FOR SHOWER SINGERS

My review of Amalia Pica's solo show, submitted to the 2013 Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize. The winning entry was announced on Monday 8 April - congratulations Jenna Krumminga for her review of photographs by Larry Clark at C/O Berlin gallery, Berlin.

Amalia Pica, BABBLE, BLABBER, CHATTER, GIBBER, JABBER, PATTER, RATTLE, YAMMER, YADA, YADA, YADA, 2010, 35mm slide sequence, semaphore flags, Dimensions variable.

Amalia Pica, Modern ArtOxford, 14 December 2012 -10 February 2013

Babble, Blabber, Chatter, Gibber, Jabber, Patter, Prattle, Rattle, Yammer, Yada Yada Yada (2010) is a work that takes some deciphering. Comprising a series of slides projected onto the gallery wall at chest height, it can be read by stringing together the words of the title, one letter at a time. The fact that ‘(...) Yada’, like its homophonous precursor Dada, essentially means nothing, renders the artist’s method of presentation comically arduous. In each slide we see Pica raising semaphore flags against a background of arid and empty landscape. Superimposed in the bottom right hand corner of the slides are the signals’ alphabetic equivalents. All of this is preceded in the foreground by a pair of actual red and yellow flags, placed alongside the projector atop a white plinth, with their wooden handles pointing towards the viewer. I imagine seizing them and mimicking the artist’s transmission of gibberish live in the gallery. I might establish communication with a fellow visitor, or on a quiet day be caught in the absurd activity of relaying nothing to no one.    

Unfortunately, the invitation to perform is not to be taken literally. Observing Babble… at close range entails crossing an approximately foot-width boundary that divides the gallery, crack-like, into two uneven horizontal parts. By calling it Red Carpet (2010), Pica conjures ideas of celebrity and wealth. Paradoxically, it is made cheaply from red gaffa tape stuck directly onto the floor, so there is little sense of trepidation as one steps on the crack. The flags, on the other hand, are presented as readymades, raised on a plinth denoting the interdiction to touch.

On the other side of Red Carpet a second opportunity to perform is offered and just as soon denied. An octagonal construct, Stage (as seen on Afghan star) (2011), is installed diagonally opposite the projection. Afghan star is Afghanistan’s version of the British/American TV talent show Pop Idol. The stage stands empty and is lit by an alluring pink spotlight triggered by the viewer’s approach. Seconds later the spotlight disappears, leaving the podium’s fragile composition exposed: brown cardboard and tape reminiscent of Pistoletto’s Arte Povera. It looks far too weak to support a singer’s weight. A microphone dangles from a cord at reasonably human height, but at too great a horizontal distance from the stage. Made of soap, it would be liable to slip from one’s hands.

The exhibition title (which is also that of the microphone) now seems relevant: shower singers are those who eschew the limelight, preferring truly private space. Modern Art Oxford, a public gallery, is an unsuitable arena for Pica’s absent stars. The installation approximates a theatre set in which the artist choreographs our path. But its props are ephemeral, to be contemplated rather than used. 

Re-crossing Red Carpet we find Sorry for the Metaphor #5 (2011). An expanse of black and white photocopies depicts a lake view, pasted straight onto the wall. A woman holds a placard in the foreground but neither her face nor her message can be read: she confronts the viewer with her back. Interviewed by Frieze (Issue 148), Pica recalls the ‘first piece of art that really mattered to her’ being ‘a full-scale silhouette of a pregnant woman drawn on paper and stuck to a wall in a street’ of her native city Cipolletti, Argentina. It was one version of El Siluetazo, a ‘graphic event’ conducted in the early ‘80s by three Argentinean artists: Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores and Guillermo Kexel. Appearing in the aftermath of their nation’s ‘Dirty War’, El Siluetazo commemorated those ‘disappeared’ by the military dictatorship. Sorry… might be Pica’s tribute to the silhouette, and to the silent march conducted by mothers of the disappeared in Buenos Aires’ Mayo Square.

