackson (b. 1974, Panorama City, CA).

Exhibited at Cubitt alongside sculpture, video, drawings and text, Matthew Day Jackson's The Lower 48 (2006) is a series of photographs of anthropomorphic rock formations, taken on a road trip through each of the continental United States. In these images, granite and moss appear to possess human features; in these images, geology wears a human face.

Why might America - its land, its silicone substance - choose to manifest itself this way? Perhaps it is to elicit sympathy from its parasite inhabitants - a human face, after, all, is just the thing to engage a human heart. But in Bush's America the heart is either stony or sentimental - it has a fatal disregard for blood. Perhaps then, these craggy faces are antibodies, an immune system, ready to rise up from the rocks to defend the continent in the time of its greatest need (we're reminded of the replica Statues of Liberty that stand guard over many small American towns, the apocalyptic prophesies of the Lakota Sioux Ghost Dancers and King Arthur's sentinel slumber beneath Glastonbury Tor). So a body battles an infection, so a land battles its colonists. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Day Jackson's drive across America in search of these landforms may be seen as an attempt to come to terms with his relationship with the continent's colonial past and its environmentally rapacious present. We might read it as a carbon junkie's last fix, or a four-wheeled walk of shame, or else a pilgrimage in search of new formal structures - of a new, redeeming faith. Absolution, however, is never easily won, and for the Survivors of the coming Apocalypse, there are brutal lessons to be learned.

Matthew Day Jackson's 'Paradise Now', a prelude to his Cubitt exhibition, was held at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2006. He has recently participated in the group exhibitions 'USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery' (2006) at the Royal Academy, London,'Uncertain States of America' (curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist) at The Serpentine Gallery, London (2006), and 'Day For Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial' (curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne).

Exhibition supported by Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation, and Perry Rubenstein Gallery NYC.

Two Films by Dan Fox

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:28:44 +0100

SCREENING, 7PM

Cubitt is proud to present the first screening of 'Russian Novel' (2006) and 'Cheap International' (2006), two films by Dan Fox.

Dan Fox is a London-based critic, musician and film-maker, and Associate Editor of frieze magazine.

No booking necessary. Free bar.

Charles Avery: The Plane of the Gods

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:37:38 +0100

Featuring large-scale drawings, models, diagrams and text, 'The Plane of the Gods' is the latest chapter in Avery's epic 'Islanders' project, which sees the artist describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature - from its geology to its flora and fauna - embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution. Avery's mapping of the Island over a projected 10-year period may be interpreted as a meditation on making (and circulating) art, on what constitutes the spine of an artistic practice, and on the impossible business of seeking 'truth'. Once the project is complete, it will be encapsulated in several large, leather-bound encyclopaedic volumes.

Inhabited by a pantheon of curious deities - including an aged bather, a giant number 2, a gnarled beast named Aleph Nul, an apparently bottomless hole, and the platypus-like Mr. Impossible - 'The Plane of the Gods' is the island's Olympus, brought unceremoniously down to earth. Existing in a horizontal relationship to the rest of the island, its spatial position suggests the domestication of the divine. The gods, here, are only one set of facts among many others, to be worshipped, gawped at, or simply ignored.

Avery's art is characterised by formal beauty, humour, and a spirit of philosophical enquiry. While its genealogy might be said to include the work of (among others) William Blake, P.G. Wodehouse, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Beuys and Joseph Kosuth, it is perhaps best understood as something like an artistic parallel to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) - a text of which the philosopher wrote 'My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless'.

Charles Avery has exhibited widely both in Britain and internationally. His recent solo exhibitions include 'The Islanders: an introduction - part II' at Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin (2006), 'The Islanders: an introduction' at doggerfisher, Edinburgh (2005), 'AVATARS' at Galleria S.A.L.E.S., Rome (2005), 'The Hunter' at Man in the Holocene, London (2004). In 2003, his work was shown as part of the 50th Venice Biennale. He has also participated in numerous group shows, at venues including the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Avignon (2005), the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2003); Gallerie Civico d'Arte Contemporanea di Siracusa, Sicily (2003), Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2003)

Charles Avery is represented by Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin, Galleria S.A.L.E.S., Rome, and doggerfisher, Edinburgh.

Supported by Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust

The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:58:17 +0100

The second exhibition in Cubitt's series One and One and One is Three: Three Shows About the Group Show*, The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head reconstructs and re-imagines a 1953 group exhibition held at the ICA, London, organized by the artist Roland Penrose and designed by the artist Richard Hamilton, with a catalogue by critic Herbert Read. Themed — like Penrose's original show — on the human head, Tirdad Zolghadr and Meg Cranston's skewed cover-version features an array of cephalic material from across time and space, from African masks to contemporary works by John Baldessari and Cranston herself.

Curator's Statement:

"Our project is a partial reconstruction of a group exhibition at the London ICA in 1953. Wonder and Horror of the Human Head was essentially a collection of visual studies of the head, which was reconstructed by artist Meg Cranston at the 4F gallery in LA, May 2006. Typically for Cranston's practice, which persistently redefines the creative function of the curator as well as curatorial strategies among artists, her staging of the ICA show is hard to classify as an occurrence. Many works on display were her own, or those of other US-based artists, or made in collaboration with various practitioners, while other pieces were (quasi-)ethnographic findings - underlining the fact that the London event was itself organized by artist (and ICA Director) Roland Penrose, designed by artist Richard Hamilton, and held at the artist-run ICA. For Cubitt, Cranston will assemble pieces in London to combine them with contributions from the recent LA rendition. To reconstruct a reconstruction in this manner is not only to reexamine what is structurally integral to a group show, but also to stage a foray into questions of adaptation, travel and, above all, art-historical testimony.

It bears mentioning that the Cubitt invitation suggests each curator pick precisely three artists. I initially decided to embrace the mandate by overidentifying, and resolving to find a Christological triptych of watertight dialectic coherence. Unfortunately, however, no clear-cut Hegelian marching order seemed to do justice to the offhand appeal of Cubitt curator Tom Morton's proposal. What is a group show — let's find the degree zero and take it from there. Typically for overidentification, strategic or not, I was running the risk of missing the innovative possibilities at hand. Morton was hoping to go beyond conventional impulses, not deepen Pavlovian reactions. Arguably, Meg Cranston's project was asking similar questions with similarly offhand, understated intelligence. But it also brilliantly messed with authorship, and pointed to a disregarded history of artists working as curators, or, if you will, of curators as something other than selectors occasionally permitting artists to futz around with the rules of the game in creative little ways.

In short, we suggest that the triad here is Meg Cranston, Richard Hamilton and Roland Penrose. As Cranston has pointed out, these are three practitioners who have frequently used other artists' and designers' work in their projects. Here, Penrose construed the concept and catalogue, and selected various objects abundantly displayed in the show, Hamilton's contribution is the installation design, while Cranston's is the reconfiguration of the above into a new installation. The advantage of our situation is that other trios are also feasible, but among all possibilities, the above constellation seems the least unreasonable."
— Tirdad Zolghadr.

Biographies:

Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance critic and curator based in Zurich. He was co-curator of the Sharjah Biennial 2005 and is a frequent contributor to frieze.

Meg Cranston is an artist based in Venice, California. Her recent projects include '100 Artists See God', a travelling group exhibition co-curated with John Baldessari.

*The Wonder and The Horror of the Human Head is part of One and One and One is Three, a series of three guest-curated group shows, premised on the idea that the smallest number of works - and the smallest number of artists - needed to make up a group show is three. Importantly, the three guest curators of the series are all figures known for working on exhibitions and biennales that feature many tens, if not hundreds, of artists and works. These curators are: Alex Farquharson, Tirdad Zolghadr, and Le Consortium, Dijon (Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot and Eric Troncy).

Cubitt curator Tom Morton has invited these guest curators to each select three works, each of them by a different artist, for a show that will run for three weeks. No other stipulations were given, and the guest curators were free to title and theme their shows as they wished.

In a sense, One and One and One is Three is a response to the current preoccupation with exploring the question "what is a group show?" through large-scale curatorial projects. Although One and One is Three is restrictive, it is by no means regressive — instead, it reaffirms and hopefully re-invigorates one of the core enterprises of curating, and offers its guest curators the opportunity to produce something closer to a haiku than an epic poem.

Timetable:

Alex Farquharson: What Have I Done to Deserve This? — 26 July - 13 August.
Tirdad Zolghadr and Meg Cranston: The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head — 19 August - 13 September.
Le Consortium: Title Pending — 6 September - 24 September.

Untitled

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:51:17 +0100

'It's only when man's object becomes a human object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.'

- Karl Marx

' A thin veneer of immediate realityis spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film.'

- Vladimir Nabokov

'Unitled' (2006) is a permanent intervention in Cubitt's gallery space by Roger Hiorns.

For more information please contact Tom Morton or Bettina Brunner at info@cubittartists.org.uk or on +44 (0)20 7278 8226.

Permanent Intervention in the Gallery

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:31:14 +0100

'It is only when man's object becomes a human object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object'

- Karl Marx

'A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film.'

- Vladimir Nabokov

'Untitled' (2006) is a permanent intervention in cubitt's gallery space by Roger Hiorns.

For more information please contact Tom Morton or Bettina Brunner at info@cubittartists.org.uk or on +44 (0)20 7278 8226.

What Have I Done To Deserve This?

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:36:53 +0100

One and One and One is Three: Three Shows About the Group Show*

Show One: What Have I Done to Deserve This?
Pawel Althamer, Chris Evans, Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Curated by Alex Farquharson

What Have I Done to Deserve This? is an exhibition of re-activated documentation relating to three 'random acts of kindness', by Pawel Althamer (Warsaw), Chris Evans (Berlin) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles (New York).

The attitudes and motivations of these projects vary, but in each instance a generous deed, involving hard work and self-sacrifice, becomes a means of making contact with others — excluded kids from Warsaw (Althamer), a museum's maintenance staff (Ukeles), artists in need of production money (Evans) — from which working relationships evolve.

Altruism, in these practices, also serves as a Trojan horse through which the artists intervene in relations between groups of people and the institutions that are supposedly responsible for their interests: an American art museum, various funding bodies in the U.K. and the Polish school system.

'Work', as in 'work of art' and work in the general sense, acquires special meaning as each artist takes as their medium a form of 'real world' labour — school teaching, public maintenance and form filling — conventionally considered alien to the creative act.

Through hard graft the artists locate ludic and desirous openings in structures often experienced as excessively hierarchical, bureaucratic, unresponsive and disciplinary by those threaded through them.

Pawel Althamer, 'Einstein Class', 2005
Commissioned to make a project as part of a major celebration of Einstein's centenary in and around Berlin, Althamer used the funds to give physics classes to a group of twelve to sixteen year old boys who rarely attend school, face problems of various kinds, and hang out in the deprived neighbourhood in Warsaw where the artist's studio is situated. Led by a maverick physics teacher, who'd recently been made redundant, the boys learnt about Einstein's discoveries through practical experimentation in a rented building that served as their classroom. During the six months the project lasted, the kids went on trips to the countryside, had a week's vacation by the sea and travelled to Berlin for the opening, which for some was the first time they'd been outside Warsaw. It culminated with an outdoor science day on their own street for family, friends and neighbours. The children's experiences are documented in a half hour feature film, which receives its UK debut at Cubitt. In addition, to benefit the participants and perpetuate the project, two children who took part in 'Einstein Class' will be given a short holiday in London. 'Einstein Class' has an autobiographical dimension: Althamer, who was disenchanted at school, devised the project according to what he would have wished for as a young boy. The project itself was an experiment: it involved considerable risk and its outcome was unknown.

Chris Evans, 'UK Arts Board Agency', 2000
'For the UK Arts Board Agency (UKABA) I put advertisements in various magazines and distributed 7000 flyers asking artists to put forward ideas for work that needed funding from both regional and national arts boards. I then took these ideas — often not more than one or two lines in length — and turned them into fully costed applications to the appropriate funding bodies [The National Lottery, Scottish Arts Council and Arts Council of England]. The only restriction, hinted at by the logo, was that all proposals had to relate to the theme of 'trees'. Freed from having to balance the chore of making an application against the realistic chance of success, artists put forward plans they might otherwise have shelved. For example Alan Currall proposed building a bridge from Plymouth to Cape Cod, following the route of the Mayflower pilgrimage, using only English oak trees (a project to be completed by the year 3000). I applied to the Arts Council of England for £700 to build the first stretch of the bridge leaving Plymouth but was unfortunately unsuccessful. I was trying to intervene between artists and state funding, to work my way into the set-up that decides what gets made, by whom and for whom. What kept me going, for the year I worked on this project, was the thought of an arts board officer faced with an inexplicable rush of interest in the tree as a contemporary theme'. (Chris Evans in 'Art and its Institutions', edited by Nina Montmann, Black Dog Publishing, 2006)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 'The Keeping of the Keys', 1973
The Second action, on Friday July 20, was 'The Keeping of the Keys: Maintenance as Security' (1973). In a hand-to-hand gesture, Ukeles took control of the metal keys held by the guards who stood watch in each room of the building. Enacting the guards, work, she chose to 'secure' the museum's main entrances, and room after room throughout the museum, during open hours, for specifically designated periods of time. The public involved was fully informed: notices were placed at each door explaining that an artwork was taking place and that the doors would be temporarily locked. Museum visitors were part of the performance and could choose to stay within or to move on to different locations. Some willingly stayed. Others resented the interruption to their visit, caused by a live artist having taken up new tools (keys) and thereby gaining (brief) control over the entire institution. This reversal of the hierarchy of authority, made clear by the intervention of the artist, was nowhere more apparent than in the administrative offices, where curators and others flew from their desks in outrage before the doors were locked behind them.' (From the guide to the exhibition 'Mierle Laderman Ukeles / Matrix 137' at Wadsworth Museum, 1998).

The Keeping of the Keys, was one of four performances Ukeles undertook at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticutt as part of `7500', an exhibition of women conceptual artists curated by Lucy Lippard. Each of the four performances were choreographed around a task undertaken by the museum's maintenance staff. Together they represent a unique convergence of first generation feminist performance art and institutional critique. Since 1970 Ukeles has been the unsalaried artist-in-residence for New York City's Sanitation Department where she orchestrates major public projects that explore the social and ecological issues of waste management.

*What Have I Done to Deserve This? is part of One and One and One is Three, a series of three guest-curated group shows, premised on the idea that the smallest number of works - and the smallest number of artists — needed to make up a group show is three. Importantly, the three guest curators of the series are all figures known for working on exhibitions and biennales that feature many tens, if not hundreds, of artists and works. These curators are: Alex Farquharson, Tirdad Zolghadr, and Le Consortium, Dijon (Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot and Eric Troncy).

Cubitt curator Tom Morton has invited these guest curators to each select three works, each of them by a different artist, for a show that will run for three weeks. No other stipulations were given, and the guest curators were free to title and theme their shows as they wished.

In a sense, One and One and One is Three is a response to the current preoccupation with exploring the question "what is a group show?" through large-scale curatorial projects. Although One and One is Three is restrictive, it is by no means regressive — instead, it reaffirms and hopefully re-invigorates one of the core enterprises of curating, and offers its guest curators the opportunity to produce something closer to a haiku than an epic poem.

Timetable:

Alex Farquharson: What Have I Done to Deserve This? — 26 July - 13 August.
Tirdad Zolghadr and Meg Cranston: The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head — 19 August - 3 September.
Le Consortium: Title Pending — 6 September - 24 September.

Curating for the Radio

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:03:17 +0100

Conference organised by Anna Colin — visit www.radiogallery.org.

Tamy Ben-Tor

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:13:39 +0100

Cubitt Gallery is proud to present `Exploration in the Domain of Idiocy', the first European solo exhibition by young New York-based Israeli artist Tamy Ben-Tor (b. Jerusalem, 1975), and the first exhibition in curator Tom Morton's Cubitt programme `The Fortress of Solitude'.

