Grcic in the V&A / Grcic in my room.
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Nick Relph was born in London in 1979 and currently lives in New York City. Solo exhibitions include Gavin Browns enterprise (2010), Overduin and Kite (2010), Herald Street (2010) and Standard, Oslo (2011). He is a participant in the current Venice Biennale and recently published the artists’ book VESTIARIUM SCOTICUM.
www.gavinbrown.biz
www.heraldst.com
www.overduinandkite.com
plasticforthefirsttime.tumblr.com
“I did like them … I do like them, but … well…”
“Well, what?”
“Well… it’s just that last year, when you started calling them The New Way… and said you were only going to paint pallets from now on… I got a bit… apprehensive.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
— This was the anti-climax to a few months of vague planning. My friend Jake has a gallery, and early last year I emailed him some photographs of a wooden pallet that I’d painted. He got quite excited about it and we started to talk about doing a show of painted pallets – nothing untoward, maybe me and another artist in a small show at his gallery, we’d work out the logistics with Herald St.
I hadn’t just sent the pictures to Jake. Fishing for expertise and justification, I’d sent them to a lot of people; curators, writers, critics and my own galleries … and a museum; but there was little or no interest. Neville said he liked them, but offered no more than that. Most people just didn’t reply; a clear sign that they thought the painted pallet was terrible. Nicky at Herald St ignored me until I pressed him for an answer. Finally he emailed me back; ‘What do the colours mean? Do they represent something? Is there a system? ’ The email ended ‘Why did you do this? x.’
At the start of 2009 I was in a slump; 2008 had looked so promising but had ended in disappointment. As I sat looking out at the snow from my studio/dining room in January 2009, I wished I could be anywhere else, doing anything else. I needed to find The New Way, I needed to break the ‘idea/computer/printer/show/gallery/storage’ axis. I needed to make work that I could engage with; physical, real work, because The Old Way wasn’t working.
So, I started making mobiles out of scraps of wood that I’d found around the house. Brightly coloured mobiles adorned with stenciled fragments of conversation. But the mobiles were crap. Eventually, the only wood left in the house was a pallet that our new washing machine had just arrived on. Wooden pallets … of course!
I started to think about pallets: The pallet is kind of ‘ready-made’, but it’s also an essential part of the ‘business’ of art. It’s the workhorse of the gallery system and of almost every other form of shopping. All supermarket products arrive on pallets from a warehouse; in fact almost all consumer goods of any kind arrive at their ‘release point’ at the shop, on a pallet. The pallet is the last contact these goods have in the world as a ‘unit’ before they are re-presented as ‘brands’. The pallet is the mule of capitalism!
It was simple – I’d just paint pallets in the fluorescent colours that I’d been using for my mobiles. No words needed, no crude stenciled lettering – just the pallet and the paint. But – did I really need to paint them? I knew immediately that a ‘cooler artist’ wouldn’t bother to paint the pallets. A cooler artist would just declare the pallet to be the artwork. I thought about this a lot. A better artist would work on a theory of the pallets’ role in consumer society, thinking carefully about the pallet’s link with the transportation of artworks and the transportation of soap powder boxes, tumble driers or piles of freshly boxed Miu Miu shoes. This artist would just show the ‘raw pallet’. I knew that. But I thought ‘Fuck it. I must paint something. I must engage! I’m sick of their conceptual reasoning and kowtowing to art history. SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE at SOME TIME must have just made ART without knowing why – without fucking tactics – without making ART ABOUT ART. AND FUCK THEIR THEORIES! AND FUCK FUCKING CRITICS AND FUCK FUCKING INTELLECTUAL ART PARASITES! … BRING BACK POL POT AND CLEMENT GREENBERG.
It was a bright, freezing cold morning as I scoured the snow covered streets for discarded pallets. I had one, but needed more. I needed a convincing set. I didn’t need to buy overalls, rigger boots and a woolly hat to do this, I’ll admit, but I did anyway. It was the right thing to do – Robert Rauschenberg stalking stuffed goats on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, 1959.
