Tête à Tête avec Cromwell, 14/3/08

A talk by Peter Seddon & Barry Barker

Grey Area, Friday 14th March 2008, 7.30pm

Peter Seddon and Barry Barker will talk about their project at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nimes. This curatorial/artist’s intervention into the space of a major French regional museum provided an opportunity to work directly around a single major painting from mid 19th century French art, and to work with and within the site and gallery where it is permanently installed.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was Delaroche’s famous painting of Cromwell contemplating the beheaded corpse of Charles 1st in his coffin after execution in 1649. Painted in 1831, it was the sensation of that year’s Paris Salon. Against it was a projection of Cromwell’s own subsequently posthumously decapitated head taken from 1950s photographs and animated into slight, almost imperceptible, movement. The ironies of this are many and multi layered but one of them relates to Delaroche’s own much quoted remark on the invention of photography in the 1840s, from today painting is dead! In a final flourish and acknowledgement of the macabre the Lord’s Prayer was printed in Latin backwards on the gallery wall opposite the Delaroche painting. The show itself was a reflection on historiographic concerns in politics and art from the 17th to 19th centuries; the very period which is the dominant focus of the Museum’s entire collection.

Tête à Tête avec Cromwell: A curatorial/historiographic/artist’s intervention using Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles 1st by Paul Delaroche, 1831. Musée des Beaux Arts, Nimes. 15th November 2007 – 3rd February 2008.

Vacuum 3 Launch Event, 10/1/08

Hanging Vacuums

Mark C Hewit....................Mike Russell

Jonathan Gilhooly

vacuum 3 launch, 10/1/08, 7-9pm

vacuum

issue three

The latest issue of vacuum will be launched at grey area on Thursday 10th January, 7-9pm

To mark the occassion there will be a spoken word performances by...

Liam Doogan

Mark C. Hewitt

Mike Russell

Jonathan Gilhooly

Vacuum has gone through some significant changes since its initial conception at the beginning of 2007. The publication formed as a collaborative venture between Grey Area, Permanent Gallery, and formerly thirtyfive-a, to provide a platform for critical writing, artworks, fiction, and details of exhibitions and events. Although the line-up of contributors has changed, Vacuum’s primary goals have remained the same. It is still validated by the necessity for an independent art paper that acts as an outlet for the city’s creative productivity outside of community arts events and Open Houses. It remains a free thrice-yearly publication that develops in form and content to reflect the nature of the shifting editorial role that is shared by the two galleries and Greg Daville (City Running).


The ‘theme’ of this third edition has been informed by the abundance of International art festivals that spread throughout 2007. The big guns like the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel were joined by many less established and embryonic Biennials in major European cities such as Lyon, Prague, Istanbul, and Athens. In this feverish climate of mass bi-annual art consumption, Vacuum turned on a collection of artists and writers and sucked up their regurgitated experiences for the paper. This publication features a range of international exhibition reviews as well as Impressions of Kassel and Venice by art tourists Gemma Gore and Woodrow Kernohan. Separate to this theme are contributions by Liam Doogan, Asli Çavuşoğlu, and an essay on ‘Synathesia and the Neurotypical’ by the artist Barbara Ryan.


Vacuum would like to thank all of its contributors, as well as Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor for kindly funding the printing of this edition.