pigdogandmonkeyfestos | Issue 2 | The Artists Part 2

Part 2 of our look at the contributing artists in PIGDOGANDMONKEYFESTOS Issue 2 focuses on Peter Lamb, Emma Holmes and Plastique Fantastique.

Peter Lamb, ('Studio Floor'), 

Peter Lamb was born in 1973 and lives and works in London. In 1996 he graduated from the Camberwell School of Art, London.

Peter Lamb looks like a nice guy, painting's Jamie Oliver perhaps. In his paintings, collages, and photos, he unleashes mighty visual forces of weirdness, chaos, and desire. - 

Jasper Joffe.
source:http://therebelmagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/q-with-peter-lamb.html

Peter Lamb’s paintings promote inscrutability about meaning with concentrations of strokes, shapes and textures. Gestures are his own and, conceivably, other people’s; authorship cannot be vouched for throughout an expanse of painting. Some elements are clearly not actual, physical registrations (and, therefore, marks of authenticity) but marks that have been photographed, with the photograph then worked upon by being overlaid with new matter. What is more, the photograph reproduces shapes that could fall outside the general ambit of aesthetic consideration.

source:http://www.peterlamb.org/statement.html

Emma Holmes  publishes SCHIZM Magazine in the style of zine - Every issue has a different theme and artists are invited to contribute in response to this.

Emma Holmes, 'La Siesta', found image stolen from the floor of a bookshop in Mexico City, 2003

Plastique Fantastique, '99th Plastique Fantastique Communique - What are PIMPZ? What are HOOKERZ?'

Plastique Fantastique -  a collaboration between David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan (sometimes with others), is a mythopoetic fiction - an investigation of aesthetics, the sacred, popular culture and politics - produced through comics, performances,text, installations and shrines and assemblages.

pigdogandmonkeyfestos | Issue 2 | The Artists

In advance of the launch of pigdogandmonkeyfestos Issue 2 - Shaun Doyle & Mally Mallinson's second collection of contemporary artists' manifestos and works inspired by the manifesto format - here at AirSpace Gallery on Friday 13th December, 2013, we are presenting a short series of blogposts highlighting the artists presented in the Zine.











First up is Billy Childish and Harry Adams

Original ART HATE Field Sheets - Handbill Propaganda Series. First Issued by Dr. Albirt Umber, Flanders 1917. Re-issued by the ART HATE ARCHIVE September 2010.
Redesign by Billy Childish and Harry Adams courtesy of the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop of Clerkenwell.

Billy Childish  was born in Chatham, Kent in 1959. After leaving secondary school at age 16, he worked at the Naval Dockyard in Chatham as an apprentice stonemason. Initially denied an interview to the local art school, during six months of employment at the dockyard he produced hundreds of drawings that gained him entry to St. Martin's School of Art. Childish's defiance to authority and his insistence on integrity and personal style above the formalities of educational requirement led to his eventual expulsion from art school in 1981. Childish then embarked on an artistic, literary, and musical odyssey exploring a broad range of worldly themes including war, history, social protest, art hate, religious philosophy, as well his own experiences of alcoholism, and the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. Over 35 years of continual creative activity Childish has gained a cult status world-wide; writing and publishing over 40 volumes of confessional poetry, 5 novels, recorded over 100 LPs, and painted several hundreds painting.
Billy Childish has had solo and group exhibitions internationally including New York, London, and Berlin. He was included in British Art Show 5, which toured throughout four cities - Edinburgh, Southampton, Cardiff, and Birmingham. In 2010, he was the subject of major concurrent survey exhibitions at the ICA in London and White Columns in New York  

(source: http://www.l-13.org/acatalog/copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_Billy_Childish.html)  

