Project News: A Message To... Marfa

Marfa, Texas, located at 30°18′43″N 104°1′29″W

TBC members Laura Davidson, Charley Peters and Beverley Bennett are currently working together on a collaborative project, A Message To... Marfa. Marfa is a town in the desert of West Texas, founded in the early 1880s as a railroad water stop. Marfa Army Airfield was located east of the town during World War II and trained several thousand pilots before closing in 1945, the abandoned site still being visible 16km east of the town. In 1956 the film Giant was filmed in Marfa, famously the last film featuring James Dean, who died before filming was completed. The city is now best known for housing Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation, occupying more than 10 buildings and permanently exhibiting work by artists including Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Richard Long and Roni Horn. 

A Message To... Marfa involves Peters and Bennett, in London, providing Davidson with a list of instructions for actions that she must undertake in Marfa. These actions will generate material that Davidson will send back to Peters and Bennett, which they will curate and interpret to generate a remote 'drawing' of Marfa. The project will be realised over the next two months, and published online shortly afterwards.

12-Pages Online Project Space Call for Submissions: Issue 9

Tacita Dean Chère petite soeur (2002)

12-Pages Online Project Space invites submissions from creative practitioners in response to the theme of ‘Terror’. The release of this brief has been directed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Invasion of Afghanistan. 12-Pages is committed to promoting contemporary drawing practice and requests that submissions demonstrate the drawing process in some way. 12-Pages additionally asks that new works be made in response to the brief. In order to inspire critically engaged responses a rough introduction to the thinking behind the brief is provided.

Submissions deadline: 29th February 2012
E-mail responses to: laura.davidson@tbcartistscollective.org
Submissions guidelines: viewed on our website

Outlining Terror

The Guernica myth was established on the 15th of February 2003, when rumors began circulating from the UN Security Council Chamber that a tapestry copy of Picasso’s seminal painting had been draped with a blue cloth to shield it from view. It became apparent that Guernica was an inappropriate backdrop for the impending announcement. When America’s intention to invade Iraq was announced by Colin Powell, viewers from around the world saw him framed by the UN’s pale blue, rather than the disjointed horrors of Guernica. It has been said that the UN was put under considerable pressure to conceal the tapestry as screen tests before the live announcement showed the horse’s head rear up above the person talking. The concealing of an artwork on the eve of such an historical announcement would inevitably be perceived as a gagging of free speech. The covering up of this artwork during the early stages of the War on Terror would come to represent metaphorically the lack of government response to the mass protest of their citizens (in the US and UK) against the impending invasion. The concept of an enemy named ‘Terror’ seemed somehow mythological. How is it possible to wage war against a verb? In a cultural context, how does the art community put such an elusive concept into a critical framework? In other words; if art cannot have Guernica to represent sheer terror, then what is it entitled to claim?

In the years leading up to the Iraq War, the apocalyptic visions of September 11th were pulsing through the veins of the world media when the Invasion of Afghanistan was announced. These representations were continually recycled to justify the War on Terror.  The world had become a place saturated with hyperactive illustrations, replayed over and over, filling the citizens of predominately western nations with a fear of this unknown, slippery, indefinable enemy known as Terror. The Invasion of Afghanistan was only the beginning of this stretching decade of conflict. The War on Terror left in its wake a trail of imagery, of spectacle, of war and of the sublime that is so dense in it’s recording (coinciding with the new digital era) that grasping the concept of the conflict: Terror, is still difficult a decade later. 

As perhaps suggested in the Guernica myth, art’s engagement with terror is a relationship defined through centuries of academic discourse. Most famously, the epic engagement of the sublime by J.M.W Turner and Casper David Freidrich distills to us the intangible qualities of terror and fear. The sublime could be an art historical tool to represent the elusive contemporary conceptualisation of Terror. Turner and Freidrich use painting to render the panic of the human condition to something with, of course, a peculiar aesthetic contradiction we recognize as the sublime. This contradiction was inevitably echoed in the rhetoric of the War on Terror during the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign. Had this phrase not been coined in earnest by the Bush Administration it could easily be applied to Freidrich’s painting The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818). Taken out of context, shock and awe is in so many ways a concise description of the sublime. In Freidrich’s painting, the man stumbling towards his renegade top hat on the edge of a cliff frames the ultimate power of the natural world over the small stature of man. For a humble man, the fear of nature is awe-inspiring. With a media so full of pseudo apocalyptic imagery it comes as no surprise that an interest in the sublime has come to the fore of art thinking once more.

