Hi All,

Our thanks go to Emily Rimmer and Joe Venning this week for a sterling exhibition involving a piskstallningar (carpet-beater-support, handily tranlated by Petter Yxell), a subversive square, a mysterious rippling video, some extremely analogue split-screen action and a bit of wood being repeatedly abused. Permeating the show was an exploratory approach to both sculpture and video, with each medium being gently prodded, poked and squeezed in an artistic partnership which looks set to bear plentiful fruit in the future. A discussion was held in the space prior to the opening in which Emily and Joe expanded on their interest in the everyday and the rest of us tried to work out what was happening in Emily’s seemingly computer-generated looped video. Thanks to all who attended, especially the large Edinburgh contingent – always nice to have new faces around! We had to can the film screening due to multiple technical hitches, but Joe and Emily plan to put their chosen vids up on the blog, so keep your eyes peeled.

This week (at 5PM on Tuesday 4th December) we are extremely excited to be hosting London-based collective SALT, an independent; not-for-profit; lo-fi publication and collaborative group interested in the importance of the free availability, transfer and exchange of knowledge. They’re also partial to the odd horror film. I wont say too much about the performance, partly because I’m not entirely sure what to expect myself, but this trailer might help:

http://youtu.be/Se7W012IUbA

Following on from whatever happens in Studio 41, SALT and Big Screen Glasgow will be having a joint screening at 6PM next door in the Barnes Lecture Theatre of 1978 film Long Weekend, which features a horrifying manatee-like creature:

http://youtu.be/FBtD9zPx0Gk

Hope to see lots of you at both events!

Best
Nick

PS. More film screenings happening this week, details to follow

Last week saw the Alex Millar and Bradley Davies’ co-curational zeppelin Hot Air lift off in the form of a combined exhibition of drawings and spoken word performances. The idea was (I think) to present two forms of expression in the same space, drawing the link between ‘the subject of a statement and the subject of its enunciation’. The results ranged from nonsensical poetry to sensical poetry, philosophy, sound recordings, a re-enactment of the first moon landing and gutteral expressions of misery and pain from Alex Millar, seemingly taking inspiration from the experience of writing his dissertation. See further down for pics, video documentation will be on its way at some point.

This week we are proud to present the debut Glasgow exhibition of Edinburgh-based artists Emily Rimmer and Joe Venning, Parlay Parlay. Drawing on their respective experiences of exchange programmes in Budapest and Stockholm, the two practitioners find aesthetic form in found objects, create interventions in the urban landscape and use time-based media as a way of interrogating the intersection between physicality and representation. 

The show opens tomorrow at 7pm. There will be a crit group from 5pm onwards, with Joe and Emily choosing a text to be discussed in relation to the exhibition – all welcome! On Friday at 6pm we have a film screening, details of which will be forthcoming.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Here follows two brilliant dialogues from Iris Murdoch’s wonderful debut novel Under The Net, that may serve as some sort of coda to this week’s exhibition, which in many respects circled around the concept of language in its widest sense; from a line drawn on a paper to en elegant piece of poetry read out aloud. Mustn’t life be made endurable and is truth really the goal towards which we strive?

‘As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…’
‘Touch it up?’ I suggested.
‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. ‘The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.’
‘Suppose then,’ I said, ‘that one were offering the description at the time.’
‘But don’t you see,’ said Hugo, ‘that just gives the thing away. One couldn’t give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one’s heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression – it would be for effect, it would be a lie.’
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At last night’s spoken word performance I recited an extract from Kurt Schwitters’ poem Ursonate, and as I do really think it’s an amazing piece, I would like to encourage you to explore it yourselves.

First of all here is an extract from Kurt’s own reading of his magnum opus which corresponds fairly well to the parts that I chose to recite.

If you want to listen to the whole 30+-minute poem in all its glory, I recommend you to search out this album.

For the published manuscript of the whole poem which I based my reading on, go here. On this particular site the short instructions on how to read it have been translated to spanish but they are pretty easy to decipher for anyone dabbling in the roman languages.

I also found this page, with some informative background notes and thoughts on the piece by the dutch composer and performance artist Jaap Blonk.

And finally, as a little bonus, here is a recording of a vocal group performing a few of Schwitters’ shorter poems that explore similar themes of bizarre enunciations.

I hope I have awakened an interest in at least one or two of you.

Here are a few photographic documents of last night’s opening and spoken word performances. The performances were all filmed so keep your eyes open for moving images ahead. We had a blast!

The instructions that were used in last thursday’s workshop can be found in here:

Fluxus Workbook

The first week of Ouroboros offered up a meditation on the subject of authorship, instruction and obstruction in three parts, the main one of course being the exhibition ‘Time it was and what a time it was it was a time’ by Joanna Monks and Collette Rayner, which was supplemented with a discussion group/workshop based around Fluxus instructions (which the author of this sadly missed) and a screening of Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s film ‘Five Obstructions’. Especially after watching the latter, my thoughts on the whole show came to circle around the way that art reproduces itself, and I shall fill this space up with some ramblings that came to mind.

It should be old news to anyone reading the annals of art that the author, the original and the avant-garde were all shot to pieces in a cold-blooded ambush by the postmodernists. Today, we recognise that the claim to a truly original work of art is not only impossible, but also undesirable. A work clean of references, repetitions or recognisable components – a work really ”before its time” – would, if it could be made, not be confounding in a positively challenging way; it would be utterly undecipherable, and therefor completely irrelevant. In fact, such a hypothetical piece could not even be called art, but could only be described as a dislodged chunk of time.

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Here’s a few not so amazing pictures of how the space looked today. Do post more.