Rubbish

Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 14-16 February 2014

Part 3/5

Saturday morning was spent digesting the literature while Toby napped: Supermarket exhibition catalogue and magazine (Issue #4). One side lists the exhibitors as the catalogue part and on the flip side there’s more of a contextual geopolitical narrative as the magazine part. I read the short interviews with a couple of the various nationalities represented at the 2014 fair. The interviewer Izabella Borzecka, project coordinator at Supermarket, asks each interviewee: What values are given priority in the arts sector in your country?, Which values do you think should be prioritized?, and, Do you think it will be changed in the near, or far, future? This article, entitled Differences, was probably my favourite part of the catalogue/magazine; illuminating each interviewee’s perspective on the same or similar global and country-specific issues facing the arts in their countries. It was just a shame that each exhibitor did not feature in the article but with so many that would’ve been a publication in itself.

After lunch on Saturday I headed back up to Supermarket by myself to get some quality fair time. I had a more in depth chat with the South Africans and they told me about the Meetings programme that exhibitors could sign up for; a mediated series of conversations that formally networked the selected exhibitors (exhibitors had proposed ideas/exhibitions to the fair and been selected/curated). I’d also given them a newspaper previously and asked if they’d had a chance to look through it. They said they liked it very much and particularly the Shrigley drawing, comparing the drawing styles. They had a book for sale themselves at SEK300 which was very nice but a bit pricey for my budget. Their project involved documenting the local Cape Town scrap collectors’ trolleys and the processes at the recycling plant through photography and video. The photographs were titled with the latitude and longitude coordinates wherethey found and without the owner/collector in the frame (to not make them the spectacle, they said). It reminded me a little of Simona da Pozzo’s film Exclave we showed in Fundada Artists’ Film Festival 2011 with the geographical mapping aspect.

Upstairs on the fifth floor I saw some large flowers made out of newspaper in the Ormston House, Limerick booth. I thought it would be good to talk about newspapers with the artist/gallery and asked the guy manning the booth about them. It turned out they were actually cabbages made on archival paper in workshops with specific local groups, with photocopied political articles, by Alan Phelan. He was sat at the Oonagh Young Gallerybooth and I went and had a good chat with him and Oonagh about newspapers, Supermarket and the Irish and Manchester art scenes. The notion of copying came up, photocopying and copyright and the wider subject of representation. Oonagh was interested in the price and quality of printing, and we agreed it was quite pricey at £5.55 per paper but it had been the best quote I could find online for such a small run. She said the quality was pretty good but small, independent printers can often do very good prices and mentioned one local to her in Dublin for future reference. They also said it was a substantial newspaper and piece of research, although it didn’t feel too heavy/weighty. I said it had taken a fair few months to put together which Alan laughed and said only a few months?

We also talked about the professionalism of the fair and also that the whole secretive nature of the after parties was a bit strange. The pretence of exclusivity just didn’t sit comfortably. But the level of organisation, selection of exhibitors and the atmosphere in general were great. They also told me about the Irish Embassy promising several cases of Guinness as 3 Irish galleries were presenting at Supermarket, but the delivery had fail to arrive for the party! I told Allan and Oonagh about my vague idea to sit at Paper Gallery’s booth atallotted times and invite people to talk rubbish with me and Allan pointed out that our meandering conversation could constitute rubbish!

Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 14-16 February 2014

Part 2/5

Friday, and Valentine’s day, I went with Matt and Toby to the Moderna Museet which just so happened to be free entry to celebrate Valentine’s. The was a Gabriel Orozco show Natural Motion on but no rubbish on display. There was also an exhibition Dance Machines: From Léger to Kraftwerk which had a 3-D Kratwerk installation and in another gallery a ceramic tiled floor by Christodoulos Panayiotou made with Mediterranean seawater. The best part of the visit was I discovered Klara Lidén – a Stockholm street artist, inspired by the architecture of the city; placing bins in the gallery setting as well as making poster paintings and more ephemeral earlier works such as a postbox in Stockholm from which she hand delivered mail on her bicycle. For her solo show at the Serpentine in 2010, she exhibited Unheimlich Manöver (2007), everything in the artist’s apartment.