A similarly scaled and photocopied work - Strangers on common land (2012) - is situated in the passage serving the main entrance to the gallery. It strikes a jovial tone and features brightly coloured bunting, stretched like an umbilical link between a grown man and woman enjoying the kind of successful communication forbidden by Pica elsewhere. Communicative cheer finds its echo in the gallery: Some of that Color #2 (2009) comprises a classroom chair from which bunting is stretched and pinned to the wall. A large sheet of white paper featuring a multi-coloured watery splodge hangs above the line of bunting. Purple blends into blue, blue runs into pink and pink encounters red and orange. The splodge, or stain, (also present in the turquoise streak running down Pica’s concrete plinth downstairs) perhaps commemorates the happier aspects of the artist’s Argentinean heritage: parties, carnivals and schoolroom experiences.

The mood is deflated in the penultimate room of the show’s natural trajectory. Nine assemblage pieces fill the space, including Catachresis #8 (head of the nail, teeth of the comb, eye of the needle, head of the screw) (2011): a wall mounted comb with thick black thread pulled taut through pointed teeth. A dictionary definition of catachresis is ‘the use of a word in an incorrect way’. Pica conveys this meaning through objects; disregarding their intended purpose she reconfigures the props of domesticity to make misfit sculptural beings. Some of these are elegant and humorous – the upturned table legs of Catachresis #18 (legs of the table, neck of the bottle, head of the screw) (2012) form an angular smile. Others strike a sinister note: where catachreses include bottles set against walls I am reminded of the listening devices presented in Pica’s Chisenhale Gallery show last year. Though the artist has never alluded concretely to the text, Argentinean author Marta Traba’s novel Mothers and Shadows springs to mind, in which the protagonists, living under dictatorship, fear they are being overheard.

The tiny final room seems to warn against over-interpretation. A single work hangs on the wall: a placemat reproduction of a Brueghel painting. Wall text tells us that this is the only trace of writer Pardodsky’s stay in Amsterdam. But who is Pardodsky? I google him when I get home and the nearest hit is ‘Paradoksy’: Polish for paradoxes.  

INTERVIEW WITH SALVATORE ARANCIO

My interview with Salvatore Arancio for Aesthetica Magazine.

Salvatore Arancio, Alternating Layers of Contrasting Resistance, Installation view, Rowing Projects

Interview with Artist Salvatore Arancio

London-based artist Salvatore Arancio talks with Aesthetica about science, sampling and psychedelia in his solo show at Rowing Projects. Titled Alternating Layers of Contrasting Resistance, the exhibition has been put into dialogue with Samara Scott’s cabinet room project Cd0xdsspi.

A: Alongside more traditional formats such as photo-etching, ceramic sculpture and collage, the plasma screen presentation of Window of Possible Development (2013) presents a contrast. Does Window demonstrate a growing interest in digital technology?
SA: It’s not all that straightforward, though to a certain degree you might interpret it that way. The contrast was intentional and I see the black screen as a kind of window, a void, or a space within the space. I’m interested in digital technology and it obviously plays a strong part in this work, but it’s also more subtly present in other works: in my photo etchings I scan images from scientific books dating back to the 19th-century, and work with them in Photoshop. By editing and combining different elements from different illustrations I elaborate my own image and, when I feel it’s ready, I turn it back into an etching using a process known as photo-etching. What I find exciting is the idea of combining new technologies with “outdated” techniques – reviving and reinterpreting them, aiming to create new hybrid forms of communication.

A: How about the content of this work?
SA: It’s an animation inspired by the work of the 17th-century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, a real Renaissance man who was deeply invested in geology and volcanology. Window follows my interest in the aesthetics linked to the enquiry into science and nature: the two round shapes you see slowly rotating on screen were created by manipulating Kircher’s illustration Mundus Subterraneus. He was trying to interpret and define the inside of the Earth: he drew fissures and tunnels where magma would mix and eventually flow through volcanoes. Kircher taught at the Collegio Romano, where he also built a museum collection called the Kircherianium, a typical baroque miracle chamber.