The 2009 exhibition Compass in Hand at MoMA, New York, presented newly acquired works from the Judith Rothschild Contemporary Drawing Collection. The exhibition meant that MoMA’s Curator of Drawing, Christian Rattemeyer, could concede a small victory as keeper of the medium. For the first time MoMA’s history a drawing was displayed in the public areas of the museum. Tacita Dean’s Chère petite soeur (2002), a colossal diptych measuring 243.8 x 487.7 cm, was hung in a space normally reserved for the departments of painting and sculpture. Dean’s chalk on blackboard piece had staged an insurrection of the curatorial hierarchy.

Chère petite soeur (2002) is a replay of a Marcel Broodthaers film based on a postcard he found of a boat being tossed around in a storm. The interest in the piece lies in the year of production, a year after September 11th and the Invasion of Afghanistan and a year before the Iraq War. The immersion of the viewer in a dusty, churned sea instantly brings Turner to mind.  One observes the boat’s futile attempt to triumph over the inevitable terror of nature. In retrospect the work serves as a cultural talisman, produced in advance of any announcements of ‘Shock and Awe’ by the previous American government. The apocalyptic wind depicted in the drawing was perhaps capturing the atmospheric terror experienced in the west. The reference of the sublime in Chère petite soeur evidences the growing engagement with Terror in contemporary practice.

Rattemeyer would later comment on the selection process for Compass in Hand. The exhibition, curated by conceptual and aesthetic relationships instead of chronology, revealed drawings depicting severed limbs and collaged bodies. However, what these works unveiled to him was a drawn response to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which he had not considered previously. It came as no surprise that these works were produced around the 2002-2004 period. These comments were made during a panel discussion at the conference Travelling Lines: Drawing as an Itinerant Practice, 22-23 September. Co-Curated by the Drawing Room, London and TrAIN, University of the Arts, London

The contrast of the collage on paper works with Dean’s chalk board diptych, should hopefully give you, a potential respondent of the brief, an insight into the far reaching context of terror in relation to contemporary drawing practice. Responses to ‘Terror’ can be plotted anywhere from the imagery of war to the poetic mechanisms of the sublime.

Further Research

• John Martin, Apocalypse, at Tate Britain until 15th January 2012
• Tate Papers on the sublime
• Compass in Hand online catalogue
• Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, Whitechapel, London (featured the Guernica tapestry)

A Message To... Houston

Charley Peters: A Message To... Paul Neal 'Red' Adair

Peters' piece of work is inspired by the legendary firefighter 'Red' Adair (1915-2004) who, during his career extinguished and capped oil well blowouts, both on land and offshore. The project involved collaboration between Peters and TBC's Laura Davidson, based on Davidson's interpretation of a set of instructions supplied to her with relating to a series of drawings made for the project. The instructions to Davidson and Peters' drawings - made from folded paper, reminiscent of flame forms - are below.

Instructions

• I have made six drawings out of folded paper.

• The drawings are now on the wall of my studio in London.

• On sheets of white paper I have recorded each fold as a line, thereby producing six new line drawings.

• I have given these line drawings to you and they are to be taken to Houston, Texas.

• In Houston the lines should be turned into folds and the original drawings recreated.

• The six recreated drawings should be burned and their ashes scattered on Houston Heights, the area where Red Adair spent his childhood, to commemorate his career extinguishing hazardous oil well fires until his retirement at the age of 77.

---

On the 25th of August the works were recreated and scattered along the park in the middle of Heights Boulevard, which divides the lanes of traffic travelling across town. 

Beverley Bennett: A Message To... Ima Hogg

 

Some persons create history.

Some record it.
Others restore and conserve it.
She has done all three.

