Review of Cass School of Art BA Summer Exhibition

19/06/13

Cass School of Art BA Summer Exhibition

Central House, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street

14 - 23 June 2013

I have to confess that BA and MA shows are not usually top of my list of must-sees when I have a busy schedule and am trying to narrow down exhibitions not to be missed. Admittedly, if you’re lucky, you might just spot the next big thing before he or she makes it on to the gallery scene, but, equally, in the process, you are usually forced to wade through myriad shameless – and embarrassingly inferior – copycatting of Tracey Emin, David Shrigley, Gillian Wearing, and so on, all of which wears thin after very little time at all.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find myself wandering around the third floor of the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design this morning, not only enjoying nearly all of what was on display, but also finding it to be of a standard at least as good and innovative as that which I had just been to see across the road in the Whitechapel Gallery.

As part of London Metropolitan University, which has received its (un)fair share of criticism over the past year, being branded “Britain’s worst university” by Vice magazine, and plummeting in the league tables, many students at Cass admit to often feeling ashamed to tell people where exactly they study. However, as a largely independent entity, the Faculty of Art, Architecture, and Design oughtn’t, perhaps, be tarnished by this same brush. This year’s BA class are the first to come through a new system of ateliers, whereby second and third year undergraduates get to choose a studio to be part of, and work together, learning from each other’s collective experiences. So, for example, there are options such as Crafting an Artistic Self, No Protest without Fantasy, Performing Politics, and Things, Objects and Non-Objects.

A student who chose the latter option, Karen Turner, spoke to me of how it has changed her outlook on materials. Looking back over her time at Cass, and to what she was doing, in her real life job as a window dresser, beforehand, Turner admits that whilst not much has changed in her methods, her ways of thinking have certainly enlarged. For her exhibition piece, she has converted memories into materials, using family photographs to build a twisting tower, and old cassette ribbons to suspend mirrors in a labyrinth of swinging light reflectors, beautifully hung in a corner overlooking Rachel Whiteread’s Whitechapel frieze and Rodney Graham’s weathervane.

Another innovation in the school has been the moving in of the architecture students to share the Whitechapel High Street building, bringing about an interesting cross-fertilisation of views on space and its use. This has perhaps influenced the number of installation works in this year’s show, many with interactive instructions to the viewer, and my favourite being Vika Verb’s wonderfully evocative cinema, with real velvet clad seats behind a swishing curtain, a small screen showing her self-made “trailers” and “main feature”, and even a popcorn machine. A few steps further, and you reach Iona Roisin’s chilling but engaging narrative film, with the voice of a girl telling the tale of a night out with friends, on which she was raped by a man in a club. To accompany this work, Roisin has also produced a book of “desire notes”: pithy, dirty, and sometimes erotic statements, à la Jenny Holzer, a few of which feature on walls and ceilings across the gallery and stair wells too.

More traditional techniques are featured as well, from painting to photography, architecture and design upstairs on the fourth floor, and, on ground level, even musical instrument building.

The most significant change to the Cass system, however, has been that the final exhibition, for the first time this year, counts towards the students’ final grade. Some students, in fact, who were failed on their proposed input, have been banned from taking part.[1] This, Turner suggests, has been a great thing, both for the students themselves, and also for the quality of the show overall (and, as such, its reflection on the tutors). Offering the opportunity for students to learn something about curating and displaying their work, as well as giving a lesson in publicity and marketing (all vital things in the career of any aspiring artist today), the fact that the show counts for something has meant that students, on the whole, have really thrown themselves into it, putting in both graft and consideration, and coming up with a grand finale well deserving of praise. If this is anything to go by, I shall have to amend my judgment of schools’ shows, and start moving them back up my league table of summer exhibitions not to be missed.

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[1] They will, however, be given the opportunity to put together their own show in a different faculty building at a later date. 

Images

Maciej Blazejewski

I don't have any answers, do you?

2013

Karen Turner

installation shot

2013

Iona Roisin

Stand-up II

2013

installation shot

Vika Verb

After New Condition

2013

film still

Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/3499093

Review of Steele vs. Freeakpong: Works by Joseph Steele and Nicola Frimpong AKA Freeakpong at Arbeit Gallery

16/06/13

Steele vs. Freeakpong: Works by Joseph Steele and Nicola Frimpong AKA Freeakpong

Arbeit Gallery

4 – 23 June 2013

In 2012, Joseph Steele appeared on the BBC’s X-Factor for artists, Show me the Monet, departing somewhat ingloriously. Nicola Frimpong AKA Freeakpong saw him and his work, and emailed him, believing that they might have enough in common to work together. Two years later, and after several intense months of bouncing ideas back and forth and meeting up for heated discussions, similar to the one I was invited to witness today, and their collaborative exhibition, albeit made up of individual works, is on show at Arbeit Gallery, curated by Nimrod Vardi.

Walking into the gallery, the first thing you’re hit by – and it’s a pretty hard hit at that – is Steele’s bombastic centrepiece. Two plastic mannequins, James and Deborah, who have been victims of a “bomb blast”, and whose remains are displayed miscellaneously on a couple of plinths. Deborah, the “lucky one”, is still standing, but stripped of her clothes, with one hand detached and lying bloodied by her feet, the other blown far away (later to be discovered in the back room with the free drinks). James has fared worse and his scorched and bloodied remains lie strewn across his platform, melted and exposed, as if to the bone. The horror of these pieces is visceral and nauseating, and my instinct, were I not about to meet the artists by prior arrangement, would be to turn and run. 