A: You seem drawn to museum culture and to the cabinet of curiosity – you’ve explored the idea in your video Birds (2012), and you’re participating in the Hayward touring exhibition Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing, curated by Brian Dillon.
SA: I shot the footage for Birds at the zoological museum in Bologna, which contains part of Ulisse Androvandi’s collection, one of the first cabinets of curiosity and natural history collections. When I visited, I was most drawn to the vast Zafagnini-Bertocchi collection of stuffed birds from the early 20th-century. As I walked past myriad of cabinets, I felt almost like I was moving through film stills. The birds were displayed in tableaux, recreating moments of everyday life, though they were so old that some looked slightly shabby. I filmed in Super 8 and set the images to a piece by Expo 70, a composer based in Kansas City. He makes psychedelic, gravitational, rumbling music that sounds like something from the ‘70s Krautrock scene. When I came up with the idea of juxtaposing his sounds with the footage, I was thinking about some of Herzog’s “pseudo” documentaries like Fata Morgana, and the director’s association with cosmic musicians like the German electronic avant-garde band Popol Vuh. I wanted to reproduce the almost psychedelic experience I had when I walked into this museum, and also to alter the reading of the work.

The exhibition opens soon at Margate’s Turner Contemporary. The works included will hinge on the theme of curiosity: fantasies, fictions or parodies of the human quest for knowledge or truth. They’ll be juxtaposed with museum objects, such as a walrus taken from the Horniman museum. Some of my etchings will be in the show.

A: Have you been to Turner Contemporary yet?
SA: No, I’ve been to Margate though, and to Derek Jarman’s garden nearby, in Dungeness. I loved the landscape there. I visited partly because I was a big fan of Jarman in my youth. English culture was always a big influence, though I grew up in Sicily.

A: You’ve kept something from home in your work: volcanic landscapes recur in this exhibition.
SA: I grew up in Catania, the biggest city next to the volcano, but I didn't intend for these landscapes to be seen as evocations of my past or to have a precise geographical origin – I want them to have an ambiguous temporality almost equidistant between an end and a beginning – images that might be pre-human, or have an apocalyptic quality.

A: Is that why you rarely include the human figure in your work? In some collages you seem to favour abstract geometrical forms.
SA: I started this series of collages while making a film called Sentinel, after the Arthur C Clarke story used as the basis of his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Kubrick’s film of the same name. Many years after I first saw the movie, I noticed that my landscape images had something in common with Kubrick’s. But in the movie you also have the black monolith creating an impenetrable void within the frames. My geometrical forms are a way of introducing something similarly hard and man-made  changing the viewer’s reading of the image.

A: The act of sourcing and sampling film, sound and image seems so important in your work. I’ve been wondering how you came across the 1990s Russian cartoon used in Acis and Galatea? And where the black and white images come from?
SA: I tend to work from already existing material, although the black and white footage is my own, filmed on Super 8 on the Cyclopean islands in Sicily. I became interested in the myth associated with the islands, as well as their geological characteristics, composed in parts of hexagonal basalt columns. Supposedly, a cyclops was jealous of the relationship between a nymph called Galatea, and a shepherd called Acis. The cyclops tries to kill Acis by throwing stones at him. Some stones turn into the islands but one eventually kills Acis. Galatea goes to rescue him but when she touches the stone, Acis’ body turns into a river. So it was interesting how much mythology surrounded this place, but also how completely visionary the story was. After filming the landscape I researched the myth further and discovered on YouTube that it had been interpreted by a Russian animator. Amazingly, it seemed that the animator had depicted some of the very same aspects of the landscape that I’d shot on film. So I thought I’d use the similarities as a sort of device when I came to edit and splice the two materials together.

A: The colours in the animation are very unusual, and complement those of your sculptures.
SA: The choice of colour actually came about by accident. I was using my iPhone to send photos of the ceramic sculptures to my gallerist in Rome and somehow the camera was completely overwhelmed by the mixture of light sources in my studio. The lens couldn’t cope so it artificially reintroduced colours into the images, which I ended up liking. It made me think about the hallucinatory rituals that take place around certain natural settings. I wanted to hint at these so I tried to recreate the mistakenly produced colour in real life: I worked out a specific way of spray painting the engobes to achieve an almost glowing effect.