Allan Shivers former Governor of Texas

Ima Hogg (1882 - 1975) known as "The First Lady of Texas" was an American philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts and one of the most respected women in Texas throughout the 20th century. Hogg donated pieces of  avant-garde European art to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) during the 30s and 40s. Additionally she donated the Bayou Bend property to the MFAH in 1957 and it now showcases American decorative and fine arts from the 17th to 19th centuries. Even in death she is a key figure of art patronage in Houston, which the home of some of America's most important collections. Works donated by Hogg and other collectors during her time are still loaned to museums and galleries internationally. Evidently Hogg's role in giving Houston a rich cultural heritage impacts on the popularity of the Museum District today. 

Bennett based her drawing on the Eastern Massachusetts Easy Chair, (1760-1800) a gift from Ima Hogg to the MFAH. The geometric needlework cover served as an inspiration for Bennett's drawing. The crosswalk beside the MFAH also touches on the Glassell School of Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum. This was an ideal location to install Bennett's work as often the lamp posts here are used to promote other cultural events in the city.

Laura Davidson: A Message To... Terry Hershey

Terry (Therese) Hershey (1922- ) is a well known and celebrated American conservationist. In the Houston area she is most closely associated with 6 miles of Texas parkland that bear her name. The Terry Hershey Hike and Bike Trail would not exist if it were not for her relentless campaigning to stop the Buffalo Bayou from being paved. In the 1960's the bayou was to be stripped of vegetation, straightened and filled in with concrete, a government sponsored project that set to use this method of engineering as a flood prevention measure. Hershey, who lived in the area at the time, campaigned with the proposition that this would lead to flood transference rather than flood prevention. Her fight was eventually taken to the then Congressman George H. W. Bush who eventually succeeded to Hershey's hypothesis that there is a better way to control flooding than destroying the natural habitat. She would then go on to establish environmentalist groups throughout the Houston area and become a founding member of the National Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas. She is still actively involved in conservation to this day.

For A Message To... Davidson constructed a small paper boat to be floated along the Buffalo Bayou, buoyed by the natural meander and current of the river. Prior to folding up the boat, a drawing was produced on the paper. Drawing and the botanical have a long history together and with that in mind Davidson undertook research into the endangered plants of Harris County the area, which the Buffalo Bayou dissects. The geometric shapes of the Texas Trillium were chosen to be imprinted on the boat, which glided down the Buffalo Bayou in homage to Hershey.

Project News: A Message To... Houston

 Location map of installed works in Houston, Texas

 

TBC Artists' Collective have been working on a long-term project called 'A Message To...' The project has previously taken members of TBC to Oxford in January 2011. At the end of August 2011, TBC member Laura Davidson travelled to Houston, Texas and installed works by Beverley Bennett, Charley Peters and herself. Each artist made a new artwork in homage to someone linked to Houston who has in some way contributed to state and national culture.

With guidance from Bennett and Peters, Davidson situated the works around Houston in relevant locations. The sites were as follows:

Beverley Bennett: Crosswalk of Bissonnet and Montrose next to the MFAH
Charley Peters: Heights Boulevard
Laura Davidson: Buffalo Bayou in Terry Hershey Park at Eldridge Parkway

The work will be posted on 12-Pages in the next coming days.

Altered States

Altered States

Edited and designed by Laura Davidson.

Featuring work by Beverley Bennett, Charley Peters and Paul Mendez

12-Pages Issue 8: Altered States

Introduction by Laura Davidson

“A revolutionary action within culture cannot have as its aim to be the expression or analysis of life; it must aim at life’s expansion. Misery must be pushed back everywhere.”
Guy Debord

The European Avant-Garde set a precedent for art as a force to transform the cultural and social landscape. It was seen by some as a break out agent attempting to shift the dominant powers that had ravaged the continental landscape during the First World War. Almost 100 years later, art has become synonymous with selling, consumption and the ‘market’. Questions need to be raised about how art practice can reclaim and challenge prevailing powers, without being echoed by the capitalist mainstream. Art, it feels, has lost its radical edge. The exhibition Radicals and Non-Conformists at London’s National Portrait Gallery curated by TBC founder Beverley Bennett, showcased work inspired by radicals in the 19th Century. Further work was produced for the previous issue of 12-pages. It still remains elusive whether art today has the capability or desire to challenge the society it is inhabiting. The theme for Altered States arose from a reading of Gene Ray’s essay Avant-Gardes and Anti-Capitalist Vector published in Third Text, May 2007.

