The Fold - Clouds

The Fold
Issue 2 : Clouds

The Fold is a Workroom Elsewhere* edited project by Cora Cummins and Alison Pilkington.
Published by Workroom Press Summer 2007
workroomelsewhere@gmail.com

‘Clouds’ is the second edition of The Fold – a published platform for an invited group of artists to considers a particular topic or theme.

Clouds – delicate, mutable, weightless; pushed around by vicissitudes of the winds. Are we comforted or disturbed the their wanderings? The Fold explores a gamut of possibilities – of being ‘beyond the clouds’; encumbered by ‘cloudy vision’, tormented by ‘clouds of doom , or sitting pretty on a cloud nine.

Contributions by ¬–
Cora Cummins, John Gerrard, Joy Gerrard, Alison Pilkington, Deirdre Houlihan, Alan Keane, Niamh Looney, Anna Macleod, Fiona McDonald, Dr. Yvonne Scott, Ciarán Walsh, Rebecca Solni

The Fold - Free Publication Project

The Fold Torch Songs

The Fold
Issue 1 : Torch Songs
Arists - Jonathan Hunter, Markus Oakley, Stephen Loughman, Alison Pilkington. Roisin Lewis, Carly McNulty, Jason Oakley,

‘Torch Songs’ artists were invited to contribute artworks related to the theme of love, romance, broken heart and laments typified by the famous torch songs of singers such as Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. The result is a diverse mix of artworks and texts. This issue explored ideas related to contemporary romantic notions surrounding art and the creative process.
"Art should be distant and un-understandable, the sublime is where narrative ends and fear is part of the experience”
Anish Kapoor
Modern Painters vol 16 no 3

In Torch Songs we touched on the topic of painting in contemporay Irish art.;Has painting regained part of its position of dominance as an artform that or is it to remain doomed to a corner of the art world as an ‘option’ or ‘understudy’ to the serious artforms such as photography and installation.
In Irish Art the tradition of painting in particular landscape painting has been cited as the dominant art form in Irish Art . Bruce Arnold has written extensively about modernist influences on Irish painters such as Hone, Jelliet, Yeats and later William Scott. However it is important to revise ideas related to modernist notions of authenticty, originality purity and ‘truthfulness’ with reference to contemporay Irish painting.

All Yesterdays Parties -

WORKROOM elsewhere*



All Yesterdays Parties, Carnival, Wexford Street, D2

August 26th 2005

Participants – Linda Quinlan, Lee Welsh, Brian Hegarty, Brian Fay, Stephan Brandes, Una Collins, Naomi Sex, Colin Martin, Deirdre Houlihan, Beatrice O Connoll,Aengus Martin, Julie Martin,Damian Martin, Cora Cummins, Jason Oakley, Jenny Browne, Joe Hanly, Alan Keane, Liam Sharkey,Sean, Deirdre Black, Maureen Cummins, Valerie Early, Monica Cullinane, Sinead McCann, Niamh Looney, Fiona Cummins, Alison Pilkington, Jonathan Hunter

All Yesterdays Parties was an evening to celebrate the uncelebrated, organised by Cora Cummins and Alan Keane as a WORKROOM elsewhere* project.

Artists were invited to create works of art on a white helium balloons. These ‘art-balloons’ were then inflated and installed on the night of ‘All Yesterdays Parties’.

All Yesterday’s Parties aimed to be a collaborative entity of helium balloons customised by many artists – addressing the themes of: art & parties; celebrating the uncelebrated; alternative viewing and presentation strategies for art and even the social / conversational turn in recent visual arts practice.

All Yesterday’s Parties was presented for one night only at a party of the same name (26 August 2005). There was a bar, a DJ and projections of party snap shots and party sequences from cinematic classics.

What was ‘un-celebrated’ was left open to the particpating artists to decise and address. Likewise ‘All Yesterdays’ Parties’ was not a selected show – but the results from an open call for submission mixed with a number of invitations with the hope that there would be many random connections and conflations of ideas, artworks and people.

