Where the Art Is

@ Platforms Project 2022

Colette | Holly Crawford | Marcia Beatriz Granero | Esther Planas | Artemis Potamianou | Stewart Home (in collaboration with Pandora Vaughan and Carly)

Curated by Alessandra Falbo

Assistant Curators: Marianthi Kolifeti and Niki Papakonstantinopoulou

PV: Thursday 13 October, 17.30 – 22.30
Exhibition Continues : Friday 14, Saturday 15 & Sunday 16 October: 12.00-21.00

“Where the Art Is” features real-life art spaces: museums, philanthropic organisations, galleries, art fairs, and limousine rides, but also alternative spaces, as framed within the work of six contemporary artists. Whilst the backgrounds are relevant, the actions depicted at such locations highlight not-always-apparent architectures that are intrinsic to the “institutions” of the art world [1] – https://www.artsy.net/article/theartgenomeproject-art-and-the-institution.

Screening// Part I A – two NYC-based artists explore approximations of art and life through recorded happenings in which art scene people’s interactions seem to become art.

“The limo is a moment in art, a movable salon, and an experimental space. White limo plays with the white art box. Major collectors, some with their curators, would ride from fair to fair in black limos and chauffeured town cars.” – Holly Crawford.

Critical Conversations in a Limo, a series by Holly Crawford, is comprised of 23 videoed happenings at 3 locations: NYC (2006), Melbourne (2007) and San Francisco (2008). The permanent screening within Platform 3 includes one record from each site, and new conversations are possible.

There are many interviews in art; this is something different: Crawford invited various public figures of the art world to host an intimate conversation about art with the general public in a white limo whilst sipping on Champagne. Hosts were asked to maintain the conversation with the entire group and not bring others with them. The latter direction was mostly bypassed, as is usual in such situations. POV camera, nervous laughter, pop & cheers before we start. Are the people the art? Art around relational aesthetics would say yes. People who experienced it did become connected in every place to the group with which they spent an hour. Is this an intervention? Possibly. The project was part of the Armory (Piers) Art Fair’s VIP programme over three days in NYC. For the following three years, the project’s developments were part of the fair: Sound Art in a Limo, Flatland Limo, and Live in a Limo. Invitations to produce similar projects in Melbourne and San Francisco followed. [2] Transcriptions of the conversations were made and published by AC Institute. The video series is available on PPV at Darling Pearls & Co’s Vimeo account.

Screening// Part I, B – In a similar spirit of approximation between art and life, “Justine and the boys”, also titled “Too much is not enough” (1979) – a historical hysterical tape by Colette (filmed by Robert Polidori) – documents the “real life” part of art history before reality shows existed.

Colette, a pioneer of performance art, has reinvented herself as a series of personas throughout her career: Justine of the Colette is Dead Co. (NYC; 1978-83), Mata Hari & the Stolen Potatoes (Berlin; 1984-1985), Countess Reichenbach (The Bavarian Adventure; 1986-1991), Olympia (House of Olympia; 1990-2000), Lumière (Laboratoire Lumière; 2001-2020) and now Colette/ People of Victory (People of Victory; Dec. 2020-now).

In the film, she appears as Justine alongside a group of high profile art world males: Jeff Koons, Richard Prince (as her jealous husband), Taro Suzuki, Joe Lewis, Jim Sutcliffe and Alan Jones, among others. They are injhabiting the now demolished (2007) artist’s loft in Lower Manhattan: the legendary Pearl St. “Living Environment” (circa 1972-82) which began as a “Minimal Baroque” installation & kept evolving. This “inner sculpture”, entirely made of silk, included Colette herself as a “living doll”.

The artist’s current persona, Colette/ People of Victory, was created in Dec. 2020 following a successful campaign to preserve the contents of the installation organised by a team she named the People of Victory. Now the People of Victory hope to find a permanent home for it in an art institution/museum.

Quick return to the Justine persona: soon after staging her own death at the Whitney Museum, Colette resurrected as “Justine and the Victorian Punks” (1978), her first visual art band, @ MoMa PS1. Justine, also known as the head of the Colette is Dead Co., was a prominent presence in NYC’s trendy nightclubs of that time: The Mudd Club, Danceteria, etc. She was pivotal in bringing art into nightlife while introducing a “New Look” that often led fashion trends.