A: The form of the sculptures refers to natural phenomena. However, in transposing them into the exhibition space you’ve inserted them into an electronic, sonic landscape. What can we hear?
SA: The sound comes from Acis and Galatea and Window of Possible Development. These works won’t always be shown together but I wanted to try overlaying their soundtracks here. With Window I created the sound myself by sampling Coil’s album Time Machines (1998). There are four tracks on this album, with each one supposed to represent a different hallucinogenic drug, and playing with the viewer’s perception is an important element in my practice. For Acis and Galatea I collaborated with the London-based producer Hijacker. We discussed and referenced bands like Tangerine Dream, Oneohtrix Point Never, White Noise, or Delia Derbyshire from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: I’ve been looking back to people who wanted to make music for the future, which now, I find, has an almost nostalgic quality about it.

A: Sampling and recontextualising forgotten sounds seems a good way to draw attention to them again.
SA: That’s one of my intentions. I come up with the titles for my etchings through a kind of sampling too, though this is more playful – the titles sound scientifically convincing but they’re made up: I have an archive of captions referring to geological terminology and some of the words are just so obscure. I play with the inaccessibility of this language; creating titles by taking elements of existing terminology and reconfiguring them. It’s a kind of meaningful nonsense, though the titles still feel appropriate.

A: One thing I’ve been struggling to make sense of is the orange in the wall…
SA: That’s Samara’s! I like the way it highlights some of the similar colours we used. Also, it wasn’t an intentional reference, but my surname means orange as in the colour, or orange tree.

Words by Lizzie Homersham

Alternating Layers of Contrasting Resistance runs until 6 April at Rowing Projects

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing is a Hayward Touring exhibition opening at Turner Contemporary, Margate from 24 May – 15 September.

Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich: 28 September – 5 January 2014

de Appel, Amsterdam: June – August 2014

CORIN SWORN

Here's my review of Corin Sworn's Chisenhale exhibition (8 February - 24 March 2013), originally printed in the 3rd issue of The Courtauldian, the Courtauld Institute's student newspaper.

Corin Sworn The Rag Papers (2013) Installation view, photo Andy Keate

An abandoned desk, wilted flowers, a dried up apple core, and an unemptied ash tray: a few of the deadened objects attended to in Corin Sworn’s latest film. A second set of objects have multiple lives: piles of second hand clothes and homeware are shot in depots and markets. There are two characters - a middle aged man and a middle aged woman appear separately in the room containing the desk - with an undetermined claim to these objects. Titled The Rag Papers (2013), it is the sole work in the Canadian, Glasgow-based artist’s Chisenhale Gallery show, her ‘largest and most ambitious exhibition to date’. Certainly, this film is expansive; projected onto a wide screen hung from short chains in the ceiling, it is one component of an immersive installation accompanied by surround sound, and a cluster of lights set behind four rows of viewing benches.

The sound, composed by Eric La Casa, is generally low, bringing suspense and mild dread to a scenario that is otherwise resistant to interpretation: the above mentioned characters are frustratingly opaque and we are given little insight into their relationship. The woman is the first to appear behind the desk in a position that Sworn has initially had the viewer assume (the twenty minute film opens with the same setting shot from the opposite direction). Prior to the woman’s appearance, Sworn’s voice sounds from the back of the room, inviting the viewer to turn around. One of the lights flashes in concert with her description of an unspecified encounter: ‘... watching and not watching passing people... she came over with her drink and asked if I remembered her - of course I did... she insisted that I meet her friends... she had made a living trading things that others wouldn’t touch’.

Does the ‘she’ of presumably unscrupulous trade refer to the elegantly dressed woman who subsequently makes an entrance? We see her scrutinising and handling the things in the room: photos, a manuscript, a glass paperweight and a record player are all touched in the manner of someone searching for evidence or valuables. The woman’s mobile phone rings and we hear only her side of the conversation: ‘I can’t find it... yeah, but he’s not here... I have looked!..’

