This radio programme was repeated on March 25th, Melvyn Bragg, In our Time – George Fox and the Quakers
Very appropriate considering my thinking regarding the work on Crouch Hill and my next event! also interesting as the quakers do not celebrate any religious festival dates, so despite being Christian they do not celebrate Easter.see
I went to see two exhibitions, Fieldwork Ryan Gander at the Lisson Gallery and NOW Chantal Ackerman at Ambika 3.
I always enjoy Ryan Gander’s work for the wit and humour alone, always refreshing and never dull. I love having a good laugh in a Gallery, especially the Lisson.
The playfulness with which he presented ‘Found objects'(which weren’t ) on a conveyor belt reminiscent of ‘ The Generation Game’ and the ‘evidence’ of his Field work. As the press release states ” the forms convened in Fieldwork are elliptic and opaque, starting stories for the viewer to invent or complete.” This is, of course, what I find most alluring about his work
One thing distressed me this time though. The artist’s second phone, which was a giant billboard installed outside the gallery displaying Gander’s phone number was also a ‘fake’….either that or he just didn’t reply to my text….. This reminded me of the work I made for the Interim Show last year – my work included a flyer with my mobile number on it……. Nobody called!
The artist’s second phone Ryan Gander Image from wertical.com
This show was altogether different. Apart from the difference in the exhibition space, which for Ambika is huge, underground and grey concrete and the fact that Ackerman’s work is video not object, Ackerman had died, by suicide, some months before this exhibition opened.That changes how it is viewed.
I looked at the work but also at the way the pieces were displayed. Often with multiple linked but separate projections making the almost but not quite identical images, almost painfully slow-moving films became fragments of a remembered whole for me. Sometimes there were multiple screens to be wandered through so that their material presence became more like the physical presence of people to be moved around in a crowd or of a landscape to be navigated.
This review in Art Forum January 2016 gives insight into her work which has resonance for me.
“The slow-moving, almost amatory pace of Ackerman’s films suggests she was prepared to use her camera to patiently probe…..” Kathy Halbreich
“Ackerman’s films often place us in the position of observer. They do not offer any definite interpretation that tells us what to think or how to look. We are left guessing.” Babette Mangolte
I’ve been thinklng a lot about various political and social ideologies and how they are made manifest in society…
I am not a sociologist and have not studied politics or philosophy beyond investigations necessary for my undergraduate studies and so am rather a simpleton in these matters….
so I am forgiving myself for these ramblings which are probably ill thought out and not rigorous in any academic sense. I am going to just put down the ideologies I am thinking about wrt developing work, and my thoughts.
Reading the Master and Margarita … Stalinist ideology and magic realism.
The relationship between political ideologies and magic realism ????
British political ideology and how it exists today in Party Politics… are any clear ideologies still evident in policy and does this matter?
The Magna Carta (15th June 1215), British Constitution then and now.
The American Declaration of Independence ( July 4th 1776) and US present day ideology
Germany’s surrender ( 7th May 1945) and Nazi Ideology.
Quaker ideology.
Ideology of Reading Rooms this is a useful article and there is also a fab podcast available by Professor Aled Gruffydd Jone
The ideologies of the the big telecoms and internet providers.
The ideologies of users of the various webs.
HUUUUUGE eh!
and I’m really not sure enough about the links between these at the moment to say what it is I am trying to do but it’s in there somewhere
Oh yes and the relationship of these to cultural and personal memory!!!!
HA!
About time I stopped thinking now for a bit and made some stuff!
Otherwise I’ll disappear down Alice’s black hole……what…? am I mixing things up…
who said KEEP IT SIMPLE.I’ll get back there in the end…
Rhiannon Evans MA Fine Art Digital 