Back Catalog (2020)
During the pandemic there was a movement, all but short lived, voiced by prominent collectors that now was a time to downtools, to reevaluate the over-production of art, the prolific art fair calendar, and the search for the next best thing. They proclaimed rest bite - and urged everyone to use the time in home isolation to reflect on the artwork they own and the artists they have supported.
May 8-17, 2020
PRESS-RELEASE the BACK CATALOG
Back Catalog series #1 / May 8 – 17 2020; Robert Barry, Saulius Leonivicius, Support Structure, Laureana Toledo, Gavin Wade with TJ Boulting
The ‘Back Catalog’ series is a set of 8 50pp catalogues printed and ringbound produced by Division of Labour in collaboration with invited artists and galleries, re-presenting installation views, happenings artworks from historic exhibitions to create a new exhibition as catalogue. Due to the 2020 pandemic and the precarious place we find ourselves in we are interested in visibility and the presentation in art, this catalogue project will appropriate some references to the dematerialised movements of the 1960’s. In this spirit all work shown has been made between 1965 and 2015.
The catalogue design is unashamedly derivative of, a homage to; January 5-31 1969 or the ‘January Show’ was the historic show from gallerist Seth Siegelaub. 1969, Seth Siegelaub rented out a first floor office space at 44, 52nd Street, N.Y, a gallery space with two equally sized rooms, one room was empty except for a desk, telephone and the exhibition catalogue, the other contained works from the catalogue by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner.
Issue #1; May 8 – 17, 2020 has the theme; invisibility working in collaboration with the artist Laureana Toledo and her gallery here in the UK, TJ Boulting. Later that same year there was a poster for an exhibition with no details of location, date or time, just a post-office box and telephone number. No one on the end of the line, an answering service described the work. The work by Robert Barry was titled "Inert Gas Series / Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion.' Barry released five measured volumes of invisible noble gasses into the atmosphere at various non-disclosed locations surrounding Los Angeles.
Division of Labour and TJ Boulting invite you to revisit four exhibitions between 2010 and 2015, shows that explored the limits and confines of materiality. Due to the global pandemic both galleries are closed, the exhibition will exist as a ring bound 50 page catalogue (numbered, printed and posted as soon as feasibly possible.) Back Catalog #1 is available to preorder here and will be released at 10am on the 8th May for 10 days. In this time the work described within will be available for sale. Redacted versions of the catalogue will also be available for free from 8th until 17th May 2020.
May 22 - 31, 2020
Back Catalog series #2 / May 22 – 31, 2020; Andy Holden, Jeremy Hutchison, Yelena Popova and Robert Breer represented by gb agency.
During this 2020 pandemic and the isolation we find ourselves in, galleries and artists have adopted online presentations, virtual viewing rooms and password protected websites. This publication will appropriate some of the strategies from the dematerialised movements of the 1960’s; a catalog as a show. A curated project bringing artists, artworks, curators and galleries together, selected from between 1965 and 2015. A look back at exhibitions in the past. The catalogue design is unashamedly a derivative of, and at the same time an homage to; January 5-31 1969 or the ‘January Show,’ the historic show from gallerist Seth Siegelaub.
Division of Labour, Andy Holden and gb agency invite you to revisit four exhibitions between 2001 and 2015. Division of Labour’s ongoing project Est.1690 takes as its subject, the world’s oldest newspaper; the Worcester Berrows Journal. Artists are invited to create a newspaper wrap. (page 27) This catalogue features one of these covers by Jeremy Hutchison. Objectless Expansion (2013-ongoing) addresses the co-option of the colour cyan by Silicon Valley. Skype, Twitter, Vimeo, DropBox, Windows8 are among many brands to incorporate cyan into their corporate identities. Connoting freedom, formlessness, limitlessness, this colour is deployed in order to mystify the material and economic realities around our digital activity.
