Arts Council Collection 70th Anniversary Commissions 2016
Contents Foreword
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Introduction
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John Akomfrah
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Hurvin Anderson
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Ryan Gander
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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd
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Mark Leckey
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Katie Paterson
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Heather Phillipson
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Keith Piper
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Foreword For seventy years the Arts Council Collection has supported artists based in the UK by purchasing their work. Now numbering nearly 8,000 works and including many of the best known names in British post war art, it is the most widely circulated of all national loan collections reaching beyond the gallery walls into schools, universities, charities and public buildings across the country. Reaching the age of seventy is a cause for celebration and commissioning a number of works seemed an appropriate way to do this. The response to our call for submissions exceeded expectations and it is with regret that we were unable to accept them all. The enthusiastic response from venues to the invitation to show a commission during the course of this year was also hugely encouraging and our thanks go to all involved particularly Arnolfini, Bristol; the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; Plymouth Arts Centre and Southbank Centre, London who at short notice amended their existing programmes in order to accommodate us. Thanks are also due to the 2015–16 Acquisitions Committee for giving their time so readily to assist with the selection process. Without the support of Arts Council England this project would never have got off the ground and I should like to extend our gratitude to them, particularly Peter Heslip, Director of Visual Arts, for their enthusiasm and providing vital support throughout the whole process. From the very beginning the artists have been a pleasure to work with and have produced an extraordinary diverse body of work.
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Our thanks and appreciation goes to them and their studios
Introduction
for their hard work. Beyond their existing commitments, these commissions will be available for loan to galleries throughout the
The Arts Council Collection has always supported emerging and
UK and will leave a lasting legacy to be enjoyed by future
established artists, bestowing confidence in them and their work,
generations.
encouraging the development of their practice and safeguarding their art for future generations. Some of the eight artists
Lastly, I should like to pay tribute to our Commissions Project
commissioned to mark the 70th anniversary are already
Manager, Helen Nisbet who has been an absolute pleasure
represented in the Collection, others are not, but each of them
to work with and in a very short period of time has brought this
has created something that feels current, while also reflecting on
project to completion with huge flair and professionalism.
historical events, the history of art or their own practice.
Jill Constantine
Commissioning relies on strong belief in an artist’s practice,
Head of Arts Council Collection
alongside the capacity to trust in an open-ended process of working towards something that has yet to be made. Unlike buying an existing artwork, commissioning can involve uncertainty. This makes it exciting while also offering the freedom for artists to develop old and new ideas, to create and to expand their practices beyond the limitations of the art market. Having work in an internationally significant collection is good for artists. Diverse collections also benefit the nation, its museums and galleries. A collection without walls, such as the Arts Council Collection, offers an important opportunity for people across the UK and beyond to encounter contemporary art, as well as historical works by great artists, both women and men. Of course, we can’t talk about the new without talking about that which came before. In 1946 when the Arts Council Collection began, World War II had just ended, the feminist movement was still in its first wave, and postcolonial theory was decades away.
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The lifestyles of people who were not white, not heterosexual,
The Commissions
not cisgender, were all but invisible, pushed to the fringes of society and tucked away in maligned subcultures. We also didn’t have the Internet. So much has happened since 1946 that it might be difficult to imagine what artists today have in common with those whose work was acquired in the early days of the Collection. But many of the artists we have commissioned for our 70th anniversary have similar concerns to those making art in the 20th century. Identity, language, form, transformation and social or cultural history are themes that emerge in our new commissions. They also relate to the concerns of many early artists in the Collection including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper and Roger Mayne. The Collection offers a window onto the world we were living in at the time, yet in 2016, as in 1946, artists play a fundamental role in our culture. Another key aspect of our commissioning process was to partner with an inaugural exhibition venue in which to show each of the new works. Collaborating and building relationships with organisations across England through shared research, visits and conversations with artists and curators has added the values of friendship, care and support to the realisation of each commission. Helen Nisbet Commissions Project Manager, Arts Council Collection
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John Akomfrah John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker whose work investigates personal and collective histories through memory and a consideration of cultural, ethnic and individual identity in our postcolonial era. Combining archival and new footage, Akomfrah’s practice gives a voice to the experiences of the African diaspora. As a member of the Black Audio Film Collective in the 1980s and 1990s, he made documentaries that played an important role in establishing and portraying a black national culture in the UK and beyond. Akomfrah’s commission, Tropikos is both a continuation of and a departure from earlier work. An experimental costume drama set in the 16th century, the film focuses on the waterways of south west England and their relationship to the slave trade. Akomfrah describes Tropikos’s fictional narrative as being about Plymouth and its place at the centre of British maritime history. The film is set at a time when Britain’s position as a global seafaring power coincided with the enforced displacement of millions of African people across the Atlantic Ocean. As though walking through a dream, characters dressed in beautiful period costumes seem to be ghosts enacting a series of real and imagined stories, to tell the tale of a history built on slavery and stolen treasures.