He, it emerges, in shots of the same room inhabited by the male character, has been studying the manuscript. We see him eating the apple and smoking the cigarettes that are later presented as debris. What has happened to this man? He appears to have left in haste, leaving his spectacles behind and his record playing. Why has he left? We can only answer these questions with indefinite hypotheses: in a second use of voice over, the artist refers to ‘a tattered text, more a collection of fragments than anything of substance’.

The ‘tattered text’ allusion is perfectly applicable to The Rag Papers, and not only to the conditions of its reception but also those of its production. It is revealed in the exhibition’s accompanying booklet that the artist herself had to perform the difficult role of reader, and then editor of this work. Sworn cast two actors, and asked two filmmakers to shoot according to her rather vague guidance: ‘I built a script that was largely a collection of actions, some dialogue, and events’ Sworn says, then she said to the filmmakers “a collection of events will happen in this room and I’d like you to film them as if you were making a documentary”. This production strategy, a kind of cinematic version of the tension set up by Donald Judd between his minimal instruction drawings and the three dimensional objects produced by his fabricators, meant that Sworn distanced herself from the framing of the shots and decisions regarding the weight with which each event was endowed.

Sworn’s renunciation of artistic authority is only partial, however: she appears to have regained creative control through the voiceover and its materialisation in lights: as stories are told containing third (male and female) person subjects, as well as first person recollections, references to each subject are accompanied by a different form of light - three blue lamps flash for ‘her’, one bright white light illuminates for ‘him’, and a dim amber sphere switches on for ‘I’. Most interesting about this work is the way in which its principle subject matter is its very construction. If Sworn has described The Rag Papers as ‘a seedy noir film that wishes it was an intellectual thriller’ perhaps she is being too modest: the film adopts certain principles of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘new novel’; the work that ‘expresses nothing but itself’.

LINDER: FEMME/OBJET

Here's my review of Linder Sterling's Paris retrospective, posted to Aesthetica Magazine's blog last Friday.

Four decades worth of British punk feminist work are presented in Linder Sterling’s Paris retrospective. Photography, collage, music and video works have been assembled under the exhibition title Femme/Objet, a troubling conflation of woman and commodity that lies, subverted for positive ends, at the heart of Linder’s practice: “I have always treated myself as a found object”, she says.

For Linder, this means seeing oneself as a thing ripe for experimentation and adaptation to a changing roster of contexts and roles. It is an artistic strategy made explicit to viewers: Linder’s quote is reproduced and spotlit in bilingual wall text placed above three photographic self-portraits in which the artist tries out three incarnations of glamorous goth style. The first and largest portrait encountered here is nonetheless disquieting: Hiding but still not knowing (1981-2010) sees Linder’s mouth and nose wrapped in transparent material simultaneously evoking traditional bridal wear and some kind of packaging – cling film, perhaps. The look is as alluring as it is sinister; boldly made-up eyes stare defiantly, but the transparent veil also suffocates; renders feminine beauty mute. The adjacent portrait is a smaller photomontage, Untitled (1981), in which sight is undermined by a cutlery collage covering the eyes. No sensory deprivation occurs in the third portrait, indeed the opposite takes place as red lips are inflated to ludicrous proportions. Dated 1979, the latter also appears at the exhibition entrance, repeated to Warholian excess.

Not everything is so darkly glamorous here. The exhibition is cut into contrasting halves: black walls and floors provide the backdrop for documentation of Linder’s beginnings in 1970s Manchester and her subsequent role in the 1980s band Ludus. Work from the 2000s is installed in a brighter, sickly sweet setting comprising pastel pink, lilac and orange walls, gauzy curtains and neon inscriptions: “ANATOMY IS NOT DESTINY”, we read. The stark change in the gallery environment effectively suggests that the gender campaign has paid off; that a literally brighter horizon has been reached. Undoubtedly this is true; “In the late 1970s gay clubs were the only sanctuaries when you were wearing bondage (…) Everywhere else you went in Manchester you were open to ridicule and occasional violence”, Linder recalls in a text accompanying two small scale series of photos taken at the popular crossdressing club Dickens. 