Ben-Tor's funny, alarming videos and live performances are populated by fictional characters that make Sisyphean attempts to communicate certain truths (about history, about politics, about art) but instead find themselves failing and flailing in a sludgy mental space of the artist's devising - a domain of idiocy. For these characters, saying the wrong thing, the very worst thing, is perhaps the only way to right the world.

Showing at Cubitt, Ben-Tor's best known work, the video `Women Talk About Adolf Hitler' (2003) features a series of women, played by the artist, who offer up absurdist diatribes about the Nazi dictator, among them a New York Jewish academic who discloses the Führer's struggles with bad digestion, a phobia of dentists, and ugly knees - an all-too-literal take on the banality of evil, seemingly intended to prove that the devil is indeed in the most prosaic of details. Screened alongside this piece is Ben-Tor's new video `The End of Art' (2006), in which she casts herself as what may be a hybrid of a certain all-too-familiar artist (or, as the critic Donald Kuspit would have it, `postartist') and the political thinker Francis Fukuyama, as though to point out that relational aesthetics and liberal triumphalism share much of the same self-satisfied cultural and political DNA. Elsewhere in the gallery, a monitor shows three portrait videos - `Alejandra' (2005), `The Contractor' (2005) and `The Artist in Residence' - in which loneliness, powerlessness and self-delusion work their cruel witchcraft on a trio of lost souls.

At the opening of her Cubitt exhibition on Monday, June 5th, the artist will perform `The Dance of the Albino Rat' accompanied by the drummer Dan Aran, at 7:45pm.

Tamy Ben-Tor has exhibited widely at venues including Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) New York, Salon 94, New York, PSI Contemporary Art Centre, New York, and The ICA, London.

`Tamy Ben-Tor: Exploration in the Domain of Idiocy' is kindly supported by Arts Council England and The Embassy of Israel.

For more information / images please contact Tom Morton or Bettina Brunner at info@cubittartists.org.uk or on +44 (0) 20 7278 8226.

Untitled

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:48:10 +0100

Cubitt Guest Event: Jeremiah Day in Collaboration with 'We Vs. Death' - The Gary Webb Project

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:49:36 +0100

In advance of the launch of new Cubitt Curator Tom Morton's 2006/7 exhibitions and events programme `The Fortress of Solitude', Cubitt Gallery presents a guest event by Jeremiah Day in collaboration with `We vs. Death'.

The Gary Webb project is a performance that tells the story of US journalist Gary Webb, who in December of 2004 was found dead from two gunshots to the head. In certain circles Webb is still famous for a series of articles he wrote in 1995 that linked the CIA to cocaine sales in Los Angeles. Webb's work was widely attacked, and several large newspapers made systematic attempts to discredit him - including the L.A. Times, which set up a dedicated 'Get Gary Webb Team'. Following this Webb lost his job, his family, and then ultimately his life.

Jeremiah Day, an American artist currently living in Amsterdam, asked `We Vs. Death' a young Dutch post-rock band to accompany him in making a lecture/concert/eulogy for Webb. The performance consists of a slide-show, music and lecture presentation.

Jeremiah Day (1974, USA) was a participant at the Rijksakdemie Von Beeldende Kunsten in 2003-4. Previously he was artist-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Los Angeles from 2000-2002, where he founded the interdisciplinary Beyond Baroque Working Group. In 2002 he organized "The Great Silence: 10 Years After The Riots" at Beyond Baroque. His most recent solo exhibition was at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.

We Vs. Death are based in Utrecht, Netherlands. Their new full-length album is forthcoming this May on Zabel Muziek. For more information go to

6:30pm door for 7:00pm start. No bookings taken. Entrance is free, and strictly on a first come, first served basis. Pay bar.

For more information / images, please contact the gallery.

We Are Medi(eval)

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:21:58 +0100

In 1994 artist Georg Herold invited a number of British and German artists to participate in a project called Karaoke (Fußball-WM) (Karaoke Football - World Cup) for Portikus, Frankfurt. In so doing he hoped to create an `exchange of cultural differences … with predefined rules of the game' by introducing a Karaoke element that would 'break up and expand the predefined and tightly marked-out field' of art. The exhibition, timed to coincide with the 1994 World Cup, followed an earlier exhibition that transformed Portikus into a bar and videotheque for the 1990 World Cup. Bulloch and Gillick rejected this curatorial directive and chose to take a `pre-football, before Karaoke` stance. This action involved digging a hole decorated with bunting and protected by a Herold-like wooden structure outside the main entrance to the space; planting a meadow on the land surrounding the building; and producing a video-manifesto at the Frankfurt Sportverband Hostel where all the British artists were housed. This `counter-context' position expressed their scepticism about reinforcing national identities in order to transcend them once more: a strategy of détournement conceived by the artists as a kind of `Medieval conceptualism'. Reacting to their intervention, Kasper Koenig, then Director of Portikus, commissioned an archaeological survey of the hole and produced a book about it (Portikus Publication #58). Koenig, with the agreement of the artists, subsequently offered their hole to the City of Frankfurt-am-Main as a permanent public artwork in return for an annual wild boar feast, which the city declined.

For the exhibition the artists will revisit their 1994 work for Portikus at Cubitt: the original video produced in Frankfurt will be shown alongside reconstructed `artefacts' and a wall text. In 2005, Cubitt presented a film and photography installation by Stephen Prina called Vinyl II, which examined site-specificity through the act of displacement (from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles to Cubitt, London). Working dialectically, We are Medi(eval) attempts to review a similar moment of `context art'. By reconstructing the work through a space/time dislocation, notions of site and context are posed and picked apart, leading toward future possibilities and actions; future holes and meadows.

Angela Bulloch (Canada/UK) and Liam Gillick (UK) have exhibited internationally since the early 90s. Bulloch's recent projects include De Pont Foundation, Tilburg; Modern Art Oxford; Succession, Vienna; and Le Consortium, Dijon. Her work can currently be seen at Bloomberg Space, London.

Liam Gillick has recently presented exhibitions at the ICA, London; Casey Kaplan, New York; Corvi-Mora, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Roger Hiorns

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:47:57 +0100

This is a permanent exhibition on the Cubitt website.

Russel Haswell and Florian Hecker

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:42:02 +0100

UPIC DIFFUSION SESSION # 1

ON WEDNESDAY 14TH DECEMBER 2005 AT 7PM
IN THE BASEMENT PERFORMANCE STUDIO AT CITY UNIVERSITY LONDON, ST JOHN'S ST, (AT WYCLIFF ST) EC1

"Anybody,even myself or you,or children,can draw lines or graphics with an electromagnetic ballpoint, and they are transformed by computer directly into sound..." — Iannis Xenakis

Cubitt Gallery is pleased to announce a performance by artists Russell Haswell (UK)and Florian Hecker (Austria).They will present a live 14-speaker electro-acoustic diffusion of material generated from their research with the unique UPIC system at the Centre for Composition of Music Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX)in Paris.

"The UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique de CEMAMu)is a sound synthesis system conceived by the late composer Iannis Xenakis and built by engineers at the Centre d 'Études de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu)in Paris.The UPIC system offers both graphical (time-domain)and sonographical (frequency-domain)interfaces for sound composition.In an initial version dating from 1977,the user interacted by way of a large graphics tablet,mounted vertically like a painter 's easel... The UPIC system is an especially pliable musical tool since it integrates many levels of composition within a common user interface.Graphic functions created onscreen can function equally as envelopes,waveforms,pitch-timbre scores,tempo curves or performance trajectories.This uniform treatment of composition data at every level should be extended to more computer music systems."

— Curtis Roads,Microsound,MIT Press

The artists use automatic and abstract drawing methods for the visual input material,as well as pictures sourced from online image banks such as `natural phenomena',`everyday images',`terrorist atrocities',`the blackest ever black',and `double helix structures',rendering a sonic image of the visual world.

This will be the first public performance of this evolving body of work,which has been in development for the past two years,made possible through international research grants and residencies and through the kind generosity of Ian Stewart and City University London.

BUILDINGHOSTRANSMISSIONS

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:49:28 +0100

Cubitt is pleased to announce a new exhibition by the Antwerp-based artists' collective Building Transmissions, who will present a sound installation, or `sonic architecture', along with a foldout publication and audio-CD, entitled `BUILDINGHOSTRANSMISSIONS'.

The show is developed out of field recordings and writings made in June 2005 in Bangkok, Thailand, of semi-inhabited skyscraper buildings. These `ghost' buildings are built on speculation and are often left empty when the builders run out of money, and are used or squatted by dwellers or small temporary businesses. Building Transmissions has gained access to these structures and recorded both the inhabited and uninhabited parts of these `ghost towers', scattered across the city. They then remixed the sounds/writings into a total `sonic architecture', portraying Bangkok's boom and bust economy and the way people and culture inhabit it.

Building Transmissions is an emerging collective founded in 2001 by Nico Dockx (b. 1974) with Kris Delacourt (b. 1978) and Peter Verwimp (b. 1974), that produces experimental audio-visual documents, `post-Cagean' sonic architectures, improvisational live performances and a wide spectrum of mixed-media installations. In their work they reflect upon the different social possibilities of both artistic production and the circulation of ideas in relation to text, image and sound. Building Transmissions makes use of a broad range of 'conventional' acoustical instruments along with field recordings and uncanny electronics. The physical body and its movement are conjured through the interference of still and moving data, creating alternative intersections between time, memory and movement. Relentless collaborators might be the single-most accurate way to describe these young artists, writers and musicians, as their practice persistently develops alongside and in relation to others.

Recent projects by Building Transmissions include Art Connection Festival, Bangkok; STUK, Leuven; deAppel, Amsterdam; IASPIS Gallery, Stockholm; Utopia Station, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Argos Festival, Brussels; Area Kolaborativa, Galerija Skuc, Ljubljana; Galleria Neon, Bologna; Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale. This will be the first solo exhibition in the UK.

Also available from BT's Curious recording label are (004): 220v Remix double CD; (007): The Bastard Remix double12" vinyl; (009): `Sonderweg'/Spasm vs BT 12" vinyl.
To order: bt220v@yahoo.com or www.buildingtransmissions.com

Gustav Metzger

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:06:02 +0100

CUBITT GALLERY NEEDS NEWSPAPERS! IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE TO OUR GUSTAV METZGER EXHIBITION PLEASE BRING USED, FOLDED NEWSPAPERS TO THE GALLERY.

Cubitt is pleased to announce the exhibition of a newly commissioned work by Gustav Metzger.

Metzger's Eichmann and the Angel is an installation including a wall of newspapers, a powered roller-belt conveyor, a reading area and a wood and glass structure that recalls Adolf Eichmann's bullet-proof `cage' from his infamous trial in 1961. Inspired by Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, the exhibition connects philosophers Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt with Eichmann, and the notion of history as an angel that looks back through the cataclysms of the past whilst heading towards the future. Eichmann and Benjamin stand in metaphorical relation to notions of death and entrapment: the former was responsible for the killing of millions and was executed for his crimes, whilst the latter killed himself in 1940. Arendt, in turn, becomes a kind of witness, someone speaking for a generation: she reflects on Eichmann's trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and speaks for Benjamin in her famous `Introduction' to his book Illuminations.

Gustav Metzger (b.1926) arrived in Britain a Polish Jewish refugee from Germany in 1939. He is a highly regarded artist and enigmatic figure, who from the early Sixties to the present day has continued a practice that is inextricably both artistic and political and concerned with transformation and process. In 1959, Metzger launched Auto-Destructive Art through actions, manifestos and lectures that sought to make thematic the destructive potential of the twentieth century as a "form of public art for industrial societies"; Metzger's most renowned action was his `Demonstration' on the South Bank where he `painted' hydrochloric acid onto nylon canvases. Two further significant interventions are the `Destruction in Art Symposium' of 1966 and `Art Strike' in 1974, where he enjoined all artists to cease their production for a period of three years.

Gustav Metzger has been exhibiting in the UK and internationally since 1959. Recent solo exhibitions include a retrospective at Generali Foundation (Vienna), who produced History History, the most comprehensive publication on the artist, and shows at T1+2, London and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Gustav Metzger will give a talk at the Slade School of Fine Art on Wednesday, 26 October 2005 at 4:30pm.

Honey-Suckle Company and Konrad Sprenger

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:16:25 +0100

Künstlerhaus Stuttgart presents Honey-Suckle Company and Konrad Sprenger

Cubitt is pleased to announce the second part of its curatorial exchange with Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, which like Cubitt, is a publicly funded gallery with artist studios. The exhibition Ohn End, is curated by its Artistic Director, Elke aus dem Moore, and features a new installation by the international collective Honey-Suckle Company: a group of seven individuals based in Berlin and involved in art, fashion, music, dance and performance. The group started in 1995 and sees itself as "a self-sufficient community in the sense of an almost dying species which is working on its own utopia".

The title, a German/English construct, literally reads `Without End', suggesting infinity, an in-between state, turning and shifting its `resolution' and dimensions. The exhibition deals with the contradictions inherent to individual and group identities, and will feature a sound and light installation with other spatial interventions, as well as a publication that seeks to define reality as an "infinite state of dissolving in its expressions and limitations".

Honey-Suckle Company have exhibited internationally for the past ten years with recent projects in Stuttgart, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Barcelona and New York. Its current members are Ninja Pleasure, Sim Gil, P.C. Kisur, Nico Ihlein, Zille Homma Hamid and Friedrich Ploch, along with Konrad Sprenger who was commissioned to produce the sound element of the show. This will be their first exhibition in the UK.

For the first part of the curatorial exchange, David Bussel curated a show of Daria Martin's 16mm film trilogy (Birds, In the Palace, Closeup Gallery) at Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart from 24 May - 12 June 2005, as part of his 18-month programme. For more information visit www.kuenstlerhaus.de or click here.

Harun Farocki

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:52:45 +0100

Daria Martin

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:24:50 +0100

Cubitt presents Daria Martin at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart
Exhibition 24 May - 12 June 2005 Opening 24 May 7-9pm

Daria Martin's 16mm film trilogy looks back to the first European avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. Without a dominant narrative, dialogue or character development as such, the films convey a vivid sense of the euphoria and passion of utopian spirit. Although located in an undetermined time and space, they employ the language of vanguard culture through colour, extreme artifice and abstract form as the universal tropes of the period; but at a distance, underlining their historicity and therefore, the failure of such projects.

In the Palace (2000), titled after Giacometti's sculpture The Palace at 4am, is a kind of tableaux vivant, where the camera languidly encircles a group of fancifully attired actors, referencing both Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Oscar Schlemmer's Slat Dance performance at the Bauhaus. Birds (2001) similarly depicts a group of actor-dancers dressed in multi-coloured costumes performing discrete actions with cardboard props. In Closeup Gallery (2003) we witness a magician and his assistant performing card tricks on a clear, round three-tiered table, the "stage" where their sleight of hand is performed and displayed in vivid colour like kinetic Suprematist paintings.

Daria Martin (b. 1973, USA) has had recent solo exhibitions at the Showroom and Hotel, and was a nominated for Beck's Futures prize at the ICA (London).

Thomas Bayrle

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:30:54 +0100

Cubitt is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the UK of Thomas Bayrle, who will present a series of offset print works from the early Seventies. The works on view are part of Bayrle's initial foray into printmaking, an early investigation into a medium he has experimented with ever since.

