Review
Wideshut Magazine: Collaborative Editions
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Chris Jones, ‘Sunsets’, collage, 2005.
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Thomas Hackney, ‘No 17 Sierra Bonita Apartments’, oil on canvas, 2003.
Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
Launch 6 October
The latest edition of Wideshut magazine is the first in a promised series of limited-run collaborations with ‘key producers’ of the visual arts, film and music. Curated by Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery, the latest publication focuses on the tendency among the young artists included to ‘sample’, and attempts to establish this term as separate from its bigger brother of an art-historical precedent: appropriation.
I don’t really understand the dichotomy set up between the two in Sophia Crilly’s essay Memento and I can’t really see a ‘new aesthetic strategy’ evidenced in the pieces included. Erica Scourtis’ Trailer Truths II (2002) seem lazy, even though there is an endearing playfulness in this type of work’s approach. The artists involved no longer have to wrestle with any burdening conceptual engagements. Now all the legwork’s been done, the critique’s been left to the generation that preceded them. Appropriation needn’t be some kind of razor-sharp ideological weapon; it’s just another pokey little instrument in the artists’ toolbox. Perhaps this is what Crilly refers to.
Another concurrent theme is a shift in interest to the modes of production, rather than the iconic images that cinema and television actually produce. Shezad Dawood’s production stills, Make It Big (2002) highlight the shift; Tom Hackney takes photos of famous movie locations; Paul Farley’s Set (2005) charts the distinctly unglamorous character of a film set.
Some of the artists support the appropriation/sampling distinction, others don’t. David Alkers’ text works Bad Dreams and More Bad Dreams (2001-05) act as a jokey catalyst for the viewer’s memory, highlighting one link in Crilly’s ‘mechanisms of associative chains’. Rachel Goodyear’s drawings look like dislocated scenes from late-night foreign horror films or some sinister circus; first seen at night or during childhood and forgotten as you sleep and grow old.
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First published: a-n Magazine December 2005
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