latest art

Daniel Pryde-Jarman article on Barbera Kruger for Latest Art
'Phenomenal Women', Autum 2006, Issue 2, Page 20
http://www.latest-art.co.uk

Our Critical Friend

Drawings of the grey area by Mike Bartlett published in the latest edition of Critical Friend Magazine. See www.transitiongallery.co.uk - Editions.

perform

http://www.perform-magazine.co.uk/
Grey Area interview with Daedalus, pages 12 and 13

Perform Magazine is a new publication promoting and documenting performance-based artwork, theatrics, plays, stages and live activities.

Last Words

The grey area is inviting 16 artists to take part in an exhibition entitled ‘Last Words’. Each artist is to visit the gallery individually, 1 a day for 16 days, and write on a wall what they would like, imagine, or accept their last words to be. One wall of the gallery will be painted with blackboard paint and artists will use a single piece of chalk to write their words. All preceding words will be erased before each artist applies their own, meaning that nobody will be privy to what came before. A Polaroid photo will be taken of every participant as they face the wall before writing/marking, and photographic evidence of the words will be projected back onto the same wall during the show. The remainder of the 16 chalks will be used to 'white out' the blackboard for the projection, and transcripts of the words will be read out by basic text-speach software in an installation to the rear of the gallery.

Words to be written13th – 28th September 2006
Private View – Fri 29th September, 7-9pm
Exhibition – 29/9/06 - 2/10/06
2-6pm

A Battle Done, PV, 25/8/06, 7-9pm

A Battle Statement

A Battle Done may mark surrender or plunder, a victim or victor. When those assailed upon by decisions to disintegrate with the other, are deposited by that fateful wheel to rest. A terminus is reached with every battle, to celebrate or despair, to illuminate or disappear. A strategy reaches a decision, or else it has been made despite itself. Every opposition requires another to be compromised. Grey Area stages A Battle Done to celebrate minor insurgencies, surgeries, and skirmished activities. Witnesses may be in doubt as to whether these events merit the title of ‘battle’ or be better passed off as merely ‘actions’, but regardless of belligerence or subtlety every one of the featured afflictions had an ultimatum imposed upon it.

A Battle Done

siblings

The grey area plans to contact all of its namesakes in an attempt to unite all those who stopped at the same signifier; a shared moniker demands a nod. A list of all grey area businesses, organisations and activities will be listed here to illuminate any strings of appropriated meaning or templated possibilities common to the phrase.

Accusal still

Accusal
dvd projection
detail from Stone's Eye View
July-August 2006

Stones Eye View

A house and a wife.

The art of introduction

Dust has collected on my copy of RD Laing's 'the Politics of Experience' since I bought it. I opened it for the first time yesterday and was immediately worked upon by the opening of the introduction...

'Few books today are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible. There is little conjuction of truth and social reality. Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.'

Ever greater a preceding stir? A call to arms for those who are still half-alive.

DONE

done by the time the wind had come
lost against things
that snap against skin
absorb all this
defeated
down to earths warmth
hands pull the dirt
over your aching body

practice, practice, practice

Dont you go getting any ideas, do it by the book.

In Cognito

I sometimes do art workshops with adults with mental health problems and learning disabilities. In my experience, more often than not these are apathetic processes, or else barely tolerable diversions of anti-catharsis. But I was struck dumb recently when a participant explained an otherwise unremarkable acrylic painting. He gestured across the canvas with a complete conviction that every notion featured or memory depicted existed in the same space and with the same treatment; an equility of time and consideration. Whatever allowed his clarity, be it nievity or a lack of exposure, it enabled him a confidence and a pragmatism of paradoxical sophistication. He is not inclined to paint unless really encouraged and holds no regard for his 'pictures'. The finished pieces are of little interest but there is a lot to be admired in his working process and manner of sorting ideas and placing images. For me at least, and perhaps for him too because he enjoyed my praise and the sense that he had pleased me. The experience reminded me of some of the definitions of outsider art that I have come across over the years. The term ‘L’Art Brut’ - literally ‘raw art’ – was coined by the French painter Jean Dubuffet. ‘Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it’, Dubuffet said, ‘It runs away as soon as one says its name: it loves to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called’.

Stones and clouts make martyrs

'If these should hold their peace, the stone's would immediately cry out.'
Bible, St Luke ch19, v40