The Wall and the Books
Mariana Castillo Deball’s The Wall and the Books comprises an intervention in the RCA library and a related installation in the Henry Moore Gallery. The work is inspired by the short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges about the first emperor of China, Shing Huang Ti. Most famous for building the Great Wall of China, Huang Ti also outlawed all books published prior to his reign, burning any existing copies. This epic erasure of books can be read as a highly symbolic and political attempt to create a degree zero of knowledge, a new construction of the future from a radical severing of the past.
For the intervention, each one of the 987 words from Borges’s story were found and ‘stolen’ from books in the library, one word per publication. A rubber mat covering a section of the gallery floor represents the negative footprint of the RCA library and is displayed alongside a table with a book bound by the artist containing photocopies of the pages from which each word has been cut out. A paper scroll, made from joining each of the individual words together is also displayed.
The laborious act of finding each word makes present an invisible path, or as the artist describes it ‘a tiny wall running through the library.’
Mariana Castillo Deball, The Wall and the Books, 2011, mixed media, installation view
Nobody was Tomorrow
Mariana Castillo Deball, Nobody Was Tomorrow, 2007 DVD 15:42 mins, video still
Adopting a magical realist style, Nobody was Tomorrow gives voice to three inanimate characters: Nobody, an age accelerating machine housed in the basement of the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade; a large ficus tree growing inside the House of Culture in Cacak, Serbia; and the archaeological remains of the Roman baths, also in Cacak. An incinerated book in the National Library links the characters to a common history. When the National Library reopened its doors following the Second World War, the library staff decided that they needed a symbol to commemorate the atrocities made against knowledge in the past. For this, a book was aged in Nobody by 250 years, sending it to the future as if a relic, encapsulating the fictional memories of the characters and becoming an artificial reminder of time.
As with Borges’ kaleidoscopic stories, the narrative presents multiple reflections, constantly changing the patterns of the story. Images of ruins intertwine with the empty modernist building of the House of Culture, suggesting the failure of utopia promised by modernism. In this world without humans, objects talk and disclose their life histories speaking to models of social, historical and political memory.
Blackboxing
Mariana Castillo Deball, Blackboxing, 2005, DVD, 23 mins, video still
‘A blackbox is a device whose parts are unknown or irrelevant, but whose function is understood. A machine designed to perform a particular task, whose modules are undetermined, undiscovered, not forming part of knowledge in general but whose function is understood.’
Fragment taken form the script of Blackboxing.
The term “blackboxing” refers to a body of knowledge that remains outside our comprehension. It is based on the notion of black-box systems or devices, whose internal mechanisms are obscure or unknown to us and only their output is visible. In this way, scientific and technological products are measured in terms of their success, however their inner workings remain invisible. In fact, the more science and technology advance, the more opaque and unclear they become.
Blackboxing presents three amateur experimenters: The Escape Artist, The War Magician and an inventor blinded by the complexity of his own eye. Through an accumulation of their observations, stories and descriptions Deball creates an imaginary machine, which leads to a series of chain reactions between the individuals and fragments shown in the film.
Mariana Castillo Deball, Blackboxing, 2005, DVD, 23 mins, installation view
Public Monument
Sean Dockray, Public Monument, 2011, postcard
Public Monument is a proposal for a radio tower that will remain dormant until the year 2021, when it will broadcast sounds that were recorded during Shadowboxing. During this silent decade, the very nature of radio will have transformed as stations cease broadcasting on the FM band and move to digital transmission.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, philosophers, scientists, theorists, artists, politicians, tricksters, activists, musicians, radio enthusiasts, and doomsayers will come to the galleries to record material for this future transmission. These contributions revolve around questions of publicness and accessibility – talks and discussions, stories, sounds and noises coming together as an acoustic public monument for an imagined future audience.
In the galleries Dockray has designed a temporary recording studio modeled on a shack originally built by radio pioneer Gugliemo Marconi in Babylon, New York. Each recording session will be added to Dockray’s time capsule of stored sounds, and can be heard live in a Listening Space located in the Henry Moore galleries.
The radio tower, envisioned to broadcast the material in the future is also present in the space – portrayed through a landmark postcard – neither real, nor entirely fictional. In the words of Dockray, ‘It exists as much as everything else in the world that we know but which we cannot directly witness, it exists enough to ask questions such as: what happens to the idea of a mass audience when radio becomes digital? How will the idea of publicness have changed over these ten years? How will these sounds be remembered?’
Sean Dockray, Public Monument, 2011, dimensions variable, mixed media, installation view
Subject to Change
ARK #50 (1972), © Royal College of Art
The project Subject to Change has been developed through a close collaboration between artist Marysia Lewandowska and CCA students Antonia Blocker, Robert Leckie and Helena Vilalta. The project is a result of several months’ research into the Royal College of Art, its history and its present. The College-owned archive has been central to this research, prompting questions surrounding how information is made accessible and visible – or ‘common’ – to a public, and the ways in which knowledge is produced and enclosed, as well as disseminated. Although the Royal College of Art is not notorious for an activist history, what have emerged from this research are moments of resistance to the politics of the institution, of questioning managerial hierarchies and attempts to expose obsolete definitions.
The Senior Common Room is a members-only space in the college, established in the early 1950s by the then Rector, Robin Darwin. It is not accessible to students and non-academic staff and all members pay an annual fee. For the duration of this exhibition, Marysia Lewandowska has relocated the Senior Common Room lounge in the public space of the gallery, temporarily inviting all to use it. She has also enlisted all Royal College of Art employees to choose a work from the college’s art collection, to be presented in this new context. By usurping the Senior Common Room and re-situating it in the basement of the building instead of its usual top-floor site, and by giving all staff a say in the choice of artworks that are exhibited, Lewandowska draws attention to the institutional hierarchies, which are often embedded in outdated rituals hidden from public view.