Bayrle's work with printmaking, photo-collage and design has been called 'Piranesi-esque' with its complex, micro/macro patterning that generates a kind of visual synecdoche: a figure of speech where the word for a part of something is used to mean the whole or vice versa. Diverse areas of 'knowledge' such as nanotechnology, cybernetics, pornography, urbanism and advertising provide the foundation, the impetus and the raw material of Bayrle's practice. Through the relationships of dot and grid or cell and conduit, the artist creates pictorial superstructures that analogise the social frameworks we inhabit. Bayrle constructs architectonic, technically innovative imagery that perturbs perception through its iconoclastic use of forms. In addition to his two dimensional works, the artist also produces sculptural objects: cardboard maquettes of serpentine motorways that suggest another kind of superstructure of urban ecologies.

As a founding figure in Germany's Pop movement along with Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, Thomas Bayrle has been influential as both an artist and as a teacher at Frankfurt's Staedelschule for over thirty years.

Thomas Bayrle will be at Cubitt to present a selection of his film and video work on 4 May 2005, at 7pm.

Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937, Germany) has exhibited internationally since the Sixties. Recent exhibitions include Oldenburg Kunstverein (Germany), Galerie Barbara Weiss (Berlin), Graz Kunstverein (Austria), Museum Ludwig (Cologne) and the 50th Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.

Henrik Olesen and Kirsten Pieroth

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:43:05 +0100

Cubitt is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the UK of artists Henrik Olesen and Kirsten Pieroth.

Pieroth employs rigorous conceptual strategies in her work - research, documentation, collecting and archiving - to investigate the fictive truths and truthful fictions that construct reality. Through the alteration and displacement of everyday objects and contexts, Pieroth underscores the frailty of such constructions. The exhibition at Cubitt will be the third collaboration between Pieroth and Henrik Olesen, who manipulates found objects in order to pick apart constructions and assumptions about the socially disenfranchised, specifically around issues such as sexuality and bio-politics. In recent collaborative projects Pieroth and Olesen have extended the common definition of the term 'author' by involving other persons and various strategies in their working process. For their installation at Cubitt, the artists will work with objects, video, spatial interventions and text-based works, displaying a network of references and processes, whilst expanding the common understanding of single/multiple authorship.

Kirsten Pieroth (b. 1970, Germany) has had recent solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Portikus, Frankfurt and Galerie Klosterfelde, Berlin; recent group shows include Manifesta 5, San Sebastian and the Royal College of Art, London.

Henrik Olesen's (b. 1967, Denmark) recent solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; and group shows at Galerie Meerettich, Berlin and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Nina Könnemann

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:11:58 +0100

Cubitt is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Nina Könnemann, who will show a selection of new and recent video work.

Könnemann looks at the transitional margins - the 'down time' - of cultural activity to investigate the relationship between work and leisure. She has filmed the social interactions of participants of the Love Parade in a tube station in Berlin (Unrise, 2002); the comings and goings of groups of women on a night out in rainy Blackpool (Pleasure Beach, 2001); the aftermath of an outdoor music festival (M.U.D., 2003); as well as a hallucinogenic walk through a harshly lit subway in Hamburg at night (Castles in the Sand, 2004). Each of these 'non-places' shot in a deceptively formless, random style that over time becomes both acute and technically accomplished. Like her subjects, one effectively gets lost in the work, where a sense of fiction and reality intermingle, and where traditional notions of time and space become unmoored and indeterminate. The pleasure-seeking people in her videos often react abruptly to the camera, reluctant to come to terms with their own ineluctable return to reality. The works reveal an unexpected insight into the way we define and construct our sense of self through the limits of time and space. They also reveal how art, as a form of de-centred intoxication, can act in productive tension with the harsh brutality of the quotidian.

Könnemann is an artist based in Hamburg, Germany. She recently has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Karin Guenther Nina Borgmann, Hamburg, as well as Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and participated in group shows at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne and Kunstverein Frankfurt. This will be her first solo exhibition in the UK.

Stephen Prina

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:26:23 +0100

Screening: 26 SEPTEMBER 2004
THE SCREEN ON THE GREEN
83 UPPER STREET
LONDON N1
TIMES: 2PM AND 2.30PM

Cubitt is pleased to present the UK premiere of Vinyl II (2000), a film and exhibition of photographs by the American artist and musician Stephen Prina. The work's title is a reference to Andy Warhol's film Vinyl (1965), itself loosely based upon Anthony Burgess's book A Clockwork Orange. Prina's film, however, revolves around two Baroque paintings, one by Georges de La Tour (The Muscians' Brawl, 1625-30), the other by Gerrit van Honthorst (Christ Crowned with Thorns, circa 1620). The film features both a vocal performance and score by the artist, accompanied by a group of musicians and shot in the galleries of the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it was originally commissioned as part of the 'Departures' show in 2000.

Stephen Prina has exhibited internationally over the past twenty years. He has participated in group shows including Documenta IX and the Venice Biennale (1990), and recently has had one-person exhibitions at the Kunstverein Frankfurt, Friedrich Petzel Gallery (New York) and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2003, Prina received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. This will be Stephen Prina*s first exhibition in a public gallery in the UK.

James Lee Byers

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:32:12 +0100

The World Question Center (1969), DVD, b/w, sound, 1:02 min

The World Question Center is film by Jef Cornelis that documents a live performance made by the late American artist James Lee Byars (1932-1997), known as the 'magician of silence' for his Zen Buddhist-inspired installations and performances that sought to harness the transitory, ephemeral elements of life. Shot in a Brussels television studio, the film involves Byars, surrounded by a group of men and women dressed in long, white gowns, asking 100 famous people - either present in the studio or by telephone - to pose the most important question about life. Those questioned include a heart surgeon, a sexologist, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Marcel Broodthaers and Viva, the Warhol Superstar

Publish and be Damned

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:40:24 +0100

Cubitt presents Publish and be Damned, a two-part project exploring current experimental editorial directions through an eclectic selection of self-published magazines, comics and journals.

On Sunday 4 July over 30 publishers from the UK will gather in the crypt of St James Church, Clerkenwell, for the Publish and be Damned fair, offering an opportunity to peruse a variety of publications and to meet the editors. Special projects will take place throughout the day, including Paula Rousch's 'Copylaws of the Kitchen', a free participatory event that mutates the printing press into 'biscuit cutting anarchy'; Jabba the Hut and Cousin IT demonstrating the uses of Audio Theory for dyslexics; and Berlin-based magazine Starship launching their bilingual issue on the subject of 'Darkening'.

From the 8 July to 1 August the second part of Publish and be Damned will be held at Cubitt gallery, with some 150 publications presented in a Public Library designed by Pablo Léon de la Barra. Arranged in an offbeat taxonomy and discovered through the informal networks that make up the self-publishing scene, the material ranges from DIY fanzines to glossy periodicals, video compendiums to critical journals. Surveying a gamut of independent publications, Public Library demonstrates individual approaches to making and distributing the work of artists, writers and musicians outside of the commercial mainstream.

Publish and be Damned is organised by Emily Pethick and Chris Hammonds. It is accompanied by a black and white catalogue available at the fair and gallery for £2.

Opening hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12-6pm

SELF-PUBLISHING FAIR

24/7, åbäke, Arty, Audio Arts, Audio Theory, Black Diamond, Borbonesa, Pablo Bronstein, Control, Copenhagen Free University, CRASH!, Dark Star, Disinfotainment, DOT DOT DOT, Edinburgh's One O'Clock Gun Periodical, Babak Ghazi, Guestroom, The Happy Hypocrite, Hardcore Is More Than Music, Emma Hedditch, Infopool, International Necronautical Society, Implicasphere, Inventory, Junior Asprin, The Laburnum Pilot, Le Gun, The Masterpiece, Millimetre, Mind of We, Mum and Dad, Mark Pawson, Harry Pye, Radical Vans and Carriages, Realisations (Book of Triggers), Paula Rousch (MSDM), Shadazz, Shaver's Weekly, Sick Happy Idle, Starship, Stellar, Stop Stop, Taytopographies, Timber Maniacs and Terra Form, Tollcross, Donald Urquhart, Vargas Organisation London, The Vacuum, Wayward Canon.

PUBLIC LIBRARY

Includes material from the self-publishing fair, and: All the King's Horses, American Homebody, An Architektur, Bovine Liberation, Boys Keep Swinging, British Mythic, Butt, Butter, Cahier d-Activité, Cakewalk, Chicago, Adam Chodzko, Shawn Chung, Continuous Project, deFILE, Jeremy Deller, DIN, Sara Edward Corbett, Finger, The Fire, Flaca, Flaps, Fluffers, Freier, Frozen Tears, Fucking Good Art, FUJI, Happy Pappy, Helvetica, High Dessert Test Sites, Kathrin Höhne and Bjarte Gismarvik, Karl Holmqvist, IDEA Art + Society, Incepem Fanzine, Jutta Koether, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Anja Kirschner, LTTR, Made in the USA, Make it happen, Mall Punk, Manoa Free University, Sean McCarthy, Aleksandra Mir, Montage, Tom Morton and Catherine Patha (TomCat), OCD, Pacemaker, Patti, Perific Biennale, Lia Perjovschi/CCA, Pist Protta, Pork Salad Press, Plotter, Recluse, Re-Magazine, Saturday, Seth Price, Remote, Carissa Rodriguez, Runway, Saddlesore, Shit TV, Christian Sievers, SlimVolume, Joshua Smith, Space Poetry, Spector >cut + paste<, The Stand, Swingset, Things to Come, Times, Morton & Catharine Patha (TomCat), Tourette's, Variant, Version, UKS Forum, WeAreTheArtists, Why we should talk about, Matt Wiegle, The Young Baron, and more.

Morgan Fisher

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:45:06 +0100

'The origin of ( ) was my fascination with inserts. Inserts are a crucial kind of shot in the syntax of narrative films. Inserts show newspaper headlines, letters, and similar sorts of significant details that have to be included for the sake of clarity in telling the story. I have long been struck by a quality of inserts that can be called the alien, and as well the alienated. Narrative films depend on inserts (it's a very rare film that has none), but at the same time they are utterly marginal. Inserts are far from the traffic in faces and bodies that are the heart of narrative films. Inserts have the power of the indispensable, but in the register of bathos.

( ) consists of nothing but inserts, or shots that are close enough to being inserts, so it liberates inserts from their servitude to story. ( ) elevates inserts from the realm of Necessity to the realm of Freedom, and so is a political film. And because the juxtapositions are the result of chance, it is a surrealist film as well.'
Morgan Fisher

Morgan Fisher is based in Los Angeles and has been making films since the late 1960s. His films include Production Stills 1970, The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm 1973, Cue Rolls 1974, Projection Instructions 1976, and Standard Gauge 1984. ( ) has been screened at the Whitney Biennial 2004, Galerie Daniel Buchholz 2004, the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2004, the 3rd Berlin Biennale 2004, the 41st New York Film Festival 2003.

Klaus Weber

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:53:08 +0100

Klaus Weber has conducted research into a special type of funghi, Agaricus bitorquis, which is more commonly known as the 'sidewalk' mushroom. This wild, edible mushroom tastes slightly of hazelnut and often grows beneath tarmac, strong enough to push up concrete and break through asphalt.

For his gallery-sited exhibition at Cubitt, Weber laid soil inoculated with mushroom culture, which was then covered with tarmac suggestive of an urban fragment. During the course of the exhibition the culture will slowly grow and a laboratory in a wooden hut will be equipped with the technology to conduct research, cultivate and monitor the growth of the fungi. Mushroom culture will be available for visitors to take away from the exhibition.

Klaus Weber lives and works in Berlin. In 2003 he undertook a 12-month residency at Delfina, London, and exhibited Public Fountain LSD Hall at Frieze Art Fair. He is currently exhibiting at Kunsthaus Dresden and will have a solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps, New York, in May 2004.

This exhibition has been kindly supported by Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation, The Elephant Trust, Delfina Studio Trust, Tunnel Tech, Topwood Timber and Tarmac Ltd

Josephine Pryde

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:58:45 +0100

The turn of the year is always a good time for discussing predictions, and the period 2003-2004 was no exception. The Economist magazine of 20 December 2003, for example, carried a short report in its science and technology section under the sub-heading, 'Men lose their fiscal prudence in the prresence of attractive women'. This might sound like old news to an Economist reader, but the article in fact looked at current research into something called 'future discounting'. That's the name given by economists and psychologists to the process by which either an 'I want it now' or an 'I'll hang on and have a bit more later' pathway can supposedly be activated in someone's brain. The combination in this article of somewhat weary sexism, the image of the brain, and the influence of visual material on economic decisions suggested itself as a starting point for Josephine Pryde's exhibition at Cubitt.

Josephine Pryde has frequently worked with photography, a process of early importance to scientific practices, and has often referenced the history of commercial and art photography in her work. The photographic works in Brains and Chains have been produced in the style of scientific illustrations, mixed with tecniques associated with Futurist photography such as multiple exposure. A link to the the Futurists and their love of dynamism turns up again, quite literally, in a work made out of bicycle chains that is suspended from the ceiling.

Josephine Pryde lives in London. Recent solo shows include Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels and 'The Bird of the Year is the Common or Garden House Sparrow', Galerie Meerettich, Berlin.

Emma Hedditch

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:06:17 +0100

For three days Cubitt gallery will become a feminist autonomous place (that is, we will commit to that idea).

FRIDAY 30 JANUARY 2004
6.30PM — 9.30PM
Introduction to A political feeling, I hope so , a newly commissioned project by Emma Hedditch: an optimistic reflection of feminist politics, turned over by interpersonal relations, and the always absolutely, only social selves. The launch of Part One of a two-part publication will be accompanied by living music by ‘Lesbo Pig’ (Irene Revell, Ros Murray and Anna Dahllöv), set next to a separatist curtain — a homemade fantasy of fake differentiation — made from duvet covers in collaboration with artist Henriette Heise.

SATURDAY 31 JANUARY 2004
2.30PM — 3.30PM
Open meeting and info exchange

4pm: CARRY GREENHAM HOME
Biban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, UK, 1983, 66mins, 16mm
The film begins on the 12 December 1982, the day that 30,000 women travelled to RAF Greenham Common, Newbury, to join the women's peace camp established in 1981 to protest against intended housing of ninety-six cruise missiles at the base.

SUNDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2004
2.30PM — 3.30PM
Open meeting and info exchange

4pm: A SUFFRAGETTE INSPITE OF HIMSELF
Bannister Merwin, Edison, UK, 1912/13 ca, 10mins, 16mm
‘How a respectable British householder, bitterly opposed to women's suffrage, becomes apparently a violent advocate of the cause …’ ( The Bioscope , January 1913). The film refers to suffragette actions such as throwing stones at windows and chaining themselves to public buildings. The sub-textual heroine of the film is the maid, a convinced suffragette, amused by the problems of her employer.

WHAT TO PUT ON JACK SMITH'S MEMORIAL CHRISTMAS TREE?
Stefan Hayn, Germany, 1994, 7mins, 16mm
‘What is it about? About collecting cocks. And why Jack Smith? Because he was opposing the cultural industry’ (Stefan Hayn). When Hayn was working on the film he was also working on a long, furious paper against the ghetto of gay and lesbian film festivals.

WHO HANGS THE LAUNDRY? WASHING; WAR AND ELECTRICITY IN BEIRUT
Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir and Tina Naccache, Iceland/Lebanon, 2001, 20mins, video
Plagued by the lack of water and electricity as a result of war, the Lebanese activist, Tina Naccache describes the gymnastics of doing the laundry and managing electricity cuts.

FÜR FRAUEN 1. KAPITEL (For Women 1 st Chapter )
Cristina Perincioli; camera: Gisela Tuchtenhagen; production: Berlin filmschool DFFB Germany, 1971, 36mins,16mm (English subtitles)
FÜR FRAUEN 1. KAPITEL shows a model situation of the coming solidarity of a group of women working in a supermarket. They find out a male co-worker is paid more money to supervise their work and they decide to strike. The women who played these roles acted out their own experiences, and collaborated on the script. ‘We don't need liberal filmmakers who take the issue of emancipation. We claim for the means of production in our own hands’.

