100,000 Newspapers
- a public-active installation by Gustav Metzger, Stewart Home and Wolfe Lenkiewicz
22.01.03 - 23.3.03
Private view: 21.01.03, 6-9 pm
T1+2 presents the first major show of Gustav Metzger since his exhibition at MOMA Oxford in 1998, which toured to Spacex and Nurenburg.
The exhibition took place in two adjoining spaces in the basement of an old building near Hawksmoor's Spitalfield church in East London. In the first space, massive piles of newspapers and magazines were scattered on the concrete floor. A forklift truck repeatedly picked up bales of papers, which then cascaded off the machine, mirroring the wasteful, repetitive, unproductive nature of most of the 'work' in capitalist societies.
Visitors were encouraged to cut out articles and images: the cuttings, under headings such as GM foods, biotechnology, extinction, information overload, were then placed on panels displayed in the space. Tables and chairs were provided to facilitate this activity.
The next space presented a dramatic view of hundreds of decaying metal shelves in shafts sunk deep into the earth. These shelves were filled with newspapers. Viewers were able to move through this installation - a chaotic, sunken, library - and select newspapers for cutting and fixing next door.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive series of talks, discussions and workshops expanding on the themes of this exhibition, whose central purpose is to introduce an aggressive, highly politicised aura into London's art world.
After having withdrawn from the art world in the 1980s, Metzger returned to exhibiting in the middle nineties. His preoccupation with historic photographs has grown out of a fascination with the press and the way in which these images capture pivotal and tragic moments in modern history. This includes the events of his own lifetime, such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the destruction of nature. Metzger finds it necessary to obscure these near iconic photos, challenging the spectator to interact with them in a new and demanding bodily way.
This will be Gustav Metzger's first solo exhibition in London since showing in the East End in 1996. Since then he had an exhibition at MOMA in Oxford and has taken part in more than ten group exhibitions in Britain and abroad, most recently in Iconoclash in Karlsruhe and From Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century in Wolfsburg.
In her contribution to The Dictionary of Art, Kristine Stiles defines Auto-Destructive Art as "the term applied to works of art in a variety of media, with the capacity to destroy themselves after a finite existence, ranging from a few moments to 20 years. This self-destruction may result from natural processes such as collisions, decomposition and dematerialisation, or from mechanisms requiring collaboration between artists, scientists and engineers, and may be either random and unpredictable or strictly controlled." In 1966 Metzger organised the International Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), which brought Viennese followers of Aktionismus and various artists of the Fluxus movement as well as poets, musicians and psychologists to London to create and discuss the social implications of Auto-Destructive Art. The participants - among them, Yoko Ono - also addressed recent political topics like the war in Vietnam. This attracted much attention in the press but also gave momentum to the development of kinetic and performance art in Britain.
Stewart Home
Screenings:
[Stewart Home was inspired by Gustav Metzger's art strike (1977- 80) to initiate another (1990-1993).]
All three films were realised while I did a one week residency at John Moores University in Liverpool in April 2002. Basically they come out of an interest in montage and detournement. Also, remember, I've long been interested in how little you can do with something to make a work. Also, of course, I share the avant-garde obsession with 'boredom' (not punk rhetoric about it, I'm into the real thing, which is actually rather interesting) and this obviously predates Warhol. Another thing that kicked me off on my desire to do these films (it took several years from idea to realisation) was seeing the Hollywood remake of Godard's Breathless - I wanted to show how you can really push the remake concept, which Hollywood just doesn't know how to do.
Has The Litigation Already Started? - Approx. 70 mins. This is a loose remake of Maurice Lemaitre's Has The Film Already Started? mainly using copyright notices from DVDs which are made to dance before the audience's eyes with bits of the 1922 Nosferatu cut in. Nosferatu was supressed by Bram Stoker's window for infringing the copyright on Dracula. The soundtrack consists of different realisations of a piece I did called The Bethnal Green Variations: Turning Silence Into Noise (Cage Caged) which was created specifically to stimulate debate around the issues of plagiarism and copyright. The piece was realised on 31 July 1999 by placing a beat box programmed to repeat play Wayne Marshall's version of John Cage's 4´ 33´´ on a windowsill of my flat on the Avebury Estate in Bethnal Green. I had the window open so that the noises of the inner city drifted in (youths arguing and later a thunder storm), and I recorded the results with a Sony MZ-R50. 4´ 33´´ is, of course, the famous silent piece for which the pianist sits at his instrument without playing a note. Rather than taking the little sound that was on the Wayne Marshall CD (silence being notoriously difficult to record) directly from it in digital form, I wanted to drown this out with the noises of the city. In a way I was invoking Cheap Imitation, the piece of deconstruction Cage did to bypass the extortionate fee demanded for use of Satie's Socrate. I recorded 32 versions of 4´ 33´´ being drowned out by urban noise with the intention of superimposing them over each other. In the event I've created different montages from this recording for the soundtrack of my film. Obviously, I did this with Cage and published my intention to commercially realise it (with a little help from Combined Arts at the Arts Council of England) before the court case about 4' 33'' this autumn involving Wombles producer Mike Batt. As well as my anti-realisation of 4'33'', the film also incorporates the sound of the audience's movements into the soundtrack a la 4'33'' but actually Lemaitre did this quite intentionally in the film I'm remaking well before Cage (and even Debord).
