Satellites Programme 2015

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• Foreword S a t e l l i t e s P r o g r a m m e is Collective’s development programme for emergent artists and producers based in Scotland. Running over the course of one year the programme is structured around a series of exhibitions and projects developed by each practitioner, coupled with regular group activity including retreats and field trips. It is our intention that these activities generate a space for prolonged conversation through which practitioners can test ideas, reflect on their practice and produce new work with support from a group of peers and Collective.

Selected through an open call by a panel comprising of artist Rachel Adams, curator and writer Isla Leaver-Yap and curator Gareth Bell-Jones, the Satellites Programme 2015 practitioners were: Thomas Aitchison, France-Lise McGurn, Hardeep Pandhal, Scott Rogers and Georgia Horgan.

From 2014 through to 2015 the group took part in retreats to Hospitalfield, Arbroath, and Wiels, Brussels and also visited backstage settings in a host of cultural institutions in Scotland from the stores and print rooms at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, to the BBC prop department in Glasgow. Artist James N Hutchinson facilitated these trips and a series of group studio visits, which explored the mechanisms behind public display of various kinds and acted as a springboard for discussing the development of the practitioners’ own projects. Peer review is central to the programme and this year also included a collaboration with Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and writer Maria Fusco, which saw the group meeting and exchanging ideas with researchers across the schools of art, design and art history.

Each year Satellites reflects changing and varied approaches to art production in Scotland, bringing together practitioners who are often just, or a few years, out of art school. ‘Emergent’ as a term is often paired with ‘early career’ and we recognise that it has multiple and shifting meanings.

As Raymond Williams points out in Keywords, ‘career’ was used in the sixteenth century “for racecourse, gallop, and by extension any rapid or uninterrupted activity” and by the twentieth century it “becomes inseparable from a difficult group of words of which work, labour and especially job are prominent examples.” [1] In opposition to the racecourse metaphor, Satellites Programme allows for an extended and slower way of working, where production is punctuated by discussion.

This publication marks the end of Satellites Programme 2015, documenting each practitioner’s exhibition and housing the writings Georgia Horgan developed over the course of the year. Georgia took part

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in the programme as an Associate Producer, a role which encompasses working in the gallery for six months on a research-based project and developing exhibition texts. The scope and energy of Satellites Programme 2015 is reflected here and we are happy to share the work of each practictioner in print, providing a sense of their distinct voices and the public projects developed with Collective.

Frances Stacey, Producer, Collective 1 Raymond Williams, Keywords, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p.53

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G e o r g i a H o r g a n ’ s p r a c t i c e incorporates writing, film and

sculpture to research history, politics and objects from a feminist, Marxist perspective. The exhibition at Collective was part of a body of research undertaken by Georgia that explored the intersection between the growth of the textile industry and patterns of witch hunting in Scotland. Taking the form of a workroom, the exhibition contained images, artefacts and re-published historical and contemporary texts that highlighted alternative historical or political narratives.

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici was a central text in the exhibition. Federici’s book charts the persecution of ‘witches’ from medieval Europe to colonial Latin America, exposing this as much more than hysterical superstition, but a nuanced political manoeuvre. According to Federici, as a result of various ideological developments around the early modern period, population became a core concern of the ruling class. The increasing necessity to create a larger workforce, post-Reformation religious zeal, and the Enlightenment re-evaluation of the body as a machine, meant witch hunting became a tool to discipline those who participated in any forms of ‘unproductive sexuality’ – prostitutes, single or older women, homosexuals, and those who provided traditional medicines and contraception, such as midwives or healers.

Placing an emphasis on generative, dispersed and networked methods of relaying information – such as conversation and self-publishing – the exhibition proposed Scotland as a model for Federici’s ideas about the crucial and often overlooked link between the development of capitalism and the subjugation of women. In addition, a series of events were held in the gallery space discussing how women, the body and labour are implicated in contemporary capitalism. This included screenings of Performing the Border by Ursula Biemann and Sisters! by Petra Bauer, as well as a performative lecture

by Georgia and an event hosted by Glasgow-based artists Letitia Beatriz.

• Georgia Horgan: Machine Room

Feb 14 – Apr 19, 2015

Image previous page: Woodcut from Newes From Scotland by William Wright, 1592

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• W i t c h H u n t i n g , Pa s t a n d P r e s e n t, a n d t h e F e a r of the Power of Women

This text is an abridged version of an essay written

by Silvia Federici for Documenta 13 S h e s t a n d s a l o n e in the twilight, in an empty space, holding in her

hands a skein of blue yarn that weaves around her to embrace a cluster of homes, which, because of this, appear almost as a continuation of her body. Trazando el Camino (1990) is among the many paintings that Rodolfo Morales, one of Mexico’s best twentieth-century artists, has dedicated to the theme of the female body as the material and social fabric holding the community together. Morales’ painting is a counterpoint to the image of the witch: with her quiet look and embroidered apron, the woman it represents is almost angelic. Yet something magical and secretive about her recalls the female ‘conspiracy’ that was the historical justification for the witch hunts that bloodied Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, perhaps providing a clue to some of the mysteries at the heart of this persecution, which historians have yet to solve.

