Development: We the people, Under One Bag
Our first Project of the year was to think about home curation, the using of the home to exhibit, notice and realise a new way of seeing that isn’t necessarily connected to the institution.
My first approach was to research Hans Ulrich Obrist “The Kitchen Show”. This was something I remembered from other research and tutorials.
The premise underlying this work was experimentation in “self organization”, but also to explore the “spaces in which one can present art".
This led me onto and exploration of an artist featured elsewhere on the website called Lu Chunsheng.
The setting for Chunsheng’s work was Battersea Power Station. This formed part of an exhibition called
"China Power Station" Serpentine Gallery, Co-curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Julia Peyton-Jones, London, UK, 2006
The siting of this work is helping me draw distinction to my own attempts to utilise some kind of aesthetic that not only draws on the art work, but how the artwork is ‘presented’. How do the material conditions in the film align in anyway with the desire to show this film as a projection in a specific space or other form of site?
The film I made and chose to ‘display’ is below.
Under One Bag (2020)
Video.
1920 x 1080.
03:49s
Under One Bag, is the documentation of time. Produced by using an iPhone to record a scene from my living room window, the image takes on an essence of ‘observation’ and the act of ‘noticing’ the unusual within a very ordinary and everyday setting. (Fig. 1)
Within the the film, the main interest is the ‘snagging’ of a plastic blue carrier bag on a tree branch.
After making the film in various time increments over a period of the Lockdown, I thought about space, screens and projection.
I have decided to use the same object that is a feature within the film to act as a ‘setting’ for the projected image. (Fig. 2)
Using the same type of artifact that is within the film draws on a questioning of material repurposing. (Fig.3)
Fig. 1 Projection of the recording on a plastic carrier bag.
Fig. 2, Setting for the Home Curation Project tasked to us this year with a brief to think of the home as a setting for possible ways of working outside of the studio setting.
Fig. 3 Under One Bag (2020) Homemade film projected on a plastic carrier bag.
With the plastic bag acting as a screen, we are given an extra element of terrain through the protrusions emerging into and with the 2D field usually identified with the screen as a technical support of filmic showing and presentation. The crinkles within the image add an extra tension as the projection is forced into a morphic resonance within the topography of the carrier bag that has been suspended from the door by way of two clips. I am aware that there is a constriction within the act of these two clips as they grip and retain the bag.
Research for this project was a way to use my own interpretation of discussions, viewpoints and previous ways of looking.
The quote opposite, (Fig. 4)is kind of how I too, imaging the working process, I like to think, that even when a work is finalised, that at any one point in time, there will be some kind of callback, return to or re-evaluation of what it is I have done.
This way of looking at the world around me as my pallet, technical support (I use the Kraussian term here: see Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, p. 76. In her review of Ed Ruscha’s On The Road, The article talks of the “technical support”.) (Fig. 5).
Fig. 4 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s quote on the “Do it’ exhibition.
Fig. 5, Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup book page 76. Here we can see the discussion of the technical support. This way of assessing an artistic practice is something I had adopted from the CCS module this block.