The sickly nature of the bright backdrop to the 2000s might alternatively represent ironic over-identification with a present that could yet be much more accepting of alternative identities. If Femme/Objet makes one thing clear it is that the magazine and pornography industry has changed little in the past forty years: photocollage imagery sourced throughout this period evidences how men and women have consistently been asked to identify with the conformist and idealised images that Linder loves to deconstruct. The iron-headed woman featured on the cover of the Buzzcock’s single Orgasm Addict is depressingly timeless. Videos such as Forgetful Green (2010, directed by Tim Walker) show greater gender fluidity in a utopian dreamscape to which we have little access.

Linder: Femme/Objet, MAM, Paris, until 21 April.

LIAM OUR GENIUS WILL MELT ICELAND

On Saturday evening I cycled down the road to Liam Scully's studio in Bow. All in attendance at his Liquidation Art Sale were treated to a wonderful salon hang of paintings, piles of drawings and a poetry reading. The latter, pictured below, came from Steven Micalef. Combining references to the British media-inspired subject matter of the paintings, with snatches of comments heard by Micalef that evening, it was greeted with applause.* In keeping with the fundraising spirit of the night, the poem was auctioned off, fetching the grand sum of eleven pounds.

'Liam Our Genius will Melt Iceland' by Stephen Micalef

Paintings by Liam Scully

From left: Vanessa Scully, Steve Micalef, William Alexander, Ellie

 

Liam Scully's Liquidation Sale will continue through February, with funds going to a two month studio residency in Iceland, March - April 2013. For more details or to organise a studio visit call 07981005993. Liam's Bow Arts Trust studio address: 32 Warren House, Bromley High Street, London E3 3HB.

*Liam Our Genius will melt Iceland

Coming to Liam’s - 12 kids fighting down an alleyway - I ask 3 locals where Warren House is - standing right outside - Liam ain’t cool
Driller Killer - Boris’s cunty dream, Jimmy Savile’s drooping cigar - he’s being sick says Elizabeth - or Russia? It’s Ronaldo - Vanessa.
Don’t do football - it’s full of thugs - Liam’s now rolling it - sold - a catholic recovery -
I Believe in Laughter Orgasm it keeps me in touch
witt ma feelings - do you like Prince Harrry
Wot witt the bongos - ya voodoo - Harry - wott
The footballer - Mr Blobby is glowing and
Jimmy Savile witt droopy has definitely got a
Bedside manner ‘n’ Galloway is ‘indefatigable’
Kate’s bedazzling in that ring - Liam’s off to Skaftfell ‘n’ Iceland will glow with admiration.

Micalef

LIAM SCULLY'S LIQUIDATION ART SALE

In this interview I talk to artist Liam Scully about his plans to host an everything-must-go sale of his work from the past decade. Due to take place this Saturday 9 February at his Bow Arts Trust studio in London's E3, all money raised will go towards funding his trip to Skaftfell, Iceland, where Scully has been offered a place on the Norðurgata residency.

Liam Scully in his studio in Bow, East London

Lizzie Homersham: There's something about the idea of a liquidation sale that seems very tongue in cheek and therefore totally in keeping with the tone of your work. I realise that this is a fundraiser with an obvious practical end but you could have planned the same thing more... tastefully, let’s say, by offering work more cheaply than usual to existing contacts and friends. I guess that would have been boringly conventional. Instead, the theatricality and literal cheapness of the way you're framing this sale makes me look forward to the event, and to seeing your studio again.

Liam Scully: I have always reacted to what is around me, something to do with my impulsive nature. My wife Vanessa came up with the title and I said yes, that is truly brilliant. But by liquidating my ‘stock’ I’m also referring to what is happening around us: shops and small businesses closing up, employees losing their jobs and struggling to feed their kids while the rich jolly it up. I am very serious in what I say. I am forever broke but fortunate to carry on working under these circumstances. The art builds up and storage is becoming impossible. Meanwhile I’ve been offered this residency in Iceland and I have to find a way to fund it. The idea of the sale is one that allows me to kill two birds with one stone: I can do away with old ‘stock’ and secure funds to make new ‘stock’. I do like the cheap element; many artists overrate themselves with ridiculous prices that no one in their right mind should pay. Recently at The London Art Fair I saw young galleries showing young artists who are technically competent yet excruciatingly uninteresting. And their prices are inflated beyond belief. These are artists likely to drop out of fashion very quickly and the collectors will be left with a worthless picture. Yet the work of a veteran and truly original artist like Rose Wylie can be purchased for as little as £3000. Here you are buying a piece of art history. So it doesn't worry me that I may cheapen myself by setting my prices low. I am not a fashionable painter and I am happy to be playing by my own rules.