Why were the witch hunts primarily directed against women? How does one explain the fact that for three centuries, thousands of women in Europe became the personification of ‘the enemy within’ and of absolute evil? And how does one reconcile the all-powerful, almost mythical portrait that inquisitors and demonologists painted of their victims – as creatures of hell, terrorists, man-eaters, servants of the devil, wildly riding the skies on their broomsticks – with the defenseless figures of the actual women who were charged with these crimes and then horribly tortured and burned at the stake?

As I wrote in Caliban and the Witch, the witch hunt instituted a regime of terror on all women, from which emerged the new model of femininity to which women would have to conform to be socially accepted in the developing capitalist society: sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination to the male world, accepting as natural their confinement to a sphere of reproductive activities that in capitalism have been completely devalued.[1] Women were terrorized through fantastic accusations, horrendous torture, and public executions – because their social power had to be destroyed – social power that in the eyes of their persecutors was obviously significant, even in the case of older women. Old women, in fact, carried the collective memory of the community. As Robert Muchembled has reminded us, they were the ones who remembered the promises made, the faith betrayed, the extent of property (especially land), the customary agreements, and the responsibility for their violations.[2] Like the blue yarn in Trazando el Camino, old women’s going from house to house circulated stories, secrets, knowledge; binding passions, weaving

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together past and present events. As such they were a disturbing, fear-inspiring presence for a reforming elite of modernizers who were bent on destroying the past and undoing customary relations and obligations.

As for the reasons why women’s earthly challenges to the power structures had to be portrayed as a demonic conspiracy, this is a phenomenon that has been played out over and over again in history, down to our own times. The McCarthy ‘witch hunt’ against Communism, and the present ‘war on terror,’ have relied on such dynamics. The exaggeration of ‘crimes’ to mythical proportions so as to justify horrendous punishments is an effective means to terrorize a whole society, discourage resistance to devaluation, and make masses of people afraid to engage in practices that until then were considered normal.

The witch was the Communist and terrorist of her time, which required a ‘civilizing’ drive to produce the new ‘subjectivity’ and sexual division of labor on which the capitalist work discipline would rely. The witch hunts were the means by which women in Europe were educated to their new social task, and a massive defeat was inflicted on Europe’s ‘lower’ classes, who had to learn about the power of the state to destroy any form of resistance to its rule.

1 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004) 2 Robert Muchembled, Culture Populaire et Culture des Élites dans la France Moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 1978)

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• Ep i l o g u e

Scotland’s witch hunt was one of the bloodiest in Europe, with accusations running into the thousands. The nation’s transition to capitalism was equally intense, with factories, particularly textile mills, springing up in significant numbers across the central belt in the late 1600s and early 1700s. In line with Federici’s critique of Marx, this transition to capitalism was not characterised by a bona fide bourgeois revolution, but a re-consolidation of power by an already existing feudal ruling class.[1] As Federici describes above, women’s bodies, knowledge and traditions represented the social fabric of communities. The witch hunt tore apart this fabric, re-configuring sexual politics through torture, fear and oppression in order to transfer power away from the bonds of common land, traditional medicine and peasant solidarity, and redistribute it towards the ascetic work practices necessary for the large-scale manufacture of cloth.

In the eyes of a post-Reformation, Enlightenment establishment in Scotland, the body was a machine, and for women specifically, a reproductive machine.[2] Federici suggests that the body is for women what the factory is to the male waged worker; [ 3] in this exhibition, the story of the building of this corporeal factory or prison is made visible – and through a selection of contemporary discussions about the relationship between women and machines, tentatively explores through text, events and screenings how the mechanical body could be radicalised from within.

Georgia Horgan [GH] 1 This project was particularly influenced by the story of Christian Shaw, Laird’s daughter turned thread manufacturer who condemned to death seven ‘witches’ in 1697.

See Sadducismus Debellatus by Franis Grant, Lord Cullen, 1698 2 Thomas Hobbes wrote “The heart is but a spring…and the joint so many wheels” in his 1651 work Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.7 3 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p.16

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T h o m a s A i t c h i s o n ’ s w o r k takes the form of painting, digital

animation and installation, playing with the conventions of exhibition display and decoration. Drag a File Here consisted of a new series of paintings and an installation specifically developed for Collective. The small scale, delicately painted works drew on a host of imagery including landscape, home appliances and corporate insignia. These images were processed using photo-editing software, a technique often employed for screen printing, but used in the exhibition to break down the legibility of the images which were then rendered meticulously by hand. Thomas used a vibrant colour palette that further disrupted the viewers’ reading of the original image and deliberately complicated the associations held to a recognisable object or a historically significant landscape.

The title of the exhibition was suggestive of the artist’s own process and the way in which images are regularly encountered and consumed digitally by us all – scanned, downloaded, dragged and dropped for viewing.

Operating both as objects and images, the paintings in Drag a File Here were staged on and against gallery walls that were clad with reflective paneling.

This shiny surface cast the visitor as another material within the exhibition and transformed the gallery into a space that appeared in the process of construction. Through the use of materials such as reflective vapour resistant board, old decorators’ dust sheets, and mirror plates, Thomas brought together the conventionally distinct fields of art practice, exhibition display and the decorating trade. These gestures brought to the fore the behindthe-scenes labour and materials that support the production of exhibitions, unravelling the common separation of his own practice as an artist and his employment as a joiner.

