" Oh, the Jungle club! Well done on the blog J Bird!
What ideas were you thinking of for the theme?
Are you sure that we couldn't produce wildly exciting work within the theme of front/back or one of the others?
The strengths of those ideas are that they are general enough that each person would have scope to pursue ideas that they were interested in and create really different, individual responses with there still being a link between. I totally get what you mean about 'front/back' not being exciting in itself, not like 'natural disasters' or 'tabloid headlines' or 'experiments gone wrong' but i would argue that a less specific theme is what is needed now because everyone works so differently and has such varied tastes. If we start off with something more specific there will always some people who love it and some people who hate it and feel stifled.
But apart from feeling a looser brief has its benefits,i don't mind. What were you thinking?
Miriam
xxx "
"firstly can i say to everyone that they NEED TO ACCEPT THE INVITE FOR THE BLOG and start posting ideas/work/interesting things they've found on there asap. so far only forence, alice, katie and me are on there. and these emails should maybe go up on the blog too? i know peter's in india so not expecting to hear from him for a while but i think we should keep everything related to this exhibition on the blog, so if we need to refer back to things we know where they are.
also everyones in glastonbury now and i go on holiday in two days so i'm not gonna be able to see what everyone else thinks till i get back next weekend. so i'll send my thoughts now and i'll have to catch up with any decisions you make when i get back, anyway here's what i think about the whole thing...
miriam - i think maybe you miss understood what i was trying to say, or perhaps i didn't make myself very clear. i wasn't implying we won't make exciting work, nor am i suggesting we should do something specific like 'tabloid headlines' (which, come to think of it, is almost less restrictive than front/back). all i was trying to say is that i think we can come up with a stronger theme than front/back, something with more substance... and relevance. it seems to be me that we've just gone with the first idea we thought and we haven't scraped the tip of the iceberg yet.
all i think is that we should do something that is relevant or inspired by the space. we have 2 rooms to work with... one is underground, has artificial lights, low ceiling etc... the other is at ground floor, has natural light, an opening to the outside, has a lot of people passing through and so on. i think inside/outside works well, as does light/dark... overground/underground... natural/artificial... even land/underwater... all of those things would be strong themes because they suite the environment we have. i just don't think front/back is very strong for the space we have... if we were in a bar that had two entrances, one at either end of the building, then i could understand doing front/back a bit more... but there isn't really a front or a back to the space we have... there's an up/down or above/below...
also i don't think it opens up many possiblities... if we did light/dark, for example, we could make the top room this magically happy bright flourescent neon happy go lucky playground, and then the basement we could turn into some cesspit from hell. i'm not suggesting we do that, nor am i suggesting we should take it to such an extreme... but the possibility is there... what can you do with front/back? draw pictures of things from the front and then draw pictures of things from the back? (and this is why i said "maybe i'm not thinking very imaginatively about it" - maybe i'm not, maybe i'm being too narrow minded, or maybe the theme is not very imaginative..?)
plus, and i know it's not a very big space... but could we maybe start thinking beyond the restrictions of just making 2D images? if the lady at the gallery says we can paint and make holes in the walls then we pretty much have all the freedom we need. could we start thinking about physically changing the space? i don't mean like turn it into a jungle or whatever... (or maybe we could do that? - jungle floor and upper cannopy) but even just little things. props, decoration... i'm thinking the evil twins exhibition by container... not that we should do something similar but that we have the freedom to do something like that.
more opposites we could work with are 2D/3D, colour/greyscale. we could even have more than one opposite to work with... the top room could have the themes natural/light/colour and overground, whilst the basement has the theme artificial/dark/greyscale/
i understand what you're saying about a loose theme being better... but i think that's not always true. restrictions and specifics can often work much to your advantage... it gives you rules to bend and forces you to be more creative and resourceful which often produces much stronger work. if we are too broad and general with our theme we may end up just producing work that just has no substance. not that i'm arguing for a specific theme... i just think we shouldn't rule out the possibility of having a specific theme by making assumptions that people won't like it or that it won't allow us to produce good work.
sorry for this massive rant... i've only just started to think about all this properly, i wasn't really 'with it' the other day at the meeting.
i know for now we just need a starting point so we can make some work and see where it goes why front/back? basically all i'm saying is i think front/back is not the strongest theme out of all the ones we've come up with. and i think with the 9 people we have involved in this we can come up with something so much more fresh and exciting.
personally i would prefer something like light/dark or natural/artificial, small/big. also, we only came up with like 3 or 4 types of opposites, there's like thousands of opposites we could potentially work with...
up/below, over/under (upstairs/downstairs, overwater/underwater, overground/underground, earth/space)
primitive/technical, practical/impractical
colourful/colourless,
light/dark, heaven/hell, good/evil, happy/sad, life/death.
2D/ 3D, space/time
friends/enemies, peace/war, love/hate
letters/numbers
hot/cold
natural/artifical, fluid/rigid,
cheap/expensive
obviously there are some horrible cliches in there which we would probably want to avoid but you get what i mean.
that's all i wanted to say. there should be enough there to last you for a week while i'm gone. also sorry if i'm completely missing the point... someone tell me if i'm talking utter bullshit. and also if everyones really into the front/back thing then please persuade me to like it... i can be easily persuaded... what was everyone thinking of doing for it anyway?
i get back saturday 5th july, see you all soon
love
jordan justthinkingtoomuch
p.s. another idea (turning away from opposites) is that we could turn the context of the space into something else. at the moment it's a bar with a basement/dance floor. we could turn it into a video shop with an x-rated section downstairs, or a bank with the safe/vault downstairs, or a police station/sherrif house with a prison/jail downstairs. doctors surgery with pharmacy downstairs... someones house with a basement for their 'hobby'... ? infact if we did a pharmacy we could treat the alcohol like medicine and redesign the packaging on empty bottles that could fill the walls...
just ideas.
x"
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