In the B&W “Valentine’s Day Window” (February, 1980- filmed by Michel Auder), Colette aka Justine of the Colette Is Dead Co. aka Justine and the Victorian Punks is @ Record City – Broadway (NYC) doing one of her famous window installation performances (window #10) to promote her album Beautiful Dreamer (1979). 12.5 x 12.5 in. LP Record. Rare Original, from the Edition of 1000 published (1979) by Justine of the Colette is Dead Co., reissued commercially by DFA in 2010. © Colette. On the flip, Colette and Peter Gordon -(arrangement)- give a sweetly sultry version of Lucio Battisti’s ‘Ancora Tu’ , also called ‘Still You’, which soundtracks the happening.
The half-hour documentary on Colette, “A Pirate in Venice” edited and filmed by Frederike Schaefer continues this screening.
“Colette’s art, like Warhol’s is bound up with the idea of uninterrupted performance so that her physical presence itself becomes a kind of signature, a trademark.”— Jonathan Crary for Arts Magazine ‘Colette’s new paintings’ (1983)

While in the middle of dismantling her latest residence, since the loss of her legendary atelier, Colette received a call inviting her to exhibit in Venice. She immediately got on a plane with a suitcase full of art works and her lightest wardrobe.

The film documents Colette’s presence in Venice for her show “Politically Colette” during the 2011 Biennial. It features the curator Alan Jones author of “The Art Dealers” and the gallerist, Paolo Barozzi who worked closely with Peggy Guggenheim. Also appearing in the film are Emilio Fiorucci, Anthony Haden-Guest, R. Couri Hay and Jorg Starke of the Lowen Palais, Berlin (where Colette had a private salon during the 90’s).

“A Pirate in Venice” began as a personal documentation of Colette’s voyage and evolved into a docu- mentary/collage. It is not meant to be a comprehensive documentary on Colette’s work, but a poetic portrait of the artist.

The documentary includes her “apparitions” (spontaneous performances) in Venice, interspersed with selected images and footage of her art throughout her career. Although it does not follow a chronological sequence, it does capture the essence of the artist.” – PR for the preview of the film at The Gershwin Hotel, NYC (presented by Neke Carson).

Screening// Part II – Jaque Jolene Visiting Cultural Institutions: In a series of three video art pieces, a fictional character that is also the artist researches the architectural environments of Cultural Institutions in Brazil. In a more recent film, the character visits Darling Pearls & Co’s residency space in London.

“Humour, but also drama, are constant whenever Jaque Jolene, a fictional autobiographical entity who from time to time inhabits Marcia Beatriz Granero’s body takes part in a project. Jaque is the protagonist of several films scripted and performed with the artist whose body she incarnates. At the screening Jaque Jolene Visiting Cultural Institutions, their three most recent collaborations are shown in the films Phantom, Minada and Lacuna. Each of these cinematic fictions was developed in situ from the relationships between the realities of the various versions of the woman, landmark buildings & cultural institutions that attracted Jaque.

In Phantom (2014), the building visited was once São Paulo’s first register office. Márcia and Jaque produced the film as part of the artist residency Phosphorus, which takes place there annually. Jaque faces ghosts at the location, while she inhabits at least three different versions of herself on a mission: to find the lost deed of a house.

In Minada (2015), composed as a trailer for a film that doesn’t exist, Jaque’s apparitions take place in the skeleton of a brutalist building and at the head office and other facilities that belong to Instituto Butantã: a biological research centre, affiliated to the São Paulo State Secretariat of Health, housed in various buildings at the Butantã neighbourhood. This is also where the snakes and other creatures Jaque encounters in the film came from.

The brutalist skeleton was built in the 1970’s, inside São Paulo’s Cidade Universitária (State University campus), for the purpose of, someday, housing a huge cultural institution with three floors and five studios dedicated to artists’ residencies.

The building was never finished and, for a short period of time (1994 – 2016), its ground floor entrance hall housed Paço das Artes, a cultural institution affiliated with the São Paulo State Secretariat of Culture. Paço das Artes supports young artistic productions through its annual program Temporada de Projetos (Projects Season). The institution has been moved from shared building to shared building since its inception in the 70s. Selected by Paço das Artes in 2015, Jaque featured in the last document of the institution on the ground floor of the brutalist skeleton as it was, during the midst of an outbreak of dengue fever (Jaque claims), in the process of being transferred to Instituto Butantan. The building remains empty. As it turned out, Instituto Butantan couldn’t revitalise it – even after, as Jaque found out, introducing mosquito-eating fish to control the dengue outbreak. The site was destined never to become the vaccine development facility they had in mind for it. There were no funds for the vaccines, nor for demolition. Paço das Artes once more shares a building with other art-dedicated institutions. This time around, the neighbourhood Jardim Europa (Europe Garden). And the skeleton at Cidade Universitária = White Elephant.