At this event the party did not compromise the art – and the art did not get in the way of the party. Floating above heads the artworks were safe from harm – the works could be drawn down, accessed and contemplated. And guilt-free, the business of art could be placed temporarily to one side. Neither the art or the party were a pretext for one another, they have got equal billing and the leftover helium provided the last section of entertainment as the balloons were being deflated at the end of a great night.

All Yesterdays Parties - essay

I Why Balloons?
II Why a Party?
III Why ‘A Celebration on the Uncelebrated’?

I. Why Balloons?
An accumulation of inflatables is floating free on the ceiling of Carnival’s upstairs bar. Ideas adrift. A firmanment of propositions, nudging off and rubbing up against one another. This is All Yesterday’s Parties a collaborative entity of helium balloons customised by many artists and some non artists – addressing the themes of: art & parties; celebrating the uncelebrated; alternative viewing and presentation strategies for art and even the social / conversational turn in recent visual arts practice.

Taking work of the walls and compelling viewers to look elsewhere, has some grand precidents. For sure All Yesterday’s Parties is a more modest indoor weather system of white helium balloon ‘clouds’ – but it might be nice to regard it as the baby cousin (many times removed) of Olafur Eliasson’s Tate Modern Weather Project.

Likewise the show can be flattered by linking it to art historical strands: in the 19’teens the design of constructivist exhibitions, Kurt Switters Merzbau 1920’s environments; Marcel Duchamp’s installations for exhibitions of Surrealist work in the 30’s and 40’s in New York 1200 Bags of Coal or A Mile of String; in the 1950’s Arman and Yves Klien respectivly completely filling and emptying the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris; in the 1960’s Warhol’s silver balloons – and all the conceptual and minimailist strategies there after. Or maybe it’s a return to the neck craning hangs of 19th academic salon shows – where works were hung hugga-mugga floor to ceiling?

II Why a Party?
All Yesterday’s Parties is presented for one night only at a party of the same name (26 August 2005). There’s a bar, a DJ and projections of party snap shots and party sequences from cinematic classics. Funny that, the sames names for different things and titleing a party, a night – declaring the whole thing ‘art’. It hardly needs to be said that its named in quasi tribute the famous Velvet Underground / Nico song. So there’s an ironic reference to 1960’s New York Art world decadence – but this is a wee 21st century shin dig in the upstairs room of a bar in Dublin.

The event is pitched as “a works ‘do’ for an atomised community of art workers” While artists in this town are hardly starved of social events, with a near bi-weekly round of openings, at this event the party doesn’t compromise the art – and the art doesn’t get in the way of the party. Floating above our heads the artworks are safe from harm – the works can be drawn down, accessed and contemplated. And guilt-free, the business of art can put temporarily to the (up)side. Niether the art or the party are a pretext for one another, they get an equal billing.

Parties are more & more an important aspect of the artworld. On the one hand it’s a lamentable symptom of the glamourisation and commidification of contemporary art, whereby art – the new sex, drugs and rock & roll– is promoted as the ultimate in luxery goods. As Brian O’Doherty wonders in his preface to Space: Architecture for Art have artworks become, “… emblems of capital, certifying the acceptibility of greed, to which a kind of mystical, quasi spiritual aura is now attached, as it is to the museum itself?” (2).

On the other, art practices that take the form of, or facilitate social events and discussion is seen by some as a critical and political gesture. As one Thomas More has written in the Frieze magazine letters page “ recently I have sensed a more radical spirit in the air and am accordingly working on a show concerning relational trends in art practice entitled ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’, which will be supported by a symposium I have organised ‘Chin-Wag: The Rematerialisation of Chat in Contemporary Art Practice’”(3). This is a swipe at the ‘relational aesthetics’ of curator / critic Nicholas Bouriard and the practices of artists such as Rirkit Tiravanija and Thomas Hirshorn.

To claim that ‘All Yesterdays parties’ possesses or claims ‘relational’ status would be to ludicrously over egg the mix with too much theoro-critical discourse. But it is another type of folly to underestimate the potential of pitching levity against high seriousness for generating interesting ideas and compelling conversations.

