SPONS OR S
How is value defined?
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This October the Sluice Biennial finds itself located in the middle of a designer-discount retail hub in Hackney Central. Until recently Hackney was known for having the highest concentration of artists in Europe, and as with any gentrifying area this was a transitory state. In many ways, a high-end discount retail development is the legacy that artists have gifted Hackney. Whether you read this as an indictment or not is likely tied to your views on how instrumentalisation plays out. Pallas Projects (p. 64) offer their view, informed by twentyone years of navigating the ebb and flow of socio-economic change in Dublin, Ireland. Often artists are viewed (and view themselves) as estranged from the working-class struggles of the communities they’re embedded in. By addressing sustainability head on, dkuk (p. 6) is actively confronting this dislocation from the existential realities of the community.
Julia Gat SARA
Art, like designer fashion, relies on exclusivity to achieve and maintain financial value. But Sluice is predicated on locating and quantifying value in places other than the price tag. For instance, Ian Hunter (p. 12) asks what value can be assigned to an artwork of historical and educational significance. The values we’re preoccupied with are tied to ideas of authenticity. Authenticity is tricky, for instance it’s easy to be authentically inauthentic. Authenticity is not synonymous with truth. In her review of Edward Said’s book, Representations of the Intellectual (p. 42), Rosanna van Mierlo posits the artist-asamateur as a defence against neoliberalism expressed as professionalism. Perhaps this idea of artists-as-innocents is a convenient prop to excuse us from being accountable for our complicity in neoliberal acts of artwashing, or perhaps our amateurish authenticity is a reflection of a survival strategy, against the vice-like grip we feel neoliberalism has over our existence. These questions are not all resolved in this magazine, or indeed at the Sluice Biennial, however, as the next wave of development washes through Hackney – they are all pertinent. 3
Do we believe in the art we’re making or just in the importance that we continue to do so?
6 Sluice interviews dkuk’s Daniel Kelly 12 Saving Kurt Schwitters’ Cumbrian Merz Barn project
Publishing Director Karl England Editor Natasha Kahn editor@sluice.info Associate Editors Ben Street Charlie Levine charlie@sluice.info Book Review Editor Rosanna van Mierlo rosie@sluice.info
Ian Hunter
Publisher Sluice www.sluice.info
18 Guston’s Pantheon
Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters info@chkdesign.com www.chkdesign.com
Ben Street
Lettering All fonts by Colophon www.colophon-foundry.org
23 The Supplement Ladies of the Press
Cover Stefan Riebel Distribution Central Books www.centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info www.sluice.info
29 Immersion Christopher Stout
32 SARA
A photo essay Julia Gat
40 Five types of art writer you should die before you see
Unsolicited material cannot be returned, though all correspondence will be passed on to the editor. The views expressed in Sluice are not necessarily those of the publishers ©2017 ISSN 2398-8398 EAN 9772398839005 Unauthorised copying, hiring or lending of this magazine is prohibited Subscriptions subscribe online at www.sluice.info
Alistair Gentry
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Acknowledgements Guy Nicholson Andrew Sissons Jack Basrawy Richard Stanley Sarah England Sanjay Bremakumar Lucy Cobb Marie Kyriacou-Edwards Ted Haddon Kristian Müller
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42 The artist as amateur Book review Rosanna van Mierlo
44 A distracted tour through Germany A photo essay Charlie Levine
52 Institut Für Alles Mögliche Stefan Riebel
64 Pallas Projects
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Mark Cullen & Gavin Murphy
72 Artist-run Index: B 5