Tropikos, 2016 Single channel HD colour video, 5.1 sound 36 minutes 41 seconds © Smoking Dogs Films A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection with the River Tamar Project and Smoking Dogs Films.
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Hurvin Anderson Hurvin Anderson’s paintings are based on personal experience. Many explore sites of leisure where the mind is free to wander. They convey the sense of being in one place while thinking of another, an allusion to Anderson’s Caribbean heritage, black history and community. For each new work Anderson collects newspaper clippings, posters and photographs before compiling reams of drawings and sketches as precursors to the final painting. His commission for the Arts Council Collection’s 70th anniversary is an extension of previous works such as Jersey (2008) and Flat Top (2008) which are set around typical barbershops within south London’s black communities. In these paintings, Anderson explores the architectural space of the quasi-domestic setting of the barbershop. He is interested in the shapes and colours of their interiors as well as the relationships between the materials in the space and the real and imagined conversations taking place in the room. In Is it okay to be black? Anderson subverts the gaze of the viewer, placing us in the role of sitter, confronted by more or less abstracted images of key figures in black history including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. The title of the work poses a clear question, interrogating the viewer, who can no longer remain a passive voyeur, and implicating them in the complexity of race relations, cultural history and notions of ‘otherness’.
Is it okay to be black?, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 130 × 100 cm A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection with New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.
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Ryan Gander Ryan Gander is a prolific conceptual artist whose oeuvre resembles a collection of poetic responses to the world around him. His works take on many forms including publications, sculptures and performances, and they often involve secondguessing and visual or conceptual tricks, providing clues that invite the viewer to play detective in order to unravel a narrative. His commission, As old as time itself, slept alone is part of a series of sculptures modelled on Edgar Degas’s ballerinas. Gander uses the language of figurative sculpture to create a contemporary conceptual artwork. This time the diminutive dancer lies on the floor behind a large blue cube. She is similar in scale to those made by Degas, and the blue cube acts as a cipher for contemporary art, or as Gander describes it: ‘a cartoon version of contemporary art’. Gander is interested in how Degas’s ballerinas are almost standard issue for museums. In this series he attempts to give the ballerina a new life. He takes her off her plinth and allows her to explore the institution that had previously fixed her on a pedestal and rendered her passive and watched. But the inescapable paradox is that she is cast in bronze and will remain asleep, trapped behind her accompanying blue cube.
As old as time itself, slept alone, 2016 Bronze, wood 101 × 113.5 × 134.6 cm A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection.
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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Marvin Gaye Chetwynd is known for her experimental group performances, sculptures and paintings that celebrate iconic moments in cultural history. Her works also consist of handmade props, costumes and sets. She is influenced by performing traditions such as medieval plays, carnivals, communes, drag acts and political demonstrations, as well as the history of performance in avant-garde art. Chetwynd’s commission, Here She Comes is both a live performance and a stand-alone sculpture that consists of a series of leafy screens and an aluminium box frame decorated with a collage that includes a replication of the Triclinium paintings from the villa of Livia in Rome, painted around 30–20BC. The same imagery adorns custom-made jumpsuits worn by performers, who carry View-Master stereoscopes containing images of previous performances, while handmade puppets are brought to life by groups of huddled characters. Here She Comes relates to women’s history and literature. Chetwynd mixes the reading of texts such as Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper with the lives of Boudicca and the educator Maria Montessori told through puppetry and mime. The performance takes place like a burst of energy – it is celebratory and spontaneous, a battle cry from women throughout history to women today.
Here She Comes, 2016 Mixed media and performance 45 minutes A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection.
