Aesthetica February/March Issue Out Today

This issue is centered on exploration and re-examination. We start with the blockbuster retrospective Cindy Sherman show opening at MoMA, which brings together over 180 photographs tracing the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present day. The idea of “innovation in the modern age” is surveyed in the V&A’s British Design 1948-2012 show, which opens this spring.

Lifelike opens at the Walker Art Center and examines artworks based on commonplace objects and situations that question authenticity. This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s opens at MCA Chicago, and is a timely re-appraisal of the tumultuous decade from a social, economic and political angle. IMMA Dublin opens Conversations, and we showcase a selection of works from this fascinating show, as well as looking at three photographer’s new series of works.

In film, the Chemical Brothers release Don’t Think, directed by Adam Smith and Marcus Lyall, which skillfully records their performance at Fuji Rocks, Japan. There is also a Q&A with Jes Benstock, director of The British Guide to Showing Off, which brings the Alternative Miss World pageant to the big screen.

In music, we look at Intelligent Dance Music and discuss the love-hate relationship with the term. We also chat with the Staves about being in a band with your sisters and singing backing vocals for Tom Jones. In performance, we look at the rise of puppetry in theatre with the Manipulate Festival.

Finally, Shilpa Gupta discusses her interdisciplinary approach in her new show, Someone Else, which opens at Arnolfini in March.

Pick up your copy today online or from one of our stockists.

The Language of Political Dissent | Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance | ICA | London

Text by Paul Hardman

“Touching stories picked from a wound. Positive angles wrenched from their sockets,” reads a pair of lines from Running Light, one of the texts that are collected in the publication Dissonance and Disturbance that accompanies Lis Rhodes exhibition of the same name. Rhodes makes video works, often in response to specific political situations, stories of oppression or injustice that could indeed be said to be picked from a wound. Her work is characterised by a political activism and a powerful aesthetic of grainy high contrast photography, the strength of her images matching the force of her convictions.

At times the format of some of the films moves towards documentary, in one film a voice narrates the story of the bombing of a Palestinian bakery by Israel, alongside photographs of dusty and distraught faces. In other films we are shown images of riot police dragging protesters to the ground. A protesters shoe is left behind as the police literally drag him off his feet. A policeman leans on a man’s head, pushing his face into the floor. However, these are not presented as documentary, and the narrative and subtitles merge stories and text from different sources. Images are blown up to the point of complete abstraction. Rhodes is not aiming for straight telling of factual events but creates a montage of scenes that suggest a dystopia that extends beyond the struggle of any single moment.

Rhodes is an important figure in the development of video art, not only for her work, but for her involvement in the support, showing and distribution of video and film. First in the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, and later through co-founding Circles, that formed to distribute women artists’ film and video in 1979. Circles was founded to work against the marginalisation of women film makers and continued until 1992 when it merged with Cinema of Women to become Cinenova which continues today. This level of commitment and engagement rebukes one possible criticism of her work – applicable to much overtly political art – which is that showing a film about a protest in a gallery only reaches a narrow audience and therefore may be largely irrelevant to whatever the original struggle was about. In fact Rhodes is engaged with her activism on a variety of levels. She is there in the protest documenting the event, and through the films she creates a reflective space in which the brutality of a situation can be considered inwardly in a different context to the spare of the moment atmosphere of the protest.

The exhibition gives a broad view of Rhodes' practice, since it includes pieces from the full length of her career, ranging from 1972 until 2012. The earliest film, Dresden Dynamo, stands out for its experimental abstract nature. The five minute film is an intense blast of clashing patterns running across the screen in different directions, diamonds, stripes, dots, waves, each pattern with its own pulsing scratchy noises that make corresponding sound patterns. Shown in on a screen in a blackened room the effect is fairly overwhelming and has meant the requirement of health warning signs.

The purely sensory nature of Dresden Dynamo is a welcome inclusion as it highlights one of the aspects of Rhodes work that may be neglected otherwise. When watching In the Kettle or Whitehall, which focus on the topical subject of protest, then one may feel that Rhodes is only concerned with finding a way to get a message across, but her work has a visual richness that gives it another dimension. The use of bold compositions in her photographs which fade into each other creates a hypnotic, submerged state, as if she is constructing a dream – a mixture of real experience, news events, fantasies and fears.

The notion of the blurring together of different stories seems to be a key technique which she is developing through her latest work, particularly the installation of In the Kettle (2010), Whitehall (2012), and A Cold Draft (1988), which are displayed together on two screens with a shared soundtrack and no clear division between the beginning and end of the films. She makes connections between power wielded (for example in Whitehall which is of course right behind the gallery) and the effects elsewhere in the world, whether it is the student protesting about the cut of the Education Maintenance Allowance, or the ongoing occupation of Palestine.