While state funds, organisations and institutions fail, a 100% Brazilian pharmaceutical company seems to be doing alright inside a Magenta Elephant at Vila Madalena, which caught Jaque’s attention with its beautiful ‘philanthropic’ colour that, thanks to its reflective / reflexive mirror coverage, reaches all houses of the neighbourhood at sometime during the daytime with its magical rays of light that cure all evils. It is indeed a stunning building, projected by Ruy Ohtake’s sun.

Jaque’s presence was welcomed by one of the institutions based in the building: Instituto Tomie Ohtake – which displays interactive sculptures by Tomie Ohtake, an iconic modernist naturalised Brazilian artist whose majestic sculptures are the most representative of the informal abstraction style.

Jaque went there with her medicinal juices and germinants. She looks fabulous in every scene but especially during the helicopter scene and the scene that displays, in the background, the wall relief Complexo Aché Cultural (2003). This looks like it is part of the same building, and maybe it is. Jaque also visited the head office of the company that integrates Complexo Cultural do Aché in another city – Guarulhos – SP. But it is hard to know when and where she is exactly, because there is so much art everywhere. The film, which explores connectivity through architecture, is called Lacuna (2016) and it closes our screening programme on Friday.

“It is no coincidence that the buildings all look the same as one another. This is a construction produced by the suppression of a linear narrative in favour of one that builds itself in layers from Jaque’s movements and actions within the architectures that surround her. The main purpose behind this suppression of linear narrative is not to point out that films are constructions but, instead, the three films represent a development in Márcia’s use of the cinematic language and entity-character to research enabling devices.” – Alessandra Falbo, 2018 in curatorial text for Topologies of an Ad Hoc Future, exhibition presented at Platforms Project 2018

In Paparazzi (2019) Jaque Jolene leaves her comfortable tropical zone in Brazil to live the experience of fame. Paparazzi is a document of her first time in the United Kingdom, where she reluctantly agreed to attend a few business meetings. Jolene’s path takes inspiration from news about the Royal Family as presented by historic tabloids and Brazilian media outlets.

In a series of photographs taken by Pandora Vaughan (2022), Stewart Home poses in front of the ruins of a building. “Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s brutalist masterpiece at Cardross is in ruins despite being one of the few pieces of postwar Scottish architecture with top category protection. Currently covered with graffiti, including this: “Psychedelic Communism Now!” reads the artist’s Instagram post @stewarthome1.

“St. Peter’s Seminary is only one of forty-two post-war buildings in Scotland to be listed because of its “special architecture or historic interest”, and DOCOMOMO declared it “a building of world significance”.
Commissioned by Fr. David McRoberts, who ran St. Peter’s College, for the Archbishop of Glasgow, Donald Campbell, in 1958 through Jack Coia initially and then Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan of Gillispie, Kidd and Coia. It would be one of many modernist designs for the Catholic Church in and around Glasgow.
It is mainly based on the Le Corbusier angular building La Tourette, with touches of the Maison Jaouls inspiring the vault-like structures.
Building began in 1961 and was completed in 1966. As the building had been taking shape, the Second Vatican Council had decided it needed to modernise and the resulting edicts meant that the Seminary was no longer needed. Unfortunately the building had been completed and so a smaller number of priests took up residence in the Seminary. It was eventually closed in the 1980s (…)

Kilmahew Education Trust acquired the site in July 2020 and have extensive plans for the Seminary building.
As this Brutalist building is designed for single cell occupancy, the ideal conversion for modern use is to retain this feature. We propose to reinstate the ‘cells’, to enable creatives such as animators to work individually. The refectory portion of the building will be revitalised as a restaurant for the animators and others. The chapel with its cathedral qualities, lends itself to a recording studio for orchestras and session music.
There are obvious interventions that need to be enacted on the building such as sound-proofing and fire escapes, but we would like to gently rehabilitate this iconic masterpiece and bring it into the 21st century.” – reads the website of the Trust – https://www.kilmahew.org/the-seminary

stewarthome1
@baldernocks No sign of a custodian when I was there – just a group of teens hanging off the upper floors….

baldernocks
@stewarthome1 it’s run by something called the Kilmahew Trust that are turning it in to an all singing all dancing venue for film production, education and fuck knows what else…

stewarthome1
@baldernocks Still looks pretty abandoned right now….

baldernocks
@stewarthome1 the guy I spoke to says they want to keep it in semi-ruinous post apocalyptic mode!