A reading from the film magazine LICHTBILDBÜHNE (Germany, 1912)

The article discusses the ‘modern women’s movement in England’ described as ‘the ugly movement’, the ‘fanaticism’ of the suffragettes in England who ‘attack the deeply hated male sex and especially the government who opposes them’. They planned to cinematographically register, with the help of ‘female camera-operators’, all the incidents of police violence during the suffragettes' demonstrations.

‘When I started working with the suffragette films, I became much more interested in film as a medium for social struggle. The films represent a perspective back to history, quite present with their early cinematic directness, and far away with their notion of what women should be allowed to do and what not. The spectacle and the almost grotesque vision of masses of women running through the streets was a scandal at the time.

As a public space, cinema could really work as a communication space for communities and debates (which would mean experiencing art together, not with the dispersed, mostly isolated glance at exhibitions and gallery spaces). But at the same time, my questions are about which community keeps its definition and politics open and moving or those that begin to close and use (identity) politics as an end-point enlarged. The film programme questions the ideas and contexts of feminist activism, of social and identity-politics-labelling and the distance of historical film material’. — Madeleine Bernstorff

The film programme is presented by writer and curator, Madeleine Bernstorff with Emma Hedditch.

Carol Bove, Charles Raymond

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:04:48 +0100

Cubitt presents a selection of Charles Raymond's original watercolour illustrations for Alex Comfort's pioneering 1972 publication, The Joy of Sex, alongside recent work by Carol Bove.

Alex Comfort was a physician, poet, novelist, anarchist and pacifist. Taking his inspiration from the Joy of Cooking, he conceived The Joy of Sex as 'a gourmet guide to lovemaking', to demystify sexual practice. In his introduction to the book he described, 'a cookery book is a sophisticated, unanxious account of available dishes - culinary fantasies as well as staple diets - with the practical details provided. This book is an equally unanxious account of the full repertoire of human heterosexualityS?' The book's immediate popularity spawned numerous further editions, including More Joy of Sex, 1974, The Joy of Gay Sex, 1977, and the Joy of Lesbian Sex, 1977. The first edition was illustrated by Christopher Foss, (now better known for his science fiction illustrations), and Charles Raymond, who, together with his partner, modeled for all of the drawings. Featured at the beginning of the book, Raymond's romantic, unselfconscious, meticulously detailed watercolours convey a sense of the optimism of the pre-AIDs era.

Carol Bove's displays of books and watercolour drawings investigate the aesthetics and politics of 1960/70s liberation movements. Her book collection encompasses original editions of published works that act as signposts for the intellectual and humanistic developments of the hippie era, charting art, architecture, womens' movements, and other areas of cultural discourse. Arranged on period shelving units, the books are displayed so that they highlight key images and texts and are accompanied by art and design artifacts. A series of drawings of women from late 60s Playboy magazines, celebrate the female form and evince the changing roles and representations of women in that era. Conjuring a powerful sense of the genesis of grass roots movements, these works revisit a moment in history that challenged established lifestyles, attitudes, morals, and changed our cultural landscape, from a women's perspective.

Charles Raymond's drawings have been kindly loaned by HOTEL, London. 'Educational Books', with works by Charles Raymond, continues at HOTEL until 29 November, and by appointment through December. Please contact +44 (0)20 7729 3122 for details. Carol Bove is based in New York and is represented by TEAM. She has recently exhibited at Hamburger Kunstverein, and next year will show at Kunsthalle Zurich and Georg Kargl, Vienna.

Kyong Park, Marjetica Potrc

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:16:18 +0100

People of Light in the Slush of the Sun Studies in the Reform of Life

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:29:00 +0100

In Germany, around the turn of the century, a number of groups were formed that can be subsumed under the term 'Lebensreform' (Life Reform). These part utopian, revolutionary, reactionary and reformist approaches characterised the most varied attempts to break free from the Empire of the day: the nationalistic, capitalistic and monolithic Wilhelminian Reich.

In view of the development of 'multitudes' of parallel conceptions of life, the Life Reform movements were certainly predecessors of today's 'escapist' constructions of identity, formed via lifestyle conceptions. At the time, some of these approaches lent a sense of 'metaphysical depth' to the arising National Socialism. Other groups were, on the contrary, persecuted by the society of the Third Reich, and incorporated or forced into line, which again produced another monolithic homogeneity.

The video that Stephan Dillemuth attempted to make about these matters was bound to fail in the face of their very complexity. Instead of presenting a refined and finished product, he confronts us with the assembled rubble of his investigation... a performance?

Stephan Dillemuth will give a talk at the gallery on Saturday 13th September at 4pm.

Links: INTERVIEW with Jacob Fabricius:
http://www.societyofcontrol.com/dillemuth/interview.htm

POSTER: http://www.societyofcontrol.com/dillemuth/werkl_post.htm

IMAGE ARCHIVE: http://www.societyofcontrol.com/reform/index.htm

SWIKI-COLLABORATIVE WEB PAGE:
http://www.lebensreform.societyofcontrol.com/

Jokob Kolding, Luke Fowler/Kosten Koper

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:53:09 +0100

Jakob Kolding produces collages and posters based on the relationship between social behaviour and architectural space. Rooted in his own experience of growing up in Albertslund - a rigidly planned suburb of Copenhagen - his work weighs up the modernist idea of a utopian city and the consequences of such idealism. Questioning gentrification processes and planning issues, Kolding is interested in discrepancy between the intended and actual use of public space, highlighting signs of resistance to the built environment. His collages juxtapose images of different kinds of public spaces and residential areas, with skateboarders, hip-hoppers, DJs and graffiti, overlaid with text quoting social, urban and architectural theory. Kolding's new work will include a poster to be fly-posted in Cubitt's local environment and available to take away from the exhibition.
click here to see poster >>

Luke Fowler/Kosten Koper's film, THE WAY OUT, A Portrait of Xentos profiles one of the founding members of The Homosexuals, a band that lapsed into obscurity after self-releasing a number of groundbreaking records in the post-punk period. Although The Homosexuals disbanded without ever releasing an authorised LP, L Voag (aka Xentos) released his own solo project, The Way Out, in 1979. The Way Out was a cut-up DIY concept album that imagined its musical context situated in an inverted parallel universe where pop music is made by Modernist, Serialist composers and the avant-garde is left to those on the fringes of acceptance. Amos (aka Xentos) continued to produce and distribute a mass of diverse tape projects throughout the 80's on his own label, Its War Boy, spanning most known and unknown musical genres, under a myriad of multiple identities. Fowler/Kopers's film interweaves new interviews, scripted scenes, found and filmed footage with unearthed Super-8 films by Xentos himself.

Luke Fowler (Glasgow) and Jakob Kolding (Berlin/Copenhagen) have had an ongoing dialogue since they worked together on `The Social Engineer' a project at Transmission Gallery in 2000. Luke Fowler and Kosten Koper (Stirling) worked collaboratively for the first time on this film project.

The Way Out - A Portrait of Xentos, duration 30 mins
Screening Times: Opening night: 8.00
Wednesday-Sunday: on the hour

Jakob Kolding will give a talk in the gallery on Saturday 12th July at 4pm

Kenneth Anger

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:10:32 +0100

4th July 2003
7.30-10pm Afterall presents an evening of films by Kenneth Anger including:

Fireworks (1947)
`Since Fireworks (which Tennessee Williams hailed as the most exciting use of cinema he had seen) Anger has provided an elegantly subversive alternative to mass cultural representation, mainstream film and contemporary art…'

Scorpio Rising (1963)
'In [a] climate of paranoia and repression, Scorpio Rising was confiscated by the Vice Squad. (A member of the American Nazi party, disturbed by Anger's use of Nazi insignia as erotic turn-ons and party games, complained that it was full of obscene images; the print was seized and the theatre manager arrested and thrown into jail for screening it.) At that time a First Amendment that tolerated the Ku Klux Klan had little tolerance for art.'

The Man They Want to Hang (2002)
'Anger became a cult figure, taken up by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg and Jimmie Page of Led Zeppelin (an avid collector of Crowley's own paintings, which became subject matter for Anger's recent film, The Man They Want to Hang, 2002). As such he galvanised an attitude of disrespect and blasphemy fuelled by the exorbitant intake of mind-altering substances.'

Alice L Hutchison Courting Anger, Afterall Issue 7

Full screening details:
Fireworks (1947) 16mm, 13 mins
Puce Moment (1949) 16mm, 6 mins
Eaux d'Artifice (1953) 16mm, 13mins
Scorpio Rising (1963) 16mm, 30 mins
The Man They Want to Hang (2002) 16mm, 11 mins
Don't Smoke That Cigarette (2002) VHS, 35 mins

Gareth Jones

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:16:32 +0100

Gareth Jones has been commissioned by Cubitt to make a new installation for the gallery space. This will consist of a series of nine interconnected structures that are based on the shape and dimensions of a standard plinth, adopting its form for subsequent elaboration, distortion and embellishment, and producing multiple variations within a single format. The work reflects different approaches to object making and develops a formal vocabulary whereby each plinth relates to the group as a whole. Utilising a means of presentation as the work itself, these structures continue Jones's interest in making a direct response to materials through non-representational forms. The works will create a field in the space of the gallery in which the viewer can become an active participant, with each plinth generating physical, perceptual and psychological responses.

Gareth Jones is currently a resident at Delfina studios in London. Recent projects include Seven Pages From a Magazine 1975-2001 at Platform, London and Helmut Jacoby: Milton Keynes Drawings at 38 Langham Street, London.

Gallery hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6pm

'hey production'

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:29:38 +0100

Judith Hopf, Pia Rönicke, Copenhagen Free University, Exhibition structure: Stephan Rabeck / Florian Pumhösl
Opening: WEDNESDAY 19 March 7 - 9pm

'hey production!' brings together works by Judith Hopf (D), Pia Rönicke (DK) and the Copenhagen Free University (DK) that look towards alternative models of architecture and design, ideas of collectivity, and forms of knowledge production. The works will be housed within an exhibition structure designed by Stephan Rabeck (O) and Florian Pumhösl (O), which is based on original functionalist furniture designs from Victor Papanek and James Hennessey's 1973 publication Nomadic Furniture.

Victor Papanek, a pioneer in ecological, environmental and ethical design, published Nomadic Furniture as a design manual that aspired to bring his ideas into everyday use by introducing an ethos of recycling, flexibility and DIY. The designs that Rabeck and Pumhösl have adapted for this exhibition are based on Papanek and Hennessey's 'Living Cubes' - simple wooden frameworks for nomadic rooms, customisable for multiple functions, and easily collapsed and reassembled when on the move.

Pia Rönicke's work investigates architecture as a product of human imagination, thinking about how we are affected by the edifices that surround us. Her film Cell City - A System of Errors is an animated floating OEstructuralπ city that is based on modular elements. Cell City is a totalitarian city, built on ideologies that have been formed outside of any given context and where nothing exists outside of the structure.

Judith Hopf's film Hey Produktion is based on her research into the legacy of the liberation movement. Linking 60s ideas of collective activity and social integration to contemporary counterparts, teamwork and self- management, Hopf questions the drive for productivity in contemporary society, and the search for mental relaxation and inner values. The film incorporates a choreographed dance routine that combines idiosyncratic movements originating from yoga, tai chi, and chorus-line dancing.

The Copenhagen Free University is situated in the home of Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen. Dedicated to the production and exchange of critical consciousness and poetic language, they work with OEforms of knowledge that are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, acapitalist, produced in the kitchen, produced when asleep or arisen on a social excursion - collectively

Judith Hopf, Pia Rönicke, Copenhagen Free University, Exhibition structure: Stephan Rabeck / Florian Pumhösl
Opening: WEDNESDAY 19 March 7 - 9pm

'hey production!' brings together works by Judith Hopf (D), Pia Rönicke (DK) and the Copenhagen Free University (DK) that look towards alternative models of architecture and design, ideas of collectivity, and forms of knowledge production. The works will be housed within an exhibition structure designed by Stephan Rabeck (O) and Florian Pumhösl (O), which is based on original functionalist furniture designs from Victor Papanek and James Hennessey's 1973 publication Nomadic Furniture.

Victor Papanek, a pioneer in ecological, environmental and ethical design, published Nomadic Furniture as a design manual that aspired to bring his ideas into everyday use by introducing an ethos of recycling, flexibility and DIY. The designs that Rabeck and Pumhösl have adapted for this exhibition are based on Papanek and Hennessey's 'Living Cubes' - simple wooden frameworks for nomadic rooms, customisable for multiple functions, and easily collapsed and reassembled when on the move.

Pia Rönicke's work investigates architecture as a product of human imagination, thinking about how we are affected by the edifices that surround us. Her film Cell City - A System of Errors is an animated floating OEstructuralπ city that is based on modular elements. Cell City is a totalitarian city, built on ideologies that have been formed outside of any given context and where nothing exists outside of the structure.

Judith Hopf's film Hey Produktion is based on her research into the legacy of the liberation movement. Linking 60s ideas of collective activity and social integration to contemporary counterparts, teamwork and self- management, Hopf questions the drive for productivity in contemporary society, and the search for mental relaxation and inner values. The film incorporates a choreographed dance routine that combines idiosyncratic movements originating from yoga, tai chi, and chorus-line dancing.

The Copenhagen Free University is situated in the home of Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen. Dedicated to the production and exchange of critical consciousness and poetic language, they work with OEforms of knowledge that are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, acapitalist, produced in the kitchen, produced when asleep or arisen on a social excursion - collectively

Adam Chodzko

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:40:18 +0100

Adam Chodzko has been commissioned by Cubitt to make new work for his first solo exhibition in London since 1997. Chodzko has created two projects: cell-a 2006 is a slide projection installed at the gallery and an archive concealed in Margate, Kent; Better Scenery is a sculpture, split between Cubitt and Fargo, North Dakota, USA. Both cell-a 2006 and Better Scenery propose displacement — looking in the wrong place — as a way of creating links between apparently incompatible communities and places.

cell-a 2006 depicts the activities of a group of Kurdish asylum seekers in Margate, Kent, invited by Chodzko to become keepers of the archive of the last 10 years of exhibitions and events at Cubitt. The entire project is set in 2006 when the lease on Cubitt's current building expires and the future of the organisation is once again uncertain. The Kurdish asylum seekers will try to make sense of the archive, editing, interpreting and storing the material. They alone know its exact location, acting as guides to anyone who wishes to visit it.

Better Scenery becomes the third in a series of paired signs by Chodzko. A sign advising directions to Cubitt has been erected out 'in the middle of nowhere' in a flood plain near Fargo, North Dakota, USA. A sign giving directions to the Fargo sign is installed in an ash tree on Angel Mews outside Cubitt. Both signs use the casual language of directions given to a stranger in the street. The signs will 'disappear' in the spring, the Fargo sign submerged under water when the Red River floods during the thaw and the Cubitt sign obscured behind new foliage.

cell-a 2006 and Better Scenery are supported by London Arts and The Henry Moore Foundation. Better Scenery is produced in collaboration with the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota, USA. cell-a 2006 is co-commissioned with Artracks EK 2003, part of East Kent Cultural Consortium's Visualize the Future programme and produced in collaboration with Kent Institute of Art and Design. cell-a 2006 will be shown in East Kent from March — June 2003

Adam Chodzko has recently been awarded an Artracks EK 2003 commission for cell-a. Artracks EK is the commissioning strand of Visualize the Future, a three year programme which began in 2001 to support new work by South East and East Kent artists and to raise the profile of the visual arts in East Kent. Visualize the Future is an initiative of the East Kent Cultural Consortium comprised of the six local authorities of East Kent — Ashford Borough Council, Canterbury City Council, Dover Distict Council, Shepway District Council, Swale Borough Council & Thanet District Council. It is currently supported by Southern & South East Arts, through the Regioanl Arts Lottery Programme, Kent County Council and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. cell-a will be shown in East Kent from March — June 2003. For further information: Christine Gist, Project Co-ordinator, T/F 01304 372 414, c.gist@btopenworld.com.