This exhibition is enriched by the inclusion of a series of stills mounted on the walls leading up the stairs. These are mostly from early work and show patterns and sequences similar to those in Dresden Dynamo. These perhaps reveal some insight into the working practice of the artists, but they also give a chance to appreciate some of the richness Rhodes squeezes into her films, each frame full of shape and texture.

A long publication of the artist’s writing accompanies the exhibition giving further breadth to the show. Rhodes' writing provides another way in to her work and is full of memorable phrase such as this; “The city multiplies in steel shadows, certainly fabrication contains a deal of truth.” The truth is here in her work, but it is up to the viewer to discover it themselves.

Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance, 25/01/2012 - 25/03/2012, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 12 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH. www.ica.org.uk Running alongside Lis Rhodes is In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955.

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is on sale tomorrow and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Photography: Mark Blower

One Man's Treasure | Creative Stars: Lost is Found | Cornerhouse | Manchester

Text by Liz Buckley

Found Objects have been popular as a medium since Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) began experimenting with the discarded and lost in the 1950s. The idea of making something out of nothing was intriguing for many post-war artists. Finding beauty in superfluous scrap is perhaps more challenging than putting paint to canvas, and the new exhibition at Manchester’s Cornerhouse, Creative Stars: Lost is Found, is a celebration of such. Lost is Found is a group show of work from nine artists based in the North of England. The exhibited works find beauty in the redundant and discarded, explore past lives and find new stories in transformations and fleeting identities.

Curated and developed by the Creative Stars, 19 talented young people from the Greater Manchester region, Lost is Found explores themes ranging from the displacement of identity, relics of childhood, secret desires, fragments of memory and traces of history. Brought to life through sculpture, photography, installation and drawing, the exhibition presents itself as a complex network of objects and experiences which act as the building blocks for identity.

Featured works include photography by Lucy Ridges, a visual exploration of intuitive understanding and unexplained meanings. Ridges’ images show fragments of people, as well as parts of bare trees, acutely relating the literal network of branches with the invisible network of imaginative thoughts which make up our everyday lives. This expression of all that can be imaginatively derived from our everyday thoughts and subconscious mind is a common theme in this exhibition, which focuses on the absurdity and often impossibility of a train of thought, a common occurrence in the fast paced life of a human brain.

Jon Barraclough’s All or Nothing graphite drawings are busy scribbles which possess a nest-like quality. Exploring the idea of networking, they are a clever representation of identity. Whilst the drawings could be “nothing”, they indicate the secrecy and personal nature of self, further implied by a blurred outline of a head in one of the two pieces.

One of the most interesting, and perhaps resourceful, inclusions in the exhibit is Richard Proffitt’s Louisiana Blues, Anywhere, an absurd totem of the modern world. Glorifying the found object, this piece uses everything from sticks, scrap metal, fur and light bulbs to fashion a makeshift ceremonial artefact inspired by the biker and teenage subculture, the hinterlands of suburban Britain and the deserts and ghost towns indicative of the American west. While this combination of redundant objects may not function as a bike should, it is certainly a thought-provoking comment on what can be made from what one would normally regard as waste. Displaying Proffitt’s interest in subculture, Louisiana Blues, Anywhere is an emblem of a biker’s way of life, and the disarray of objects and memories which coincide with constant travel.

Lost is Found is certainly a fitting title for this exhibition, as all the included artists have aptly demonstrated that a displacement of identity can often be found by looking to the past rather than the future. Clever "found object" pieces make the viewer question what one usually denotes as a "still life," and literal objects replaced by words bring to light alternative interpretations of accepted reality. Contrasting media is brought together here by shared themes and a desire to bring history back to life, whilst exploring all the fragments of existence, secret mind maps of experiences and misplaced memories that create an identity. The Cornerhouse have certainly presented a reminder for viewers that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that beauty, or sometimes even oneself, can most certainly be found in the discarded.

Lost is Found, 14/01/2012 - 19/02/2012, Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. www.cornerhouse.org

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is on sale tomorrow and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Captions:
1. Installation shot, Lucy Ridges
2. Installation shot, Mark Beecroft, Untitled (2010), Dimensions Vary, Mixed Media
3. Installation shot, Emily Speed, egg, nest, home, country, universe (2010)
4. Installation shot, Richard Proffitt, Louisiana Blues, Anywhere (2010), Moped, branches, sheep skull, light bulb, wood, twigs, t-shirts, blu tack, fake fur
All images courtesy the artist and Cornerhouse, Manchester
Photo credits: Paul Greenwood