Serpentine’s blurb says, “Trained as an architect, Lidén has described her built structures as ‘un-building, re-cycling or improvising new uses for what’s already been set up’. Her public actions raise ‘the question of re-appropriating privatized, urban space… with the body, its ways of moving and the temporalities it engages’. Recalling a long history of performance art and conceptual work, Lidén reveals the hidden aggression and potential rebellion that rests under the surface of our cities and their inhabitants. Using pre-existing materials and often herself as the protagonist, she plays with ideas of violence, inner tension and disaffection using simple strategies and objects readily to hand. In an attempt to de-programme our behaviour and subvert our experience of everyday life, Lidén disrupts our shared and accepted social norms with a focused, radical energy.”

I bought the Moderna Museet exhibition book of her work from the book shop for SEK150 (£15ish) which was in both Swedish and English. Turns out she had won the Friends of Moderna Sculpture Award 2013 which has a SEK300,000 prize. Her show at the Moderna Museet doesn’t seem to be listed on the website, so it feels like a very serendipitous find, particularly as on the way to the museum I photographed one of the city bins on the waterfront (something I’ve taken to doing on holiday/festival/research trips as a kind of postcard).

In the afternoon, we took Toby to the fair and had a good look around. It’s a different perspective taking a baby around an exhibition, especially as I ghost write his blog, I’m paying attention to what he’s paying attention to. After a busy day, he tired quickly so we headed back to the apartment, but I had spotted a couple of rubbish-related artworks to revisit on Saturday and aim to exchange rubbish talk with the exhibitors.

Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 14-16 February 2014

Part 1/5

With my rubbish newspapers hot of the press, I flew to Stockholm to begin distribution at Supermarket Art Fair with Paper Gallery. I got there in time for the preview and piled the papers up on the floor underneath the video loop which also included two of my videos Brown Paper Bag Box and Static. My two main objectives attending the fair were to obtain direct feedback on my newspaper and to network (the specific funding that paid for my flight and half of the accommodation was from the University of Huddersfield’s International Networking Fund). As the preview started to get busy, I soon realised that anyone picking up my newspaper was quickly scanning through it and taking it to read later as there was much to see, so I took a look around too.

The fair was housed in the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern across the length of the third floor and half of the fifth. Other floors had cinemas, a library and cafe bars and a restaurant. Paper Gallery was on the third floor opposite a Japanese gallery representing outsider art. The fair showcases artist-run initiatives; galleries, studio groups and some groups without a physical base, from various locations from Scandinavia and Europe as well as the US, Georgia, Albania, South Africa, Syria, Egypt, Australia and more. The variety of projects was impressive. Many took the standard gallery fair model and had samples of represented artists for sale (often as artist-run initiatives they were representing themselves). Others took more interactive approaches with some performances too.

I found the preview a bit odd. Maybe due to the day of travelling or maybe that I hadn’t been to a preview in absolutely ages! There were people coming to support their friends and lots of people with very cool glasses presumably local art crowd types. The preview wasn’t really made public and presumably invite only, but then everyone was permitted entrance (on the public opening days there was a charge of SEK120 for one day pass – roughly £12). The bar was extortionately priced and the exhibitors had their own booze that would be given out to important people. So nothing strange there. The exhibitors had mainly been around installing for the days prior to opening and had maybe had a chance to meet each other briefly, but I didn’t sense there was much interaction going on between them (yet). People seemed a bit apprehensive, standing by their respective booths waiting expectantly for visitors to look, talk and maybe buy. I don’t know any Swedish, or the other mainly Scandinavian languages being spoken, so it was difficult to eavesdrop what was being said. I did have a good chat with Simon and David at Paper Gallery and a quick chat with the artist studio group Atlantic House from Cape Town who had made a recycling documentary project specifically for the fair, but after a while I decided to come back on Friday afternoon with more energy.

Currently Reading: Mark Dion, 1997, Phaidon, London.

..continued

He criticises the museum as conceiving the audience as childlike and passive, simplifying questions and giving reductive answers. Rather, the museum should provoke questions not spoonfeed answers. Dion wants the museum to be a time capsule: “If someone wants to update the museum they should build a new one.” (p.17). Transparency about the elusive workings of the museum is critiqued too; “The museum needs to be turned inside out – the back rooms put on exhibition and the displays put in storage.” (p.18). “Freeze the museum’s front room as a time capsule and open up the labs and store rooms to reveal the art and science as the dynamic processes they are.” (p.19).

