A review written by Kasia Wlaszczyk and published in The Blue Note Book: Journal for artists' books, Volume 5: no. 1, October 2010. The exhibition was curated at KALEID in Shoreditch between 2nd-27th June 2010. Further documentation is available here.
In the UK, much like their plumbing, politics are divided into two main streams. It’s either a tap running hot or running cold, Conservative or Labour. Through history and dogma, the two have prevailed, and so in this year’s British General Election when the Liberal Democrats became a serious player in the political, black and white chess field, a grey area of a coalition was formed, which was just big enough to question how effectively a government can be formed through an either/or approach between two dominant parties.
This lack of scope in the political spectrum created a void that KALEID editions decided to explore with their exhibition White Heat, where out of the political pingpong game a more collaborative experience was sought. “The exhibition hints at the diverse gamut of values, which the British general election’s two party first-past-the-post voting system fails to reflect”, says Victoria Browne, co-curator with Dr. Aylin Kunter and one of the artists exhibiting in White Heat.
Established in 2009, KALEID editions represents contemporary artists’ books and small press publications in London, simultaneously conceived as an annual programme of exhibitions, performances and events. White Heat is an attempt not only to question the prevailing structures but to diversify them through twenty two artists and therefore twenty two standpoints.
“The exhibition enables KALEID editions to engage artists’ books with an interdisciplinary group of artists, whether fine art, fashion, photography, book arts, printmaking, painting, interactive digital media or sculpture. Artists were invited to articulate and draw upon a personal perspective disseminated through the book format, to exhibit as part of an assemblage of sociopolitical ideas.”
Inspired by Harold Wilson’s 1963 White Heat of Technology speech, the political potentiality of artists’ books is highlighted, creating both an individual experience, where one can hold the book and physically experience a singular standpoint, and a collective one where like in a library, the works make a collaborative entity. However, unlike being stacked up in a library shelf, these books are physically and conceptually mobile where
concepts interchange and a lack of chronology or any conventional order provokes the reader to form his own individual approach in this new order.
Browne emphasises the quality of artists’ books as having both ‘academic status’ and ‘anarchic qualities of self-publishing’. With a history of ideological and artistic manifestos it is within the very action of creating through this medium that the political is evoked and the idea of art as a dissemination of ideas is put before its material value. Coming from a variety of artistic backgrounds, the artists gathered echo the fragility of the current political coalition, to create a left field collaboration without the need of cohesion. Here, no consensus is reached as none is sought in the first place. An experimental space is constructed within which the political and the aesthetic, public and personal exist in parallel. The exhibition is devoid of the maltreated sarcastic play on the various ‘crises’ of current times and in turn seems to take on a more constructive criticism, one of potentiality through instability.
One of the approaches taken is Desmond Felix’s The Manifesto of Magnolia Slimm, a CD in which the
current recession and political climate is the source of a poetical audio. Felix’s highly structured and lyrical
medium of hip-hop is aimed, as the artist claims, at “sexing up today’s predictable political discourse.” Another playful stance is taken by Harvey Dellanzo and Graeme Gerard Halliday, both artists touching on the British media and its constant state of urgency, dramatification and inescapable subjectivity. Dellanzo’s piece Black White and Read All Over is layered with collages of appropriated words from The Scottish Sun, The Daily Record and The Daily Sport that through witty rearrangement highlight the absurdity of the beloved headline, while Halliday’s Articulate and Juxtapose playfully questions the glorification of and our addiction to the shocking and the unlawful. Although bold statements, these works leave space for doubt, where the reader is left questioning how much of this is an independent criticism and how much is it simply a playful acceptance of the scale and power the media has gained.
Artists Mayari and Angie Butler take on the everyday as a space of potentiality, with Mayari’s Gratitude Journal
encouraging the reader to note down both minor and major events in life while Butler’s Small Pleasures, a packet of hand typed cigarette papers, gradually reveal a narrative while being pulled out one by one throughout a day of a smoker.
Flora McLean, fashion designer and professional milliner, offers another individual approach through her construction of a ballot box hat book and selection of voting visors, View Finder. McLean plays on the idea of the iconic shape of Grace Jones’ hair as a medium through which to shape the future government, emphasising individuality as the first step to a political engagement. Having created her book in the time leading up to the General Election, visitors’ can try on the hat and become, as the designer explained, “a futuristic hat book wearing warrior who can’t see too well and is indecisive to what the future may hold”.
