Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Freedom (2011)

Freedom from Eva and Franco Mattes aka 01.ORG on Vimeo.

In the terms of the ongoing wars, there is really only one side you or I can be on in the infiinte struggle between freedom and tyranny.

But Eva and Franco Mattes have questioned the extent of that freedom, with a novel approach to playing networked console game Counter-Strike.

With Eva at the controls, the pair have found themselves in a virtual town somewhere in the arab world, dealing with an endless parade of heavily armed American gamers.

She too has the right to bear arms, as you would expect the genre of this game. And so we view the landscape from behind the barrel of her revolver.

Yet she looks for all the world like a terrorist (certainly not a freedom fighter), and she uses a real time messenger window to plea for clemency on the grounds of being an artist.

“Please don’t kill me,” she says time and again. “This is a performance art piece.” But she doesn’t survive long. There are limits to what you can get away with in a war zone.

“You don’t want to be in this game. Go and play in paint,” suggests one of the counter-insurgents. One other, sounding for all the world like half of Beavis and Butthead says “Shut up, Matisse.”

The title of the piece, “Freedom” is a rallying cry dropped by US soldiers running by in the distance, before he turns to gun down the immobile artist. It is too perfect.

But as Eva asks at one point in the game, “What are we doing here?” At time of writing 54,000 people are currently playing Counter-Strike.

That is only 14,000 less than the total number of real troops in Afghanistan. What can it mean that so many people are waged in an invisible war from the bedrooms and front rooms?

There is total moral freedom in these environments. Bullets are scattered left, right and centre. Compared with the gunshot in this earlier performance piece, the results are total bathos.

Freedom can be seen in Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable at Carroll/Fletcher, London, until 18 May, see gallery website for more details. For my review of the whole show on Culture24, click here.

Damien Hirst, Lapdancer (2006)

If needing just one word to sum up Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, you might resort to some made up slang invented for a work of dystopian fiction.

The violence of his killed and pickled animals is horrorshow, as is the vitrine pictured. Real horrorshow, the ultimate accolade for gang member Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

Lapdancer packages up a world of medical pain in four glass shelves of surgical tools. There are saws and knives you want to hope you never encounter outside the gallery.

But as the title makes clear, there is an erotic attraction with the apparatus of death. Or perhaps it is the death drive which in turn draws men to lap dancing clubs.

Whatever the lure, one cannot but reflect that our own final days may feature some of these tools. En steely masse, they reflect the power in a pair of surgeon’s hands.

They also reflect the apparatus of medical knowledge. By shipping a room full of surgical tools into a gallery, Hirst throws the authority of science into question .

Like the earlier work Pharmacy, Lapdancer allows for art historians to scrub up and begin to operate on the assumptions of modern science.

That’s not to say that if you break a leg, you should go to a gallery for treatment. But there is a creeping sense in which medicine serves its own ends with proliferating diagnoses.

But this piece also reminds us that medicine and art have long been close. The mastery of figuration could not have been achieved without dabblings in anatomy.

Hirst himself spent some formative years drawing in the anatomy department of Leeds Uni. And he is not the first artist to bring the operating theatre into the gallery.

One has to ask though, is Lapdancer clinical enough? Those serrated blades will give you chills. In front of this work itself, your critical faculties all desert you. Mine did. It was horrorshow.

Damien Hirst runs at Tate Modern until September 9. See gallery website for more details. And see this Brian Dillon review for a great analysis of the numb shock value present in his work.

Found Objects 04/04/2012

This week has indeed had its quota of hard-to-ignore links:

• Let’s get Damien out of the way. Here’s a well argued piece from Tom Jeffreys which puts the new Tate show in the bigger picture.
• And in case you should need to know what Jay Jopling eats for lunch, here’s a highly readable interview with the White Cube director from the FT (via @risearts)
• Art Info reports on the rise and the rise of the museum quality show an otherwise commercial space. Cunning!
• And in case you didn’t know it, Andrea Fraser has made clear that art is a luxury goods business. She unpacks some alarming implications on the Phaidon website.
• The Guardian lets us hear from half a dozen of the artisans without whom most blue chip art might never see the light of day.
• Way to write about abstract painting! Sebastian Smee reports back on a Richard Diebenkorn show for the Boston Globe.
• Media artists Lucky PDF hired a reality star to guide them round the ICA’s new show about television. Blogger Lizzie Homersham was there.
• Simon Reynolds (Blissblog) posts the new Plan B video, truly an urban safari, and then explores grime as an emergent cinema genre .
• Art or literature? @GrantaMag linked to photos of a torrent of 5,000 books from the first floors of various Spanish buildings.
• Likely to put a dopey smile on your face: these performance pieces featuring twins and quadruplets.
• This week @LaScatola_ was good enough to share the work of Charlie White with me. His film Pink makes a serious point about young fans of that colour.