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Mark Leckey Mark Leckey has a cumulative practice in which everything he has done leads to what comes next. The use of meticulously sourced and reconfigured archival footage in his work predates the Internet, which has popularised this kind of practice. His ongoing interests in music and its subcultures, as well as in the fetishisation of material objects, have also been central to his approach. A specific long-standing reference for Leckey is Felix the Cat, who is also the subject of his Arts Council Collection 70th Anniversary Commission. The work, feelinthecat, was inspired by a found photograph of an actor wearing a Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland. The installation consists of an immersive dome, shaped like an abstracted head of Felix the Cat, which houses two screens showing a motion capture of the artist transforming into Felix the Cat, tail, fur and all. Felix the Cat represents Leckey’s obsession with moving image and broadcast technology (the cartoon cat was famously the first picture transmitted on TV in 1929). Perhaps Felix the Cat is an avatar for Leckey himself, and feelinthecat imagines the moment Leckey achieves his final transformation into him. For Leckey, the idea of turning into an animal incites both fear and desire: fear of humiliation at being turned into an animal against his will, and desire for the loss of pride and the spiritual awakening that might accompany it.
feelinthecat, 2016 Mixed media with video 400 cm2 approximately A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection.
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Katie Paterson Katie Paterson’s practice involves extensive periods of meticulous research and development. She works in a range of mediums including photography, installation, sculpture and sound, and her projects explore big numbers, natural phenomena and the intersection between art and science. She is interested in what happens on planet Earth and beyond. Paterson’s commission Totality is a large mirror ball featuring nearly every solar eclipse documented by humankind. Thousands of images of eclipses, painstakingly sourced and collected by the artist and her studio, form a patterned sequence across the surface of the mirror ball. The jewel-like ball slowly turns, projecting images of eclipses around the room, becoming a small rotating planet. The images depicted on the mirror ball include the oldest found drawing of a solar eclipse from 1778, early 20th century photographs, as well as contemporary images from the most technologically advanced telescopes. Totality creates an immersive environment, shrouding the walls, floor and viewer in tiny illuminated solar eclipses.
Totality, 2016 Mixed media 80 cm diameter sphere Edition 1 of 3 + 2 AP A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection.
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Heather Phillipson Heather Phillipson’s practice mixes images, noises, objects, languages and bodies. Her immersive works are full of cultural references and emotional responses, suggesting her close dialogue with the materials she uses. Language plays a fundamental role in Phillipson’s creative processes: in addition to being a celebrated artist she is also an award-winning poet. Her commission for the Arts Council Collection’s 70th anniversary, TRUE TO SIZE is a series of video and audio works that play out stimulating, fantastical and furry sculptural narratives. It pairs mass-produced materials, such as large printed emojis and teddy bears, with monitors and speakers. In one scene, a bear wearing a pink ball gown climbs a set of cardboard steps, and then emerges triumphant from emoji flames. In another, a bear has cut itself in half with giant emoji scissors. Phillipson describes the emojis as stand-ins for nouns. This is a commission in its freest sense, a physical poem transplanted from Phillipson’s imagination to the Arts Council Collection. The work’s visual register and its materials are sourced from the Internet. Her videos use images and snippets of language found online, and the large cuddly toys were bought from web shops. TRUE TO SIZE is multi-layered and stimulating, merging banal and easily digested online culture with ideas of fantasy, emotion and care.
TRUE TO SIZE, 2016 Mixed media with video and sound Various A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection.
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Keith Piper Keith Piper is an artist, curator, critic and academic. He was a founder member of the BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands, who mounted a series of exhibitions of young black British artists between 1980–1984. Piper’s works examine the history and culture of black identity in the UK and beyond, and he was an early pioneer of the use of new technologies in contemporary art. Piper’s commission for the Arts Council Collection’s 70th anniversary, Unearthing the Banker’s Bones comprises three synchronised high-definition video projections. Alongside these, ‘physical evidence’ in the form of books and bones is displayed, playing off against the unfolding narrative of the video. The commission addresses notions of apocalypse, science fiction and the future. Piper’s sketches are superimposed onto the video, accentuating the moody, haunting tone of the work. For Piper, landscape operates as both a mythical and futurological site, within which to consider what will happen to the ecology, civilization and urban space in the future. Unearthing the Banker’s Bones, itself a powerful piece of prose, pays homage to a range of literary figures including science fiction writer Octavia Butler, Gothic novelist Mary Shelley and the 1960s group The Last Poets.
Unearthing the Banker’s Bones, 2016 3 screen 4k video with 2 vitrines Various A 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection with Bluecoat, Liverpool and Iniva, London.
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Unless otherwise stated, all works are Š the artist.
Graphic Design by Catherine Nippe, www.cnippe.com
Artist texts by Helen Nisbet Edited by Ellen Mara de Wachter
The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. For further information about the Arts Council Collection, please visit artscouncilcollection.org.uk To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk To enquire about acquisitions and gifts to the Arts Council Collection, email acquisitions@southbankcentre.co.uk