- Venue
- Tart
- Location
- United States
Skank Bloc Bologna, devised and curated by San Francisco–based Scottish artist Anne Colvin takes its inspiration from Semina, a free-form journal published sporadically by artist Wallace Berman and his circle in California in the 1950's and 60's. Described as short bursts of contemporary avant-garde poetry, prose, photography, collage and drawing, augmented by fragments lifted from various visionary precursors, the publication was then mailed out to a couple of hundred kindred spirits, thereby creating (with a somewhat irreverent attitude and a DIY, ad hoc approach) his own culture and community.
Anne Colvin now repositions this earlier self-determined enterprise into the modes, contexts, and mechanisms of contemporary art practice; she scrutinizes through this published representation the function of curator, publisher, artist, advocate and philanthropist and the possibilities of how these definitions may bleed over, merge and distribute/disperse, fostering a new outline of the meaning of and for these roles and of ‘community’ itself. She scrutinizes, using a deliberate and shrewdly anarchic spirit in the selection of these artists, the meaning of the ‘show’, documentation, the ‘catalogue’ and the structures and processes that surround proliferation. Its strength is its simplicity, fusing an elegance of presentation/inclusion/offering and a complexity of focus/purpose/content.
Edition Number Two is devoted to, in response to, artists that have shown at and the history of the gallery space New Langton, one of San Francisco’s longest running and prominent contemporary spaces and in particular to the event Book It!, a one-day alternative publishing fair and panel discussion that brought together artists’ books, zines, magazines, and online publications from the Bay Area and beyond, which had been programmed in conjunction with Alejandro Cesarco's Once Within a Room and Dexter Sinister's Phantom Rosebuds, the current Langton exhibitions which, in turn, reconsider the place of text, narrative, and reading in contemporary art and society.
It is this methodical union of reference, examination, repositioning and approach that send out engaging signals on the investigation of language, print, curating and presentation. Skank and this broader range of works and artists, plays a significant role within present tense articulations over our relationships to the press and representation, media and interpretation, institutions and their narratives of authority, inclusion and omission.
The publication itself is a loose leaf assembly of works, each piece able to stand on its own or be re-configured within its thematically unpredictable collective. There is an emphasis on poetry, a practice significant in the Bay Area, and the poetic, which here is sometimes precious, sometimes casual. There is an emphasis on signature, the word (printed, split up or written), experiments into the “response”, thoughts on the compassionate and works in progress, and playful annotations on the appropriated and the indexed. Despite its loose leaf disparities it is difficult not to construct narratives, find similarities, discern mutual thoughts, and these open the project up to an array of possible alignments, readings and conclusions. Stand-out pieces, however, include Colter Jacobsen’s “left and right handed blind contour drawings of the sailor querelle”, nervous drawings on the leafs of self-help books; Erlea Maneros’ “The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806, USA”, which explores in its appropriated reproduction of the original Charles Willson Peale painting a synthesis of science, popular appeal, and democratic access within the context of a private proprietary institution; Tucker Nichols’ “Complimentary”, a collection of adverts for free food, magic sneakers and automobile parts; Anne Colvin’s fractured image combining a newspaper headline with a Godard film still transferred to video, a work about interpretations and communications between differing medias; and Larry Rinder’s “Alert!”, a form of concrete poetry, which tries to find a voice between emotion, abstraction, sculpture and the written word.
Skank Bloc Bologna was the first recording ever put out by the English pop band Scritti Politti in 1978. In the spirit of a punk rock DIY ethic, its photocopied and rubber-stamped sleeve included the record’s production costs; this served to demystify the process of making and distributing the record, indicating, at the time, the radical possibilities of other individuals employing similar strategies. Anne Colvin here demonstrates an equally radical “Rough Trade” position in a more media savvy, saturated circumstance: one that articulates the benefits of returning to basics, of self-determination, while peeling away at the surface, innards and mechanics of language, visual art vocabularies, media, representation and institutions.