Screams In Favour Of De Sade - Approx. 90 mins. English language colour remake of Guy Debord's avant-garde classic from 1952. Like the original this film has no images, but whereas Debord's consisted of black with silence and white with dialogue in French, mine has black with silence and TV colour bars with dialogue in English. The original dialogue is translated and in a number of places also rewritten. However, while Debord had five voices reading his script, I have one voice with an additional spoken indication of which voice is speaking The periods of blackness and silence in Debord's film are strictly adhered to, with the final twenty four minutes being entirely black and silent. Although Debord never explained his original film in this way, I believe his intention was to transform cinema in theatre, turning the audience into actors rather than treating them as passive spectators. If this is the case, then it should matter little to viewers whether they watch Debord's original or my remake, what's important is what happens amongst the audience, not what is on screen (which in a classical gesture of avant-garde iconoclasm is essentially nothing).
The Golem - Running time approx. 100 mins. This is Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 silent with the intertitles taken out and replaced with those from Paul Wegener's silent version of Der Golem. There are fewer intertitles in The Golem than October, which enables me to use repetition to good effect. This piece was partially inspired by my liking for Rene Vienet's Can Dialectic Break Bricks? in which a Hong Kong kung fu film of the seventies was redubbed to give the story a revolutionary spin. However, I'm also aware that Debord theorised the most effective forms of detournement as being those that showed their contempt for all existing forms of sense and culture, whereas those that simply inverted pre-existing messages (in Vienet's case, Hong Kong cinema's obsession with Manchu against Ming conflicts) are somewhat weak. So if this detournement of October is a homage to Vienet, it is simultaneously a critique of him - and even more obviously a critique of the reactionary anti-working class politics of the bolsheviks. A blazing rock soundtrack by Finnish punk act The Dolphins has been dubbed onto my detournement of October - although it is also my intention that at some screenings very different live realisations for the sound might be achieved (which is why I used a live recording of The Dolphins on the dubbed soundtrack).
Stewart Home, 2002
- Wolfe Lenkiewicz and Gustav Metzger
Wolfe Lenkiewicz
The Park
There were also screenings of Wolfe Lenkiewicz's film The Park. This film takes as a reference point newspapers found in an East End park. They act as windows to penetrate into the park's history. Themes such as WW II, fascism and the East End are explored.
The Park is a film based on visual and sound fragments gathered from a park in Bethnal Green. One of the inspirations for the installation comes from Italo Calvino's novel Mr Palomar. As in the novel, the direction of the focus of attention is non-hierarchic creating an impression of objective passivity – as if everything is seen through a lens. The movement of an ant and the flight of an aeroplane are afforded equal narrative status. In this way the subject matter becomes potentially infinite: the park continues endlessly to yield for the seemingly impartial view of the narrator.
Despite this impartiality particular narratives seem to assert themselves from the chaos of meanings: the influence of the local Bangladeshi community, their post-war immigration as well as that of Jewish population (once estimated at 20,000 in the London East End) continually echoes. The interpenetration of the present with the time of war is given voice through 'signs' still existent in the park. The park carries its history.
However, perhaps the 'impartiality' of the narrator is not so total: through the dialogue with the park is he being drawn into an approach with his own distanced heritage as the child of a Polish Jew? The semblance of dispassionate 'distance'- both through the idea of the 'objective' narrator and the idea of boundary inherent in the park -enables a powerful engagement with the park.
Depth of meaning overflows from the false 'objective' flattening of significance (and history): the human being is on the other side of the lens and history continually gathers meaning into itself. The park is like a seashell: it carries the echoes.
Sound sampling and expressive visual editing combine to create a deeply poetic and powerful installation that explores identity, place and time.
