Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Sligo - juneau/projects/: The black moss - Model:Niland - September, November 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | juneau/projects/ from I’m going to antler you , 2006; courtesy Model:Niland | Ben Sadler and Phil Duckworth have been working collaboratively as juneau/projects/ since 1999 using a range of approaches incorporating installation, video, graphic design, painting, performance and music. The Black Moss charts the development of the duo’s themes, particularly nature and technology, Romanticism and the Sublime. Early works are based on the destruction of pieces of technology in natural settings; this conflation of themes is evident in walkman/ lake , 2001 which records a tape recorder being lowered to its doom in Coniston water in the Lake District while it plays Richard Strauss. Recently they have begun creating work in collaboration with children, partly, they say, to offset the destructiveness of other strands of their practice. During the show’s run at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham juneau/projects/ organized two groups of kids into two bands, the results of this process form the final piece in the show, I’m going to antler you , 2005. Using backing tracks created by juneau/projects/, the kids made their own songs and devised their own band identity which they used on clothes and other paraphernalia. The songs and the artifacts are an amalgam of the endeavors of the artists and the children. An integral part of juneau/projects/ work is to perform this growing repertoire as a kind of tribute band. The work produced collaboratively brings to mind many questions. One of these concerns the role of the participants – are they being manipulated into producing self-consciously naïve work that fits into current taste in the art world but does nothing for them in terms of making something of genuine worth? Is it the sort of work that can only exist in the context of a publicly funded gallery – where education and engagement of youth are essential to funding? The work does stem from a genuinely democratic impulse. If parts of it appear to be a celebration of the amateur or the amateurish should this necessarily be a criticism? You could say that juneau/projects/ are having a party and we are all invited. Engagement with the exhibition is in no way contingent on prior knowledge of contemporary or modern art, or indeed any other cultural factors other than pop music and culture since the 1980s. juneau/projects/’ interest in Romanticism and the Sublime may stem from a desire to pick up from an art movement that is untainted by the perceived failures and elitism of Modernism and its descendants. Their energetically euphoric vision of nature bathed in pathos has links to Romantic poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the ‘pop stars’ of their day; they achieved popularity by communicating society’s anxiety about technology and industrialization and its relationship with the natural world. juneau/ projects/’ work seems to be connected to this era when an artist could be a ‘genius’, an individual creative visionary. That connection runs contrary to the dissolution of identity implicit in working collaboratively, and to the notion of socially engaged practice. This creates an interesting paradox at the heart of the artists’ work. On one level they eschew the vulgarity of stardom and attempt to celebrate people’s creative endeavors in areas that fall outside the traditional system of values of the artworld; on another they create such a singular vision, with each item in the show branded with their logo, that it is hard not to think of them more as auteurs than facilitators. The children and teenagers involved in their work have no apparent misgivings about the idea of individual creative genius. They would probably like to be seen as Romantic heroes. The answer to the question ‘Why do they work with kids …?’ is that the kids are proxies; they are able to say things that the artists cannot; their voices are unmediated and unconstrained by embarrassment. Just as The Black moss was opening in Sligo, a sperm whale beached itself nearby and the event prompted memories of the near hysteria generated in London when a whale lost its way and swam up the Thames into central London. Both events highlighted our odd relationship with nature and produced an unlikely but strangely compelling spectacle. This show does the same thing. juneau/ projects/ create a spectacle which thrusts contemporary culture and technology into an uneasy meeting with nature. The result prompts a number of questions about the role of the artist in society and the enduring power of nature as a theme in art. Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. Sligo - juneau/projects/: The black moss - Model:Niland -
|
