1-2-3-4
Artists
Martin Creed
The Apathy Band (Bob & Roberta Smith, George Barker, Victor Mount, Leonardo Ulian)
The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim aka David Blandy
The Coolness
Plastique Fantastique
Date: Friday 18th December 2009
Time: 7.00pm-11.00pm
Location: Fabrica, 40 Duke St, Brighton, BN11AG
Tickets: £6.50 in advance
available from Grey Area, Fabrica, Rounder Records, Resident Music, and online at
Grey Area presents a one-off art-gig bringing together five artists who use music performance as an integral component of their practice. Staged in front of the altar of a deconsecrated Church, now Fabrica gallery, 1-2-3-4 features a diverse billing of inter-disciplinarians who both play and display.
'When I'm doing music work I want to do visual work, and when I'm doing visual work I want to do music work. For me they are more or less the same, in both being things I try to do. I like them both. I like listening to music when I'm making things, and I like looking at things when I'm playing music.' - Martin Creed
Turner Prize winner Martin Creed's songwriting runs parallel to his visual work, and has been a major aspect of his creative output since the beginning of his career in the late 1980's. Creed's minimal music often has a self-referential simplicity, which is typied by the song 1-2-3-4; the title of which incorporates the song's entire lyrical content. Creed's visual work comes from the objects and words of everyday life, and in much the same way his music uses basic building blocks to form stripped-down compositions that are both playful and immediate.
Throughout his career Bob & Roberta Smith has written music and played in bands, frequently blending live performance with sculptures and painted text pieces. Smith's past bands have included the Ken Ardley Playboys, who had their first 45 released on Billy Childish's Hangman Records label. Smith also hosts his own weekly radio show called MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN MUSIC on Resonance FM. The Apathy Band was formed to explore ideas about artist/audience engagement and the expectations of live performance. The band's attempts to avoid captivating an audience with its 'apathetic' manner, revives a spirit of post-punk shoe-gazing in rambling sets of inescapably self-conscious entertainment.
David Blandy will embody the musical spirit of The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim; a persona famed for his journeys of self discovery and pilgrimage to sites featured in various soul, rap, and hip-hop songs. The Five Boroughs of the Soul (2004) documents Blandy in moments of homage, spinning records at the locations featured in those songs. This work expresses the need to physically and psychologically place shared experiences in music. The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim will DJ through his well-traveled legendary sound system and will be joined by a team of very special guest performers.
The Coolness are a London based rock/electro band with a fast growing reputation for their lively sonic concoctions, DIY aesthetic, and shameless burlesquery.
Plastique Fantastique - avatars from the extreme future and the past - is a fiction produced by David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan and others. The fiction is created through the production and performance of objects, protocols and avatars first presented in writing, manifestos and comics. Plastique Fantastique is an exploration of the different temporalities and durations produced by art, popular and mass culture and sacred practices.
Plastique Fantastique are mummers, a band of masked performers who wander through a town or village and ‘gate-crash’ gatherings or events to perform a play. Plastique Fantastique combine the folk tradition of mumming - often banned for providing ‘cover’ for individuals to settle scores with their ’betters’ or commit criminal acts - and the rituals of apocalyptic cultures from the future to produce disorientating encounters and new myths, so as to call forth a people-yet-to-come.
A neon text piece by Darren Edwards entitled HIC MANEBIMVS OPTIME (2008) will be suspended above the audience to signal the Off-site residency of the Grey Area gallery within Fabrica for one night only. Loosely translated as WE WILL BE HAPPY HERE, these words (attributed to Aeneas upon finding Italy) have previously been sited in a wood on a remote Canadian island, and form part of a body of work entitled Our Infinite Day-trip. The function of the work's nomadic search for a place to be, shifts again when temporarily 'pitched' within a space that becomes its host.
1-2-3-4 has been curated by Daniel Pryde-Jarman
Discussion
A free discussion event featuring selected artists from 1-2-3-4 will take place at the University of Brighton's Sallis Benney Theatre, Grand Parade, on Thursday 28th January 2010 at 7pm. The themes of the discussion will focus on the event's interdisciplinary performances and their relation to spaces with 'altered' functions.
Tickets
Tickets are available online at
www.amiando.com/1234artgigand at the following venues:
Grey Area, Lower Ground Floor, 31 Queens Rd, Brighton, BN13XA
Fabrica, 40 Duke St, Brighton, BN11AG
Rounder Records, 19 Brighton Square, BN1 1HD
Resident Music, 28 Kensington Gardens, Brighton, BN1 4AL
1-2-3-4 is sponsored by...
University of Brighton, CRD, Grand Parade
Pussy Home Boutique, 3a Kensington Gardens
Hotel Pelirocco, 9-10 Regency Square, Brighton
The Guitar, Amp, & Keyboard Centre, 76-81 North Rd, Brighton
Adult & Community Learning, Connaught Centre, City College Brighton & Hove
Lighthouse, 28 Kensington St, Brighton
Same Sky, 1 College Rd, Brighton
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