Adam Chodzko Biography

Adam Chodzko (b.1965) lives and works in Whitstable, Kent and London. Solo exhibitions include Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles; Els Hanappe Underground, Athens; Accademia Britannica, Rome and Arizona State University Art Museum. Chodzko's work has been included in group exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland; The Royal Academy, London; Deste Foundation, Athens; Venice Biennale; De Appel, amsterdam; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis and Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. Recent publications include Plans and Spells, a catalogue published by Film and Video Umbrella, and Romanov, a book published by Bookworks. Chodzko was one of this year's recipients of the Hamlyn Award.

International Necronautical Society

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:10:42 +0100

The First Committee of the International Necronautical Society has called a public hearing in preparation for its planned radio transmission project. A range of practitioners and theorists with special knowledge and expertise in the fields of sound, wireless electronic communication, cryptography and broadcasting will be examined by a delegation of the INS First Committee. Their statements will be recorded and analysed as the INS Communications and Encoding Group begin to configure the future INS station.

INS information: http://www.necronauts.org
INS press service: http://www.vargas.org.uk

INS First Committee Delegation:
Tom McCarthy (General Secretary), Anthony Auerbach (Chief of Propaganda), Zinovy Zinik (Extra-mural Assessor)

Witnesses:
Heath Bunting (retired artist), John Cussans (writer and cultural theorist), Ken Hollings (novelist), Cerith Wyn Evans (artist), Jane Lewty (researcher), Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel (ambientTV.net)

'We've been looking at the lines of code transmitted over the wireless by the poet Cégeste just after he was killed in a road accident. The messages are picked up by Orphée on his car radio, in the dead zone between stations. Now, Orphée is the most celebrated writer in the world, but he knows that just one line of Cégeste's blows his work out of the water: "Jupiter rend sage ceux qu'il veut perdre. Une fois. Je repète: Jupiter rend sage ceux qu'il veut perdre. Deux fois. Je repète ..." The broadcasts are modelled on British agents' or Resistance transmissions from occupied France. Obviously, that's an important reference for Cocteau in the fifties. 'These are transmissions coming from an other place, i.e. death, full of cryptic meanings which they parade right in front of you, but without giving you the key that would decode them. That's great. Our own Communications and Encoding Group could learn a lot from that. That's why we're holding these Hearings: to work out how best to set up our own transmission unit and what to put out over it.' Tom McCarthy, speaking at the Aconvention, Liverpool Biennial, 2002.

The Witnesses

Heath Bunting is a 'retired artist' who emerged from the 80's committed to building open/democratic communication systems and social contexts. Besides setting up radio projects such as Radio 90, EMI (Electromagnetic Installation) and Cellular Pirate Listening Station, he has also been involved in mobile phone and fax/mail art. He has produced many internet projects, some highly recognised, and has helped form a strong context for the practice of net.art. Recently, he has moved into the field of genetics, proclaiming it to be the next 'new media', and is also developing work in the area of physical network performance. http://www.irational.org

John Cussans is a writer and cultural theorist. As co-initiator of The London Bughouse, an ongoing art project revolving round the writing and ideas of author Philip K. Dick, he has extensively explored the relationship between telecommunications and death, incorporating his research into a series of performances and networked, semi-fictitious 'events'. http://www.globlocal.com/bughouse

Cerith Wyn Evans has worked with a wide variety of media, including film (he worked with Derek Jarman), mirrors, neon lights and even fireworks. Spelling out Situationist and Marxist slogans in this last medium, he has created what have been described as 'subtitles for an unseen narrative incorporating translation and a distortion of the original meaning.' His mirror work Inverse Reverse Perverse, included in the Royal Academy's 1997 Sensation exhibition, also involves linguistic translation and inverted representation. In his 2002 work Cleave 00, shown at Tate Britain, he had passages of Blake's writing randomly selected by computer, translated into Morse code and refracted off a large mirror ball -- a technique he replicated in Documenta XI using passages from George Bataille's The Accursed Share. He is currently working on transmitting sound from crystal chandeliers.

Ken Hollings is a novelist who has written on sound and transmission networks for a number of publications including The Wire and Sight and Sound. He has also written widely on the viral broadcast theories of William S. Burroughs. In collaboration with electronic composer Huib Emmer he is currently producing Welcome to Disturbia, which will be broadcast on Dutch Radio in December 2002. His novel Destroy All Monsters is published by Marion Boyars.

Jane Lewty is a researcher in Literature at the University of Glasgow. She has written widely on the impact of radio -- and in particular of the wartime transmissions of Lord Haw Haw -- on modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender and Virginia Woolf. She recently spoke at the James Joyce Biennial Symposium in Trieste on the relation between Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Raudive's EVP Experiments.

Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel have worked on a series of projects using sound and networked media, including Stealth Waltz (Ars Electronica), Karaoke Busking (White Space Gallery), Telejam (Public Life/radio FRO) and Acoustic Space Lab VR (in which twenty-five media artists generated work from the Latvian site of a Soviet-era 32-metre dish antenna formerly used to spy on satellite transmissions between Europe and North America). They are currently developing a telematic theatre piece, flipflop, using WLAN and live streams, with New York-based motion poet Ajay Naidu. Patel's primary medium is sound, which he attempts to sculpt into novel and resonant textures. For many years he worked with Talvin Singh as part of the Anokha and Calcutta Cyber Café collectives. Currently he collaborates extensively with dancers, writes on science and technology (and their intersection with the arts) and studies the classical music of India. Luksch is a film maker who works outside the frame. With an academic background in Fine Arts (Vienna, Bangkok) and the Artistic Directorship of the Munich Media Lab behind her, she began to conceive and produce interdisciplinary projects related to media and net culture. She founded ambientTV.net as a platform for the investigation of generative networks in both social and technical senses. http://www.ambienttv.net

International Necronautical Society First Committee Delegation

Tom McCarthy is General Secretary of INS

Anthony Auerbach, INS Chief of Propaganda (Archiving and Epistemological Critique) is an artist.

Zinovy Zinik, Extra-mural Assessor, is a novelist and broadcaster. Born in Moscow, Zinik has lived in London since 1976, where he is editor and presenter of the BBC's West End Radio Review. His seven novels, which have been translated into several European languages, include Russian Service, set in a fictitious émigré radio station, and Sounds Familiar (a New Frankenstein), which deals with the transformation of sound into matter. His novel The Mushroom Pickers was serialised by the BBC in 1994. He is also founder, in collaboration with the New York-based Russian artists Komar and Melamid, of the Safety Pin Society of Great Britain.

The INS Second First Committee Hearings will take place in an environment designed by Laura Hopkins, previously set designer for among others the Globe Theater and English National Opera.

Hosted by CUBITT. Supported by London Arts.

Allen Ruppersberg in conversation with Thomas Lawson

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:17:13 +0100

Presentation of 'SISTE VIATOR' (Stop Traveller) 1993, by Allen Ruppersberg
An event organised in collaboration with Afterall . More about Afterall at: www.afteralljournal.org

Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:27:43 +0100

The Blacks
By Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, 2002
Opening of the exhibition at Cubitt: Thursday 5 September 7- 9pm

The exhibition runs from 6 September - 20 October, 2002
The gallery is open Wednesday - Sunday, 12 - 6pm
Artists Talk: 12 October, 4pm

'The Blacks', 2002 is a new sculptural work by Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan commissioned by Cubitt. 'The Blacks' is both the title of the work and the work itself: a title, a label, a reading, a social indicator, a presentation, a construction… a description of the letters themselves and a theatrical design… an absurdly flamboyant non-sculpture sculpture. The title says here are the Blacks - and then here they are. Alongside 'The Blacks', a short play 'The Slapstick Mystics with Sticks', will be available in the gallery to take away. This work draws on the tradition of the irreverent allegorical folk play as a device to make contemporary conceptual art.

Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, The Hope Scott Trust and London Arts

JEZ: (from THE CHORUS) You can hear the jingle jangle of the bells
    (JEZ jangles his bells) As he walks into town

I-EYE:In walks I,
       I,
       I-Eye.

THE CHORUS: Aye, but who is I-Eye?

I-EYE: Aye, who is I-Eye?
       Who is I?
       I am I,
       I am I-Eye
       Aye, I am.

(THE MIRROR steps forward, I-EYE reflects.)

I-EYE: But who am I?
       I, I-Eye?

Extract from 'The Slapstick Mystics with Sticks' 2001
by Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Blacks
By Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, 2002
Commissioned by Polly Staple, Curator at Cubitt, London, 2001-2003

The Slapstick Mystics With Sticks
By Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, 2001
Designed with Robert Johnston of Pause ButtonEdit
Published by Cubitt in conjunction with the exhibition The Blacks, 2002

Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation; The Hope Scott Trust and London Arts

Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan - Biography
Joanne Tatham (born 1971) and Tom O'Sullivan (born 1967) both live in Glasgow and have worked collaboratively since 1995. Recent projects include "HK", a solo commission for Tramway in Glasgow (2001); "My Head is on Fire but my Heart is Full of Love" at Charlottenborg Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen, curated by The Modern Institute (May 2002) and "The Best Book About Pessimism I Ever Read" an exhibition curated by Lucy Mackenzie for Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (June 2002).

Aleksandra Mir: Two New Cubitt Commissions

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:26:28 +0100

Living & Loving: #1: The Biography of Donald Cappy
By Aleksandra Mir, 2002

Living & Loving: #1: The Biography of Donald Cappy By Aleksandra Mir, 2002 is a new Cubitt Commission: a 32 page; A3 size; full colour publication. The project is the public dissemination of one ordinary man's extraordinary life; printed in an edition of 5000 copies to be distributed for FREE from Cubitt.

If you are not already on our postal mailing list and you would like to receive a copy of the publication for FREE please send us your postal address.

"San Francisco, December 16th, 2001,

Polly,

… I've been working here for a few weeks now, researching this other project for the CCAC Institute, and I've just met this young man, Donald Cappy.

Donald is the Manager of Public Safety here on the CCAC campus where I am staying; we got talking about his life after my first night in town when I thought I was being harassed and my place broken into (by an unassuming security guard it turned out). Donald grew up in various foster homes; was a punk in his teens; went into the marines; saw 47 nations; had 50 girlfriends; was married; had a child; found the love of his life. She dumped him the day he got a divorce from his wife (Why? "Because she is a woman!"); came back to go to college; dropped out; went into security and bouncing; works the nightclubs where he meets all the stars and manages security at the school where he is buddy with all the staff and the students. Donald is 28 years old.

He showed me all his meticulously well kept photo albums and broke everything down for me in detail: The reasons why people take in foster kids and what is expected of you in return; the destroy-and-create economy of punk; the torturous aspects of love and friendship; the logic between swinging when you are married, cheating when you are not; the rituals of the marines and the intimacy between men; the fine line between violence and safety.

Donald's life hinges on everyone else's but this story is his only; the public dissemination of one ordinary man's extraordinary life. I am coming back here at the end of January and will take the opportunity to spend more time with him; record our conversations and scan his photos. I have promised Donald I will make a book about his life one day, so thus extend this opportunity to you.

Aleksandra".

Living & Loving: #1: The Biography of Donald Cappy
By Aleksandra Mir, 2002
Commissioned by Polly Staple, Curator at Cubitt, London, 2001-2003
Administrated by Deirdre Kelly
Co-Published by Cubitt, London and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation; Elephant Trust and London Arts, UK.
Distributed by Cubitt, London

Edited by Aleksandra Mir & Polly Staple
Interview transcribed by Moran Paldi

Designed by Silke Roch
Printed by Offset Colour Print Limited, Southampton

Edition: 5000
ISBN: 0-9532765-1-1
© Copyright Free

Aleksandra Mir was born 1967 in Poland. She grew up in Sweden and has been living in New York since 1989. Aleksandra is represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise in New York, she exhibits in the US and Europe and has most recently completed a residency at the Sydney Biennale, 2002 in Australia.

Aleksandra has exhibited in the UK since 1998, working with the Transmission Gallery and the Modern Institute, most recently as part of the `Pyramids of Mars' exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and the Barbican, London in 2001. She held a Delfina residency in London in 2001 where she developed a commission for the Compton Verney House Trust in Warwickshire and will exhibit at the ICA in February 2003. She will be spending the summer in London to create a new commission for Cubitt.

Ne Travaillez Jamais!

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:42:41 +0100

The first issue of the occasional zine SATURDAY was produced and edited by Polly Staple and Mark Leckey in June 2001. The second issue of SATURDAY has been produced and edited by Polly Staple in conjunction with the `SATURDAY' programme running through May and June 2002 at Cubitt. A range of artists and writers were invited to contribute texts and images in, and of, the spirit of SATURDAY - Ne Travaillez Jamais!

This issue includes... Michael Archer on Soft Machines; Cecilia Bonilla, Paul Claydon and Elinor Jansz on Graphic Design; Neil Chapman's Accounts from a Diary of Traffic Accidents; Anne-Marie Copestake's Songs; Will Bradley's Lifestyle Challenge; Adam Chodzko and Rosa discuss DIY; Ann Collier on Beauty; Dan Fox on Existentialism; FlatPack001 on Youth Club's; Fuelair on Cocktails; Alison Gibb on Late Night Love Songs; Bruce Haines on Flying; Matthew HIggs on Punk; Anthony Iles and Craig Martin present Radio City; Gareth Jones's Harliquinade; Juneau Projects Create a Banned Record; Sarah Lowndes's Red Scratch; Nina Manandhar's Mobile Milkbar; Mattin on Relaxation; Aleksandra Mir presents This Seasons Debutantes; Dave Muller on The Watercourse Way c/o Jimmy Webb; Paulina Olowska on Disco Polo; Matt Price on The St. Dunstan's Experiment; David Robbins on Civilization; Paul Rooney on Not Going To America; Paula Roush/msdm's SATURDAY press card; Polly Staple and Jen Clark discuss being Saturday Girls and the John Lewis Partnership; Mark Titchner on Labour; Rob Tufnell on Some Follies of the Tay Valley; Gary Webb on Art; Ian White on Weekends Away; Andrew Wilson presents Alex Trocchi: Potlatch... Plus, SATURDAY cover design by Rachel Thomas... And, a HUGE! Free Poster of Matthew Higgs.

Trent Harris's Beaver Trilogy

"Trent Harris's Beaver Trilogy is a series of three pieces about the same subject, a young man from a small town called Beaver who is obsessed with Olivia Newton John. The first piece is a documentary (1979). The second piece is a dramatic work based on the documentary starring Sean Penn (1980). The third piece is yet another dramatic work, this time starring Crispin Glover (1985).

Los Angeles Critics Association awarded Beaver Trilogy BEST INDEPENDENT/EXPERIMENTAL FILM OF 2001 What the critics are saying...