Parties can be very important – in Korea, for example much has been made of the impact of the club scene on a emergent generation of artists and as a motor for and reflection of, the liberalisation of the country (4). And we can we think on the significance of how the Beastie Boys’ 80’s frat-boy mantra “(You gotta) Fight for your right – To Party” was both contradicted and augmented in meaning when their record label mates Public Enemy recorded “Party for your right to fight”

Then again and again. ‘Free floatingness’ is a position open to criticism. Terry Eagleton reminds us in his book After Theory (5) not to forget that, all the ideas that inform our understanding of contemporay culture: marxism, post –structuralism, feminism and and post-colonial thought were laboured over and brought to fruition principally as a means of ensuring just and equitable existances for oppressed peoples – not just as a clever way to ‘defer meaning’ and skirt around the issues in relation to art practices and objects.

III Why celebrate the un-celebrated?
How, then about some art, that doesn’t ‘float’, that know’s where it stands? Well we’re in tricky times – consumer culture and the market has pretty much hi-jacked the language of creativity and indeed rebellion. Sony has the slogan ‘go create’. Capital runs free and un-regulated. Nowadays ‘break the rules’ and ‘revolt’ are most likely to be found as chapter headings in a bestseller on economics. And hasn’t even the notion of colectivity has been co-opted – we’re just a mass of consumers now?

Rebecca Solnit is a writer who can help us see beyond this doomladen po-mo future-cast. She argues that we must value the fact that change comes slowly, through small steps, that might not seem significant at the time (6). Therefore, despite what leftists of the old school might argue – that capitalism has it all sewn up and that resistance has be co-opted and anticipated, meaningful protest and change IS possible. As access to public space, wandering and rambling is her field of interest, in particualr Solnit emphaises that, being in public and stating your position – at a street party or march – is a small victory, one worthy of record. ‘All Yesterdays’ Parties’ is an invitation to affirm these otherwise un-celebrated digging-ins of heels and a few short steps forward.

Another why and wherefore is to be found in the underlying premise of a previous Workroom project, the exhibition ‘Elsewhere from here’, curated by Cora Cummins, (4 - 20 Dec 2003). The show brought together a number of artist practices that articulated alternative spaces, principally 'patches of calm' that permitted in various ways contemplative reflection in the otherwise frenetic, image saturated inviolable edifice of contemporary urban culture. Painter Fergus Feelhily says some thing similar in his artist’s book A Venn Notebook: “How do you make work that is potent? We live in a culture where everybody has a certain level of slickness around then that they didn’t have ten years ago … and that maybe is why a lot of art has become quite rough. It looks like it’s almost cack-handed. I think it relates to this issue of how does art survive and still be potent.”(7)

So where does this leave us? Let me re-cast the words of Prince’s 1999 as an apologia for the way critical art writings end inconclusivly and to much in the negative. I was dreaming when I wrote this, so forgive me if I’ve gone astray. When I woke up this morning and I (really must have) thought it was Judgement Day.

Time to lighten up – like helium is lighter than air. Scoops?


Jason Oakley


(1) P-art-ying: Julian Stallabrass on arts monied parties. Art Monthly May 2005

The Workroom - Workroom Elsewhere

Background Information on the Workroom and Workroom Elsewhere –


The Workroom was an art studio, gallery/ project space that ran in the Hendron building on Dominick Street between 2002 and 2005. It was originally set up by artists Alison Pilkington and Cathy Hendrick. Artists who had studios there were – Cora Cummins, Jonathan Hunter, Deirdre Houlihan and Fiona McDonald.
Over the years a number of interesting projects and events happened there including film screenings, art classes and exhibitions such as Mark Garry’s first solo show, and a curated exhibition by Stephen Loughman.