• Th o m a s A i t c h i s o n : D r a g a F i l e H e r e

Apr 25 – Jun 14, 2015

Image previous page: Thomas Aitchison, Banana Hanger, 2015 Oil on old decorators’ dust sheet, mirror plates, 51× 40 cm

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• I n v i s i b l e Lab o u r , Ma t e r i a l Da t a Th e E u r o p e a n U n i o n has made a subtle semantic shift in the language

used in policy making since the end of the last decade,[1] where work is increasingly referred to as ‘occupation’ as opposed to employment or labour. The difference is inconspicuous yet ideologically distinct: ‘labour’ implies production, an outcome, or a tangible form of remuneration; ‘occupation’, however, implies no such beginning or end, but a constant state of activity, whether gainful or not.

Occupation is not simply about earning, but also spending, consuming and distracting.[2] Increasingly, the most desirable employee is freelance. Flexible and isolated – and without the contractual obligations and financial nuisances associated with sick pay or maternity leave – the freelancer is available for all types of occupation at all times, free to work, spend, consume, and engage twenty-four hours a day.

In a post-Fordist economy where nothing is made and all that is produced and reproduced is capital, we find ourselves in what can be referred to as the infoeconomy, where the currency is attention.[3] As labour time vanishes into consumption time, what is manufactured, bought and sold are info-products, vast streams of visual and aural content that demand our engagement in order to produce value.

The artist occupies a peculiar position in regard to capitalism’s newfound preference for the precarious, self-employed worker. Once idealised as an occupation that offered complete flexibility and freedom, an alternative lifestyle that disavowed the nine-to-five grind, the artist is now capitalism’s model employee.

As issues surrounding zero-hour and flexi-time contracts enter into mainstream political consciousness, it becomes clear that the isolated, precarious, ad-hoc conditions traditionally reserved for cultural workers have become the preferred status for all.

Particularly within the canon of postmodern painting, the artist also becomes the perfect conduit for the stream of the info-economy. The painter is always already at his or her leisure to receive, digest, regurgitate and rehash the flow of visual culture emanating from the lights and sounds of late capitalism.

This tendency is best articulated through the work of eighties postmodern assemblage painters such as David Salle or Alexis Smith; [4] what is manifested is a pastiche of high-octane simulation, arguably aiding in the proliferation of capital through images in the form of highly reified info-products.

Thomas Aitchison’s work both embodies and interrogates the structures within which painting functions in a late capitalist landscape. Representational in essence, the paintings draw together a series of unrelated images, harvested from search engines and processed into bitmap format ready to be reproduced

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as fragmented data. These images refract and reproduce themselves across the iridescent foil of moisture resistant vapour board sheets, maintaining their viral trajectory into the physical world.

However, this use of the space age surface of vapour board is where occupation, art and labour intersect in Thomas’s practice. Trained as a joiner, his work continually references materials used in the trade: dust sheets, mirror plates, decorator’s pyramids. The contrast of the meticulously reproduced digital images against the contingent marks on the dust sheets draw an aesthetic comparison between the tangible labour associated with traditional trade and the sanitised environs of the info-product. The use of joinery paraphernalia also serves to examine the value of different types of making. Painting, arguably the most reified of mediums, contributes content to the image-capital matrix; however, when iterated on the humble dust sheet, with its mirror plates unpainted, the work espouses a kind of nakedness in its making, or a revealed framework.

All of these references, from the arbitrary jpegs to the splatters on dust sheets, represent what is perhaps an overall diminished agency of the worker within the context of contemporary production: the brush strokes are drag and drop, keeping us occupied; the accidental but palpable imprint of labour attributes no surplus value.

[GH] 1 The Carrot Workers’ Collective, ‘On Free Labour’, carrotworkers.wordpress.com/ on-free-labour/ (13/04/2015) 2 An expanded discussion of the relationship between occupation and labour can be found in Hito Steyerl, ‘Art as Occupation’, e-flux.com/journal/art-as-occupation-claims-foran-autonomy- of-life-12/ (08/04/2015) 3 John Kelsey writes “The best consumer is the self-employee who is available enough to invest maximal quantities of attention to the info-products that ceaselessly demand our attention” in ‘Self-Employment Rate’ in Rich Texts, Selected Writing for Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), p.181 4 Their work is discussed in relation to the somewhat hazy definition of what postmodern painting is in Thomas Lawson, ‘Last Exit: Painting’ in Theories of Contemporary Art, ed. Richard Hertz (London: Pearson Education, 1993)

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F r a n c e - L i s e M c G u r n ’ s p r a c t i c e is informed by a non-indexical

archive of materials collected from advertisements, poster campaigns, club flyers and other printed ephemera designed for mass dissemination. These written and visual documents range from recent French language textbooks, graphics from Le Petit Marseillais shower gel and public health posters from 1940s Europe warning soldiers and sailors of the dangers of venereal disease. The archive also includes numerous discrete and personal forms of language including handwritten notes and sketches. Inspired by graphology – the pseudoscientific analysis of handwriting – France-Lise is interested in the connotations of gender and sexuality in the written and drawn line.