What's up for sale?

Pretty much everything I have done in the last decade that is still in my possession. Some of the work I consider not so good but I am putting it out there anyway so that people can decide. Drawings from 2004, 05, 06 and 07 are there right up with works made in the week of the sale. Dieter Roth, an artist who had a studio in Iceland where I am heading for my residency, was unconcerned with ‘quality control’. This freaked out some of his collaborators such as Richard Hamilton but I relate strongly with Roth’s unapologetic attitude.

Is there anything you don't want to part with?

No, everything must go. I have spent long enough with most of the work and I think 2013 is a potential turning point for me, where I can make new work without the burden of the older pieces hanging around. Who knows, I may see the old pieces again one day.

Have you catalogued or at least photographed the work you hope to sell?

Vanessa has helped document most of the work but there are definitely drawings that have not been photographed. If one of those goes I will snap it with my mobile phone at the point of sale.

Is there some criticism of the art market here?

I guess I feel disenfranchised by the art market. Since 2003 I have been working hard to make my work and so on but on the few occasions that I have shown my work to a potential gallerist they have not wanted to take me on, or things have looked promising and the gallery itself has lost the financial fight to survive. This is alienating so I have to create my own opportunities. I wouldn't want to criticise the art market as some day I would like to be a part of it. I am simply highlighting the fact that at this moment we are separate entities. People often say your work is only worth what people are willing to pay for it and the people I know, or the people who appreciate my work, don’t have a lot to spend. Therefore this sale is for people who genuinely like what I do. The whole idea of the sale is to create an interactive performance. I hope to benefit from it of course, but I will my do my best to ensure that everyone enjoys the event, whether they buy or not.

How cheap are liquidation prices?

Drawings will go for as little as £10 and for as much as £700 (for my painting of Mr Blobby that is framed). Small paintings are on average £250 but some are £50. Compared to my contemporaries these figures have been liquidised.

Do you intend to explore new techniques or subject matter once all this old work is out of the way?

Yes, that is an important part of this whole thing. Like a business that goes bust and is bought out by a different company with the power to regenerate it, I think after Iceland there will definitely be new things happening.

What do you hope to gain from being in Iceland?

Space and fresh air will do wonders for my psyche, I feel my current painting is too much about claustrophobia, anxiety and frustration. I need a change! London is not the most accepting place for my work; I refuse to play up to certain expectations. On the other hand Leipzig in Germany has been very generous in its response: I have shown there numerous times and even sold ambitiously scaled work. I hope Iceland will be kind, with an appreciation for my energy and style. I have a feeling that I may receive more acclaim abroad, so it is good to be expanding my horizons.

Do you hope to meet new people at your liquidation sale?

Yes. If I can reach people who are not familiar with my work that would be great! I love to meet new people - that’s why I’m inviting them to my studio, which is also my home.

TIME TO RETHINK PUBLIC ART?

Ahead of tomorrow's debate at Tate Britain, titled 'Who owns public art?', I'm posting a slightly amended version of an article written for Issue 2 of The Courtauldian, the student newspaper of The Courtauld Institute of Art. 