When we had to leave the premises on Dominick Street last summer we developed Workroom Elsewhere, which is a title we can develop future projects under. In August 2005 ‘All Yesterdays Parties’ was organised by Cora Cummins at Carnival as a Workroom Elsewhere

Workroom Press

In 2005 the exhibition Workroom Press invited a group of artists to respond to the idea of the multiple and to explore the idea of publishing or printed material within their own practise. The results were a diverse and experimental range of artworks which included a mail/email art wall. Artists included – Gemma Tipton, Markcus Oakley, Linda Quinlan, Jason Oakley, Alison Pilkinton, Jonathan Hunter, Mermaid Turbulance, Cora Cummins, Una Collins, Mark Garry.

Artists–Books

Artists–Books
2004

The Workroom hosted two shows dealing with the realms of publishing and multiples.
In 2004 the exhibition Artists – Books curated by Alison Pilkington brought together over 70 artists and 150 books from disparate areas of bookmaking and publishing from one off hand made books to critical texts, sculptural objects, comic books, poetry and short stories. This show toured to the Model Arts & Niland Gallery as part of Scriobh The Writers Festival.
Participants included - Mermaid Turbulence, Coracle Press, Kids Own Publishing Big If Productions and Booklyn Alliance.

Elsewhere From Here Exhibition

Elsewhere from Here
Curated by Cora Cummins
The Workroom December 2004

Elsewhere from Here briought together artists who articulate imaginary spaces and zones in response to the realities of living the city.

The Exhibition was curated by Cora Cummins, an artist whose practice is concerned to highlight how our environment is simultaneously the residue of natural processes (growth, erosion, decay, and seasonal cycles) and human activity and imaginings (construction, excavation, agriculture, development, pollution, landscape design).

Elsewhere from Here presented a selection of artists who the curator feels address these and other issues in exemplary ways,

8 Artists in the show were based in studios in Inner City Dublin.

Jonathan Hunter’s iconic images of burning trees, appropriately enough rendered as charcoal drawings, are set in tantalisingly non-specific Arcadian or Mediterranean landscapes.

Fiona McDonalds works in drafting ink, meticulously composed of mesh-like marks, are derived from the patterns of bird flight, suggesting a migration from a ‘here’ to ‘there’.

Alison Pilkington's paintings evoke imaginary landscapes of another order, spanning the micro and macro, symutanously bring to mind weather patterns, geological surveys, microbes and molecular structures.

Fiona McDonalds electrolytic tanks, containing copper sulphate solutions and wired up to transformers and electrodes, collect furry accretions of stalactite like metal oxide deposits that build miniature mountain-scapes.

Liam Sharkey's works are based on the premise of ‘zones of resistance’, his floor based sculptures incorporating a self-regulating energy loops of electro conductive heating elements.

Cora Cummins video piece ‘Sky Field’ records and animates an ‘elsewhere’ existing in the city – a paradoxical meadow of grasses growing on a disused building in the centre of the city.

Alan Keane's works using depleted commercial computer printer ink cartridges, deploy happenstances of flow and bleed, to create images suggestive of natural phenomena.

Living and working in South London, Marcus Oakley’s works present a comprehensive alternative universe to the depersonalised urban realm, that amongst its many facets champions a home made craft aesthetic, provincial village life, back woods Americana, 1970’s country rock, cups of tea, sewing, Skateboarding and the Beach Boys.

Making work in East London and Dublin Joy Gerrard's print works, derived from digital imaging processes, present overlooked incidental objects such as screws and needles hint at other ways of seeing, contrasting the macro view with the micro, subverting the application of technology to simply assert the beauty in small things.

Roisin Lewis

Elsewhere From Here essay

ELSEWHERE FROM HERE


“The fact that it is possible to take vulnerability seriously as a statement, without simply discrediting it as insecurity, is a very contemporary phenomenon. It is only today that fragility can be seen as an effective weapon, or at least a defiant attitude, against the seemingly inviolable, perfect surfaces that dominate advertising, media, public life and art itself”

Thomas Groetz ‘Unlimited Sympathies: Jutta Koether’s Art’ Afterall 2003


“We think that society has been seduced by a collective fantasy of technological power, such that whatever the question, technology has typically been the ever ready answer. Technology has become second-nature, given and unquestionable part of the order of things. Such is the standing of moral examination of the technological enterprise”

Kevin Robbins & Frank Webster ‘Times of the Technoculture:
From the information society to the virtual life’ Routledge 1999


This exhibition presents a range of quiet and understated works that none the less can be said to mark out zones of resistance.