In 3am France-Lise worked across painting, drawing, sculpture and sound to explore language and the performance of identity. A sound work played outside of the gallery on to Calton Hill much like a loudspeaker broadcasting announcements in a train station, or the sound spill of club music in a smoking area. Made using software that replicates the human voice, this work was inspired by recordings of castrato voices. The paintings and sculptural arrangements in the gallery drew on her informal archive, never replicating specific images but appropriating gestures, motifs and devices such as the sailor or soldier, to become a form of shorthand that scored the exhibition space.

• France-Lise McGurn: 3am

Jul 11 – Aug 30, 2015

Image previous page: France-Lise McGurn, Throb, 2015 Digital drawing, 32 × 32 cm

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• Now We’re Here Th e s e r i e s o f p a i n t i n gs Index: Now They Are, produced by artist

group Art & Language in the early nineties, consists of fifteen canvases of various sizes each overlaid with a sheet of glass painted fleshy pink. The paintings appear to be blank, in the style of high-genre late modernist painting. In the centre, barely discernable, is the word H EL L O .

Beneath the glass is a reproduction of a section of L’Origine du Monde, Courbet’s bawdy reclining nude. Art & Language became interested in the image due to its historical associations with literal concealment. First commissioned in 1866 by Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey, it was displayed in his home behind a green veil. Later, during its time hung on the wall in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s study, it was hidden behind a specially commissioned painting made by artist André Masson.

What happens when these two loaded symbols from art history collide?

Do they reveal the “masculine heavy breathing” of the conventions of the high-modernist monochrome painting and the dehumanised nude? Does this encounter reveal the repressed sexuality of modernism? Is the block of colour erasing gender or is gender breaking through?

In reality, none of these things are happening. There is no dialectical resolution between modernism and gender politics on offer from Index: Now They Are.[1] As the viewer struggles to make out the image beneath the fleshy glass, seeing nothing but themselves reflected in neo-classical beige, a voyeuristic and unresolved encounter occurs. The infuriating inscription HELLO implies a figure, giving the solid pink rectangle a head, yet the words mean almost nothing, implying only a banal and non-specific greeting. What is actually produced is Art & Language’s on-going preoccupation with destabilising the plane across which the visual and the verbal are demarcated.

Groping at the frustrations and instabilities of language is at the centre of France-Lise McGurn’s practice. In the installation 3am, ageless, androgynous figures from French language textbooks act out ambiguous tasks or occupations, their poses substantiating their meaning as insufficiently as the shapes of the letters that compose the words they are substituting.

To give a more lucid example, in French, the letter H is often considered to be feminine. Therefore, by association, the inanimate, abstract and apparently neuter noun rythme, the French for rhythm, has a dimension of femininity because of its H and to a certain extent its E, despite its usual categorisation as masculine. This is a frail and senseless connection, very much in the same way that a goofy cartoon from a textbook lying flat on its sexless back can be a proper expression of the irregular verb mourir, to die.

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Within the context of the installation, these marks act as a type of pictorial notation, or gestural shorthand constructing a space. They behave like evidence in an apartment that suggests there was a party there the night before – a phone number jotted on a wall, or a cigarette burn in a carpet. However, like the shapes of words, these signals will never fully embody or reveal every conversation, or song, or situation that happened there that night.

While three men from Coventry patrol the parameters of “modernism’s nervous breakdown,” [2] France-Lise’s practice utilises a visual vocabulary that more explicitly addresses the condition of language – not merely as shapes and symbols that we recognize as forming meaning – but as communication, and the smoke screens between us. The gestural lines and lumpy stookies inscribe the space with the sense of vulnerability that comes with attempting to fully comprehend a situation, a place, or person, what happened at the party, or where to go from here.

[GH] 1 This analysis of gender in Index: Now We Are, was originally proposed by Steve Edwards in ‘Art & Language’s Doubt’ in Art & Language in Practice Vol. 2, ed. Charles Harrison (Barcelona: Fondació Antoni Tápies, 1999), p.252 2 Mel Ramsden’s description of Conceptual Art, in ‘The Trouble with Writing’ in Painting: Further Essays on Art and Language, ed. Charles Harrison (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), p.27

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P. 180 For many decades, the Fore confronted a multitude of new objects and technologies, introduced by a regime of power whose personnel held different conceptions of life and death. A particular challenge for the Fore has been how to explain the disappearance of the disease that once endangered their survival. Most people said that kuru had disappeared with the arrival of the mission, the school, and the market – a set of coherences that seemed causal. Some said that sorcerers had turned to more profitable kinds of business, and most agreed that kuru would end when the last of the generation of old men had died, taking with them their special knowledge of kuru sorcery.

P. 179 In 1997, [Stanley] Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize for his finding that normally innocuous cellular proteins can convert their structures into pernicious conformations that damage nerve cells.

P. 179 …he described the elusive infectious agent as a “prion,” until that time called a “slow virus”… Prions, Prusiner said, consisted of malformed proteins and nothing else. Moreover, prions might be inherited, transmitted through infection, or occur spontaneously.

P. 179 With the appearance of BSE in the United Kingdom in 1986... the kuru epidemic acquired new global relevance... Kuru provided the example of an epidemic thought to have resulted from consumption of an individual dying of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, followed by the recycling of the infectious agent within the community as others developed the disease and were themselves consumed.

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‘ E n d l i n g ’ i s a t e r m u s e d to describe the last remaining member

of a species that will soon become extinct. Incorporating sculpture and text, Endling was a culmination of research developed from Scott’s interest in processes of decay, mutation and disappearance. The artworks focused on ideas of extinction and the relationships and contradictions between preservation and collapse.