In the article Ray sets out various revolutionary hypotheses derived from the theoretical. The overall impression is that art has to develop an ability to be: nomadic (in reference to Deleuze and Guttari), uncompromising and unaware of it’s own significance. The importance of art in culture, Ray claims, is stopping art practice from becoming Avant-Garde once more. Art needs to escape. Revolutionary actions are not to be uncovered exclusively in the atelier of the contemporary practitioner. Instead, suggestions for the living artist are to look beyond the discipline of art, look toward revolutions in science and medicine, creativity in protest and transgressive lifestyles, still hidden and being newly formed. Not much different from the approaches of the now canonised André Breton, Alexander Rodchenko, Claude Cahun and Marcel Duchamp. How we now navigate through these ideas in a post-post modern world seems heavy laden with social responsibility. Almost so heavy in fact, it could lead to a creative block. A breaking free needs to be started off small, like the woman in the Netherlands who escaped from prison by digging a hole with a spoon.

The Altered States brief simply asked contributors to consider art as a catalyst for change. It was important that these ideas were considered in the widest possible sense, to bring a sense of plurality to a changed state. As we know too well, the drive for a reformed state in Europe post WW1 lead to in Germany, Italy and Spain the spectre of Fascism and in the East of Europe the steel face of Communism. Such extremes of belief today seem less significant in the age of Web 2.0, where multiple states of exchange between individuals can seemingly co-exist. As 12-pages’ editorial remit is to create a discourse around contemporary drawing practice and it’s definition, the featured outcomes additionally challenge the ‘drawing’ in some way.

Altered States will be published on 12-Pages, Tuesday 19th July.

Slice Project Update: Research Publication

TBC have published a research document on the blog for Slice, the international art commission that will be exhibited at Rich Mix, London and The National College of Arts, Lahore in September 2011.

The document details rudimentary relationships between drawing, space and performance. It hopefully allows the audience an insight into part of the process that TBC have undertaken in response to Catherine Wheel Alley, East London. It was originally a private publication made to communicate possible ideas between the group members. The research produced features the choreographers William Forsythe and Rudolf von Laban, as well as sculptor Franz Erhart Walther.

Open publication - Free publishing - More drawing

12-Pages Issue 7: Radicals

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Smartphones: To access Radicals and other TBC publications, please click here.

12-Pages Issue 7: Radicals Cover and Introduction

Introduction by Paul Mendez

A group of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers in the early nineteenth century, among them the British notables Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, Thomas Paine, William Blake and Mary Shelley, became known as the Romantics. Priding intuition and imagination over reason and empiricism, their original thought and free speech was a radical departure from Enlightenment rationalism, yielding a cannon of seminal works, such as Paine's Rights of Man and Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, whose legacies are enduring.

It has become a topic of contention as to what the term 'radical' means today, such is its ever-changing context. Arguably, since the events of September 11, 2001, pejorative connotations have been dominant. Radical Islam and the threat of terror hang over the globe like the Armageddon of Revelation, precipitating a war between the secular and pious that has prattled on bloodily for a decade. Indeed, the 'radicalisation' page on Wikipedia focuses almost solely on the path to jihadisation and subsequent commitment to the performance of terrorist acts. It can thus be argued that, paradoxically, radicalisation today serves to create something conventional: a homogenous army of self-destructive followers as opposed to the individual, free-thinking, independent agent for positive change that each of the Romantics is remembered as being.

Indeed, worryingly, the gloved hand of the state, fearing the might of the people as demonstrated in the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is frequently creeping round to silence such independent voices, even in the second decade of the 21st century. Following Ai Weiwei's arrest and detention by the Chinese government, the Booker-Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy told The Guardian of the increasing persecution she has received as she continues to polemicise about the problems of the Indian state, its stance on Kashmir, its scant regard for the environment in favour of rapid development and its record on corruption.