The physical spaces or state of mind represented in these works share a common quality of the overlooked, patches of calm or situations that permit reflection in an otherwise frenetic, image saturated, commercialised environment. These works indicate ideas of spaces that are beyond contemporary cultures crude demarcation of our relationship to the world around us in terms of zones for work, shopping or other prescribed leisure activities.

The works can be read as the outcome or expression of urban survival tactics in an imperfect built environment and society. Personal coping strategies if you like. These are not the wipe-the slate-clean megalomaniac utopian dreams of the modernists, but works that admit the fractured quality of contemporary life. Presenting the quiet, the calm, peaceful contemplation and wondering. In their own way, each of the works in this show present radical spaces.

Resistance need not conform to stereotypical ideas of cataclysmic violent collapse and conflict or puritanical 'high-horsery'. Resistance by stealth, qualities of calm and gentleness are just as, if not more valid. Of course this is not to condone and idea of ‘going with the flow’ or passive acceptance. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that this, has been absorbed into the prevailing ethos of late capitalist development. As Slavoj Zizek has written:

“The ultimate post-modern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when European technology and capitalism are triumphing world-wide at the level of the economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of ideological superstructure in the European space itself by New Age Asiatic thought.

The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavour to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, ‘let oneself go’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblance’s that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.

‘From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism
Slavoj Zizek (Cabinet, Issue 2 Spring 2001) (www.cabinet.com)

The works in this show represent clear instances of not going with the flow. Instead they illustrate everyday revolutions.

This diverse range of works, by simple merit of the being made in our time and attempting to eke out a space for themselves in the present world share some correspondences to the lofty ideals of the 1960’s Situationist’s ‘Derive’.

The Derive being the attempt of the Situationists, using the tactic of aimless walking (not to work, not to shop, not to sight see) to arrive an new and un-blinkered understanding of the spaces around then and their relationship to them. A psycho-navigation unhindered by the propaganda of contemporary culture, the society of the spectacle. A mode of being neither working, nor at leisure.

Indeed much could be said about the idea of the art ‘work’ and (professional) art practice. How much does this represent the codification, representation and organisation of cultural activity along productive / industrial capitalist lines?

Or might we look upon the use of terms like work, practice, ‘professionalism’ in art as something more playful, subversive and ultimately resistant to the idea of ‘work’. An ideal of no clocking on, no indicators of productivity or worth ….

But then again this whole uncertainty and malleability of what can be bought and sold, what you do with your time has been co-opted by capitalism. The very labour of producing meaning has been harnessed. The theory going (it’s been called the cinematic mode of production (3), that when engage with mass culture, at the cinema multiplex, in shopping mall, at home with our x-box’s and DVD’s – we are manufacturing ‘meaning’, working when at our leisure – consuming and perpetuating consumerist messages and values, being programmed and helping to programme others for this ‘design for life’.

“Beneath the paving stones – the Beach!”
Situationist Graffiti, Paris 1968

Think on this for a moment. Beneath the city is earth. The built environment is accommodated by the natural landscape. The sky above a city is the same as that above a forest, a desert, a snow covered tundra or the sea.

These works represent in an optimistic and concrete way what ‘revolution’ might look like. Contemporary cultural critique as admirable and clever as it is, always ends up expending the majority of its energies painting a distopian, Matrix-like, all encompassing and inescapable picture of capitalist development.

The imparting of any solutions or tactics for resistance is too much a rarity. This show reverses the balance. Its as if we asked the question of artist’s “what does the revolution look like – what places are good for you”? It’s a radicalism defined on a smaller scale …

The Curators

Various Art events at the workroom

The City

The city exhibition was a group show curated by painter Stephan Loughman held at the Workroom, Hendron building, Dominic Street, Dublin in Sept 2004