`A rivetingly strange, multilayered inquiry into, celebrity, obsession and serendipity.' New York Times - A.O. Scott

`By far the most exciting and heart-breaking piece of cinema this critic has seen in years.'' IndieWIRE - Aaron Krach

`Filmmaker Trent Harris is a genuine maverick who has poisted his first piece of genius.' The Time London - James Christopher

`Both guileless found art object and beautifully crafted pop fantasia... Beaver Trilogy is destined to go down as the coolest footnote to any number of careers.' Filmmaker Magazine

`Of all the films that have ever been or will be, nothing compares to Beaver Trilogy.' Sundance Film Festival

`A stunning and complex exercise, an elaborate karaoke-upon-karaoke that snaps right into place with contemporary obsessions.' New York Press - Ed Halter

`I would strongly recommend your taking a look at Trent Harris's Beaver Trilogy, a work that's as strange and rare as a fire-dwelling salamander.' The Nation Magazine - Stuart Klawens

`Beaver Trilogy is so perfect, so odd, and so affecting that you will feel you're in the presence of a minor miracle or some strange form of beatitude.' New York Video Festival - Lincoln Center" - Trent Harris's website

"When I sent Trent Harris an email asking his permission to screen Beaver Trilogy as part of the `SATURDAY' programme at Cubitt he wrote me back immediately: `HI POLLY... I WOULD BE HONOURED IF YOU WOULD SCREEN BEAVER TRILOGY. PLEASE DO IT AND HAVE A HELL OF A GOOD TIME... ALL THE BEST AND GOOD LUCK... TRENT'." - Polly Staple

A Little Pain Hurts Nobody

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:54:23 +0100

The Black Diamond is an art show on paper, providing a general theme for artists and writers to respond to and presenting the work submitted in a simple magazine format. The first issue was published in October 1999 to coincide with the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art and was distributed free throughout the city during the festival. Since then two further issues have been published and distribution has widened to take in the rest of the UK, USA, Croatia, Ireland and Holland.

To coincide with the London launch at Cubitt Gallery of issue four of the magazine the publishers will be screening the first four episodes of the BBC television series 'Survivors' which originally aired from 1975--8. The series concerns the aftermath of a plague, which has wiped out 95% of the world's population. The action is centred on the experiences of a group of individuals in England as they grapple with the post plague world and the trials of day to day survival. The opening episodes immediately grabbed the attention and interest of the viewing public in 1975 and it remains a powerful and disturbing viewing experience. Its creator was Terry Nation of Dr Who fame.

The screening will take place in a specially designed mobile cinema, which has been donated for the occasion by All Horizons Club.

The Dilapidated Dwelling

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:22:13 +0100

The N.W.R.A. Variety Night

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:42:52 +0100

Paul Rooney, with Downfield Musical Society and Max Factory.

The North Walton Ratepayers Association presents a showcase for a London audience of the best of the turns who have performed at the club before it was condemned and bulldozed by Liverpool Council earlier this year. The bill will include:

A showing of `Warm Up' video by Paul Rooney. Full version 7 minutes, 2002.

Scouse comic Ted Robins (an N.W.R.A. regular over the years) is the `Stars In Their Eyes' TV audience warm up man, and this piece documents a chance meeting artist Paul Rooney has with him during his routine. The soundtrack voice over narrates the event in the context of performance as `self effacement' and a moment in the film `King of Comedy'. "The contestants in `Stars In Their Eyes' itself, who are introduced with a mini documentary about their lives and a studio interview with the host, dissolve themselves in the process of performing as someone else, they are eclipsed, consumed, by the logic of the show. Like them, Ted, in his summer shorts and casual shirt, skillfully suppresses himself and his craft to the benefit of the `greater' entertainment, happily knowing his place."

The N.W.R.A. house band will perform their song `Norman Collier' live to the video `I Am Not Going To America' by Paul Rooney. A CD audio guide for any chairlift. Video version 7 minutes. The voiceover story takes in a Herzog film, a Manchester band called Joy Division and the last performance by another Northern band called Rooney. The narrative touches on circles, singers, death and sanity in everyday Northern England. The comic Norman Collier (another N.W.R.A. regular over the years) has a pivotal role in the narrative.

The Downfield Musical Society from Dundee will perform a song written by Paul Rooney, `J for Juliet', a `duet' ballad for two vocalists and a pianist based on a real call centre phone conversation between a female operator and a male caller. The piece will depend on the particular nuances of an observed relationship between performers, as well as the distanced relationship of the initial conversation itself.

The NWRA house band will peform some cover versions of songs by NWRA stalwarts Rooney.

Max Factory will perform `M.I.N.O.R.; Movements In Need of Resistance', based on a performance therapy workshop at N.W.R.A. last year. The question raised by the performance is: is the Liverpool accent in a minor key? The audience will participate in the asking of this question, and the N.W.R.A. resident band will aid the process by playing a medley of `Liverpool songs' in `A' minor.

FAG: Film Art Gainsborough

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:55:44 +0100

An evening that repeats and accrues, but never shows the same thing twice, that's as much about space as content, where new riches spring from the living gaps in a tired, old-world fabric, saturating what might have been ordinary nothing with significance. Come and sit quietly for life, through death, to begin again from the smallest into the epic, conditional upon new conditions. A hopeful declaration. A declaration of love, them to us, me to you.

Jimmy Robert's super8 films are literally figurative and simultaneously abstract: pure colour studies and tender, personal, profoundly political documents.

Emma Hedditch's videos observe something small. Minimal actions break what felt like a microcosm into Romantic vastness, heartbreak.

Gainsborough's paintings (slide show) will be read as psychotic by a gay hysteric, sitters facing their own death, our own apocalypse. A visionary painter aligned with Blake, not the Public lie.

7.30pm: Jimmy Robert 1 - Gainsborough 1
8.30pm: Emma Hedditch
9.30pm: Gainsborough 2 - Jimmy Robert 2
10.30pm: Emma Hedditch, Jimmy Robert, Ian White

Broad Cast

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:00:59 +0100

Six hours of live and recorded audio work.

2pm Rosy Parlane 'Presence'" Manar Zarroug 'Oceans of Possibility'
2.30pm Mattin 'Words for Work 1' / Neil Chapman 'Untitled'
3pm Zeigam Azizov 'Travelling Voices'
3.30pm N55 'Art and Reality'
4pm Juneau Projects 'Disc(o)' / David Ellis 'Silent Key: Incursions Into Knob Culture '
4.45pm Ultra-red 'La economia nueva (Operation Gatekeeper)' / Mattin 'Words for Work 2'
5pm MSDM (Pelado) launching sub-label 'Plate Audio'
5.30pm Howard Slater, 'Post-Media Operators : an imaginary address'
5.50pm Mattin 'Words for Work' (Collected Conversations)
6.10pm Christian Nold & Duncan Whitley, 'Fuelair'
6.30pm Neil Chapman 'Untitled' video / Subcunt & Mufcoli 'Sheppey' video
7pm Inventory 'Endless Sonic Mania'

Broad Cast 2 - 8pm 107.9fm

Credits
Rosy Parlane 'Presence' was commissioned by Kunstradio for ISOL, a five part radio series curated by r a d i o q u a l i a www.radioqualia.net/isol/

Howard Slater 'Post-Media Operators : an imaginary address' was produced and presented for Info Centre, Hackney, 1999.

Ultra-Red 'La economia nueva (Operation Gatekeeper)' appears courtesy of Fat Cat Records, Brighton.

An Evening at the Pictures with Dan Fox

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:12:18 +0100

Muratti Greift Ein (1934)
Kreise (1933)
Allegretto (1936) by Oskar Fischinger
Three graphic works by the German animator Oskar Fischinger. The bright lights, the big city, the Broadway boogie-woogie Piet Mondrian and Busby Berkely never got to make.

Fat Man on a Beach by BS Johnson (1973)
"This is a film about a fat man on a beach. Did you hear what I said? I said: this is a film about a fat man on a beach. Are you sure you want to sit there and watch it? Well don't say I didn't warn you."

A curious musing on life, poetry, bananas and the Welsh coastline made just before his untimely death, this is a rare opportunity to see a film by B.S. Johnson (1933 - 1973) - one of Britain's most original and inventive experimental writers.

The London Nobody Knows by Norman Cohen (1967)
Starring James Mason, and based on Geoffrey Fletcher's cult travel guide to the seedier side of our capital.

Seven Eleven

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:45:54 +0100

Formed in 1998 FlatPack001 (Mark Beasley, Steve Beasley, Tim Hutchinson and Andy Robinson) is a 3D publishing point. A collective project drawing upon architectural, curatorial and artistic practice; facilitating new formats for creative exchange and providing a framework for collaborative activities. Recent and forthcoming FlatPack001 projects include Nostalgia of Mud, ROOM, Rotterdam, December 2001; Presence, Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich, June 2002 and ROADSHOW, a UK touring exhibition, Grizedale Arts, 2002.

For the SATURDAY programme at Cubitt, FlatPack001 have been specially commissioned to design and construct a performance arena, and to present an evening of experimental electronica. FlatPack001 in turn invited Matt Price (The Young Baron) to collaborate on an event showcasing emergent Birmingham Electronica/Electroacousitics and sound art projects to a London audience. CDs, zines and publications will be available for sale on the night.

Supported by BEAST

Watt

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:01:06 +0100

Six people will sit down and as a team read aloud Watt, by Samuel Beckett at Cubitt. The reading will start at 6.00pm on Saturday May 4 (after a short extract from the book has been read) and will finish sometime during the morning of Sunday May 5. The reading will be continuous. The cast of readers will be made up of one Scottish man, one American woman, one English man, one South African man, one Canadian man and one American man. The audience should bring their own cushions. Refreshments will be available.

In the winter of 1952, Merlin, a British expatriate literary magazine published in Paris, approached Samuel Beckett and asked if they could read the manuscript of his novel Watt with a view to publishing an extract from it. One rainy afternoon Beckett delivered the manuscript to the editorial offices of Merlin at the rue du Sabor banana-drying depot. Richard Seaver, an American advisory editor for Merlin (and later director of Grove Press in New York), has recalled how 'a knock came at the door and a tall, gaunt figure in a raincoat handed in a manuscript in a black imitation-leather binding and left almost without a word. That night, half a dozen of us - [Alex] Trocchi [editor of Merlin], Jane Lougee [publisher of Merlin], Christopher Logue, Patrick Bowles, Charles Hatcher and I - sat up half the night and read Watt aloud, taking turns until our voices gave out.'

It is this event, 50 years later, that the reading at Cubitt will re-present and translate. The different national origins of the readers will reflect those of the original readers of the manuscript in 1952.

The editorial staff of Merlin read the manuscript at Richard Seaver's flat, with Seaver first reading the passage that Beckett had marked as suitable for publication in the magazine:

Watt had little to say on the subject of the second closing period in Mr Knott's house. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed,from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door; from the fire to the door, from the door to the fire; from the window to the bed, from the bed to the window...

At which point it was agreed that Seaver should go back to the beginning of the book and together the six of them read it through to the end.

The English poet Christopher Logue has remembered how 'Progress was slow because, at first, the text was so comical. Everyone wanted to read. Patrick was the best: deadpan, following the punctuation. As we read on, the writing unsettled us, became frightening and funny by turns; comedy at its most extreme. We found the use of English astonishing. Rhythmically fine-tuned. A first of its kind. Beautiful. For us, it was as it must have been for those who came across the work of Picasso and Duchamp in the 1910s. Or the poetry of Eliot in the twenties. An aesthetically encouraging shock. As is usual when one comes into contact with something good, we felt good.'

Issue3 (Winter 1952/53) of Merlin published an extract from Watt. In the Summer of 1953 Collection Merlin published the first edition of Watt in collaboration with the Olympia Press.

Negative Space & Dead TV

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:32:02 +0100

Filmmaker Chris Petit will be introducing a screening of his films Negative Space (1999) and Dead TV (1999). In collaboration with the launch of Afterall Issue 5. Following the screening Chris Petit is in conversation with Mark Lewis, artist and co-editor of Afterall.

Truth and invention, real lives and fiction become indistinct and equal elements, merging with other people's work in the found-footage style, to create a single fabric of random spontaneous expressiveness, not unlike the life that slides by in front of a shop video camera. Each piece of film presents a clue to an inextricable tangle to which everything in the world is connected in its spider web of time, space and chance.
— Excerpt from Serafino Murri, `Chris Petit, Anatomies of the Image', in Afterall - A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 5, February 2002.

Chris Petit is a filmmaker, writer and film critic. His films include Radio On, (35mm, 102min, 1979); An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, (35mm, 91min, 1981); the collaborative works with Iain Sinclair, are The Falconer, (hi-8, 8mm, 55min, 1998 and Asylum, (DV Tape, 8mm, 56min, 2000). Petit has published novels since 1994 among them Robinson, (Granta, UK 2001); The Hard Shoulder, (Granta, UK, 2001) and The Human Pool, (Scibners, 2002).

Chris Petit is featured in Issue 5 of Afterall — A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, with texts by Laura Mulvey and Serafino Murri. This issue also features Anri Sala, Mary Heilmann, Barbara Kruger and Pawel Althamer.

Afterall is published biannually by Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London and the California Institute of Arts, Los Angeles. For further information about Afterall please contact Emily Pethick on +44 (0)20 7514 8173 or email afterall@linst.ac.uk.

100 Reviews

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:11:15 +0100

Melanie Carvalho

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:17:08 +0100

"Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible - the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched." - Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea

For her solo exhibition at Cubitt, London, Melanie Carvalho presents a selection of her large-scale watercolour and photographic collages alongside a collaborative painting project OEDescribe a Landscape∂. For this project Carvalho worked with a range of people (artists, friends, school children, Asian women∂s groups) posing the question, "Describe the landscape that represents your idea of home?". According to Carvalho, "the way in which people responded was incredibly varied, a mixture of writing and drawing. Some responded very abstractly. There were interiors as well as exteriors; dreams; barely-there pencil drawings and a five page detailed manuscript. There was a lot of fantasy. One person described living in a filing cabinet. Another described flying through brain-clouds." Recording the written and visual responses Carvalho then interpreted these as a series of over 100 small oil paintings. The resulting paintings are romantic landscapes in a traditional medium, constructed by Carvalho through another's imagination.

At Cubitt the paintings are hung together to create a salon of imaginary landscapes. Both the 'landscape' project and the collages engage with Carvalho's oscillating practice as an artist and her role as a curator; the idea of the unique artwork and the collaborative nature of a group project; the relationship between the written word and the visual image; painting and photography; landscape and genre painting; ideas of 'home', exoticism and fantasy. To coincide with her exhibition at Cubitt and to complete the project, Carvalho is publishing the original descriptions in a limited edition booklet.

Melanie Carvalho graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1997 and was awarded a scholarship at the British School in Rome the same year; she has participated in many national and international group shows and co-curated (with John Maclean) 'The Poster Show' at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York and Cabinet, London 2000. This is Carvalho's first solo exhibition.

Melanie Carvalho shall be talking about her work at Cubitt on Saturday 2 March at 4pm.

Opening hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6pm

Hot On the Heels of Love

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:29:39 +0100

David Robbins

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:23:14 +0100

Ice Cream Social and Symposium
In High Entertainment:
Saturday 12 January 4 - 9pm

Cubitt presents David Robbins's Talent (1986) - eighteen portraits of New York artists (Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer et al) photographed in the style of 10" by 8", black and white, actors' promotional headshots. Now regarded as Robbins's seminal work, the piece is at once an idiosyncratic recording of his peer group, historical evidence of a key moment in American art production, and a prompter to much subsequent discussion regarding the relationship between art and entertainment, the image of the artist, the tradition of the American maverick, the photographic, the documentary, hierarchies and categorisation, talent, context, curating, fetishism, visual pleasure, optimism....

On 12 January 2002, 4 - 9pm, David Robbins will be present at the gallery to host an Ice Cream Social, followed by a symposium on his pursuit of High Entertainment. Simple confections and light theatrical gestures will be offered for the enjoyment of all who choose to attend. Afterwards, guest speakers - among them David Robbins; writer and critic, Michael Archer; artist and writer, Padraig Timoney; artist, writer and curator at Cubitt, Polly Staple - will address aspects of the artist's achievement to date.

David Robbins and Cubitt have collaborated with Black Diamond Press on the production of a limited edition poster The Frontiersman, which will be available free at the gallery throughout the duration of the show.