Central to the exhibition was a text work developed between Scott and cultural anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum on the subject of ‘kuru’, a neurological disorder experienced by the South Fore people in Papua New Guinea.

Similar to Mad Cow Disease and often referred to as ‘Laughing Sickness’, the disorder spread predominantly due to the consumption of human brain matter and was eventually eradicated through the introduction of western cultural practices. Concentrating on Shirley’s fieldwork with the South Fore people, the text considered the link between the epidemic and cultural change, particularly in relation to colonialism.

This text at once illustrated Scott’s concern with ecological or biopolitical issues and his approach to artistic production as ingestion, or the metabolising of information, offering the exhibition as a site for the distribution of ideas. The use of Doves Type was significant in the exhibition, as this font was once assumed lost but has now re-emerged, after fragments of the typeface were dredged from the River Thames and digitally replicated.

There was also a sculpture of the now extinct Passenger Pigeon – a 1:1 replica – produced from examples of nineteenth century hunting decoys.

These new works explored the impulse in humans to eradicate or preserve, and the values implicit in these processes.

• Scot t Ro g ers: Endl ing

Sept 12 – Nov 1, 2015

Image previous page: Scott Rogers, Endling, 2015 Extract from text work, dimensions variable

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• R e a l ly R e a l ly R e d u c t i v e S c o t t R o g e r s ’ p r a c t i c e considers the possibilities, processes and

outcomes of disappearance. The tensions of entropy and disintegration play an integral role, as research is broken down, metabolised and re-presented as something changed, fragmented and transitory. However, what becomes visible is the element of irony inherent in disappearance – whether it is the inevitability of degeneration despite our best efforts to preserve, or the futility of its completion, as ‘nothing’ is a paradoxical and inconceivable concept.[1] The interplay between disappearance and contradiction draws a parallel to perhaps one of the most enigmatic and evasive artworks of the last fifty years, Lee Lozano’s Drop Out Piece. In 1972 at the height of her career as a painter, having shown at multiple important galleries around New York, Lozano decided to sever all ties with the art world and disappeared completely. She left the city, moved in with her parents in Texas, and nobody ever heard from her again.

Her gesture was part of a larger dialogue surrounding disappearance as a political strategy in contemporary art at the time. The ‘dematerialization of the art object’, a phrase coined by Lucy Lippard in her 1967 essay of the same title, described a refusal of the sacrosanct, masculine totems of modernism in favour of materials that were cheap, lightweight and ephemeral.

‘Dematerialization’ aimed to pry the artwork away from the slobbering jaws of the art market, and re-imagine its radical potential. In affect, it sought much of the same purity as late modernism, but in concept rather than form: the dematerialization of the art object manifested a canvas so blank, or a room so white and empty, that it represented “modernism’s nervous breakdown” [2] as opposed to its complete denial.

Of the multiple strategies that were employed by artists, Lozano’s Drop Out Piece was perhaps the most uncompromising. ‘Ultra-conceptual’ [3] artwork or ‘life-as-art’[4] was becoming increasingly pervasive amongst the avant-garde New York scene. In spite of many artists’ loyalty to the dematerialization project, they were “often pumping up their own art-world images in the process” [5] conveniently filling the shoes of the heroic modernist. Lozano, however, initiated the complete renunciation of her own ego: “I will not seek fame, publicity or suckcess.”[ 6] Drop Out Piece was indicative of Lozano’s melancholic self-effacement leading up to her departure. Her painting practice, albeit frenetically prolific, was coarse, mocking and grey, with crudely scribbled penises, breasts, vaginas, religious symbols and tools. An archetypal untitled work by Lozano from 1962 depicts a roughly drawn, bright red, gaping, grinning face with a flat penis penetrating the eye socket; the image is naïve, abrupt, violent, dark and funny.

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In the late sixties, Lozano became increasingly disenfranchised by painting.

She devised works that she called her ‘Life-Art’ pieces, which followed the anarchic, aggressive humour of her earlier work. However, many of the later iterations of her ‘Life-Art’ pieces expressed her frustration and alienation from the art world. At a lecture at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1971, she said, “If there’s no love left in the art world, I don’t want anything to do with it!”[7] After she was evicted from her studio that year, she gradually began to ignore all invitations to art events and stopped speaking to her artist friends.

One of her final gestures before her complete disappearance was her insistence to her gallerist Rolf Ricke that she was referred to as ‘Lee Free’. Later she decided to shorten her name even further, to ‘E’ for energy.[8] When physics dictates that energy is neither produced nor created, only transferred in a closed circuit, what is the nature of disappearance as a process or possibility? Endling considers this question across several references. The term ‘endling’ refers to the last surviving specimen of a species; the carved sculpture in the gallery is a replica of decoys that were used to hunt Passenger Pigeons, an extinct breed of bird from North America. The world’s last Passenger Pigeon, an endling called Martha, died in captivity in 1914. In the early nineteenth century, the Passenger Pigeon was the most numerous bird species on the planet.

The Passenger Pigeons’ extinction was primarily caused by humans; they were hunted in their billions to feed slaves, pigs, and European settlers.