The ‘Charter Day’ ceremony, which took place in 1967, celebrated the granting of a Royal Charter to the Royal College of Art, endowing it with university status and the power to grant its own degrees. Lewandowska evokes a shadow of the event by projecting a series of archival slides, taken by an unknown photographer.
Marysia Lewandowska, Subject to Change, 2011, installation view (the Senior Common Room)
By exploring certain historical moments that are now largely buried in archives, Lewandowska acknowledges the political awareness of those Royal College of Art students who have challenged the institution that at once supported and controlled them. The Environmental Media department, which existed from 1971 to 1986, was set up for ‘students requiring extended or mixed media facilities and for those whose work includes proposals for redefinition of conventional fine art boundaries’ (Annual Prospectus 1976-77). An experiment in interdisciplinary practice, the course was not well aligned with other College departments, which were defined by more traditional subject areas, such as painting and sculpture. ‘[Environmental Media] students [were] expected to create for themselves the conditions, which [would] enable them to work self-sufficiently for limited periods, isolated from criticism’ (Annual Prospectus 1974-75). Students were able to work conceptually, and with emerging media such as video, as well as embracing the more conventional means of production, seemingly free to create their own terms. As the course progressed, its existence and the students’ practice became increasingly politicised. The appointment of Jocelyn Stevens as Rector in 1984 led to a culmination of grievances and, after much debate, the department was forced to close. This closure not only caused controversy within the College but also drew the attention of a wider public that shared the students’ outrage.
The presentation of a selection of moving image works produced during the 1970s and 80s by Environmental Media lecturers and students acts as a ‘memory room’, acknowledging the legacy of this relatively short-lived period of politicised experimentation. Largely omitted from the official histories of the college, the most vivid record of the aims and achievements of the Environmental Media department seem to be contained within the accounts of the students themselves.
Marysia Lewandowska, Subject to Change, 2011, installation view (video works produced by students of the Environmental Media Department)
Ian Bourn, The Wedding Speech, 1978, 5 min, video, b&w, sound
David Critchley, Instruction Limitation, 1977, 12 min, video, b&w, sound
David Critchley, Dave in America, 1980, 20 min, video, colour, sound
Catherine Elwes, The Gunfighters, 1985, 5 min, video, colour, sound
Sandra Lahire, Uranium Hex, 1987,12 min 55 sec, 16mm transferred to video, sound. Courtesy of Diane Knight and LUX, London
Stuart Marshall, Pedagogue, 1988, 11 min 4 sec, video, colour, sound. Courtesy of Neil Bartlett and LUX, London
Lis Rhodes, Hang on a Minute, 1983, video, colour, sound
Four from thirteen one-minute episodes: ‘Pornography’, ‘Ironing to Greenham’, ‘Windscale’ and ‘White Words’
All works courtesy of the artists and LUX, London, unless otherwise stated.
The political and educational context that surrounded the rise and fall of the Environmental Media department in a sense anticipates the contemporary student upheaval. Whereas the politics of the department are firmly located within this institution alone, the recent involvement of the Royal College of Art students and their Union in current protests is in solidarity with students from institutions nationwide. The Entrance Gallery serves as site for the articulation of a lineage of protests that have been generated by or have involved the students of the Royal College of Art throughout its history. By locating this element of her project in the very space that was occupied by students in the most recent protests, which relate to the passing of laws enabling further privatisation of education, Lewandowska inscribes the current uprising within a historical trajectory. Calling attention to the politics of the educational institution and how actual and symbolic spaces are negotiated, Subject to Change exposes the tension between threats of enclosure and gestures of openness.
Marysia Lewandowska, Subject to Change, 2011, installation view
Pertinho de Alphaville
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Pertinho de Alphaville, 2010, installation view
For Pertinho de Alphaville Wendelien van Oldenborgh takes the complex relations between women, labour and cultural production as her point of departure. In the late 1970s Brazilian industry was shaken by a massive strikers’ movement. From this historical moment of collective action Van Oldenborgh reflects on today’s changing conditions of labour and its effects on the construction of the self in working life.
The artist has produced a composition of voices and images filmed and recorded in collaboration with a group of women working at various levels in a jeans factory near Alphaville, Brazil, as well as a member of the São Paulo based performance group Teatro Oficina. Within the recent changes in the economic order and the subsequent delocalisation of production in search of a cheaper labour force, the women’s work involves new measures of ‘performance’ which is fundamentally changing identity within the workplace.
The Basis for a Song
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, The Basis for a Song, 2005. Slide installation with three projectors, sound and separate subtitles in English. Filmed on DV-Video, video still transferred to slide.
Filmed over a one-day recording session in a music studio, The Basis for a Song links the urban politics of today with a particular moment in Rotterdam’s history marked by a widespread squatting scene and anarchistic punk movement. The work features the voices of two hip-hop artists from Rotterdam, both of Surinamese descent. Through improvisation and free association characteristic of the hip-hop genre, DJ Fader and Scep consider the way in which the action of squatting, which constituted a visible form of acting out against official policy, was met with an attitude of tolerance during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Of central concern is how toleration and integration can counteract the often conflicting energy and directions that underpins many forms of resistance. As the rappers outline the shift in recent years towards policies increasingly driven by economics, they expand from their own perspectives on the political implications of these rebellious actions to the occupation and possession of space.