David Robbins has had more than two dozen solo exhibitions of his work in the United States and Europe, and participated in many group exhibitions. He is the author of four books - The Ice Cream Social (1998), The Dr Frankenstein Option (1993), Foundation Papers from the Archives of the Institute for Advanced Comedic Behavior (1992), and The Camera Believes Everything (1998) - as well as numerous essays, interviews and satires. Currently residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the U.S., he is Assistant Professor in the graduate writing programme at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is his first solo exhibition in Great Britain.

Opening hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6pm
Please note the gallery is closed 22 December 2001 - 4 January 2002

Cathy Wilkes

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:39:17 +0100

"There is an area, at which art and life intersect, which becomes physically present in Scottish artist Cathy Wilkes' carefully constructed installation Mister So And So,... It is a panoramic installation, full of delicate hints and fragile signs of courtship, dreams and projection, assumptions and knowledge... With a logic of her own, scepticism, and minimal means, her sculptures consist of found, thrown-away and neglected objects, furniture, from which she produces her own poetic and ambiguous narratives... Cryptic, but with their improvised 'povera' - charm oddly timeless, the single pieces assume the characters in a complex narrative of individuals and relationships." -Angela Rosenberg, Flash Art, May/June 2001

For her solo exhibition at Cubitt, London Cathy Wilkes has made a large tableau of furniture, still life, fabric collage, linear wood sculptures and paintings.

A Cathy Wilkes publication, designed by Cathy Wilkes, Jorn Bortnagel and Yvonne Quirmbach and produced by The Modern Institute, Glasgow shall be launched at Cubitt on the opening night.

Cathy Wilkes shall be talking about her work at Cubitt on Saturday October 20th at 4pm.

Cathy Wilkes' recent solo exhibitions include: Transmission, Glasgow and Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin (both 2001); Cathy Wilkes lives and works in Glasgow and is a member of the art and music group 'Elizabeth Go'.

Jack Goldstein

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:57:34 +0100

A one-night screening of Jack Goldstein films; a selection of ten short 16mm films from the period 1974-1978, including The Jump, MGM and Some Butterflies. Jack Goldstein (b. Montreal, 1945, lives in Los Angeles) has worked with sculpture, performance, film, sound, photography and painting. A contemporary of artists David Lamales, Allen Ruppersberg, Michael Asher and John Baldessari, his films from the 70s are highly influential investigations of durational performance, minimalist construction and the conventions of Hollywood movie making. The films will be shown at Cubitt according to Goldstein's specific installation design - a rectangular white projection space set within a red painted wall; emphasising the flickering, hallucinatory effect of the slight, performative actions.

`A 16mm film is projected onto a white rectangle in the centre of a garishly painted red wall. At first the image is black, then a figure appears, assembled from abstract, luminous red, jewel-like details. It performs a somersault and disappears. A new figure emerges, traces the same leap in another direction, and then it too dissolves. The red crystals that outline the body fly apart and fade into a swath of light. This scene lasts for 16 seconds. The Jump (1978) is a vision of inane euphoria and innocent abandon, illuminated by a brief flare of decadence. It's easy to forget how skillfull the artist's manipulations are: like a self-propelled Romantic archetype, the film seems to animate itself.' - Anke Kempkes, Frieze 2000.

Jack Goldstein's recent solo exhibitions include: Artists Space, New York; 1301PE, Los Angeles (both 2001); Galerie Buchholz, Köln (2000). A selection of Goldstein's Portfolio of Performances (1976-1985) were included in the recent exhibition 'Sound and Vision', ICA, London (July, 2001).

A Cubitt event in collaboration with Afterall and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln.

Issue 4 of Afterall - journal of art, context and enquiry (July 2001) features the artists Jack Goldstein, Lily van der Stokker, Thomas Struth, Cerith Wyn Evans and Frances Stark; their work reflects in different ways on the term `wonder' as both a miraculous phenomenon and speculative endeavour. Afterall is published biannually by Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design; copies will be available on the night. For further information about Afterall please contact Emily Pethick: +44 (0)20 7514 8173, e.pethick@csm.linst.ac.uk

Urban Islands

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:05:47 +0100

Akademie Isotrop and Klat

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:11:50 +0100

Time Table

Jochen Klein

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:27:42 +0100

Jochen Klein (1967-1997) paints landscapes that take the viewer on a cruise filled with visual seduction and polymorphous adventures. Klein shows us an alternative present that is not threatening. His paintings are a map that we can play with in order to imagine ourselves somewhere else. One cannot simply look at Jochen Klein's paintings because one always and already looks out of them.

In relation to this exhibition, CUBITT presents a billboard project by Group Material. Jochen Klein was a member of Group Material from 1994-96.

The exhibition was accompanied by a book: Jochen Klein; edited by Wolfgang Tillmans, with contributions by Doug Ashford and Helmut Draxler published by Walter Konig, Cologne. The book is available during the exhibition for £12.

Do You Really Want It That Much?...More

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:35:45 +0100

How are art spaces projected in mainstream cinema? What does cinema want to tell us about the function of these spaces? Why does the cinematic representation of museums and galleries differ so much from the real? The video-sampler 'Do you really want it that much ? ... More!' explores manifestations of art spaces as sites of sex, crime, comedy, and corporate play among others. This sampler produces a network of recurring themes and transformations that challenges established notions of museum and gallery going.

How is it that James Stewart gets a free catalogue?
Why does Clifton Webb regard something as 'stiff as a sculpture' not worth collecting?
How can a Jackson Pollock fuck up Woody Allen's date?
Will Pepe le Pew ever catch his 'object of art'?

In 'heist' movies such as 'How To Steal A Million' the museum is presented as an impregnable glittering fortress only to be reduced to a self-service shop window for the master criminal's picking. These films subvert the museum's function as custodian of the priceless cultural artefact. Does the sanctified space of the museum provide the perfect setting for anti-social behaviour only on film?

In many films the love of art is intermingled with the love of flesh. As in 'Pleasure Seekers' art spaces seem to provide the perfect stalking ground for sexual predators stimulated by the act of looking. With art spaces transformed into meeting places does the love of the object and the love object become irretrievably blurred?

Does Audrey Hepburn 'really want it that much ? ...More!'

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:43:42 +0100

Jeff Luke

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:48:00 +0100

Cubitt presents a survey exhibition of work by Jeff Luke, who died in 1995 aged 33.

With the logic of inevitability Jeff Luke's art mutates the machine-made goods of urban culture into new hybrid forms. Combining the associative drift of unconscious thought processes with a near-promiscuous approach to materials, the work invites the participation of the viewer: we consider its origins and speculate on possible applications, alternating between past and future tenses.

Making Apparent, Doing Nothing, Use - three titles map out a scenario of potential function denied, of desire excited then frustrated. Associations multiply. 800 small objects sealed in plastic bags anticipate a future archaeology. 300 household fluids, removed from the homes of the artist's friends, are a portrait of a community tied to consumption. 100 sculptures strewn across a gallery floor suggest both obsession and boredom, polar responses to the disorientating volume of information in circulation.

Recalling the earlier enquiries of Minimal and post-Minimal practice, this work implicitly negotiates the "thing in itself" stance of the assisted readymade, and calls instead for the presence of the viewer to activate it - either physically or conceptually. In this light, the humorous allusions to bodily function and need go beyond anthropomorphism, inviting a more complex involvement with these imagined technologies.

Jeff Luke was born in Hartlepool in 1962. He studied at Cleveland College of Art and
Byam Shaw School of Art, and subsequently worked in London. Group exhibitions included;
Inside a microcosm, Laure Genillard Gallery; Imprint 93 Cabinet Gallery and City Racing;
Now Wash Your Hands, Arnolfini. Jeff Luke's work can also be seen in
Lovecraft at CCA, Glasgow from June 14th 1997.

Multiple Choice

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:51:43 +0100

Fabienne Audéoud, Keith Farquar, Jochen Klein, Bernd Krauß, Mike Marshall
(selected by Silke Otto-Knapp)

Phil Allen, Jenny Greep, Jefferson Smith, Soda
(selected by Adrian Jones)

Billy Childish, Matthew Donovan, Stewart Home, Inventory, Amikam Toren, Christopher Warmington
(selected by Matthew Higgs)

Richard Clegg, Greg Fisher, Hilary Lloyd, Dawn Mellor, Ian Vail
(selected by Sadie Murdoch)

Steve Glynn, Paul Hodgeson
(selected by David Williams)

Multiple Choice is, in part, an attempt to reveal the individual dynamics of the members of Cubitt's gallery committee.

Five of the current six incumbents each selected a number of artists whom they wished to exhibit, their selections being made with little or no concern for their colleagues choices.

The resultant 'group' exhibition has been hung collaboratively, in order to make some kind of sense from otherwise disparate material.

I dig KX

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:20:04 +0100

Second and third year students from London's Architectural Association have been digging about in King's Cross. "… temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcasses of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks… a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream." That was Dickens describing the coming of the railroad to the area in Dombey and Son 150 years ago. It could also be King's Cross now, as it anticipates another grand arrival — the railway to Europe.

Such large scale projects breed statistical data on passenger flow, consumer habits and economic viability which "grasp the material of our everyday practices, but not their form; or the 'phrasing' produced by the bricolage and discursiveness which combine them" (to quote from de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life) "Statistical inquiry 'finds' only the homogeneous". The exhibition is presented in the form of a large model of the railway lands. It combines a reading of the domestic, commuter and industrial phrases ingrained in the gritty material reality that is King's Cross, with the writing of visionary briefs for her imminent future.

Drawing on Tschumi's typological displacements — crossprogramming and disprogramming — and applying the principles of Roget's Thesaurus to generate a discourse between context and definition, generalisation and particularisation, students of Sector VI make public their work in progress. Work concerned with possibilities of a 25 year architectural urbanism; a provisional, particular urbanism of lightweight economies and precarious scales.

I love KX is a collective work investigating the abstract relations among things, space, the material world, the intellect, volition and the palimpsest of our affections by Chiara Bersi Serlini, Nicholas Boas, Sam Britton, Reem Charif, Matthew Collins, Martha Giannakopoulou, Takako Hasegawa, Aud Koht, Martand Khosla, Alex Lau, Yoash Oster, Remco Rolvink and Greg Sheng.

The exhibition has been made possible through the support of the artists from Cubitt Gallery, as part of an ongoing educational remit. Cubitt remains dedicated to bringing contemporary artistic practice to the heart of the city in this, their third King's Cross home in the past five years. I love KX is curated by Catherine du Toit, Peter Thomas and Richard Wentworth, Sector VI @ the Architectural Association. Typographic and digital assistance from Andrew Gibbs and Geoffrey Makstutis.

Shift

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:23:09 +0100

Sally Barker, Peter Land, Raimund Luckwald, Tobias Gerber, Bernadette Schwering.

For its forthcoming project 'Shift' Cubitt Gallery has invited the German writer and editor Gregor Schwering to curate an exhibition. This will be the third in a series of exhibitions featuring the work of young European artists and curators. Raimund Luckwald, Tobias Gerber and Bernadette Schwering live and work in Cologne, Peter Land in Copenhagen and London and Sally Barker in London.

The idea of the transformation of the self within its experience of reality is relevant to the practise of the artists in the exhibition. If the subject is never totally itself and the reality is not a real one either, what impact does that have on the artists perception of the outside and how is that reflected in the artistic production?

Peter Land shows a video of himself stripping in his living room, dancing to tacky disco music; Schwering shows a slide installation featuring herself both naked and dressed up at the same time, turning the dress as a strong image of power into a metaphor for its opposite. To escape from all this Sally Barker invents an alter Ego called Teela, a strong figure from outer space; the subject dresses up in order to create expectations that allow it to execute power by means of the disguise. Raimund Luckwalds drawings refer to that peculiar internal malice possessed by the object. Again and again it withdraws from its one-dimensionality and reveals its ambivalence. The viewer is confronted with a surface which transports the lack of a consistent reality. Tobias Gerbers installation based on Fibonaccis mathematic insights insists on the same point. He shows that even a mathematical structure is not what it seems to be.

On Friday the 7th February special guest Andreas Schlaegel will sing Elvis songs.

Andreas Schlaegel lives in London and has exhibted and performed in Austria,Germany and Denmark. He is a regular act at Paul Chan's Gracelands Palace, Old Kent Road, London.

Ground Plans for Paradise

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:29:02 +0100

Quarterlight, The Workstation, Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 4SP
25th-29th November,1996.

Ground Plans for Paradise conjures a vast imaginary city using model buildings, street indexes and photography. The project draws on the reality of city life and on the utopian dreams which urban spaces can inspire. Using 1,000 balsa wood tower blocks each lit from inside, it creates an abandoned Metropolis which viewers are asked to fill: imagining the lives, people and stories that might belong there. This deserted space-inhabited, or dreamed perhaps by the sleeping figures in Hugo Glendinnings' photographs which surround the models-features the names of places and of streets from both real and fantastic cities.

Forced Entertainment is based in Sheffield and in the last ten years has become internationally respected for its brash performance vision that mixes high and low tech, bitterness and poetry. The group is continually involved with cross disciplinary practice; moving from performance towards installation, site specific, works for radio and television broadcast. Hugo Glendinning is an arts photographer who has documented and collaborated of contemporary arts and performance practitioners — from Cornelia Parker and Anne Griffin to Mark Wallinger and Nigel Charnock. Glendinning has worked closely with the company since 1986, creating photographs and documenting performances. their previous installation collaboration, Red Room broke attendance records at The Showroom Gallery, London featured on the cover of Academy Editions recent Art and Design issue, Performance Art.

Ground Plans for Paradise concerns itself with the relationship between the real and the imaginary-with the 'fantastic' space of a huge model city which nonetheless points us back, in numerous ways, to the 'real' cities in which we live day by day. Its girded photographs of sleeping figures evoke both the state of dreaming and an angelic unworldliness-a human experience that is both ordinary and extraordinary. What to make, in this jumbled, evocative city, for example, of a building named after Mellor and De Sanchez, or of a street called New Coronation Street? What kinds of lives might be lead in The Suicide Building, what kind of exhibitions might be held in The Museum of Love and Drunkenness, and what kind of crowds may gather on Esperanto Place?

Ground Plans for Paradise was originally commissioned by Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery & Studio Theatre.

These Days

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:32:59 +0100

Phatfuctinsanepervert

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:39:17 +0100

There are plenty of obvious similarities between skate culture
and contemporary art, not least that both are somewhere out on the
margins of society as a whole. If you were in the business of making
comparisons you could maybe add obscure, complex, ironic, tribal, male-
dominated, acutely aware of their own short histories and tending to
alienate the uninitiated. Everybody knows that street culture is post-
modernism live and uncut, appropriating, recycling, spontaneously
generating new forms from the debris of the old. It's the glamorous
differences though, not the similarities that have meant that street art
in its many forms has been eagerly assimilated by the gallery world, and
its iconography and language have influenced a generation of artists
for whom the street is, more often than not, just something you walk
down on the way to a private view. Skatewear is currently the look of
choice for the switched-on boys of Glasgow and the art scene is no
exception - Stüssy gear, Pervert T-shirts and beaten-up Vans abound on
the dance floor at Glasgow School of Art. It's also primarily American
and Glasgow as a city often looks across the Atlantic for inspiration, an
activity made more attractive to many Scots as it involves turning one's
back on London.

The point is that ISPFP is, surprisingly, a temporary reversal of the
usual cultural flow - an island in the stream, an island on the street.
There's a low-key feeling to the whole event and the twelve artists
involved (only one of whom skateboards, you guess which) don't seem to
be making a collective bid for street-credibility. It's taking place in
Concrete Skates, a smart skateboard shop which also sells clothing,
shoes, shades and so on and there are plenty of decks on display,
casually arranged on racks and shelves so that the underside is visible-
the side that shows in all those photos of skaters in mid-air, pulling off
their best tricks, and where just about every board in the world is
painted, or screen-printed, or somehow customised. A dozen of those
here have been customised by the artists and they have a much stronger
kinship with their makers' previous work than with the commercial
skate designs around them, designs which have mostly been handed
down to the market from the boards of real, live pro skaters. These
have a constantly developing language of their own, and an important
part of skate culture is the idea of authenticity , living the life.