The pigeons’ implication in colonialism is what connects them to the other protagonists of Scott’s research, the South Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea.

The South Fore people became of particular interest to anthropologists and medics due to the tribe’s protracted epidemic of ‘kuru’, or ‘Laughing Sickness’.

Kuru was a degenerative neurological disorder that earned its name from the Fore people’s word to quiver or shake, as tremors and spasms were a classic symptom. Its nickname, Laughing Sickness, refers to the pathological bursts of laughter also associated with the disorder.

The disease was contracted through the consumption of matter from the human brain and spinal column. The South Fore people practiced funerary cannibalism, literally imbibing the flesh of the dead so their life force could be incorporated back into the community. It was an impulse for preservation that encouraged the tribe to consume their dead, but it was this act that led to their culture’s near demise. European colonials eradicated many of the South Fore people’s customs through the demonisation of their cannibalism; ending the practice saved them from kuru, but also helped justify their domination and Christianisation. Their physical deaths themselves were a grotesque paradox, as they laughed hysterically whilst their neurological systems degenerated.

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Laughing whilst you die is a contradiction in terms; being a whole lot of something then absolutely nothing holds an abrupt, cruel irony; to take absolutely everything away, even yourself, and become one of the most influential and mystical [ 9] artists ever, is a mind-fuck like that flat cock piercing the brow of Lee Lozano’s crude picture. Is disappearance even possible? Art is eating itself.

The face splits into a wide, red grin.

[GH] 1 Francis McKee discusses the paradox of the idea of nothingness in his essay ‘Zero to Nothing in No Time’, francismckee.net/zero.htm (04/09/2015) 2 This is a phrase that I have returned to several times whilst writing the series of texts for Satellites Programme. It is Mel Ramsden’s description of Conceptual Art, in ‘The Trouble with Writing’ in Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art and Language, ed. Charles Harrison (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), p.27 3 Lucy Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’ in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, eds. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA, 1995), p.17 4 “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct as possible” – Allan Kaprow, in reference to his Happenings. Kirstie Beavan, ‘Performance Art 101: The Happening 101’, tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/performance-art-101happening-allan-kaprow (06/09/2015) 5 Lucy Lippard, ‘Cerebellion and Cosmic Storms’, in Lee Lozano, ed. Iris Müller-Westermann (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), p.195 6 Iris Müller-Westermann, ‘Introduction’, Ibid., p.48 7 David Askevold, ‘David Askevold on Lee Lozano’, in Lee Lozano: Win First Don’t Last Win Last Don’t Care, ed. Adam Szymczyk (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2006), p.178 8 Müller-Westermann, Lee Lozano, pp.48—9 9 Sol LeWitt wrote, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach” in ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum (Summer 1967), pp.79—83

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H o b s o n - J o b s o n w a s a n e x h i b i t i o n that brought together new

drawings, sculpture, knitted work and video. The exhibition framed Hardeep’s research into processes of translation, uneasy humour and his interest in histories of identity and difference. Much of the work was made through collaboration or directly referenced texts written by other artists and academics.

Hobson-Jobson is the title of a Victorian-era glossary of Anglo-Indian words. These colloquial terms are highly assimilated, typically vulgar adoptions of foreign words into English – the title itself was phonetically adopted

by British soldiers upon hearing the chants of Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain! by Shia Muslims during Muharram processions. These ideas of translation and the adaption of language or cultural customs drew on a rich pool of sources and relationships. The new works presented in Hobson-Jobson touched upon issues ranging from the history of British-Indian Soldiers who fought during World War I; the fascist adoption of the benevolent Hindu Swastika symbol; and western representations of the Sati ritual, a funeral custom where a widow would martyr herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. The discussion of the Sati ritual is a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal text Can the Subaltern Speak?, which is widely regarded as a founding text of post-colonial theory.

Collaborations in Hobson-Jobson included cartoons by Stefan Sadler, text by art historian Rebecca Senior and reworked and performed artwork Ross Kemp on Gangs: The Initiation by David Steans. Hardeep also created a new knitted work made through a long-term collaboration with his mother, incorporating a portrait of Bhagat Singh, a socialist and key figure in India’s fight for independence. As Hardeep speaks little Punjabi and his mother little English, they share a language barrier. However, Hardeep views this collaboration with his mother in the same way as he does working with anyone, as the slippages of meaning and intent that can occur with her also happen with other academics and writers.

• H a r d e e p P a n d h a l : H o bs o n - J o bs o n

Nov 14, 2015 – Jan 17, 2016

Image previous page: Hardeep Pandhal, Adult’s Imagination of the Child’s Imagination of the Adult’s Imagination (Pretension Study), 2015 Ink and ballpoint pen, 22 ×16 cm

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• Who’s Afraid of Cheryl Borck?

A B i t c h i n ’ B o d i s a c o m i c s t r i p by pervasively popular cartoonist Robert Crumb. Notable for his psychedelic style that has permeated comics since the sixties, Crumb’s drawings have never shied away from explicit material.

Accused of everything from virulent misogyny to flagrant racism, his cartoons have frequently attracted controversy and A Bitchin’ Bod is a textbook example.

Hardeep Pandhal has specifically referenced this particular cartoon in previous work, and continues to stylistically refer to Crumb through his characters’ bulbous boots and screw-top bodies.

