GROTT-BOX

Monday, 22 December 2008, 19h30 - 21h30, Grey Area

Impromptu Performance directed by Dionysus P-Monroe (Orion Maxted)

Guests include:

Yoko Ishiguro

Billy Barrington

Nadege Derderian

Harry Neve

The evening's performances included the construction of The Sandwich Box in bad weather - with audience members being invited to erect the Lysthus tent in the gallery in an artificial blizzard - without instructions or guidance.
This performance became an act of attrition as the tent slowly took form under duress to offer the audience shelter from the snow.
The protective role of the tent was later altered within the gallery space when the gale found its way into the Lysthus to be momentarily contained and isolated, causing its sides to billow and its supports to strain.
A video link for The Sandwich Box performance will be added soon.

GROTT-BOX, 22/12/08, 7.30-9.30pm

GROTT-BOX
A performance-based subterranean annual display custom

Orion Maxted & guests
Monday 22nd December 2008, 7.30-9.30pm

The Grott-Box installation fills the grey area with an artificial ‘blizzard’ amongst its artworks, visitors, and three interlocking rooms.

A wind-swept box marked out with poles, polystyrene, drummer-boys, pulled-out posters, song, and flood lit acts. The accompanying rhyme, by which some have in past times hoped to solicit recompense for their artistic endeavours, varies from place to place:

Please remember the grotto
Me father has run off to sea
Me mother's gone to fetch ‘im back
So please give a farthin' to me!

Chelsea Child (1979), Gamble R

Grott-Box is the first in a series of responses to a curatorial project entitled The Sandwich Box due to take place at Grey Area. The Sandwich Box consists of a travelling metal suitcase that circulates around the world as a means of producing artwork in intervals of 6months. The Box is a platform for ‘artwork in global stage management’ and the lysthus (a form of tent/gazebo) stored within the box is integral to participant’s responses. The project is administered by its originator, Lars Vilhelmsen in co-operation with its Uk co-ordinator Karen D´Amico. The project in its entirety is published on http://www.thesandwichboxsite.org/

The experience of the project is considered to be an artistic process in and of itself, therefore it is the experience and hence, the documentation that becomes the artwork, rather than a singular artwork becoming manifest at the end of the project. The dynamic of this interaction is informed by a set of aphorisms that function as a source of inspiration its participants. These can be read here: http://www.thesandwichboxsite.org/

‘The spaces are applied, there is a life in and around them. The gazeboes have been used for social meetings of different kind of atmosphere, e.g. imaginative meetings with other cultures, tea drinking and societies, and as hermitages, where silent contemplation and reflection compared to life and death, compared to God or yourself, was the aim. The most fundamental is that the gazeboes have functioned as intimate spaces that invited to silent contemplation over the life of the individual. They had the function as exterior space for the individual surrendering oneself to its own life.’ Lars Vilhelmsen

Orion Maxted: http://protoplay.net/orion-maxted/

CAINed & disABLEd installation images

Shaun Doyle & Mally Malinson

Dada Death, Tim Bailey

Dada Death

In 1918, George Grosz walked down the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin dressed as Dada Death. Although primarily known as a painter, photomonteur and illustrator, Grosz’s action that day – that is, confronting audiences unexpectedly wearing a skull mask and carrying a cane - can be considered one of the first art events in the public sphere that combined performance and activism.

The Berlin Dadas took on ‘revolutionary’ names (Grosz was often called 'Propagandada') and processed ceremonially through the streets, singing anti-military songs. At the first Berlin Dada soiree in February 1918, Grosz recited his poetry (‘You-sons-of-bitches, materialists/bread-eaters, flesh = eaters = vegetarians!!/professors, butchers’ apprentices, pimps! you bums!’) and then urinated on an Expressionist painting.

In Grosz’s autobiography, he writes that ‘Artistically speaking we were 'dadaists' in those days. If that meant anything it was a disquiet, a dissatisfaction, a delight in mockery, that had all been fermenting a long time already. Every defeat, every upheaval gives birth to such movements. In another period we might have been flagellants.’

Dada Death, George Grosz, 1918