Amalia Pica, I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011) 

Leafing through the first issue of The Courtauldian last term I was surprised by the conclusion of Lucy Watling’s article concerning the proposed sale of Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman (better known as ‘Old Flo’) by Tower Hamlets council. In November 2012 I wrote to Lutfur Rahman, Mayor of Tower Hamlets, to express my disappointment in the short termism of his proposal to sell the sculpture, and in the favourable allusions he had made in his blog for Huffington Post to Bolton Council and Bury Council's decisions to sell works by Millais, Picasso, and Lowry, as a way of justifying his stance with a precedent. Watling took a different view. In ‘Public art must not be sacred’, she said that she ‘knew Henry Moore would have agreed’ with a decision to: ‘Sell the sculpture. Set aside £100,000 for ten new public artworks, by upcoming British artists, to be displayed around the borough. Set aside another £100,000 to fund sustainable art education programmes in the area, perhaps a further £100,000 to fund undergraduate fine arts scholarships.’

Public art may not be sacred, but works over 30 years old can be legally protected with listed status, if the English Heritage considers them to be of ‘outstanding artistic interest’ (See Art Monthly No 362). This aside, I cannot profess to know whether Moore would have agreed with the sale of his work; he is unfortunately no longer around to ask. Sources close to the artist suggest he would have been dismayed, however. A letter written by his daughter Mary in opposition to the sale was published by the Observer on 3 November 2012. In it, she wrote that ‘(...) the mayor's proposal goes against the spirit of Henry Moore's original sale to London County Council at a favourable price on the understanding that it would be placed in East London.’

Mary Moore did not deny the strong argument supporting a sale: she acknowledged that it would provide Tower Hamlets with a source of revenue at a time when the East End borough is being forced by Coalition austerity policies to make £100 million of cuts by 2015. The council cites funding housing projects as their priority (not the financing of new public artworks and art school scholarships that Watling suggests). However, on 21 December 2012, Draped Seated Woman was formally withdrawn from the list of artworks to be sold at Christie’s February auctions. It emerged that Bromley council became custodian of the work 27 years ago, and although it took an Art Fund lawyer to point this out, Bromley leader Stephen Carr appeared pleased with the discovery: ‘The idea that selling this national treasure will somehow tackle Tower Hamlets’ financial situation is flawed—the money would not protect frontline services very long’, he said. I agree with Carr and hope to see ‘Old Flo’ in Tower Hamlets soon. Though Mayor Lutfur Rahman deems her a burden, photos of Draped Seated Woman show her to be a beautiful sculpture, realised by an artist with high ideals for the community in which he intended her to sit.

It is unlikely that ‘Old Flo’ will be returned to a housing estate: she was installed at the Stifford Estate in Stepney from 1962 – 1997 but unfortunately vandalised there during the last year of her stay. In my opinion, future vandalism of the sculpture is far from inevitable: I recently moved to the Lanfranc Housing Estate in Tower Hamlets, an extensive block of flats that is currently noisy because, happily, funds have been allocated for its renovation. Ordinarily it is a quiet estate where I feel completely safe. There is no sign of vandalism, not even graffiti. I have no reason to think that residents would treat a public sculpture with anything but respect. But to cover all eventualities ‘Old Flo’ must be insured. The Museum of London has offered to foot the bill, and to have the sculpture installed on their Docklands site. This solution has its advantages: ‘Old Flo’ would be more easily accessed by visitors to the area while remaining within reach of Tower Hamlets residents.

At the time of writing the fate of Draped Seated Woman remains unconfirmed. In future, hard-pressed councils might hesitate before accepting the well-intentioned gifts of artists making public works: when made in unwieldy proportions and in materials that command high insurance costs they can turn out to be a curse. Perhaps our current economic climate calls for artists to reconsider the forms that artworks conceived for the community might take.

One example of public sculpture that did not represent a financial burden to the already overburdened council was realised by Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Argentina) in July 2011. Alongside her solo exhibition atChisenhale Gallery (25 May – 15 July 2012), Pica presented a pink granite sculpture carved in the shape of the South American Echevaria plant, which is especially suited to domestic environments. The work might more accurately be called semi-public: for one year, Tower Hamlets residents were invited to look after Pica’s sculpture in their homes for a period of one week. Participation in the project, titled I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are, was voluntary and thus sidestepped another problem normally inherent in permanent outdoor public sculpture; that appreciation of an unsolicited yet essentially invasive kind of artwork can never be guaranteed.