Harry Adams is the name of the artistic partnership between Steven Lowe and Adam Wood. Although the two artists have collaborated together closely since meeting at art school in 1988, where they studied painting, they only chose the presentational construct of Harry Adams in 2008. Despite their training as painters, their early collaborative projects were loud musical ones, since when they have engaged in many diverse activities including painting, drawing, film, performance, printmaking, photography, digital montage and poster design (especially the Art Hate project, in collaboration with Billy Childish), artists' books, publishing (poetry, novels, polemics), web projects, running galleries and curating. Their most notable musical project was STOT21stCplanB, whose accompanying videos and other related artworks reveal a strong visual sensibility. It is a long, hardworking partnership.
These assertions and appropriations, being brought to a great temperature in the furnace of the L-13 imagination, have sometimes generated incandescent light, and sometimes the fiery conflagrations and burn marks of destruction. Many shows, publications, events and performances have been made working in this way, the results of which will undoubtedly confuse future cataloguers and commentators hoping to make forensic sense of them - especially, perhaps, because of their often mysteriously unresolved endings. This interest in the nature of creation and creativity's relationship with the energies of destruction, and in both resolute and irresolute endings, has been a shared constant at L-13, and is now also seen in the paintings of Harry Adams.
As committed collaborators at art college, Steve Lowe and Adam Wood had wanted to be assessed for their degrees on the basis of a joint show, a performance they had both devised. But they were not allowed to do this, and had to give two separate performances, under their own individual names, for separate assessment. Although the performances were effectively the same, one artist was passed, the other was failed. This occasion was an important moment for them, making ideas of success and failure seem redundant, and has since played a defining role in their outlook. It has led to an indifference to - or defiance of - the received ideas that seek to determine whether an artist is doing well or badly - a position that is consistent with their theme of creative non-finality as opposed to a career identity.
Ideas of creation and destruction are central to the paintings, with whose themes we are familiar from our experience of the heavens and the utopias, the hells and apocalypses, of mythico-religious art from all times and all places. Within Harry Adams's paintings there is belief and disbelief, beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, dirt and cleanliness, and ecstasy and dysphoria. He summons and combines these polarities as dualities or paradoxes of discord and unity, and then evades tidy meanings, or deliberately misplaces conclusion. Saints are made grubby and grubby things are made beautiful, and ideals of love and beauty and holiness are recombined. He disrupts the perfectionism or absolutism of paintings by other artists, while ensuring that his interpretations are also homages to that absolutism or perfectionism. Huge architectural monoliths are depicted, whose important survival or cultural functions, as repositories, have their already complex meanings disrupted in further ambiguities of moral scale. 

(source: http://www.harryadams.org/acatalog/About_Harry_Adams.html) 

Small Change - The DIY Common : revealing the potential behind the actual

The DIY Common : revealing the potential behind the actual

The DIY Common is a project developed by public works in Cheetham Hill, North Manchester. The project injects new life, both natural and social, in Cheetham park (commonly known as Elizabeth Street Park).

Dye Garden

It adds to it a dye and herb garden, as well as a temporary café. The residents of the area can meet in the café and participate in a number of workshops around planting, cooking, foraging, making natural dyes… The products of these activities are served in the café.

Introducing shared ways of interacting both with the park and between the members of the community, the DIY Common opens up new possibilities for both. This joint effort between public works and residents aims to transform the park into a productive landscape, activating its potential as a natural resource. At the same time, exploring the possibilities of creating a new type of common, and in a real DIY spirit, the project seeks to democratize and engage people in the process of using the park and ultimately run the café on their own.

Temporary Cafe

Commissioned by Buddleia, an agency that was set up in 2010 by independent curator Kerenza McClarnan, aiming to develop a culture of ‘socially engaged art practice within North Manchester.

The temporary café structure is on view at AirSpace Gallery until the 7th of December. 

Sevie Tsampalla does a Q&A with Torange Khonsari from public works about the project.

  

ST: What made you choose this way of intervening in the park, i.e. creating a temporary café and a dye garden? How do you approach the local community and what kind of challenges are there in the process of working with people?

TK: I am really interested in finding out how one can over time establish commitment of long term engagement with communities. I believe this takes a very long time and for it to be successful you need to STAY in a place. For me the platform to establish such commitment over time is Hosting and hospitality. I like to host people to get involved in very basic activities and through the informal act of making or doing social relations form. What I enjoy with the park is that activities that have their basis on the land and what is produced by nature and land have been part of human history for thousands of years all around the world. E.g making dyes from flowers, cooking, willow weaving, making earth ware etc. This not only means that people can relate to it as it is familiar and has been part of human history but also every ethnicity can relate to it. Every part of the world have similar traditions when it comes to production that comes from the land but of course the techniques or aesthetics or particular food etc maybe different but in essence they are the same. 

ST: Your DIY café made me think of what Nabeel Hamdi says about design combined with emergence. I am paraphrasing: ‘A designed structure which leaves room for something to emerge’. In your case, the physical structure of the café and the community around the park or the strengthening of the existing community. Secondly, in the book Small Change, practice is often about acting spontaneously, improvising and building in small increments. Do you see an affinity with the way you work? How much room do you leave for spontaneous or improvised solutions? 

TK: Everything I do is spontaneous and improvised, as this is the only way you can deal with social projects. They never go as you plan them. It is not about what you as an artist expect; and that element of surprise is very strong and allows very innovative projects to develop. However, having said that, you have to have a clear program or project to which people can react to. I find engagement is never successful and becomes more dis-empowering, when you are too open or too flexible. It is good to have a structure/program and then allow people to subvert it or disrupt it. 

ST: What are the objectives for the DIY common in the near future? What kind of change do you want to see in the area? 

TK: DIY Common will continue for the next year or so and we see where it spills into and how it develops taking the ideas of productive landscape that can support community activities and social clubs. We at public works are mainly doing long term projects now. DIY common is part of my PHD and in partnership with Buddleia and Kerenza McClarnan we will push it as a project, I hope. It may move to other sites in Cheetham Hill, but the project will continue.

To find out more, visit:

www.publicworksgroup.net

www.buddleia.co.uk

www.buddleiacommissions.wordpress.com/about

www.cheethampark.wordpress.com