Current exhibition: Votive

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO CHRISTMAS CLOSURE, THIS EXHIBITION WILL BE CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC FROM 25 DECEMBER 2009 UNTIL 5 JANUARY 2010

'Every event is an object anyway and every event has object-like quality' George Brecht

Curated for CCA by Sarah Lowndes, Votive brings together works by leading international artists including; Chris Burden, USA; Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mexico; Thea Djordjadze, Germany; Torsten Lauschmann, UK and 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright, UK.

The exhibition will also include artifacts from the World Cultures Collection of Glasgow Museums which have rarely, if ever, been exhibited. Also the seminal Chair Event, 1969, by Fluxus artist George Brecht, who died last year and whose work has rarely been shown in Scotland.

For the opening night of Votive, Basque singer Nerea Bello, noted for her extraordinary vocal range and powerful delivery, devised a song performance in response to the other works in the exhibition. A recording of this performance will be played at intervals within the exhibition space.

Votive will examine the idea of object as event, addressing the idea of performativity enshrined in the votive offering. A votive offering either expresses a wish or is given in thanks for a wish fulfilled. It is therefore both sculptural, existing in space, and performative, existing in time, as an event and thereafter as a memory.

Many of the objects included in the exhibition have qualities similar to amulets, charms and talismans, which work by magical and not physical means. Johan Huizinga, in his important study of the play element in culture, Homo Ludens (1940), observed that ‘[…] in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.’ This activity, the act of representation, the creation of a second, poetic world, is the focus of Votive.

There will be a publication, gallery talk and a film screening to accompany Votive. Details of these will be released at a later date - keep checking back on the website.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND WORKS
Basque singer Nerea Bello is noted for her extraordinary vocal range and powerful delivery, variously described as ‘thrilling’, ‘warm’, ‘ethereal’ and ‘spine-tingling’. Since 2005 Bello has performed with Glasgow-based quartet Tattie Toes, and was previously a member of German band Krakatit. She has also performed for world music band Zuba and fusion music collective Nomadiqa.

A major inspiration behind Votive is the work of George Brecht, a founder member of Fluxus and key originator of participatory art who died last year. The generous loan of Brecht’s Chair Event (1969) from Kunsthandel Onnasch in Zossen, Germany has made it possible to bring this important and rarely seen sculpture to Scotland for the first time. This mixed media work consists of a whitewashed chair, on the seat of which are placed a walking stick painted with black and white stripes and an orange, generating a sense of preceding action or an event that has yet to occur.

The tension between the live situation and its representation connects all of the works included in Votive, including the problematic Super 8 documentation of seminal concrete performance Bed Piece (1972), by Chris Burden, in which the artist undressed and remained in bed for 22 days. The documentation is problematic because it alludes to, yet can never fully convey, the power of Burden's vigil-like performance, which he has described as the 'strangest, most powerful piece' from his early career. Burden described his body as generating a force-field like 'a repulsive magnet' during the performance, an effect reversed in the Super 8 film, which onlookers cluster around to observe the supine body of the young artist.

Abraham Cruzvillegas acknowledges his own practice as a development of ideas relating to his upbringing and the self-building practices of his community in Ajusco, Mexico, ideas that he reflected upon during his Autoconstruccion (2008) residency and subsequent installation at CCA. For Votive, Cruzvillegas will send a piece of work back to Glasgow as a gesture of faith, an acknowledgement of the ideas implicated in the postal art of the 1960s and 70s. This work tells about ‘real experience: subjective, warm, live.' The work consists of a portfolio of screen-printed posters based on political protest posters - a different poster from the portfolio will be shown at weekly intervals throughout the exhibition.

This exhibition will include a site-specific installation by the Georgian born, Berlin-based artist Thea Djordjadze. Djordjadze mainly works with sculpture although she has also realised performances and been involved in music projects. In her sculptures, she often uses perishable, fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and may hint at femininity, such as plaster, ceramic, silicon, sponge, cardboard, textiles and soap. The shelves, railings, walls and boxes that support or encase the sculptural objects, are simple but delicate architectural structures of wood and metal. Their expression stands in stark contrast to the organic shapes and ‘unfinished’ surfaces of modestly scaled sculptures propped against walls, resting on shelves or hanging from railings.

The work of Torsten Lauschmann often explores the borders between technology and timelessness. For example, Lauschmann's digital portrait of his sleeping partner and baby, Mother and Child (2004) is a contradiction in terms: a moving still life, in which the religious symbolism of the image is undercut by the minute stirrings of the woman and child, breathing and blinking. His film Misshapen Pearl (2003) uses the conceit of filming street lights and neon signs in both daylight and under the cover of darkness as a metaphor for the way that consumerism shapes society. Adapted from Vileem Flusser's book Dinge und Undinge, the film creates a melancholic and strangely beautiful meditation on life in the city. Based in Glasgow over the past decade, Lauschmann’s work has evolved beyond straight photography and film works to investigate the mechanics of digital processes, software creation, experimental editing, approaches to performance and the sculptural potential of video installation.

The exhibition will include a new commission from the Glasgow-based painter Richard Wright, who makes site-specific wall drawings, which respond to both the emotional and physical qualities of architecture. Wright is currently a candidate for this year’s Turner Prize. The curator Douglas Fogle has written, ‘Wright’s subject matter, if it can even be called that, is derived from a variety of sources. His kaleidoscopically converging lines, repetitive geometric progressions, and baroque decorative fragments collide with a variety of extrapolations of typographic fonts and patterns seemingly derived from the world of underground tattoo design to form a kind of hybrid, graphic Esperanto.’

Glasgow Museums have generously loaned twelve objects from their world-renowned World Cultures Collection for Votive. In many of these objects, the natural world and the poetic world co-exist: for example in the turquoise bead, used in decorating headdresses, from a collection of ethnographical objects from Tibet which, for traders in salt of the Himalayan region, had an amuletic function, in averting sickness on journeys. Similarly, the trumpet conch-shell, used in worship along with cymbols and also placed on altars from Tibet is a natural form that has a symbolic, cultural meaning and function.

The curator of Votive, Sarah Lowndes, is a lecturer, curator and writer based in Glasgow. Her book Social Sculpture (2004) documented the Glasgow art and music scene since the 70s, while her PhD analysed 1960s and 70s concrete performance in Southern California. Since 2002 Lowndes has been a lecturer in the Historical and Critical Studies Department at Glasgow School of Art. A contributor to art journals including Afterall, Frieze, the Frieze Yearbook, Artforum, Art on Paper, Circa, MAP, Spike Art Quarterly and Untitled and to catalogues for international institutions, she was the first recipient of the Scottish Arts Council Literature Residency at Cove Park (2008), curated the acoustic music project Three Blows (St. Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh, 2008) and co-organised the Subject in Process symposium on feminism and art (CCA, Glasgow, 2009).

Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery