EpiloguesItStartedWithACarCrash1

CHARLES DANBY

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Epilogues: It
Started With A Car Crash

IMT Gallery, Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9NQ (17 September - 23 October 2011) / >>

The Bruce High Quality Foundation
Ray Johnson
Alastair MacKinven
Thomas Raat
Vibeke Tandberg

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash
17 September - 23 October 2011
Press View: Friday 16th September 5pm – 9pm

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening
Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm (This event is part of Artist Book Weekend)
Pigeon Magazine will launch their first published issue, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice.

Curator’s talk with Charles Danby
Saturday 15th October 11am
A breakfast talk on the Epilogues: It Started… exhibition and project by its curator.

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
Tuesday 18th October 2pm – 8pm
Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
An educational road tour hosted by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, with guest contributions and presentations from UK based alternative educational groups.

IMT Gallery stages Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash, a timely response to today’s climate of cultural and institutional instability...

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash examines how artists address the contexts, ideologies, and histories that surround them in the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. It looks at the nature of archives, ideas of dialogue and exchange, and of education both inside and against educational institutions.

Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash looks beyond representation and facsimile to present viewpoints that highlight the fluidity and agency of works within the present. It draws on works that contest orthodoxies of institutional position, inherited mythology, and assumed perception.

It brings together three stands of thinking. The first is an idea of an archive that is open and active, collapsed across time. This is examined outside of the retrieval of works, through a wider set of ideas, those that mark the future in the present, and those that dislodge the present through the past. Fundamental to these ideas are systems of dissemination; methodologies that expand and alter the form that artworks take, affected through vandalism, extended through alternative usage - from the postal service to social media platforms.

The second strand of thinking connects to ideas of exchange and dialogue. It considers migration and reference through the shifting lenses of European and American ideologies. It looks to the movement of creative practitioners through the war and post-war periods of the Twentieth Century, and the (in many ways) autonomous position of the UK in relation to this, as a point of international passage, of arrival and departure. Ray Johnson’s education at Black Mountain College (North Carolina) under tutelage of both European and American artists underlines such positions of trans-Atlantic connection and exchange. This is further unpicked through the work of Alastair MacKinven (UK), The Bruce High Quality Foundation (US), Thomas Raat (NL), and Vibeke Tandberg (NO).

The third strand of thinking is connected to education and counter-institutional positions. The underlying presence within this discourse is that of Ray Johnson, through his education at Black Mountain College and his instigation of the New York Correspondence School. The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own University in 2009 and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals. This is documented in their work Teach4Amerika (2011). This material is explored through a connected off-site event that opens up a debate around alternative networks of arts education and artwork dissemination, It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour. The Bruce High Quality Foundation will be joined by UK based groups and collectives including the Kurt Schwitters Summer School to open and share ideas on arts education.

About the works:

Vibeke Tandberg’s works, produced across multiple media, cut through handed-down, inherited, and culturally generated mythologies of gender and identity. Her photographic and video series Old Man going up and down a Staircase (2003), showing manipulated self-portraits (whilst pregnant) of the artist dressed as an old man, connect through multiple channels to the work, lifestyle, and myth making of Marcel Duchamp, whilst the silhouetted portraits from her more recent (2010) Winehouse Variation (Amy) works add further dimension to this interplay.

Alongside is a new and significant work by Thomas Raat, a 1:1 scale replica in vinyl adhesive of Barnett Newman’s Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1966-67) following its vandalism at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1986. An extension of an earlier series (from 2006), Thomas Raat shows the slashes to be irreversible marks that confront and collapse ideas of singular and stationary origin. Also showing by Thomas Raat is the work, Das Sprechen (2010) which is a turnaround of the celebrated piece Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird Überbewertet (The Silence Of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated) (1964) by Josef Beuys.

Duchamp remained a haunting presence and recurring point of focus for Ray Johnson who, through Black Mountain College and the New York Correspondence School, challenged institutional orthodoxies and initiated the mail art programme. Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash includes selected (unseen) mail art pieces that highlight the control, sharpness and play of Johnson’s conversational exchange and reflect the connective nature of his legacy to other works in the exhibition.

Alastair MacKinven’s All the things you could be now if Robert Smithson's wife was your mother (2008) is an archival record of a performance that restages the making of Nancy Holt’s earthwork Star Crossed (1979). In conjunction with its title the work concludes as the artist crawls naked through the work, contesting the agency of inheritance and handed down futures.

Nancy Holt’s husband Robert Smithson also features in works by The Bruce High Quality Foundation. The Gate (2005) is a documented performance in which the Collective set about installing a scale replica of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) onto Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island (1970/2005). The Collective’s work draws on the circumstance of two unrelated works presented in New York in 2005.

Pigeon Magazine launch and film screening

Saturday 24th September 6pm – 9pm
(This event is part of Artist Books Weekend)

Pigeon Magazine will launch their first published issue ‘Studio’, casting a perceptive eye over the role of the studio within current changing modes of artistic practice…

Launch: Pigeon Magazine Issue 1 (Published by Hato Press)
Pigeon’s first issue ‘Studio’ is devoted to the relationship of artists to their places of work; mapping what an artist can and cannot be without their studio. The frustration of a removed physical studio space within the educational environment has led Pigeon to reach for a broader understanding of the very term studio.

In the late 1960s artists questioned and overturned the traditional modes of production, circulation and reception of artworks causing the notion of the studio to gradually diminish. The diffusion of the artistic workplace across globalised networks has led to the pervasive acknowledgment of the ‘post-studio’ era. In the case of the post-studio Pigeon considers the lengths to which the term does justice to the current nature of the space and place of art production. There is an ongoing debate within art education about the necessity and significance of providing art students with a studio. In an era where students work ever more systematically, does an architectural or institutional workspace remain valid?

Pigeon questions the connection between the artist and the physical space of their activity. Pigeon ask us to pay the studio a visit, to consider the innumerable spaces where artists are at work, creating along the way a studio of image, text, paper and glue.

Contributors include Mateus Domingos, Mike Stubbs, Leo Powell and Vanilla Galleries

Pigeon film screenings
33mins

Alongside the launch of their first published issue Pigeon present a connected film series of ‘moving portraits’ inviting viewers to enter the usually private workspaces of artists including Bill Culbert and Mike Stubbs. Unexpected and unforeseen moments are captured, projecting Pigeon's perception of the artists at work, their studios and the transition of their work from the studio to public presentation.

John Stezaker
John Hilliard
Gerard Hemsworth
Michael Craig-Martin
Michael Stubbs
Bill Culbert

Pigeon Magazine >>

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It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour

Tuesday 18th October 2pm – 8pm
Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB

Inspiring and enabling arts students to define the future of their own educational experience…

20 Projects in collaboration with IMT Gallery present It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour.

Hosted by the Bruce High Quality Foundation It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour is a special event that gets to the core of debates within and around alternative networks of arts education and artwork dissemination. What do art schools represent? How can learning environments be organized? What is the role of arts education? The Bruce High Quality Foundation set up their own University in 2009 and in 2011 they embarked on a coast-to-coast road trip of America visiting educational institutions, project spaces, groups and individuals, documented in their work Teach4Amerika (2011).

Crossing the Atlantic the Bruce High Quality Foundation will be joined by leading UK groups and collectives engaged in alternative systems of educational organization and interrogation in a series of presentations, workshop sessions, and screenings that consider the social, political and economic questions underpinning today’s arts educational environments.

It Started With A Car Crash: Alternative Educational Road Tour
18 October 2011 (2pm-8pm)
Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London, WC1H 0AB

SCHEDULE

The Bruce High Quality Foundation

2pm-3.30pm / The Bruce High Quality Foundation / opening presentation (Studio 7)

Session 1:

3.50pm-4pm / Kurt Schwitters DIY School (Studio 5)

4pm-4.40pm / Free School (Studio 7)

Session 2:

4.50pm-5pm / Kurt Schwitters DIY School 2 (Studio 5)

5pm-5.30pm / The New International School (Studio 7)

Session 3:

6pm-6.10pm / Kurt Schwitters DIY School 4 (Studio 5)

6.10pm-6.30pm / This Is Not A School (Studio 7)

6.30pm -7pm / *Ladies of the Press – Event publication available* (Studio 6)

Studios:
(Studio 4) / Screening Room - Film contributions from participating groups and collectives
(Studio 5) / Occupation - Kurt Schwitters DIY School / Reading Room
(Studio 6) / Live-Press - Ladies of the Press / Pigeon Magazine
Studio 7) / Presentations

Contributors:
The Bruce High Quality Foundation
The Free School
The Kurt Schwitters DIY School
This Is Not A School
The New International School
Ladies of the Press
Pigeon Magazine

It Started With A Car Crash is a publication that includes interviews and invited contributions from publishing collectives, zine artists, and writers. Contributors include Pigeon Magazine, The Ladies of the Press, IRP, ZEENE.