Two hundred years after the Romantics paved the way for independent minds to help change the world for the better, and in a world where each individual has the capacity to express and propagate their opinions via free blogging software and microblogging sites such as Facebook and Twitter, it seems inevitable that governments will stymie the potential for anarchy these technological and social developments can engender, for better or worse. Individuals become more radical as societies homogenise. Something must break.

12-Pages Issue 6: Movement

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

For its sixth issue, 12-Pages asked artists to respond to the theme of Movement. Contributors from Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Norway, the US and the UK combined with members of TBC Artists' Collective to comment on change, stasis, dynamism and process in contemporary art practice.

Contributors: Beverley Bennett, Jeffrey B. Childs, Laura Davidson, Sarah Duncan, Fred.L'Épée, Duncan Fallowell, Paul Mendez, Milos & Slavica, Elizabeth Oniri, Charley Peters and Preben Van der Straete.

Co-edited by Charley Peters and Paul Mendez.
Design by James Tuitt.

Smartphone users: To access all 12-Pages issues, please click here.

12-Pages: Windows

Open publication - Free publishing - More drawing

Smartphones: To access 12-Pages: Windows, please click here.


Featuring: Paul Mendez, Laura Davidson, Beverley Bennett, Charley Peters,
Susannah King, James Tuitt, Philip Weiner
Editor: Susannah King

12-Pages Issue 3 Cover: Windows

Project News: Trace Elements - Press Release

Trace Elements

TBC Artists' Collective comprises four London-based artists – Beverley Bennett, Charley Peters, Laura Davidson and Paul Mendez – who work collectively to generate projects with a focus on drawing and its scope within contemporary art practice.

Established in 2009, their recent first show Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing considered the presence of drawing beyond its traditional parameters and within such disciplines as writing, film, sculpture, painting and embroidery. Delineation began a series of projects that will engage the collective with other artists, writers and curators, who are invited to participate based on their individual perspectives on drawing.

Always keen to challenge creative identities and generate new ideas, the 12-Pages Online Project Space enables members and associates to regularly produce new work by means of short deadlines and notional themes, often instigating fresh lines of inquiry. 12-Pages Magazine seeks to document each key stage in the development of these and other of the collective’s investigations.

The collective’s latest exhibition project Trace Elements will continue to develop the initial themes first outlined in Delineation, exploring drawing through erasure, repetition, accumulation, trace, memory and the interruption of surfaces. 

Work in Progress: Anatomy of a Projection

TBC artist Charley Peters will preview works from her Viral series of drawings at Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing.Viral I (left) and Viral II (right) suggest the ways in which both analogue and digital technologies interrupt image data, through an exploration of the relationship between mechanically produced and hand rendered marks.

For more information visit: charleypeters.blogspot.com

Dialogues with Drawing: John Cage

River Rocks and Smoke No.1 (1990) Watercolour on Smoked Paper

Hayward touring exhibition, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage is the first comprehensive survey of Cage's visual works. Already celebrated for the musical notations used for his compositions, Every Day is a Good Day allows the audience to appreciate the prints and drawings Cage produced over a 15 year period at the Crown Point Press in San Francisco and at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia.

Taking inspiration from Zen and the I-Ching, Cage used the same random chance procedures in his drawing practice as he did when composing. He would devise the aesthetic structure of a drawing by taking rocks from a river and numbering them. To define their position on the paper, he would use a computer programme to produce answers to the questions of which rock to use and where to place it. The exhibition itself is hung using such a technique. The curators asked a list of questions to a computerised version of the I-Ching to determine where the works should go within the gallery. The appropriation of this philosophy allows the exhibition to fully compliment Cage's work as one of the most influential composers, writers and artists of the latter half of the 20th Century.

Every Day is a Good Day is at the Baltic, Newcastle until Sept 5 and continues at Kettles Yard, Cambridge 25th Sept - 14th Nov.