To give a brief overview of the comic’s events, A Bitchin’ Bod features three recurring Crumb characters: Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont and Devil Girl.

Mr. Natural, a bearded perverted prophet, gives Flakey Foont – who is a selfportrait of sorts – a headless woman. The body belongs to Cheryl Borck, or Devil Girl as she’s better known, an archetypal Crumb female fantasy: well built, athletic and dominating. A screw-on lid seals the place where her head used to be, which Flakey Foont can open and pour in liquidised food to feed the body.

Delighted and bemused by his new fully automated luxury sex toy, Flakey Foont starts to have sweaty, gasping sex with the headless woman.

Right before Flakey Foont reaches his grotty climax, he begins to imagine Cheryl’s severed head; she’s turned into a raging, vengeful Medusa. Suddenly racked with guilt and fear, Flakey Foont stops humping the headless body, grabs a hat his wife left in his office to conceal the stump, and takes the body back to Mr. Natural. Mr. Natural agrees to take it back, unscrews the feeding cap, and reaches inside to reveal that Devil Girl’s head hadn’t been cut off, but stuffed down her oesophagus. As Flakey Foont pre-empted, she emerges absolutely furious, teeth gnashing, and baying for blood.

The sexual violence depicted in the cartoon is grotesque and disturbing – however, when attempting to read Robert Crumb’s work, or make any sort of assessment on his position, it’s crucial to take into account the conditions surrounding its production. First and foremost, Crumb’s early output in the 1960s was largely influenced by the explosion of censorship in America, associated with Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts and the emphasis that this placed on ‘American values’ and moral hygiene. This panic in mid-century America produced the Comics Code, a set of censorship guidelines that prohibited a range of topics from sex and violence to positive representations of divorce.

Secondly, although Crumb was intent on lashing out at the mainstream, he also had a profoundly ambivalent relationship with the counterculture movement he is generally associated with. Always an outsider, Crumb found he had “too many hang ups” [1] to really align himself with hippy culture. Counterculture

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itself is difficult to pin down as a cohesive movement, as it was largely a series of negations associated with lifestyle choice as opposed to a coherent political manifesto.[2] As a result, the ideological tensions and hypocrisies that this produced are reflected in Crumb’s uncomfortable, unstable blend of political satire and private subjectivity.

In Hardeep’s work the tension between cultural commentary and personal experience is inscribed through a plethora of academic references and psychosexual doodles, where the sacred is enveloped into the profane and the growing pains of ‘acculturation’[3] are played out across a chaotic stage populated by bizarre characters. Headlessness appears consistently throughout the exhibition – for instance, the sculptures depict the absurd deaths of characters from the video game Mortal Kombat, which attracted particular attention from censorship lobbyists in the nineties for its graphic violence. In another drawing, a nervous, decapitated Ross Kemp glances over at a mutant ostrich-woman hybrid, as he waits to be penetrated by a giant severed finger.

With these ideas of censorship and most crucially ambivalence in mind, a useful lens through which to read A Bitchin’ Bod and in turn the work Hardeep has produced for Hobson-Jobson, is through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body.[4] In Rabelais and His World, which was published in English in 1967, Bakhtin argued that medieval carnival rituals, with their grotesque masks and base humour, produced an ambivalent laughter and symbolic inversion of hierarchies that destabalised authority. The grotesque body of the carnival degraded everything that was idealised, cosmic, spiritual and abstract down to base materials of piss, shit, semen and menstrual blood.

However, for Bakhtin, this lower level represented a cyclical “indissoluble unity” [5] of the people and the site of reproduction and new birth.

For Hardeep, and indeed Robert Crumb, the head is a seat of power.

Symbolising the state in a metaphorical ‘body politic’ its removal is a gesture towards the disruption of authority prompted by the carnival’s ambivalent laughter. However, the relationship decapitation bears to gender is, as with everything else, in a constant process of negotiation. Despite agreeing that the loss of the head is a symbol of castration, Freudian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva also argues that the severed female head retains the same castrating potency.

According to Kristeva, the slimy, snake-wreathed head and petrifying gaze of history’s most famous decapitated woman, the Gorgon Medusa (or in Crumb’s case Cheryl Borck), represents the abject fear of an engulfing vulva.[6] The interplay between femininity and masculinity in Hobson-Jobson is no less complicated than the interaction between class, race, and culture. Equally, the relationships between the protagonists – whether it’s Ross Kemp and his ostrich-lover, Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh and a heroic Mother India,

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or the production of the knitted works the artist makes with his mother – remain profoundly ambivalent and unresolved.

So who really has the power? Despite wagers of misogyny against Crumb by radical feminists and his cartooning contemporaries,[7] in their sexuality issue pioneering feminist journal Spare Rib re-printed his cartoon Sally Blubberbutt exclaiming “Men! At best they’re pitiful!” [8] Crumb, as an artist and a subject, is in constant, gut-wrenching flux; equally, Hobson-Jobson pays no lip service to the holy trinity of gender, race and class, and instead exposes the violent assimilation and constant mutability of the contemporary post-colonial subject.

