Monday 19 January 2009

is it just me or has the jungle club banner disappeared?

i think tuesday after the talk at 4.30 would be a good time to meet no?

also before i spue out some pictures, i would just like to say that everyone is producing some really good material on this blog, both text and image - grade A research. i don't mean to sound condescending, but well done everyone, it's brilliant!

anyway. here's some of the stuff i brought to the meeting:


Roger Hiorns
- Seizure


A disused council flat filled with 90,000 litres of copper sulphate which then dried/reacted and coated all the surfaces in blue crystals. Below is a very good video by Tate Shots featuring an interview with Roger and a little walkthrough tour of the installation. (more tate shot videos can be found here: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateshots/issue17365/default.htm)

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Rachel Whiteread - Places

From the Hayward Gallery's 'Psycho Buildings' exhibition. A room is filled with a selection of dolls houses that are all stage lit from the inside.


"They're all second hand objects which I started collecting about 20 years ago... People may see these things as being rather sentimental - personally I see them as having a great deal of pathos, as extremely sad, interesting and sympathetic objects. Some of them are really bashed up. They're made by dads, uncles, grannies and granpas - whoever wanted to get involved in making them - in the garden shed. It has a real feeling of pottering..."


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Christoph Büchel

This guy has quickly become one of my favourite artists, he makes these epic hyperreal installations that allow the audience to walk through and actually experience the environment that's been created, much like walking through a film set or some empty post apocalyptic world. The photos below are from different installations, 'Deutsch Grammatik' and 'Simply Botiful'.



Here's an interesting analysis from www.kopenhagen.dk:

"The scenarios and settings Buchel have created are intended to provoke deep, unsettling feelings in the viewer and you've got to bring your own paranoias, fears and prejudices to the exhibition.
Buchel likes to force his audience into an uneasy complicity with the sleaziness, discomfort and unsettling scenarios he creates - as a paying visitor, you are somehow responsible for what you are walking through. Sometimes you are a victim at the mercy of the environment Buchel puts up around you, sometimes you are a voyeur onto someone else's misery - and we can't say which is worse. The effect is to critique and encourage criticism of existing institutes and political agendas..."

And here's a couple of videos of people walking through 'Simply Botiful':






More photos and info can be found here.

And on a slightly unrelated note, he's also "had a punk band’s entire equipment frozen at –25° Celsius immediately after their concert, arresting the transitory moment of the performance in a kind of standstill" (taken from an essay about reinterpreting space). Which actually brings me back around in a circle as it's not dissimilar to Roger Hiorn's copper sulphate room 'Seizure'.



A final note: When thinking about what materials to use we mustn't forget what we could use that we already own or can be obtained from skips. The image above of the frozen instruments remind me that I own a drum kit, and if it didn't get damaged I wouldn't mind actually including it in our installation (if we wanted to use it). In that sense I'm more reffering to the interior of the space than the actual building materials, but if you think about it, what do you own that could make our 'den' more interesting and how could we use them effectively? For example using a microwave oven as a display cabinet. And what would happen if we each brought something from our own homes into the installation, or even built the entire thing from our own belongings?

Also I'm really interested in Alice's post about memories/imagination/escapism and creating worlds within worlds and playing around with people's perceptions.

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