It took me all day to find eleven pallets, and it’d been dark for three hours when I brought the last one into the house. I carried them home one by one – backbreaking real work. The hallway and kitchen were now lined with pallets – I thought about Fordism and factory work, but the BIG idea was doing it, don’t get distracted by thinking. On the second day, I got up at 7am and began dismantling the first pallet with a claw hammer. After complaints from a neighbor, I was forced to work in the back garden. A cigarette clasped between my teeth, tools hanging from my overalls pocket. I started to sweat under my woolly hat. My breath made steam train clouds in the freezing air as I ripped the pallet to pieces – smoking and sweating – Jackson Pollock, overlooking Accabonac Creek, Long Island, New York, 1948.
Once I’d broken the first pallet down to all its component parts, I took the bits back into my studio/dining room. I sanded all the rough edges off by hand: proper hard work. As I worked I forgot about what I was doing, just doing was enough. I did not want to be distracted by logic. I was determined not to Google in search of explanation. I kept trying out names in my head for the genre I was inventing ‘Industrial Decoration’, ‘Post-Industrial Minimalism’, ‘Fuck Off Conceptual Art Groupie Archeologist Wankers’. It was bliss. One day turned into four days as I sanded, primed, painted and varnished. The first pallet would perhaps be called Pallet #1, a nod to Jack, “Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is – pure painting.”
Finally, on the fifth day, I assembled the pallet. If I studied the nail holes, I could figure out exactly how to put everything back in it’s original place. Bingo! That’s all I’d done – spent 4 days in real work heaven, only to reassemble the pallet exactly as it was, albeit in different colours. The futility of this excited me. Someone, somewhere would recognize the parallels between pallet reassembly and painting, Pollock and Ikea… perhaps ‘Point #1’ in the Industrial Decoration Manifesto: Re-paint the inane.
I had to wait a week for a plinth to be built. Annoying, but it did give me time to finish 4 more pallets. The plinth was essential. Some rule of Minimalism would no doubt dictate that I didn’t need a plinth, that the pallet should be shown on the floor… maybe unpainted; a different mindset. I emptied out our living room and carefully placed the plinth in at one end, as near as I could get to a gallery setting. I cut the bubble wrap from the finished pallet and gently lifted it on to the plinth. With great excitement, I sat down on the sofa and stared at the pallet.
THE NEW WAY
2009
wood, nails, acrylic paint
110 x 90 x 12 cm
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Scott King was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1969. He currently lives and works in London. He worked as art director of i-D and as creative director of Sleazenation magazines. Occasionally he produces work under the banner CRASH! with writer and historian Matt Worley. King’s work has been exhibited widely in London, New York and European galleries including the ICA, KW Berlin, Portikus, White Columns, Kunstverein Munich and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ART WORKS, King’s first monograph, was recently published by JRP|Ringier, Zurich.
www.scottking.co.ukwww.heraldst.comwww.bortolamigallery.comwww.soniarosso.com
Dedicated to Brendan Majewski, a great influence in my life.
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Mira Billotte is an artist, vocalist, pianist and composer performing as White Magic. She performed and composed for Quix*o*tic along with her sister, Christina Billotte (Casual Dots, Slant 6) and Brendan Majewski (Orphan), and later Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Krallice). She creates art, using sand paintings and film projections and performs inside her installations, with solo shows in Baltimore and New York City. She recorded Bob Dylan’s AS I WENT OUT ONE MORNING with Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) for the soundtrack album for the film I’M NOT THERE directed by Todd Haynes. She was featured actress in the film CHAIN by director Jem Cohen, performing some of her own compositions in character. White Magic have released numerous recordings, with the label Drag City, and also recorded LONG TIME AGO with producer Hal Willner for the compilation album ROGUE’S GALLERY: PIRATE BALLADS, SEA SONGS AND CHANTEYS (Anti-). Mira Billotte recently started her own label, The Mysteries, releasing the new White Magic single WHITE WIDOW which includes a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’.