Upon arrival, Steele himself is fairly cavalier about it all. “Originally I wanted a child as well, but the mannequin fell off the back of the lorry and broke,” he laughs, swinging his legs over the edge of James’ plinth to sit down. He began setting fire to things and using explosives straight out of university as a response to his boredom with painting, inspired along the way by Jeremy Deller’s Baghdad car wreck. For this piece, he was apparently aiming for a look similar to Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s shocking Napalm image, incorporating into it a comment on the continued use of sweatshops and the current trend towards artists becoming celebrities or brand names. Steele doesn’t move the detritus, once he has exploded it, since the element of chance in how it lands is part of the artwork, but, fortuitously, James’ Vivienne Westwood label survived the blast and is stuck fast to his scorched skin, as if it were, in fact, branded on.  

As part of the show, each artist has made a work dedicated to the other. Steele’s for Freeakpong is entitled Zed with the head of the Freeakpong and depicts a disaster movie apocalypse, with the female heroine, Zed, standing atop the rubble of a bombed out London, the Shard and other recognisable landmarks looming in the background, and a red sky being swept through by tidal waves made up of cars, a homage to Hokusai. Zed, Steele explains, is the lead character from a film he has been working on for a while now, called Thus, taken from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Set against the Occupy Movement, it quickly turns into a revenge movie, with destruction to rival Sodom and Gomorrah. By now, this comes as little surprise to me. Steele, however, maintains that despite all of the violence and harm, “this [his work] is salvation in contrast to Nicola’s suffering.”

So, what exactly does Freeakpong produce that is more destructive than Steele’s Armageddon? Unlike him, for whom scale and impact factor seem to rule, Freeakpong’s comfort zone is A4-sized paper, on which she outlines in biro and colours in with watercolour paint, producing childlike – or might one say childish? – drawings, full of disturbing and crude detail, offering taboo-breaking, completely un-PC visions of the bad in society, exaggerated beyond all decency. She churns these works out hard and fast, spending between two and four hours per piece, and proudly stating: “Art is just pouring out of my head right now.”

On first meeting, Freeakpong is taciturn, admitting to feeling herself to be “quite repressed” as a person, with her drawings offering her “a way to let things out.” However, as soon as Steele turns up, “fashionably late,” she comes to life, and, upon the mention of the film Caligula, a recommendation from their previous get together, almost hyperactive, as she bounces about enthralled at the recollections of its “epic orgies” and “gratuitous violence.” With inspirations such as this, as well as figures including Salvador Dalí and the Marquis de Sade, it is easy to see where some of her pervertedness comes from. Her pages are populated by characters wearing t-shirts covered with slogans such as “I hate black people,” “Britain is shit,” and “Jesus sucks cock.” Gay body builders, Ku Klux Klan hooded protesters, and butchers severing human body parts: nothing and no one is left untouched by this orgy of violence and hatred, not even the artist herself, since in one work, protestors demonstrate waving placards scrawled with the chant: “We hate Nicola Frimpong. Kill Nicola!”

Her piece dedicated to Steele depicts a massacre on Downing Street, renamed here as Steele Street, with liberal amounts of blood, shot policemen, and David Cameron holding a sign announcing “I’m a gay prime minister.” One moment Freeakpong says that she aspires to be “inventive and refreshing,” and the next, perhaps more fittingly: “Really I just like to push and push and push myself and do the most disgusting things I can as a challenge.”

The world she creates is, she announces excitedly, “a world that I would like to be in if I could.” Even Steele seems more than a little bemused by this. “But why would you want to create these worlds and bring more pain and atrocity into the world? Do you not think a happy society would be as much about the repression of emotions as about the expression of emotions?” To this, Freeakpong guffaws, retorting sarcastically: “A happy society?!” Clearly, in her mind, this is an oxymoron.

“I think I’m quite old-fashioned in the way I work,” Steele concludes. “It’s always very serious, whereas Nicola’s is much more throwaway. Nicola creates a world of terror, pain, and suffering, whereas I want to reflect.” Indeed, both artists clearly know their cultural references. But whilst both are disillusioned with society, both, through their art, are unwittingly adding to all that is bad about it. Although, I’m tempted to believe that in Steele’s case this might be less unwittingly so, since his works do truly seem to be deliberately ironic, at least trying to make some comment on it all. “As an artist, you’ve got an obligation to make something with real integrity,” he says. And if only through sheer bombast alone, his works are at least impressive.

The information sheet to accompany this exhibition warns that “negativity is inescapable and flows through every part of us into the deepest, darkest corners of ourselves, polluting our souls.” It certainly feels like that upon leaving the gallery. Steele’s joke that “the best thing about this show is the plinth” sadly quite accurately sums it all up.

           

Images:

Joseph Steele

MANNEQUINBLAST documentary photograph

2013

digital print

Nicola Frimpong AKA Freeakpong

Untitled

2013

watercolour on paper

Nicola Frimpong AKA Freeakpong

Untitled

2013

watercolour on paper

Nicola Frimpong AKA Freeakpong

Untitled

2013

watercolour on paper

Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/3487913