While McLean celebrates distinct singularity over the multiple, Peter Rapp criticises the singular as authority in his narrative great...Britain. Rapp’s book presents a British history, one in which the Boer War, opium trade and apartheid are integral to the British Empire and its aftermath. Disillusioned with the conventional history book, Rapp states “By deliberately selecting such events as the concentration camps in the Boer War, Indian and Irish famines and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I intend to question the selections that history makes and to attempt to give a perspective on the atrocities being committed in our time.” Putting in perspective the acquired economic wealth and commerce of contemporary Britain that is now once again shaken, Rapp highlights the trajectory of consumerist nationalism; heritage proves more burdensome than glorious; and national interest is valued over international collaboration. With such a statement great...Britain could easily be seen as the contemporary version of an antiauthoritarian voice of the revolutionary years of Europe, in which old ideologies are questioned and new forged.
History and heritage also play integral roles in Andrew Pegram’s work Divine Decline, a collection of small scale photographs of buildings that despite their architectural and historical value are left abandoned and un-restored. Through a neo-romantic portrayal of the passage of time, Pegram, a contemporary photographer, creates, much in the vein of Foucault, a heterotopia. In his work the buildings are like cemeteries, physically disseminated throughout London and the everyday while simultaneously occupying a more ambiguous space of absence. If the city in its skyscraping glory was the embodiment of the modern, then Pegram’s phantom buildings seem to define our post-modern age of ruptures and dissemination.
Victoria Browne is another artist re-visiting the modern, with her piece Chequered Game of Life, 2010. Appropriating Milton Bradley’s 1860 version, in which financial success and material wealth are the highest values at stake, Browne replaces the original motifs with Cartesian graphs, emphasising as she puts it "our aspirational society driven by speculative market forces”. The rat race for material wealth proves to be as much based on chance as any board game, yet unlike in chess, we cannot replay our steps and begin again.
Each work having a strong conceptual voice, the aesthetics are none the less secondary. Stephen Lee’s Landscape Logarithm, Johnette Taylor’s Old Fashion baggage, Sofia Stevi’s Couple, 2010, A.A.A.B.A.M.’s Botched Earth and Stephen Fowler’s White Heat all address artists’ books as a framework for imaginative exploration that provokes the format into a more adventurous reading through their use of unconventional media and shapes.
This sense of a journey, a narrative that takes us out of our surroundings was further explored through the two performances that took place during the opening week of the exhibition, including an extravagant performance by The Readers, and Augusta Oglivy’s and Martin Sexton’s reading of Attendant to the Stars, a piece that contains a meteorite that fell in Transylvania and was captured by an overhead infrared camera. Taking turns in reading, and therefore creating a collaborative narrative, Oglivy and Sexton split the reader, between a place of contemporary reality and a transcendence of metaphisical and esoteric existence.
Although the collection challenges the convention of book arts, some preserve the art of the traditional craftsmanship, with Lorna Crabbe’s The Pigeon in the Future, Shelley Revill’s Worm and Carolyn Trant’s The Magic Rabbit, all being handbound, and Daniele Genadry’s Streaming and Mary Rouncefield’s The Older Boy’s Book of Mathematical Curves both being hand screenprinted.
These pieces hold the collection within the medium’s context of an art that, whether editioned or singular, is a hands-on production, a practice that requires time and skill and therefore a true art in a sense that is often scarce within the contemporary arts. All of the artists’ books are displayed on the iconic gambling table of the
KALEID project space and with such a layered dialogue, what holds the collection together like a common denominator, is Hellicar’s and Lewis’ piece Replicate, Mutate and Evolve. The interactive light installation projects a constantly moving flock of light “pixels” across the table that react to the sound and interactions of the visitors to the books. This refreshing and innovative approach transforms the project space into an organism, a living event that while self-sustainable, is equally responsive. As Joel Louis states; “We like the idea of light consuming information, responding to movement. Light can be thought of as a pure form of information, and the law of conservation of energy states that you can’t destroy energy, merely convert it into another form. The same goes for information.”
This constant presence of information, packed into ever new ways of consumption through multimedia and the internet has placed the form of the book into a new context, one that allows for a sculptural and finite experience. Each book is a three dimensional manifesto that like any other, has to be read out and engaged with personally in order to come into existence. Through such a necessity the artist’s book as a medium encourages self-sufficiency in the increasingly unstable global climate comparable to the town of Lewes making their own currency, where the do-it-yourself culture is the policy of the day. Instead of proposing a new grand narrative, White Heat presents a multiplicity of experimental approaches and an invitation to step into the grey areas between the chequered black and white.
Kasia Wlaszczyk is a BA Art History student at Goldsmiths and was Assistant Curator of White Heat at KALEID editions.