KALMAR… UH…
A QUESTION OF WHERE TO COMMENCE NEW STRUCTURES IN LIGHT OF SOME RETURNS AND EMERGENCES:
THE POSTWAR AS A FINISHED MOMENT: IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT AND GLOBAL CONTEXT VIA COLD-WAR INDENTIFICATIONS.
THE INABILITY OF THE ART CONTEXT TO IDENTIFY WITH THE NEW CONDITIONS.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF LABOUR IN DETAIL. SPECIFICALLY IN LIGHT OF VARIED FREE-TRADE AGREEMENTS.
THE NECESSITY TO POSIT A NEW FRAMEWORK OF ACTION THAT CAN ACCOUNT FOR THESE LOSSES AND GAINS AND PREVENT THE MOST DYNAMIC WORK FROM BEING UNDERSTOOD AS OPERATING WITHIN AN INSTRUMENTALIZED TERRAIN.
IMMATERIAL LABOUR.
ANALOGOUS MAPPING.
CULTURAL ECHOES.
SITES OF PRODUCTION.
AGENCY IN RELATION TO ECO-POLITICS.
COALESCENCE/RETURN OF CLASSICAL RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION.
CONSENSUS MODELS AS A PHANTOM PARALLEL.
DETAILED WORK IN THE CULTURAL FRAME.
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Liam Gillick is an artist based in London and New York. Solo exhibitions include THE WOOD WAY, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; A SHORT TEXT ON THE POSSIBILITY OF CREATING AN ECONOMY OF EQUIVALENCE, Palais de Tokyo, 2005 and the retrospective project THREE PERSPECTIVES AND A SHORT SCENARIO, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein, München and the MCA, Chicago, 2008-2010. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002 and the Vincent Award at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2008. Many public commissions and projects include the Home Office in London (2005) and the Dynamica Building in Guadalajara, Mexico (2009). In 2006 he was a central figure in the free art school project unitednationsplaza in Berlin that travelled to Mexico City and New York. Liam Gillick has published a number of texts that function in parallel to his artwork. PROXEMICS (SELECTED WRITING 1988-2006) JRP-Ringier was published in 2007 alongside the monograph FACTORIES IN THE SNOW by Lilian Haberer, JRP-Ringier. A critical reader titled MEANING LIAM GILLICK, was published by MIT Press (2009). An anthology of his artistic writing titled ALLBOOKS was also published by Book Works, London (2009). In addition he has contributed to many art magazines and journals including Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly, October and Art Forum. Liam Gillick was selected to represent Germany for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. A major exhibition of his work opened at the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in April 2010. He has taught at Columbia University in New York since 1997 and the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College since 2008. Public collections include: Government Art Collection, UK; Arts Council, UK; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
IN DARKNESS LET ME DWELL (2010, 7:49 min), extracts
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Born in 1976, Mai-Thu Perret lives and works in Geneva. This year, Bice Curiger included Perret in ILLUMINATIONS, the exhibition for the International Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Perret was recently awarded the Zurich Art Prize; an associated solo show dedicated to her work will open at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, in August. Perret’s 2011 solo exhibitions include MIGRAINE, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; Mamco, Geneva, Switzerland; Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; and Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland. Recent solo exhibitions include AN IDEAL FOR LIVING, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan; 2013, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO; NEW WORK, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; AN EVENING OF THE BOOK AND OTHER STORIES, The Kitchen, New York; and LAND OF CRYSTAL, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland. In the past few years Perret’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including ABSTRACT POSSIBLE, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden; GOLDENE ZEITEN, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; HEAVEN -SPLENDID ISOLATION, 2nd Athens Biennial, Athens, Greece; and A SPOKEN WORD EXHIBITION, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, among many others. 2011 will also see the release of MAI-THU PERRET, a monograph published by JRP|Ringier that includes texts by Diedrich Diederichsen and Elisabeth Lebovici.