To this apocalyptic mode background, another photograph is titled after the graffiti: “No Loiter” (2022). On the image, this text is followed by the imperative order: “Don’t stop for proletarian revolution!”; written in a speech bubble. All three pictures have them, and many Facebook posts by the artist too. It is a thing he is always doing ;).

The title of Esther Planas’ (Spanish, b. 1960) photography diptych, “Hear no evil, see no evil…” (2013), refers to two parts of the famous Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys”. It calls us to reflect upon looking the other way when facing manifested evil. There is also a saying in Spain: “There is no-one more blind than the one who does not want to see, nor deafer than the one who does not want to hear.”

The artist’s research focuses on self-instituting practices during hostile times and spaces, engaging in situationist ‘derives’ from which to encounter the multiple dimensions of the urban space, its components, and inhabitants for deciphering the tensions generated in and by the spatio-temporal reverberations of the capitalist policies of the city. Her practice is informed by her background in dance and theatre and takes form multidimensionally as installation, film, lectures, publishing, performance or sound interventions.

In 2013 a group of young Belgian artists invited Planas to participate in an art residency and exhibition at their artist-run space De la Charge, to work on her urban interaction project Escuela de Calor/School of Calidity. The methodology deployed in the project’s improvised and receptive actions and urban ‘derives’ is inspired by tactics of the International Situationist Movement. Physical outputs are installations containing a variety of collected objects and documentation.

Upon arriving at the controversial African Museum, she noted the institution preserved and displayed the Belgian plunder of Africa. On her way out, she came across this monument to Leopold II (to his supposed heroic deed; in reality colonial and genocidal). She improvised there, and these two poses or postures emerged automatically by free association. The artist states this type of work is not a performance nor planned. In this case, it was instead the result of a tense encounter, a reaction to the environment that provoked strong emotions. Its mark, the photographs, aimed at enquiring what Europeans, herself included, could do in front of this evidence. Could the so-called “white” individuals get involved in denouncing racism in their work as artists, academics or activists from their ‘privileged’ positions? Thinking about these questions has undoubtedly developed in Europe and in South America in the years that followed the production of the images. It remains the artist’s position that causing awareness of the colonial history represented within public sculpture and monuments & doing active work on these themes is positive from every background.

Artemis Potamianou’s artworks group diversities of carefully selected samples in new compositions: characters and environments represented in seminal artworks and also actual life artefacts. This virtual and physical reorganisation of known references highlights, comments upon and subverts originally intended or otherwise acquired meanings and purposes of representations and/or objects. Their placement forms updated narratives as the knowledge we have about them (and this is different for every viewer) enters a dialogue with their new context in the present. Her multimedia practice re-frames the circumstances and agents responsible for producing and exhibiting art and offers critiques of gender politics within our milieux from the perspective of a female participant. It is also from this position that the artist examines other features of the art world and cultural treatments of women are discussed.

The “Re-view series” (2006-2018) explores the volatility of signs as Potamianou re-contextualises groups of characters and representations of art objects known to us from art history over images of renowned and aesthetically definitive museums and architectural works. In the two pieces presented as part of this show, the figures escaping from artworks begin a dialogue with one another against the backdrop of the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe. The new compositions invite viewers to explore a fictional, uncanny world in which narratives are subjective, and the meaning of the art is constantly re-negotiated.

Silence Drew Off: Women’s Work in the Museum – Statement by Holly Crawford

“Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women’s work, and as such, not considered ‘high’ or fine art. Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing—none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued ‘women’s work’ specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the ‘feminine.'” — Women’s Work, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center For Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/womens_

Working, embroidering, in museums—but not in a centre created for feminist art. I’ve chosen to work in major museums in the main galleries. These spaces are now my studio and public performance space. A new relationship is created between the art that is owned and displayed and a space for my physical work and creation—my intervention and public performance. My new studio, the museum, is filled with the work of other artists, mostly men’s. Men’s paintings and sculptures many times of women. They’re the canon. All this is now juxtaposed.

Using used material and found text. Things already containing memories. Deconstructed and reconstructed. Fragments of stories. Embroidery. Needlework. Fabric, thread and needle. Changing the text and images beyond the original saves personal ephemera from a young woman. Some of the selected material: Letters, recipes, boxes of candy eaten, valentines sent and received, laundry powder bought, concerts attended, menus, and telegrams.

