Independent State a New Commission by Foreground

Leading British artists Edwina Ashton, Bob and Roberta Smith and Matt Stokes are preparing to begin work on a major new art project, Independent State, commissioned by Frome-based art organisation Foreground.

Independent State explores how we define social distinctiveness and achieve self-determination as individuals and communities. The new works will take a number of different forms, from eccentric historical celebrations to major collaborative performance that will culminate as floats, performances and demonstrations in the Carnival on 26 September 2009.

Carnival is one of the most distinctive features of Somerset’s cultural identity and generates huge popular audiences to witness its grass roots creativity that range from the spectacular to the eccentrically amateur. As the first carnival in the Somerset Carnival season, Frome Carnival is one of the smallest yet generates an audience of over 20,000 people in a single night.

Edwina Ashton’s videos, performances and drawings create oblique and absurd concoctions of character and narrative. They explore the allure and peculiarity of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy, often through the use of insects and creatures given human attributes to ridicule the perversities of British politeness. Ashton will create one of her most ambitious works to date for Independent State. Collaborating with local naturalists and craft and drama enthusiasts, Ashton will manufacture a small army of bizarre insect costumes for performers, creating an alternative society of insects as parallel residents of Frome who will enter their own float into Carnival.

Bob & Roberta Smith fuse humour and serious politics into an egalitarian art that uses the skills of the sign writer, pop group and workshop leader to cajole his audience into a celebratory but often acerbic campaign for more art and greater democracy in our society. For Independent State, Smith will stage an anarchic celebration of the long forgotten names of fields around Frome. Similar to a protest rally, local people will march with placards, costumes, and whistles to a soundtrack of field names sung by a community choir of local people, ranging from school children to the retired.


Bob & Roberta is everywhere at the moment including the Grey Gallery Edinburgh for This Artist is Deeply Dangerous as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. You can read all about his new show in the current issue of Aesthetica.

Matt Stokes is a really interesting artist. He creates ‘performance based’ investigations into alternative and informal movements that bind people together. Music subcultures have been central to the development of his recent projects, which have focused on their ability to shape lifestyle, beliefs, and create collectivity. For Independent State, Stokes will work with Frome’s thriving hardcore/metal music scene and Somerset blacksmiths and metalworkers. Drawing on Frome’s industrial heritage (in particular that of Singers, a former foundry in the town), Stokes plans to create a semi-permanent monument to the hardcore/punk/metal community of the town and area, which will be paraded through the Carnival procession, flanked and heralded by bands, musicians and fans of the genre, harking back to statues leaving Singers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I can't help but think about how lucky the residents of Frome are to have such world class artists engaging with the community.

I think it's important for these types of activities to occur. I have been impressed by Orange's Rock Core. I think that in our society, we're not encouraged enough to interact with each other, the concept of benevolence seems to have been thrown out the window. It's refreshing to see Foreground redressing this.


www.foregroundprojects.org.uk

Unpopular Culture: Grayson Perry curates at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Taking advantage of my friend’s car, I escaped the city this weekend to visit the unique environment of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s a fantastic summer day out with the country’s best permanent collection from the movers and shakers of modernism such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, to contemporary giants of sculpture Anthony Gormley and Winter/Hörbelt. These are sculptures which belong in the open air, and it’s so rare to see them in such a setting – weathered by the elements in a way that only serves to enhance their beauty.

But that’s for another blog, I’d wanted to stop by the Sculpture Park to catch the new indoor exhibition, Unpopular Culture, after interviewing its curator, Grayson Perry earlier in July. Perry’s reputation precedes him, but what is special about his work as a curator is how irrelevant much of the preoccupations on Perry as an artist seem to be. Interviewing Perry, it is clear that he is attracted to the quieter side of art, the unassuming Britishness which makes up our national heritage and jars discordantly with the shouty sensationalism of contemporary art

The works on show question our view of the past and the invert the rose-tinted nostalgia of the good old days. With works including photography, painting and sculpture, Perry has included his own thoughts on many of the pieces and explains their appeal from among the Art Council’s extensive collection of home-grown art. Paintings such as Carel Weight’s The World We Live In, are typical of their time – kitchen sink representational art that highlights the hardships of a very particular moment in South London. Before gentrification, willowy figures amble aimlessly in a windswept yard, they are swayed by the wind in a manner that alludes to feelings of worthlessness and worklessness during the deep recession of the 1970s.

Photographical studies of the long-term unemployed in Newcastle Upon Tyne, and Martin Parr’s distinctive record of British grit, accompany the paintings and sculptures and visitors are invited to lounge in easy chairs and browse a collection of books on the period captured, and the artists involved. Perry himself has created two new works for the exhibition, one of which, Queen’s Bitter, showcases his trademark craftsmanship with an acerbic wit, and highlights that Perry is not as removed from the showmanship of contemporary art as he’d like us to believe, daubing the image of his alter ego, Claire, over the ceramic alongside further representations of our green and pleasant land. Unpopular Culture makes us aware of the flipside of British nostalgia – the grey times of unemployment and want that tempered the post-war UK. Perry notes: “Somehow people feel that they’re working towards a golden moment when everything will be all right. That doesn’t exist and people need to be reminded that life is a work in progress and there isn’t any solution at the end of it.” It’s a fascinating exhibition, expertly collected by one of British art’s leading figures in an effort to criticise itself.