Sarah Maple and Beverley Knowles, It’s just like any other job really… (2012)

It turns out that despite ourselves, even the most urbane and politically correct audience can still love a beauty pageant.  The sequence of young women in swimsuits could not be more easy on the eye

It is obvious what heterosexual men might get from this. But women too were enjoying it. There were no shortage of volunteers to strip off, while their fully clothed sisters looked on with vicarious pleasure.

But context is everything. Each of us knew this was a performance by a feminist artist, Sarah Maple, and a feminist curator, Beverley Knowles. So that was okay.

Also, the swimsuit, sashes, and tiaras were balanced up by the fate of each Miss America. After parading past the extensive glass windows of La Scatola, they went to stand facing a wall.

Here they reminded the viewer of children in disgrace. It was as if they had blown their moment in the limelight by using their platform to make an off beam comment about the recession or the war.

About 20 women took part, only coming to life every five minutes when a burst of Sinatra or maybe Bert Parks cut through the silence and then cut out with just as much abruptness.

When the music played and the girls were up, it was all eyes in their direction. The rest of the time they were to be seen and not heard. The choreography was impersonal and brutal.

As the title of the piece and a corresponding handout suggests, to be crowned Miss America or Miss World entails a year of hard work. Just like artists, their levels of dilligence might surprise the public.

Gallery director Valentina Fois is not sure how this glass box of a space was used before. But last night it was not hard to imagine a car showroom, with bonnets for the girls to drape themselves over.

Clearly we have come a certain distance since the time men crooned about beauty queens and no car ad was complete without a dolly bird. But not so far we could not recognise our role in this piece.

It’s just like any other job really took place at La Scatola gallery on 30/03/12. For more on the players visit the websites of La Scatola, Sarah Maple and Beverley Knowles.

Found Objects 26/03/12

Almost too many links to choose from this week, but here are the best all the same:

• Government ministers sack head of Arts Council England. Could it be they want someone who will cosy up to big business instead? (via @MutualArt)
• Here’s a reality check for London and New York. The world’s most visited exhibition last year was in Brazil.
• This was the week Artist Taxi Driver cropped up on my Twitter feed. Imagine a rabid leftwing cabbie venting his spleen and you’re still only halfway there.
• The laughs come at unexpected points in this low key spoof: Christopher Walken reads Where the Wild Things Are (via @adam_orbit).
• Also very funny is this Bedwyr Williams piece from Frieze, which chronicles the life and sad death of a fictional intern (via @LizzieHom).
• To get a little more serious…photos for those who may still not yet have had enough of Soviet brutalist architecture (@caravia158)
• Damien Hirst has just rigged up his studio with a pair of web cams, which is oddly compelling (via @BevieKnowles)
• New York Times reviews Keith Haring at Brooklyn Museum and there was more to the prodigious young artist than t-shirt designs.
• Daily Serving look at a playful and pleasing Chicago show by identical twins Alan and Michael Fleming.
• The final link comes from Art Fag City and features a rap by CalArts student Yung Jake. Be warned you may have to tidy your screen a bit when it’s all done.

Found Objects 19/03/12

• The Art Newspaper reports on a ‘major systemic shift’ as sales go to the world’s many art fairs, rather than through traditional galleries.
• No less than 56 rhino horns have been stolen from museums since 2011. Der Spiegel reports on this worldwide crime trend.
• The Smithsonian website looks back at the trailbrazing career of guitarist Carol Kaye, a rare female member of the so-called Wrecking Crew of session musicians in the 60s
• More Damien Hirst. Since the artist has said he makes art about money, Hari Kunzru offers a quotable analysis of his market in the Guardian.
• Philip Hoare writes in The Independent about Britain’s current fixation with the comforts of television, theatre and art which look to the past.
• The Guardian also covers the arty new PlayStation game Journey. It really is out there.
• Paris Review carries an interview with Martin Kippenberger’s sister Susanne. Covers alcoholism, art critics, and Jeff Koons.
• Olafur Eliasson has built a kaleidoscopic doughnut on the roof of a museum in Aarhus, Denmark. Beautiful Decay has pictures and video.
• There’s something amusing about a vagrant voyeur making his own camera  – although of course there shouldn’t be.
• Art Info have posted some good hip hop links this week, and none better than this track by Nas.

Opposition to the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings

Pictured above is a view from upstairs at the brand new Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. If those fishing boats weren’t already picturesque enough, now they are framed.

At the foot of the shot is a yellow poster. And as you might know, there are several of these nearby, all voicing opposition to the new £4m gallery.

Fishermen, at least those in this town, do not want to share the beach with a first rate collection of modern and contemporary British art.

What they would prefer is a coach park, so that daytrippers can arrive by the busload and visit the old town for fish and chips. This is the town they want to see.

It cannot be denied that the new gallery changes the complexion of this part of the beach. So perhaps the neighbours are right to resist the gentrification.

They have the largest beach-launch fishing fleet in Europe and now their daily toil will become the charming and quaint view from this window.

As an art blogger from just down the road, clearly my vote goes to the gallery. We do not have a comparable space in Brighton, so Hastings is lucky.

But we don’t have a fishing fleet either. All that remains of that industry on our stretch of the coast is a beachfront museum. No, I haven’t been.