Although skate art and fashion is notoriously eclectic and punk rock,
hip-hop, heavy metal, op-art, nineties corporate logos and seventies cop
movies have all gone into the mix at some point, there's a vibe going
down, particular allegiances being expressed. In contrast , the custom
boards produced by the artists ignore the conventions, which means
both that they're more inventive, more varied than the others and that
as outsiders their skate-world status remains in doubt.

This doesn't mean they all look out of place: Toby Webster's
Scotchlite rendering of an iconic modern hi-fi, Jim Lambie's chrome
veneered deck, Richard Wright's repeated skull motif and even Martin
Boyce's screenprinted text contrasting shootings in two different cities
could all be taken for neat, desirable examples of the genre they're
usurping, at least if the artists' boards weren't distinguished by their
lack of price tags. Martin McDonald's goth-punk inscription 'mutiny' is
at the DIY end of the same territory.

The underlying difference in attitude is more obvious from the
other contributions. Jeremy Deller's, for example, is a home-made
explosive device (manufactured by US artist Gregory Green) attached to
the underside of a board , making skating impossible and alluding both
to terrorist car bombs and to the ultimate trick move, vertical take-off;
Jonnie Wilkes has employed a sign-writer to letter '54 glorious nudes' in
yellow on black enamel, a tactic which time-warps the finished article
straight back to the fifties, the genesis of skateboarding and pop
art; David Shrigley's paranoiac hand-written text lets you know that
'even though you are an immeasurably tiny speck of shit, your every
movement is still being monitored (and found repulsive by those
employed to do so)' ; Jonathan Monk can't resist a good one-liner and
applies abrasive grip-tape on the wrong side- lighting a cigarette and
stubbing it out there for good measure- while Cathy Wilkes, Toby
Patterson and Victoria Morton have all treated the board simply as a
flat space on which to continue working out their own ongoing
aesthetic concerns.

The desire to get out of the gallery, escape the codes and get
plugged in to the life of society is a recurrent theme in contemporary
art and it usually ends in tears. ISPFP works because it never tries to get
its knee-pads on and jump breeze-blocks in the underpass, it doesn't
make an issue of the situation, just uses it to let the artists involved
explore new possibilities in their own work. This is a low-risk strategy
and so the returns are not spectacular, but it's still more adventurous in
its laid-back way than many more formulaic projects which have
attempted similar things. Once this is over, the artists' skateboards will
travel south to occupy a white gallery space somewhere in London, and
things might be different there.

Dinner

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:45:03 +0100

A Small Shifting Sphere of Serious Culture

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:48:57 +0100

John Stezaker

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:51:03 +0100

Virginia

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:54:29 +0100

The ear is both a receptacle for sound as well as a means of transferring data to be processed internally. The four artists in this exhibition address the possibility of sound or the suggestion of sound as the fundamental issue at stake in a work of art.

This shared concern has resulted in a collaborative sound piece emanating from a speaker system throughout the gallery. Bernard Herman's score, which was used to accompany an elevator in the film 'North by North-West', serves to create a tense ambience and a sense of expectation on the stairs into the gallery. The Hitchcock film has been left behind, but its mood is allowed to prevail. Similarly, Nicholas Bolton's video installation, called 'Judd Use' takes up from the last known whereabouts of a Judd sculpture. The echoes of footfalls from the museum in which the Judd sculpture was last exhibited form the soundtrack for this film. Are we able to receive the technological information that his space user ( or is it a sonar device? ) potentially collates? Stewart Wilson's 'Touch Wood' might well provide a tinnitus-free zone.. However, the set of headphones contained in his 'room for one' booth provides further blows to one's ears.
The whirring of fans ushers in the touching of fingertips during Jaime Petrach's painfully intimate piece. These office fans stimulate the still, projected images of hands into a cinematic narrative for the unexpected juxtaposition of commonplace objects.

Expectations rise and fall with the sound of applause in Niamh McCann's double slide projection. Intermittent pauses function like the ear itself positing silence as the strongest motor for sound. The pivotal image is that of a chess game being played. The human scale of the playing pieces, reminiscent of an episode of 'The Prisoner' in which lives are lost rather than pieces taken, provides further disquiet in an atmosphere of fluctuating moods.

The channels of communication are all open and await the correct response. It's your move next!

Speaking of Sofas

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:57:37 +0100

Stuck With It

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:00:04 +0100

Liesbeth Bik, Tacita Dean, Peter Fillingham, Jos van der Pol

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:02:52 +0100

From November 24th to December 17th 1995 Cubitt Gallery presents the work of four artists. Liesbeth Bik, Peter Fillingham and Jos van der Pol are showing three works created in collaboration. Tacita Dean will be making a series of blackboard drawings.

Bik, Fillingham and van der Pol are interested in the development of an appropriate medium which realises works of art arriving collectively from notions of interaction and collaboration. The works developed during Peter Fillingham's stay at the guest studio of the Duende studio complex, Rotterdam. At Cubitt Gallery they will exhibit The Kitchen Piece, The Shower Piece and a ceiling made for the gallery office.

The Kitchen Piece is a copy of the kitchen in the living space of Jos van der Pol at the Duende studio complex. The other two works consist of a replica of a personal shower created for an ongoing project in Rotterdam, "Rest", and a replica of a plaster ceiling from a bar in Rotterdam. The three works bring with them the situation and context of their origin thus implying an imaginary line between London and Rotterdam.

Tacita Dean makes large scale blackboard drawings to document an imaginary film scenario. She uses both the languages of film and drawing to describe a cinematic space, travelling from one drawing to another as you might move through an action movie, from establishing shot to close-up, still to finale. The drawings work not only with this cinematic time from one board to another, but with the real time involved in the actual process of drawing itself, and the history of the lines left behind.

Just Do It.

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:05:18 +0100

Paul Noble: work from 1993-1995

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:07:20 +0100

Billy Childish: big hart and balls

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:09:13 +0100

Television

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:12:29 +0100

Television - viewing from afar, two channels............ Andie Wilkinson and Elizabeth Wright.

Poisoned, contaminated, a bottled water scare. The Americans won't drink European
water since Chernobyl. An ecological wasteland, the flickering of the artificial that is an excited gas, a fluorescent light fixture with bad nerves twitching uncontrollably. Andie Wilkinson uses the neurotic brightness of day-glo coloured plastic as a sign of the toxic, unnatural and unforgiving. A landscape painter for the nineties. She shows our fragility as we are grouped like insects and literally pinned to the wall as specimens. A trolley as waste disposal unit becomes a viral seascape of sand and detergent. Shelves of coffee and powdered milk piled like a snow capped mountain range. Spore, cake-like fragments become islands on the floor that is the sea. With imaginative and deceptively simplistic combinations of quiet materials Wilkinson creates a whole world similar in feeling to the reading of tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Perhaps tragic at times but always tinged with humour. Remember what the dormouse said.

No thanks I'll smoke my own. Imagine smoking a whole pack at once, chewing a stick of gum the size of a table, trying to get into a tent that can only accommodate one foot. These feelings of anxiety combined with perceptual dizziness experienced when viewing Elizabeth Wright's work makes for a psychological thriller. The 'twilight zone' meets 'Psycho' meets 'Bed Knobs and Broom Sticks'. Disney would have signed her up. The incredible shrinking woman, what a witch; by reducing the size of a London business pages phone book she manages to wipe off 30% of the value off the shares, reduces British Telecom's printing costs, saves trees, lowers inflation, helps you to enter a fiction. She sneaks up on us under a cloak of invisibility that the use of the everyday, the mundane, discarded and unworthy affords her. The simple but affective strategy for her is that size is everything. She makes objects the way other people make photographs, makes fun of perceived reality . The why? word keeps jumping up and whispering delicately in your ear for the power is not only the visual skill, the surrogate made real, it is the subtlety, the conceptual shock that her ambush leaves you with. Feed your head.

A confirmation of the forthcoming century change, you've just entered mind fuck country. Please do not adjust your set.

GIORGIO SADOTTI

Material Evidence

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:15:57 +0100

Three sculptors, whose work shares a common richness of texture, chosen for the walls of Cubitt Street Gallery. Reliefs and sculptures exploiting the material of the world around. Work that is neither on the ground, nor free-standing, but which emphasises its relationship to the gallery walls which in Cubitt Street mark out the fragile interior space from the studios behind.

These works quote from the texture of common experience and give concrete form to anonymous elements that pass unnoticed. They re-formulate the plasticity of vegetable, mineral or architectural structure. As sculpture they set up a formal logic which they also undermine.

Stephen Elson has cast reliefs in resin. They operate in the shallow but suggestive space between painting and sculpture, and refer to the perception and interpretation of visual information. Tina O'Connell's works are extracted from the fabric of the gallery, components fitted out to their own specifications in customized carriers which exploit the subliminal associations of the look of materials. Andrew Sabin interweaves cosmetic and authentic functions within the look and the structure of each of his sculptures. Their dense texturologies suggest a world of heightened richness which is necessarily both natural and artificial.

This work is full of matter. In contrast to the current tendency towards the insubstantial and the casual, these works are made. They have body, weight and memory. They provide material evidence of the way the world is put together.

This show has been selected by Penelope Curtis at the invitation of Cubitt Street Gallery.

Billy Childish

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:18:02 +0100

Ida Applebroog

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:20:56 +0100

Organised and presented by the Orchard Gallery,Londonderry (with support from Zwemmer Art Books and the Orchard Gallery)

Having previously worked in the areas of performance, sculpture and film, Ida Applebroog has concentrated on making paintings since 1974. This exhibition includes selected earlier works juxtaposed with her recent sequence of free-standing and arranged paintings, the 'MARGINALIA' series of 1991. The selection of work also includes her seminal film, 'BELLADONNA', a collaborative project by Applebroog and Beth B, her daughter . Applebroog deals with contemporary sensibilities of disaffection, rejection, humiliation and what amounts to the near breakdown of communication in our society.

Ida Applebroog was born in 1929, she lives and works in her native city New York. She is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Inc, N.Y. The artist was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990 and she accepted the Milton Avery Professorship at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York for the 1991-92 academic year.

Her work is represented in many private, and major public collections world-wide including:

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, N.Y.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.
Australia National Gallery, Sydney, Australia.

Recent solo exhibitions include:

The Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, touring to the Irish Museum of modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin, and Cubitt Street Gallery, Clerkenwell, London.
The Weatherspoon Art Gallery, North Carolina, U.S.A. and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

"Applebroog's key significance may lie in the new impetus she has given painting...she moves with disorientating facility from cartoonish story-board drawings to rich sensuality...when an artist is similtaneously passionate, skilful, funny and clever, somebody, somewhere ought surely to take notice."
   — Charles Hall, Art Monthly, November 1993.

"I'm conducting a cultural anatomy of what makes us miserable today."
   — Ida Applebroog.

"These paintings of the dark side are simultaneously witty, horrific, disturbing, comic, perverse, sensible, entertaining, and apocalyptic. Casting an eerie light on civilization's follies, they find a match of style and substance as affecting in their ownway as Leon Golub's. Applebroog's discontents are aimed as the violence (sexual and otherwise) in the human heart, a subject that should give her enough material for a lifetime."
   — Kay Larson, New York, Nov. 9 1987.

"These are pictures about the politics of contemporary life - about loneliness, helplessness, power, sexuality, the nuclear threat, the vulnerability of children - and the themes are woven together in tapestries fraught with irony." "This is an age where people are dying without aging,"she says, referring to the Aids epidemic, "and others are aging without dying", speaking of her mother, who lost her ability to function long before she died, at 91.
   — Ruth Bass, Art News.

"Applebroog's work is sweet and nasty, but the sweet never apologises for the nasty. Rejecting various media strategies of the 80s, the painter uses paint to tell stories from real life."
   — Elizabeth Hess, Village Voice, Nov. 19 1991.

"Ida Applebroog has mounted an exhibition that scrutinizes the dark side of American life while also pushing at the possibilities of painting. These 'marginalia' as the artist collectively titles them include a painting of an over-weight man tottering on a child's tiny scooter; it stands near a canvas that depicts a seemingly handicapped girl who eats by holding a spoon with her foot. The two images - the first ridiculing the powerful, the second rooting for the vunerable - are quintessential Applebroog. So is the way the emotional and interpretive tables can turn, with the scooter rider suddenly seeming the vulnerable pathetic figure, the child the one who is capable and in control. Ms Applebroog....is a moralist who does not judge, but merely presents different events and allows her viewers to draw their own conclusions, all according to their individual sympathies and demons."
   — Roberta Smith, New York Times, Nov 1 1991.

Crosscurrents - Duch Exchange

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:24:57 +0100

Crosscurrents - Duch Exchange

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:23:27 +0100

Gunter Förg: The Threat of Serenity

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:29:44 +0100

As part of the European Arts Festival 1992, Oriel Mostyn has organised the first major exhibition in the U.K. and Ireland of the internationally known German artist Günther Förg. Born in Füssen, Germany in 1952, Förg now lives and works in Areuse, Switzerland. Cubitt Street artists are pleased to present his first London solo show. The exhibition will continue its tour travelling on to the Musée des Beaux Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

The Threat of Serenity includes paintings, wall painting, photographs, bronze wall-reliefs and stelae which together form an installation.

" .....[Förg's] ability to lyrically recollect old tradition makes him one of the leading artists of his generation. When he began working, classic modernism was coming to a close. While other young artists entered into a speculative adventure which I would call art-as-commentary, he was not prepared to give up image-making in the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. The way forward he decided, was paradoxically to go back and establish a rapport with older tradition. He understood that such a rapport should be established via the best of modernist art which was abstract art. In that he succeeded brilliantly."
Rudi Fuchs

A 72 page case-bound book accompanies the exhibition, including 24 colour plates with an introduction by Rudi Fuchs, Director of the Haags Gemeentemuseum and an extensive essay by John Hutchinson, Director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery. The publication has been sponsored by Gustav Ernstmeier Gmbh, Germany suppliers of fine book cloth and is printed on an environmentally sensitive material - Zanders' Ikonofix Special-Matt Chlorfrei, 170 gsm, supplied by John Heyer Paper Ltd.

This exhibition has been brought to London with the support of IFA Stuttgart. The project has been funded by visiting arts, A.C.G.B. International Initiatives Fund, Welsh Development Agency, European Arts Festival Fund, MOMART and the Institute of Cultural Affairs, Stuttgart.

Title to Come - French Exchange

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:32:27 +0100

Homebase

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:35:01 +0100

To Boldly Go

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:37:45 +0100

Curators should be shot, they say, Artists could do better themselves. Weary of cheap abuse, an over-sensitive critic decides to get his own back. First he picks up the telephone just long enough to invite three young painters to show at Cubitt Street. Instead of visiting their studios, he gives them directions to the space and the time to arrive. There they find paint and primed canvases. From that moment, they will have two weeks to make large works, which will be hung an hour before the opening. Their only instructons will be to go for broke. Can punk curating produce masterpieces? All will be revealed in To Boldly Go.

Trapped in a vortex of self-referentiality, JASON BROOKS only appropiates already appropiated images. Though photographs make them seem demure, in reality LAURA DALY'S brushstrokes look like J.P. Hartley on acid. What was CHRIS OFILI doing selling elephant dung in a Berlin market?

Stuart Morgan is old enough to know better. William Shatner is threatening to sue. See what happens on Wednesday the 12th of May 6-9pm at the Cubitt Street Gallery.

Making People Disappear

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:39:44 +0100

Strictly Painting

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:41:47 +0100