Exhibitions

Venue: Simon Lee Gallery, London

Dates: 28th August–29th September 2007

Preview: 28th August 2007, 6pm

Notes: curated by David Thorpe. With Claire Fontaine, Olaf Nicolai, Jordan Wolfson

As individuals we are constrained by the social and political settings in which we find ourselves. In the 1960’s the feminist movement coined the slogan ‘the personal is political’; it encapsulated the ideas that our personal lives are defined by political and social circumstances and are to a large extent politically delimited and determined. All the choices we make, the idea goes, have political implications and, by extension, as all personal choice is also political, then the political, the social, the economic and the cultural derive from our personal choices. The directive the slogan implies; to take control over one’s own understanding of the political implications of one’s own actions, has become a sound bite for the culture of self. Another more recent expression, ‘poetic-conceptualism’, defines the individual in an art context that is subject to a political partiality that involves personal feelings, experiences and potential. Today’s rising artists belong to the first generation for whom the events of the 60’s have been experienced indirectly and, although those embedded in the western European mainstream may have a historical commonality, for Olaf Nicholai, who was brought up in the former German Democratic Republic, to Kate Davis, originally from New Zealand, the dialogue surrounding that era must be radically different. In any event these artists, once removed from the immediacy and potency of their parents’ generation of alternative practices and protest, imbue art with a language that has emerged from a received impression of an earlier era. Claire Fontaine declares herself as ‘ready made artist’ whose practice has been described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence that defines contemporary art today. A Paris based collective that has taken its name from a well known brand of school note books, Claire Fontaine questions her role and purpose as an artist while bringing the rhetoric of agitprop into the sanctified environment of the art gallery. Fontaine operates within a framework that utilizes the contradictory nature of art production, political history and contemporary reality, (removed and) the needs of the gallery system and the art market. She claims the potency that much of the art world has abandoned to assert a political position that recognizes, abnegates and challenges the status quo while at the same time acknowledging the realpolitik of today. Fontaine has countered the diminishing return on political sloganising by originating her own slogans that have begun to occupy the ever expanding space of representation which she describes as expanding selectively while deceasing in general intensity. Fontaine’s smoke texts are installed on the ceiling and proclaim: ‘The educated consumer is our best customer’ – ‘The true artist produces the most prestigious commodity ’ – ‘You pay for your pleasure’; they exist only as temporary works not easily captured by the mechanisms of the market. In her installation Untitled (Identite, Tradition et Souverainete) (2007) Fontaine utilizes the image of the French national flag, le Tricolore. Claire Fontaine has changed the proportions of the bands of colour on the flag so that their differences in width have become far greater and undermine the flag’s ability to evoke the patriotism it is intended for. Three flags, rather than being displayed high and proud, droop towards the floor in an attitude of obeisance that contradicts the nationalism usually associated with their display. In her video Instructions for the sharing of private property Claire Fontaine instructs the audience on how to pick a lock and theoretically liberate the rich.

The language of conceptual art is utilised by Olaf Nicholai to create a form of ‘neo-conceptualism’ that draws its impetus from contemporary culture as he makes statements that observe and critique the mores of present-day life. Nicolai’s work deals in an oblique, politically subversive way with the orthodoxies of Modernist experiments that he regurgitates to satirically reveal the quotidian in contemporary life as presented to a consumerist media sophisticated audience by a rapidly shifting ultra-sophisticated media world. Nicolai is concerned with aesthetics in a very fundamental way, ‘As I understand aesthetic it is the modus of being in the world and I try to reflect this modus by working in it.’ In Vogue Mirror, the cover of the ‘Special Millennium Issue’ of the English edition of Vogue has been reproduced to its exact original scale. The text, originally printed on the mirror card of the wrapping, has been rendered here on a common domestic mirror. Two mirrors are juxtaposed, like a pair of twins bearing another slogan – ‘The future starts here’. In his piece Elster, a reproduction of a photo accompanying an article reporting on animal behaviour shows a magpie looking into a mirror and interacting with its own reflection. Experimental tests examining the reaction of animals to their own reflection are intended to illuminate the extent to which animals possess a self-relationship or even reflexive concepts of the self. The photo poses questions arising from observed behaviour that cannot be answered definitively by the scientists. However, the documented arrangement shows how central the production and reception of images are to the comprehension and conception of identity as well as for a concept of culture. The work Blue Print consists of a piece of blue carbon paper (the kind of thing once used on typewriters to make copies) put between two sheets of white paper. Framed it looks like an Yves Klein piece and has the potential to be reproduced in an unlimited edition. Kate Davis subtly mixes references that explore the relationship between the body and the object, the iconic implications of significant moments in the history of modern art selected as part of a personal referential system that has developed within a feminist discourse. Davis has an interest in how associations that certain aspects of visual culture may have acquired through time can be interpreted to say something relevant today. She knowingly expresses the personal and political contexts in which her work is created and in which it is now exhibited, creating works that are linked to the history of art and the art institution while playing with systems that we encounter in our daily lives transferred to the exhibition space. She incorporates an association of drawings, objects, ‘ready mades’ and prints in installations that address a relationship between the body and the inert stuff of objects in an open ended manner in which the viewer has an important part to play in the conclusion of the work. Davis’s objects and images are carefully selected to emphasise an ambiguity that exists within an intricate interchange between different modes of representation accentuated by an odd relationship between materials, plastic with ceramic, manufactured with hand made, domestic and technological. She appears in drawings that accentuate a sense of vulnerability and anxiety. In Waiting in 1972: What about 2007?, Davis combines the outer shells of old televisions with ceramic batons implanted in them with a full length figure drawing of the artist seemingly assembling an erased image of an easel. Her I want to Function in the Present Time (self-portrait III) juxtaposes a drawn framed portrait with three aluminium tiles that lie on the floor in front of it. A theatrical presence that the spectator can resolve for themselves. Jordan Wolfson’s films, installations and videos have attracted the description ‘poetic conceptualism’. Proposing a site with the potential for personal experience and communication, Wolfson is careful not to oversubscribe his work with too much specified meaning. He uses collective mythologies, cultural icons, nostalgia and language in his videos, installations and photographs. In other instances the instantaneous, ephemeral significance of a fleeting moment attracts his attention. Day, the sound recording of a match being struck, originated with the flash of self awareness that Wolfson experienced in the moment of lighting a cigarette in the street. The latent psychic potential of the domestic cat is evoked in Clairvoyant as the mythical feline condition of heightened sensibilities and cats’ reputation for being the embodiment of lost souls is conveyed in the image of a sleeping cat. In his film of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from ‘The Great Dictator’, transposed into sign language, Wolfson is making a subjective political statement. Historically this speech was one of the reasons why Chaplin was deported during the McCarthy era just one year before the US entered World War II. Wolfson uses the assumption that the work is a political statement and the history that the work references is an opportunity to propose questions about the world we live in. Standing in the centre of the installation the 16mm projector occupies the space as an integral part of the work. Its presence evokes the historical and filmic heritage of Wolfson’s own received knowledge of film. Political experience given rise to, as a product of, social structures and conditions and the accumulation of individual choice.