Embroidering text and images from selected found material on old napkins, handkerchiefs and dish towels. Recipe, letters, telegrams, cards, ads, instructions, images and text from 1905-07 from my grandmother’s scrapbook. (She died when my father was nine.).

————————————

“Why does the art world hypocritically promote female creative talent but simultaneously fail to accord women artists the respect given to their male counterparts? Why are women so under-represented in top curatorial posts? Just what has happened to the feminist movement?

Using pornographic spam emails, and replacing the generic ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the names of leading feminist artists, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie delivers a vicious feminist assault on the pretensions and hypocrisy of the London art world.

With walk-on parts by Martha Rosler, Sam Taylor Wood, and Tracey Emin, sensational lost Belle de Jour transcripts, and missives from the underbelly of the blogosphere, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie reads like SCUM manifesto remixed by The Bomb Squad. Rushed to Malcolm McLaren for an endorsement, legend has it his final croak was, ‘feminism with balls’.”- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8303511-blood-rites-of-the-bourgeoisie

Published (2010) as part of Book Works’ Semina series (No.7). Edited by Mr Trippy and Gavin Everall.

“In a way, a lot of the book is like this: juxtapositions of (tidied-up) penis-enlargement spam with musings on art, with interruptions from dirty email correspondence from someone called “the Suicide Kid” and someone calling herself “Belle de Jour”. (Many have believed that Home was the creator of the “Belle de Jour” blog, and he has fun with this in a 44-page appendix.)

But the important thing about this book is that it is very, very funny. The joke about female artists might seem to be subject to the law of diminishing returns, but I am afraid the headline “Georgina Starr Will Never Laugh At You Again!” made me laugh as much as “Karen Finley’s Used G-Strings and Yams For Sale!” Is this demeaning to the artists? “You counter that it draws attention to the way in which their work is devalued by a patriarchal capitalist society that views art activities . . . as one of the few legitimate areas of male emotionality . . .”

“Experimental work can be po-faced, stuck up when it contemplates its own daring. What’s lovely about Home is that he uses laughter to make you think.” – Nicholas Lezard, 2010 – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/26/blood-rites-bourgeoisie-stewart-home

“I’m showing a roughly 30 min camroom actual live record of me reading a chapter of Stewart Home’s Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie on an Ipad over 15 signed books.

Aaand on that particular bit is a conversation between the Suicide Kid (a transgender curator) and supposedly Belle de Jour, an actual escort and writer later IRL identified. When he was writing the book a lot of people assumed Home was Belle de Jour because he often writes from escorts’ perspectives based on diaries of his mother.

That part of the book is particularly graphic as the Suicide Kid proposes Belle writes back explicit text. And she does. Then I read it to punters and record it. Then show it to an arts audience. Some punters are an arts audience. Anyway I ask them to tip if it is good… and the punters do. The curator will ask the art audience to buy books. Or the installation. The price of the installation increases by a book with every book sale.” – Carly, 2022 – explaining her reading to her friend Lexi on Snapchat.

Screening

1. Holly Crawford, Critical Conversations in a Limo NYC #8 (2006), 27’22’’
   With host Anne Barlow and guests Gina Dorcely, Marcia Farquhar, Denise Holzer, Pia Lindman, Trine Nedreaas, Berta Sichel, Stephan Stoyanov and Pawel Wojtasik
2. Holly Crawford, Critical Conversations in a Limo Melbourne #1 (2007), 54’39’’
   With host Jeff Kahn and guests
3. Holly Crawford, Critical Conversations in a Limo San Francisco #2 (2008), 36’13’’
   With host Kenneth Baker & guests
4. Colette aka Justine of the Colette Is Dead Co. aka Justine and the Victorian Punks, Justine and the Boys (1979). Shot by Robert Polidori @ her legendary Living Environment, 39’21’’
5. Colette aka Justine of the Colette Is Dead Co. aka Justine and the Victorian Punks, Valentine’s Day Window (February, 1980- filmed by Michel Auder), @ Record City – Broadway (NYC), 13’08’’
6. Colette aka Lumière (Laboratoire Lumière), A Pirate in Venice (2011), edited and filmed by Frederike Schaefer, 26’54’’
7. Marcia Beatriz Granero, Phantom (2014) – Video | color | stereo | Full HD
8. Marcia Beatriz Granero, Minada (2015) – Video | color | stereo | Full HD
9. Marcia Beatriz Granero, Lacuna (2017) – Video | color | stereo | Full HD
10. Marcia Beatriz Granero, Paparazzi, (2018-2019) – Video | color | stereo | 5′ 35′ | Full HD

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