A Weekend of Art and Culture with Crunch: the Art and Music Festival at Hay

This Friday will see the majority of the London art scene decamp to Wales; to the small, picturesque town of Hay, situated on the edge of the Black Mountains next to the River Wye. Every year a glut of artists, critics, collectors, philosophers, novelists, politicians and scientists descend on this “town of books” for Crunch: the Art and Music Festival at Hay, coming together to ask the big question: what’s the point of art?




Kicking off on the Friday evening with a magical lantern procession from Hay’s Market Square to the globe field, the first night is a frenzy of live music, dancing, wild costumes, sky-high fire sculpture and trapeze artists. The rest of the weekend is a whirlwind of talks, debates, parties and art, with Hay playing host to a legion of big names from the art world. Speakers include leading rights advocate, Bianca Jagger, Serpentine Director Julia Peyton-Jones, Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed, ICA Director Ekow Eshun and BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz and many many more. In addition to this comprehensive series of events are performances from Laura Marling, Lulu & the Lampshades and Man Like Me amongst others.

In the globe field, you’ll find the Tate Great British Art Debate Tent with a cabaret mix of talks, music and desert island art and outside pyrotechnic excitement with globe on fire. And this year, for the first time, Crunch is holding the Crunch Art Fair, showing and selling work by some of the UK’s leading artistic talent and galleries. A cultural highlight of the festival, the Crunch Art Fair combines leading galleries with the programme of talks and debates. Giving festival-goers the opportunity to look at – and buy- works of art, the new space directly below the globe field plays host to a series of containers, each dedicated to a different gallery platforming the work of multiple artists. In addition, work will be exhibited in the Upper and Lower Galleries of the globe at hay.




The exhibiting galleries will be showing pieces by both established and cutting-edge artists. With works spanning the media of sculpture, video art, painting and photography, the Crunch Art Fair offers visitors an opportunity to discover new developments in contemporary art and experience artworks in a relaxed and beautiful setting. Work will include new video art from Squid & Tabernacle, being shown in the UK for the first time, contemporary painting inspired by the Old Masters courtesy of the Cynthia Corbett Gallery, video painting from Open Gallery including work from the winners of the Open Prize, and mid-career and celebrated emerging work from the Alexia Goethe Gallery. The Museum of Everything- whose Exhibition #1 became the most successful exhibition of self-taught, marginal and non-traditional art ever to be staged in Great Britain- will be showing Exhibition #2 in the globe at hay.

Engaging, irreverent and challenging, the weekend promises to deliver an unforgettable festival atmosphere amidst the bleakness of winter.

For more information, see www.artfestivalathay.org.

Re-visualising the cinematic: Angela Bulloch at Simon Lee Gallery

Angela Bulloch’s (b. 1966) Discrete Manifold Whatsoever opened early this autumn in London at Simon Lee Gallery, marking her first solo exhibition in the UK since 2005.

Angela Bulloch’s installations respond to the presence of the viewer and in doing so create a kind of separate world within the exhibition space. By encouraging physical interaction with the pieces, Bulloch effectively presents the viewer with a blank rule book (interestingly, Bulloch made a book Rule Book in 2010 which is comprised of an ongoing collection of rules that have been broken, subverted and altered). In this way, Bulloch allows the viewer to experience the notion that repeats itself throughout the body of her work; how background shapes who we are and how we experience the world.

This exhibition showcases an entirely new body of work that develops and de-constructs the “pixel box” sculptures that have become her signature. For two decades this modular, infinitely programmable light box with a wooden case and opaque plastic screen has been one of her primary media. At once sculptural units and carriers and transmitters of data, these boxes have until now remained consistent in form. From one work to the next they zoomed on the digital image and re-visualised the cinematic.

For this exhibition Bulloch turns her attention to the forms of the boxes themselves. In one work, consisting of a group of four such boxes fabricated in copper, the hard metallic sheen of the units clearly asserts their relation to Donald Judd and the modular language of minimalism. Mondrian Corian Pixel (Blue) is caught in a different kind of grid and hangs, suspended, abject, straps and wires trapping it and rupturing the purity of its form. Elsewhere boxes with solid faces are pierced so their light spills out and throws shifting patterns upon wall and floor. The configuration of their holes makes yet another reference to Bridget Riley’s White Discs (1964).

Alongside this re-imagined pixel box sculptures Bulloch will show wall pieces which suggest their conceptual concomitant, their texts elaborating and expanding the exhibition’s title, along with interactive spotlight installations. Pushing against the mill-stone of traditional gallery regulations this is a show not to be missed.

Continues until 27 November. www.simonleegallery.com

Image Courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London.

Art & Architecture – The Wider Debate – Interview with Carson Chan

Looking at the wider definitions of architecture, Marcin Szczelina chats with Carson Chan, co-director of PROGRAM in Berlin. To continue the debate, read the current issue of Aesthetica for a feature on Architectures of Social Change.

Firstly, I would like to ask you about your definition of architecture. What is Architecture?
Architecture is the spatial practice of a body of knowledge dealing with socio-historical contexts, structures and subjective experience.