There’s a full feature on Unpopular Culture, as well as the accompanying film screenings from the British Film Institute archive, Nostalgia for the Bad Times, in the new issue of Aesthetica out now – available at WH Smith, Borders and selected newsagents. Or click here to order your copy now

[Image credits: Henry Moore, Bryan Kneale, Carel Weight]

REVEALED: THE BEST OF MANCHESTER 2009

With over 250 entries and a judging panel that includes some of the biggest names in British art, music and fashion, Urbis has announced the winners of this year’s Best of Manchester Awards.

We all love Manchester, there’s something of a northern cool about this place, look at its history with music – Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, Oasis, Badly Drawn Boy – need I say more? There’s also the uber cool Afflecks Palace and a host of museums and galleries, as well as the Manchester International Festival. You’ve got to admit, there’s something special about Manchester.


The Best of Manchester Awards, organised by Urbis, celebrate innovation in art, music and fashion. Open to anyone that lives or works in Manchester, candidates this year stood a chance of having their work judged by a panel of industry experts that included Peter Saville, Wayne Hemingway, the Turner Prize winning artist, Jeremy Deller, Tim Marlow (White Cube, London), Miranda Sawyer, Yvette Livesey (In The City) and Luke Bainbridge (Observer Music Monthly). Together, the panel of judges selected just three winners:

THE WINNER OF THE BEST OF MANCHESTER ART AWARD 2009 IS OWL PROJECT.

Owl Project is an art collective comprised of three artists: Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons. Drawing on a wide range of influences and interests – including woodwork, hobby-style electronics and open source software - Owl Project has produced a range of semi-sculptural musical instruments that have been exhibited across Europe and premiered at events such as the Sonic Arts Network EXPO, Lovebytes and Futuresonic. These portable ‘rustic’ instruments, with names such as the iLog, m-Log and the Log1k, are working digital instruments that mimic popular handheld gadgets such as the ubiquitous iPod. The only difference is that Owl Project’s instruments are crafted from simple, untreated pieces of wood.



The Log1k was Owl Project’s first such foray into art, electronics and woodwork. ‘There was something about the image of the performer standing behind a log that made us laugh,’ said the collective, describing an artwork created at a time when many musicians were using laptops during live performances. ‘But it also felt really natural to be working with the raw materials of wood, batteries and switches.’ The Log1k evolved from pastiche to an instrument capable of producing complex polyrhythms, and drew interest from musicians, designers and software developers. ‘It stands in resistance to music made within the rigid structures of commercial audio software,’ said the collective.


THE JOINT WINNERS OF THE BEST OF MANCHESTER MUSIC AWARD 2009 IS JAYNE COMPTON AND MAX MORAN

For the first time, the Best of Manchester judges have decided to award a joint first place in the music category. This decision reflects the very high standard of entries, and the complimentary, but equally impressive, skills of both winners.

Jayne Compton was selected by the judges because of a diverse portfolio of work that includes the long-running experimental club night, Club Brenda, ‘a genuinely uncompromising underground art happening’, according to Compton, which blends live music, art and performance. Compton also won praise for her Switchflicker Records label and an upcoming Arts Council book, Strange Trees (which incidentally features illustration from BOMA art nominee, Rachel Goodyear). ‘Established in 2000, Switchflicker has given voice to some of Manchester’s most esoteric performers, such as Divine David and Chloe Poems, whilst remaining tuned into new pop talent, including 2008’s surprise hit, the Ting Tings, who launched their career at the label,’ said Compton. Compton’s current signing, Magic Arm, is fast becoming one of the most talked about acts in the country, while Compton herself says, ‘We bring Manchester’s contemporary art scene together with the underground music scene – following in Manchester’s punk/art tradition.’


Max Moran was selected by the judges for an energetic portfolio of work that includes the video-based music blog, ThisTownSounds.com, his sell-out club night, Hot Club, its laid back sister session, Hat Club and, more recently, Moran’s burgeoning record label, Hit Club. Running since 2007, ThisTownSounds has premiered White Lies’ first ever filmed interview, as well as early performances from the likes of Florence & The Machine. Moran won particular praise for his entrepreneurial attitude and his contribution to the music scene in Manchester as a whole. As well as managing much of the filming and writing for his blog, Moran also puts on club nights, handles their promotion, runs a weekly Friday night session at Trof in Fallowfield and is in the early stages of setting up a record label. ‘Hot Club has been constantly involved in the evolution of the Manchester music scene,’ said Moran, ‘whether it be its involvement with new venues such as Blink, The Chapel, Redrum and The Corner or its support of new local bands and artists.’

THE WINNER OF THE BEST OF MANCHESTER FASHION AWARD 2009 IS HOLLY RUSSELL

Holly Russell is an alumnus of Manchester School of Art whose shimmering, stunning graduate collection features hundreds of hand-sewn scarab beetle wings. Russell has also collaborated with a metal worker to incorporate aluminium into her designs and an astronomer to create embellished digital prints. ‘Working with unusual materials I am able to create interesting surface textures, which helps make my designs very bold and distinctive,’ said Russell. ‘I do not conform to creating generic clothing…I prefer to look at the body almost as a plinth to display beautiful designs and creations. When worn, I consider my garments as works of art that come to life.’ Hugely ambitious but with a realistic approach to the fashion industry, Russell has already taken part in a placement at the independent label, Aminaka Wilmont and, later this year, hopes to take up an MA in Fashion Womenswear at the renowned Royal College of Art.

Each category winner received £2,000, as well as a 12-month professional development package - designed to help them kick-start their career with the kind of contacts and professional development that money can’t buy. It’s well worth a visit, because, based on the stellar work of these individuals, I think we’ll be seeing much more of them in the future.

The Best of Manchester exhibition runs until 20 September.

www.urbis.org.uk