1. On The Ephemeral And The Orchestrated.

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    June 8, 1968, 2009, (Film still), Philippe Parreno at The Serpentine Gallery

    Extensions Of Reflections
    , 1992, Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern

    Cosmogony, 2009, Frédéric Fontenoy from the exhibition On The Ephemeral in Photography at Hotshoe Gallery in collaboration with ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography

    © held by the individual artists

    Ah the new year, always bound to throw spanners at you. I’m sorry about the lack of movement around here over the last couple of months, things have been…well, interesting to say the least. But I’m back on another track, I’ve had some great and challenging talks with people about my work recently and been busy helping to get the exhibition On The Ephemeral In Photography together too. So new year, another new start and fingers crossed!

    (this blog post is very long, sorry!)

    On The Ephemeral In Photography is a collaborative exhibition between the director of Hotshoe Gallery, Daniel Campbell Blight, and vintage dealer Brad Feuerhelm of ORDINARY-LIGHT Photography. The exhibition has spawned four different outputs, the main exhibition at Hotshoe Gallery in Farringdon, an extension of the show as a stand in the project space of London Art Fair last week, two talks at London Art Fair with Charlotte Cotton, Jason Evans, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Trish Morrissey and Douglas Murphy, plus an accompanying newspaper. There are ten artists and photographers in the show: Ori Gersht, Rut Blees Luxemburg, David Maisel, Julian Stallabrass, Steffi Klenz, Mikael Gregorsky, Lewis Ronald, Jeff Millikan, Jefferson Hayman, Frédéric Fontenoy, plus a varied selection of vintage work including cyanotypes, a fantastic Ilse Bing, Roger Schall and the intriguing archive of an anonymous RAF pilot. Boy have we been busy! 

    I have been involved in almost every part of putting the whole thing together and it was great to be much more involved in putting the hang together. As a show I honestly think it’s one of the most interesting shows in the Hotshoe space and it’s really exciting to see fantastic vintage work hung alongside people like Ori Gersht and Jeff Millikan. I’d really recommend a visit to the gallery and the show is on until the 5th of March. 

    This week has been a terrific week for shows, I’ve seen two that have really blown me away. The first was Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern and the second was Philippe Parreno at The Serpentine Gallery.

    I’ve been a big fan of Orozco for a long time, the image from the series Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe that appears in David Campany’s Art And Photography book is something that has been vividly stuck in my head from when I first began to get seriously interested in photography. I also wrote about him in my dissertation (three years ago this week!) but have unfortunately, until now, seen very little of his work in person. I don’t know how I missed the lead up to the exhibition, it was only when I saw the posters appearing on the underground that I found out about the show and to see it in the first week was a treat. The use of space was really interesting, the huge central room made the exhibition feel much freer. It meant you were free to discover the exhibition for yourself and there were clever nods to different pieces, linking them, throughout the show (I particularly liked how Path Of Thought, 1997 was hung at the other end of the gallery space to Black Kites, 1997). I also enjoyed coming to the realisation, with some help from Bruce, that many of Orozco’s yellow Schwalbe photographs are actually printed backwards and not only that they’re printed like that so that they all face the same way… La DS was beyond brilliant too.

    From a completely free gallery experience to an entirely orchestrated and directed one, the Philippe Parreno show was completely out of the blue. I randomly bumped into Andrew Bruce (who I also saw the Orozco show with two days before) in Farringdon after my Swedish l lesson, he had just finished assisting for the day and I had a free afternoon. Bruce had been recommended by two different people that he really had to see the Parreno show, but neither of us knew anything about it. So off we went, off to High Street Ken (again) and when we got to The Serpentine Gallery we wandered around, thoroughly confused. The space has been made into a small entrance way, one large room in the middle and two symmetrical rooms on the left and right. Each space was painted white with wires trailing around the corners, a projector (with nothing on) in each space and various speakers seeming to lead you around. It was all very suggestive and when we first arrived the only people there were the gallery assistants, who looked very suspicious. We couldn’t work out what we were there to look at, every now and then muffled noises came from the different spaces. But why were all the lights on, the curtains raised and nothing playing on the projectors? I think the immortal words “well that was a waste of time” where uttered just before we went into the left hand room. By now this room was almost completely dark and there was a beautiful projection of a structure made from clear tarpaulin lit from the inside by warm orange lights. As we sat down a group of 20 odd young students blocked our exit and we watched the last moments of the video, when the video finished a male voice started singing and slowly wandered off to one of the other rooms. The lights came on and the blinds came up and we followed the students to the main space (they seemed very certain). After they had splayed themselves across the floor, the lights turned off and the colossal wall opposite was turned into a beautiful projection from the perspective of a train as it made it’s way through various American spaces (both urban and natural) in the late 60’s with passer-by’s stood frozen staring at the train (and viewer). This turned out to be Philippe Parreno’s utterly sublime film June 8, 1968 (2009). When this finished the sound, again, guided us round to the right hand room where another film (Invisibleboy, 2010) started. Again the lights turned off, the blinds came down and the film started. When it was done, the lights came back on, the blinds came up and it started snowing outside…(more on this later!). This time the sound of chanting children guided us to the small middle space and another video started, when this finished the sound guided us to the left room again and it all happened again. Bruce and I sat and watched all of the videos a second time before choosing to end on Insivibleboy.

    I don’t want to spoil the work, I feel I might have by even saying anything at all, but it was incredible. The videos are stunning, mostly shot on 35mm and then converted to digital they’re incredibly lush. Invisibleboy has a stunning soundtrack it’s three note riff really plays up to those found in feature film soundtracks (John Murphy’s score for 28 Days Later came to my mind) and the monsters animated by scratches in the film stock…brilliant. June 8, 1968 was my favourite by a long way, I only found out on my way home where it’s thoughts come from and in doing so, has cemented it further in my mind. The exhibition truly is a triumph of what the medium of the exhibition can do and seeks to engage with the audience and redefine the possibilities of the exhibition as a singular object or experience.

    I will leave you with a few descriptions of various things that are still playing through my mind: a summer breeze blowing through the long grass of a sunny hillside as a scattered group of people stand perfectly still underneath a fantastic tree with the deepest blue sky you’ll ever see whilst swallows dive in and out of shot, a close shot of an ox’s eye during a thunderstorm, discovering the snow was fake only after seeing all of the videos twice, the intital shock of the opening scene of June 8, 1968 in it’s 20-odd foot wide glory, the white wall after the train passes some baseball players and a woman and small child, the girl sat in the boat, quality and texture of the depth of field, how I couldn’t stop thinking about anything other than William Eggleston whilst watching June 8, 1968 for the second time, the editing of the two shots of the men sat on top of the train carriage, and finally the image of twenty-odd people lying on the floor looking up at the most stunning piece of video I’ve seen in a very long time.

    I seriously can’t recommend it enough.

    On The Ephemeral In Photography is on until the 5th of March

    Gabriel Orozco is on until the 25th of April.

    Philippe Parreno is on until the 13th of February.

     
    1. bonzobonzo posted this
     
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