You have said that “not all buildings are architecture.” Can you expand on this idea?
Buildings are the physical structures we live in; they protect us from the elements. Architecture is when we wish to communicate ideas or concepts through built structures. Traditionally, the architectural ideas conveyed through buildings have been about lifestyle and socio-political ideologies. Architects have also tried to express literary concepts such as deconstruction through architecture to varying degrees of success. Architecture does not have to occur in built structures, but we may find moments of architecture in many other disciplines. The music of John Cage, the artwork of Olafur Eliasson, are obvious examples of architecture outside of building design.

You have been a guest speaker at events such as Ex-Architects Lecture in Wroclaw, Poland. What is your stance on activities such as these, which address the problem of the identity of architecture? Does asking such questions help define the architecture itself?
Yes, I would say that such activities are absolutely necessary for architecture—particularly when there are non-architects in the audience. Your average person engages regularly with opinions on film, literature and music, but rarely gives much thought to buildings, let alone architecture. I hope to engage people in thinking about the built world, and the meaning of the experiences it both provides and produces.

How does the curating of architecture different from that of the fine arts?
Curating is the process of mediating between the work and the audience. Both artwork and architecture need to be contextualized for it to become expressible. Work installed incorrectly is distorted. Imagine Duchamp's Fountain installed in a place that doesn't signify its artistic intentions! Art and architecture are different disciplines, so naturally, their mediation requires different techniques.

What is the role of the architectural exhibition?
Traditionally, the architecture exhibition has been a place for the display of representations of architecture- such as models and drawings. I think architecture exhibitions can themselves show architecture without recourse to representation. Exhibitions are produced in spaces, and the experience of space, for me, is the primary way we perceive architecture.

As the Director of the PROGRAM Gallery, which deals with presenting exhibitions that break the boundaries between art and architecture, does the fact that your point of reference is architecture make it a challenge to find a "middle ground"?
Architecture, as I mentioned earlier, can exist in media other than building design, such as art or music or installation, which are much easier to exhibit in gallery spaces. One of the aims of PROGRAM is to test the boundaries between architecture and other disciplines. In doing so we can know to what extent architecture is still architecture, even though it doesn't behave like a building anymore. If architecture is traditionally embodied in buildings, which take a long time to build and cost millions to realise, then manifesting it in a gallery space allows for more its most experimental form. The gallery becomes a place where ideas are vetted, and mistakes are made.

Can you tell us a little bit about the exhibitions you are currently working on?
At PROGRAM, we've become somewhat interested in dark spaces. By darkening the exhibition space, the visitor has to use their entire sensual faculty to navigate. We just presented an exhibition by an experimental architecture installation group called Raurouw. They created four different spaces with lasers arranged in the four stages of loss and mourning. The exhibition with Miessen, Pflugfelder and McCusker was in a dark space, as were two other ones we made last year. I have also recently curated a solo exhibition in Milan with Luca Pozzi. Luca works with theoretical physics in his artwork and it was a challenge to convey them spatially in the exhibition. We ended up using different types of light with different tones, temperatures, and luminosity to show the variety and variability of ideas in these theories.

Before the Venice Architecture Biennale you were a bit wary about the vagueness of this year’s theme. After visiting the event what do you have to say about architect's ability to communicate their ideas and the meaning behind their architecture?
I would still say that the title, People Meet in Architecture, is pretty loose, to the point where it’s almost meaningless. Sejima, the director, had a strong statement in her catalogue text, and I think her ideas to use space as a primary material to express architectural ideas really come through. The arsenal, which was the only part completely curated by her, holds together as an exhibition quite well—it was like a succession of different experiences that activated different senses and positions towards architecture. I also enjoyed how Sejima included artists in the exhibition. The success here was that she showed artwork made by artists, unlike Aaron Betsky's exhibition, which asked architects to make installations.

You often speak about different ways of exhibiting architecture and new curatorial strategies presenting or perhaps lacking in architectural discourse. Do you think that biennales really present innovative ideas and theories and are they also meaningful for non-architectural audiences?Biennials are more celebrations than anything. Most of the exhibitors are invited with less than a year's time to make something. It's a length of time that artists are comfortable working in, but most professional architects aren't used to completing projects within the span of several months—let alone in a medium they are not accustomed to working in. There are always interesting ideas when people do work for the sake of exposing it to a community of like minded people, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that bienniales, by definition, are able to innovate ideas and theories.

What, for you, have been the most inspiring exhibitions of recent times?
I recently toured through the Hansa Viertel with some of my students. The Berlin neighbourhood, made in the late 1950s, was intended to be an exhibition of actual buildings, and moving around buildings by Alvaro Aalto, Egon Eiermann, Walter Gropius and Oscar Niemeyer, while observing how people actually live in and amongst them was a pretty satisfying experience. The organic, modern utopian ideals of the exhibition are still communicated quite clearly. It still retains the ideology active in its inception.


Marcin Szczelina (b.1982) is an architecture critic and curator based in Wroclaw, Poland.

For further information on PROGRAM visit www.programonline.de