[GH] 1 Robert Crumb, ‘Minds Are Made to be Blown’, crumbproducts.com/pages/about/minds. html (26/10/2015) 2 Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, ‘Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s’ in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (London: Routledge, 2002), p.10 3 Coined by Salman Rushdie, acculturation is the term for the cultural and psychological shift that occurs when two societies merge 4 This analysis of Crumb’s work was found in the chapter ‘R.Crumb’s Carnival Subjectivity’ in Emma Tinker (2008), Identity and Form in Alternative Comics, 1967–2007 (Doctoral dissertation), retrieved from discovery.ucl.ac.uk/17599/1/17599.pdf (25/10/2015) 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Carnival Ambivalence’ in The Bakhtin Reader, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p.205 6 Julia Kristeva, ‘Who is Medusa?’ in The Severed Head, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) 7 Crumb is criticized by two female cartoonists, Diedre English and Trina Robbins, for his “sexually hostile” images of women in the documentary Crumb (1994), dir. Terry Zwigoff.

USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Crumb’s experiences with criticism from women are catalogued in The Complete Crumb Comics: R.Crumb versus the Sisterhood! (Seattle: Fantagraphics 2009) 8 ‘Man’s World: Quips and Misses’, Spare Rib (January 1973) p.11. It’s worth noting that Spare Rib also criticised Crumb in their November 1972 magazine, despite valorising his depiction of Sally Blubberbutt in this later issue

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Th o m a s A i t c h i s o n is an artist based in Edinburgh. He studied at the

Edinburgh College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Recent exhibitions include: Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2013, Spike Island, Bristol and ICA , London; New Build, Hanover Project, Preston; and Rybofunk, Embassy, Edinburgh. Thomas received the Barns-Graham Travel to Italy Award from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014.

G e o r g i a H o r g a n lives in Glasgow and graduated from the Glasgow

School of Art in 2013, as well as participating in an exchange at the California Institute of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Early Modern Administration, a solo exhibition at WASPS Studios, Dundee and Fold Up Snap On, a group show at The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, as part of Glasgow International 2014. Her writing has been included in Undercurrents journal and in 2013 she was a contributing writer for Generator Printhouse: Anyone Incapable of Taking Sides Should Say Nothing, at Generator Projects, Dundee.

F r a n c e - L i s e M c G u r n lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated

with an MA from The Royal College of Art in 2012. In 2014 she exhibited in The White Hotel, Gimpel Fils, London, and Nos Algae’s, a performance at Tramway, Glasgow, as part of Generation. In May 2015, she was part of a collaborative performance titled Amygdala N.O.S with Kimberley O’Neill and Cara Tolmie at South London Gallery, for the launch of Love your Parasites, edited by Camilla Wills.

H a r d e e p P a n d h a l graduated from the MFA programme at the

Glasgow School of Art in 2013. Recent exhibitions and projects include: Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2013, Spike Island, Bristol and ICA , London; Jojoboys, Glasgow International 2014, Glasgow; A Joyous Thing with Maggots at the Centre, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, as part of the Asia Triennial 2014; A Neck or Nothing Man!, Comar, Isle of Mull; and Plebian Archive, David Dale Gallery and Studios, Glasgow. Hardeep was selected for the Catlin Art Guide and was the recipient of the 2015 Drawing Room Bursary Award.

S c o t t R o g e r s lives in Glasgow. He completed an MFA at the Glasgow

School of Art, as well as an exchange at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Where is our Twentieth Century Promised, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; A L P TR UTH , YYZ , Toronto; and Negative Miracle, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow. Recent group exhibitions include: The Alberta Biennial, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Time After Time, Market Gallery, Glasgow; Seeing Things, Glasgow International 2014, Glasgow; and Fight!, Center, Berlin. Alongside Sarah Rose and Rebecca Wilcox he co-runs tenletters, a project space in Glasgow.

Edited by Georgia Horgan Design by Kaisa Lassinaro Installation photography by Tom Nolan ISBN 978-1-873653-17-3 All images courtesy of the artists and Collective, excluding the woodcut from Newes From Scotland, which is courtesy of Glasgow University Library Special Collections.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. The publisher has made every effort to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made, we ask copyright holders to contact the publisher. Š Collective, the artists and the authors

Collective City Observatory & City Dome 38 Calton Hill Edinburgh EH7 5AA T +44 (0) 131 556 1264 collectivegallery.net

G e o r gia H o r ga n : M a c hi n e R o o m

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Installation detail, 2015 Installation detail, 2015

T h o mas A it c his o n : D r ag a F i l e H e r e

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Lottery Sign, 2015 Oil on old decorators’ dust sheet, mirror plates, decorators’ pyramids, 66 × 41cm

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Pictish Stone, 2015 Oil painting on old decorators’ dust sheet, mirror plates, 56 × 30 cm

F r a n c e - Lis e M c G u r n : 3 am

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Oysters(m), 2015 Oil on canvas, 150 ×124 cm

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Grown Up, 2015 Oil on canvas, 60 × 6 6 cm

S c o tt R o g e r s : E n d l i n g

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Installation view, 2015 Endling, 2015 Steel stand, lime wood, gesso, acrylic paint, false eyes (resin), dimensions variable

H a r d e e p P a n dha l : H o bs o n - J o bs o n

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Gang Signs, 2015 [detail] Ink, gouache, paper, wood, 51 × 76 cm

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Bhagat Singh Draught Excluder by Mum, 2015 Synthetic wool, dimensions variable

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Installation shots, Satellites Programme 2015

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