A few notes I think a repeats from Archaeology but worth noting again: Dion sees the fieldwork as performative and likes when people can engage with the work on different levels (p.25). History Trash Dig and History Trash Scan (Civitella Ranieri) superficially borrowed the method of archaeology. He notes that one of the reasons he made these works [concerning rubbish] was so he wouldn’t get pigeon-holed as ‘zoology-themed’ (p.29). His method is generic, but always specific. “During my digs into trash dumps of previous centuries I’m not interested in one moment or type of object, but each artefact – be it yesterday’s Juicy Fruit wrapper or a sixteenth century porcelain fragment – is treated the same.” (p.30).

On the environmental aspect of working with rubbish (p.33): “I am generally pessimistic about the fact that the environmental movement has shied away from providing a more systematic critique of capitalism. It has become more corporate, divisive and collusive, missing an important opportunity to present a meaningful challenge to the juggernaut of world market economy. Environmentalism has become eco-chic, another gizmo, another category or commodities.”

In Survey, Lisa Graziose Corrin brings in some important influences on Dion’s practice that are relevant to my research in their own right. Hans Haacke – Dion’s former teacher – created his own ecosystem using samples of raw sewage and industrial run-off collected from the city’s plants (p.46). In praise of the interdisciplinarian and polymath, she also references Joseph Beuy et al’s Free University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research which promoted an understanding of art as connected to other activities, not restricted to trained art professionals (p.49).

Corrin compares Smithson’s “view of the museum included a pointed critique of its arbitrary categorization of fragments and artistic media.” (p.50) “The categorizing of art into painting, archaeology and sculpture seems to be one of the most unfortunate things that took place. Now all the categories are splintered into more and more categories, and its like a interminable avalanche of categories.” “Smithson liked the museums precisely because of their ‘uselessness’.” Conversation with Robert Smithson, 1972, p.48/49.

In the Discussion with Alexis Rockman Extracts, 1991, featured on the pages alongside Concrete Jungle (The Birds) (1992) and Concrete Jungle (The Mammals) (1994) (both featuring assorted rubbish), Rockman notes, “You seem to come to [ecological issues] from a more clinical, methodological position wherein you generate a revisionist ‘official story’ of natural history in a pseudo-documentary format.” (p.119).

And a final note on shit from Dion: “The modernist cube … is the environment without nature. … In the same way that our culture does not acknowledge shit, distance itself from production of food or denies the processes of ageing.” (p.120).

Currently Reading: Mark Dion, 1997, Phaidon, London.

Survey by Lisa Graziose Corrin, Interview by Miwon Kwon, Focus by Norman Bryson, Artist’s Choice text by John Berger, Writings by Mark Dion.

Overview

Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who takes on the roles of explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist to make his art

His research and collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine lab equipment, artefacts and taxidermy animals

Since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories and museum caches of the great historical naturalists, crossing Darwin and Linnaeus with Disney and Hitchcock

His still lifes resemble walk-through Wunderkammers or cabinets of curiosity – an artist’s take on science and discovery

I reread this book as I’d identified Dion as one of the closer linked artists to my own practice through my rubbish research. I studied Dion’s work at college and attended a talk by him at the Manchester Museum circa 2005. Coming to it again, with a specific rubbish research focus, it seems like my memory of what I’d previously studied was a dust-covered museum archive itself. I’d catalogued it into long-term memory with key concepts such as the museum and museum-critique, animals and taxidermy, taxonomy and classification systems. A lot of the detail was hazy with dust. I’d recently seen Xylotheque Kasselat dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012 and read Archaeology (1999), Black Dog Publishing, which focusses largely on Thames Dig (1999), so revisiting his wider body of work was bound to be useful.

In the interview with Miwon Kwon (p.11), Dion sets his stall out be saying irony, allegory and humour are the meat and potatoes of art and literature, which I would have to agree with.

He goes on to talk about his interest in the politics of representation and categorises the categorisers, so to speak (p.16): “ As I see it, artists doing institutional critiques of museums tend to fall into two different camps. There are those who see the museum as an irredeemable reservoir of class ideology – the very notion of the museum is corrupt to them. Then there are those who are critical of the museum not because they want to blow it up but because they want to make a more interesting and effective cultural institution.” It’s clear to me Dion identifies with the latter. Specifically, he is interested in the tension between the museum’s position as an educational forum and an entertainment forum (p.17, interviewing Michel von Praet who co-reorganised the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, 1990).

He says the museum has become more educational as part of the popularization effects (owing the reduced public funds) along with the commercial reliance of the gift shop, outreach programmes and cafes, etc). This comment chimes with the kind of things Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska were saying around the same time in The Value of Things, August/Birkhauser, 2000 (see November 2012 posts).

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