In a perfect world, thousands of art lovers would descend here every day and buy fish. Fishermen would pop round the gallery for some 20th century abstraction.

Is it really such a crazy dream? Many gallery visitors will cheerfully feast at the local chippies. But a “not for the likes of us” mentality may prevent reciprocal footfall.

But since lives are being risked daily to bring fish back from the English Channel, the maritime neighbours have the moral, if not the cultural, high ground. What’s to be done?

For more info about opposition to Jerwood on this stretch of beach, The Stade, visit the campaign website (features a 50 verse poem!). Read my review of the gallery on Culture24 here.

Found Objects 12/03/12

Stories you may or may not have seen from the last seven days:

• Succumbing to the fact we may need rolling new coverage of Damien Hirst in 2012, here’s a fine analysis of his spots from The Point + here’s a revealing interview in the Guardian (via @artnet)
• Gilbert and George now also have a worldwide show in their London Pictures. I hope this is not a new trend to cater for 1%ers. But here are the inimitable duo on film in The Telegraph.
• You’ve got to like a man with enough talent to carve out his own name, throwing it away for a life of more-or-less victimless crime. Story on the German ‘hippie forger’ in The Independent.
• Daily Serving celebrates the tactile art of Mark Bradfield, while lamenting the failure of jpegs to do him justice.
• Some important questions raised in a report from Puerto Rico; Pedro Vélez takes in the confessional show Vividos/Vividos.
• The Modern Art Notes podcast hosts the legendary Richard Serra, who furnishes some anecdotes about his formative artistic experiences.
• Catch up with the progress of a boulder, which has travelled halfway across California to LACMA, with a short/sweet interview with gallery director Michael Govan.
• Just love the look of these tele-waves and tele-breezes. All is explained on Hyperallergic.
• Pending the death of the printed word, an artist performs open heart surgery on a number of antiquated books (via/ @TheSimonEvans).

Jeremy Deller, The Uses of Literacy (1997)

You may not think much of this picture and I should point out quickly it is not by the artist Jeremy Deller. It is by an anonymous young person and fan of therein mentioned band.

But the onetime inclusion of this work and many like it, in a show given over in its entirety to art by fans of the Manic Street Preachers, is a really wonderful thing.

The Uses of Literacy (1997) demonstrated the ways in which a rock group has served as an “alternative educational resource” for those who consumed their music and press appearances.

It is hard to take lyrics as seriously as the syllabus for A level English, but perhaps we should. Which of us has not been led from an album sleeve into a bookshop?

But this was, to be fair, a more common phenomenon in the 80s, when NME journalists regularly dropped references to Kafka, Camus, Dostoyevsky, et al.

By the time the Manics broke through in the 90s, intellectual pop music was as defunct as the Soviet Union. And it has never really made a comeback.

Yet fandom, as expressed by a show like The Uses of Literacy, can be expression of more than idolatrous desire. Here it was also once a commitment to bettering oneself.

And besides, idolatry never did that much harm. One can quite easily see the history of art as a catalogue of fandom: Jesus-worship, Mary-worship, nude model-worship, etc.

Deller himself is clearly a big music fan. His oft mentioned lack of artistic training means that in some ways he makes work as a fan, rather than an artist.

This gives his new show at the Hayward an impulsive simplicity, like that in the picture above. “I am a simple man, making simple art for simple people,” he said in a recent BBC documentary.

If simple art can sometimes be naive art, as this picture shows, then it is also an innocent form of engagement with the world. Bad technique is even a sign of good intentions.

And only an innocent would tow the remains of a Baghdad car bomb across the United States, as Deller has done for his project It Is What It Is. Who else would have got away with it?

For that reason I’ll happily go on record as a Jeremy Deller fan. I defy anyone who’s ever had a record collection to see his new show at the Hayward and not be converted.

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is at Hayward Gallery until May 13. See gallery website for more details.

Found Objects 04/03/12

Some links from the week that was:

• China Miéville offers a dystopian portrait of London which most will recognise. Can he do some more cities, please? (via @AnnaMinton)
• Martin Creed, artist behind a redesign of part of Sketch restaurant, tells The Independent he prefers to eat at home.
• On art-Corpus, there’s an in depth review of the Boetti show at Tate. Sounds like a must see.
• Rare photo of Andy Warhol having fun on Animal NY.
• What connects anal sex to space probes? Well, this Geoff Dyer piece for starters. Thomas Ruff also features.
• Nothing says controversy like a local news report. Take this footage of Sarah Maple and Beverley Knowles, for instance.
• The gamefication of your 80s angst is here at last with the hilarious Super Morrissey Bros on Sound Cloud (thanks @thebenstreet)
• The gamefication of neoplasticism can be found on Beautiufl/Decay. Who could have seen this one coming?
• Nice photo essay about a Paris trip in Pipe magazine. I’m always up for a second hand boat trip on the Seine.
• Witty interview with a binman from Georgiasam (via @jod45) but I’m not sure who is the real target.