This work consists of a newspaper print, a gallery installation and an CGI film. Hutchison instructed that every surface of the gallery be painted cyan. (pages 26-29) A film shows a digital rendering of the gallery, multiplied through a labyrinth of infinite spaces. The soundtrack to this film is the voice of a Skype user who Hutchison contacted via an unsolicited request. In intricate detail, this individual describes the room from which he speaks, on the twenty-fourth storey of a residential building in Beijing, China. Presented at Christine Koenig Galerie, Vienna; Division of Labour, Worcester; Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia.
Robert Breer a solo exhibition at gb agency. A collection of sculptures (1960-70) the complete set of drawings from the film A Man And His Dog Out For Air (1957), and film screenings. For forty years, Robert Breer has eluded formal, stylistic and conceptual labels, and produced work that is at the same time free and precise. His work in different media including sculpture, painting, drawing and film, is characterized by a dialogue between each of these processes. Robert Breer tests the thresholds of perception and the limits of representation.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Breer gave new legibility to the mutoscope (a precursor to filmmaking) and brought that object into the art gallery. Those sculptures, according to the speed at which they are operated, show movement as it is being constructed. His films are not narrative in structure; they include photograms, drawings, collages, sound, video, and photographs. Breer explores every possible interaction between color, speed, and the appearance and disappearance of shapes. He creates an extremely rapid rhythm, thoughtfully produces randomness out of shocking visuals, and uses an irreverent tone in his films. As geometric modules, his sculptures are recurring shapes drawn from his films. Without pedestal, these “pure” forms are an ironic allusion to Minimalist art. They are discreet motorized presences that move slowly, at ground level, almost imperceptibly and without logic. Seeing them, viewers recognize the time and space that they themselves occupy. Each of these “eccentric” sculptures has its own interaction: they make noise but are almost inaudible; their movement is resolute but their path accidental; they are in one place and another at the same time.
Breer’s structures called Floats question the relationship between sculpture and the ground, and between sculpture and the position of the viewer. An abundance of forms of expression, their intricate entanglement and a freewheeling curiosity are the marks of Breer’s artistic career. He has experimented with Cinematic Structuralism, Fluxus, Pop, and Minimalism, without ever getting tied down to any one of these.
Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (2011–16) is the result of artist and musician Andy Holden’s five-year project on the laws of physics in cartoons. Holden, who describes the work as ‘a lecture on cartoons, and also a cartoon lecture’, acts as our guide through an animated landscape populated by well-known characters including Bugs Bunny and Wile E Coyote. Drawing on the work of Greek philosophers and Stephen Hawking, Holden identifies and unpicks ten laws of cartoon physics, the first of which is that ‘anybody suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation’. Holden, who first learnt to draw by copying cartoons, argues that ‘the golden age of cartoons’ offered ‘a prophetic glimpse’ into the world in which we live. Studying them, he suggests, will help us better understand the events of our contemporary landscape, not least the 2008 financial crisis and President Donald Trump.
July 10 - 18, 2020
Back Catalog series #3 / July 1 – 8, 2020; Victor Burgin, John Hilliard, Andrew Lacon, Alexandre Lavet
During this 2020 pandemic and the isolation we find ourselves in, galleries and artists have adopted online presentations, virtual viewing rooms and password protected websites. This publication will appropriate some of the strategies from the dematerialised movements of the 1960’s; a ‘catalog’ as a show. A curated project bringing artists, artworks, curators and galleries together, selected from between 1965 and 2015. A look back at exhibitions in the past. The catalogue design is unashamedly a derivative of, and at the same time an homage to; January 5-31 1969 or the ‘January Show,’ the historic show from gallerist Seth Siegelaub.
Division of Labour, Dürst Britt & Mayhew and Richard Saltoun invite you to revisit four exhibitions between 2014 and 2015. Division of Labour’s ongoing project Est.1690 takes as its subject, the world’s oldest newspaper; the Worcester Berrows Journal. Artists are invited to create a newspaper wrap. This catalogue features one of these covers by Victor Burgin. Untitled. (2014) A block of justified texts containg two paragraphs collided, one a fiction and the other Burgins own theory; Victor Burgin: Components of Practice (published by Skira Editore, 2008 pg 124) Starting from a perspective of the world already too full of imagery, Burgin’s early works gave new context to existing photographs by introducing text to interupt and change the context of presention, here Burgin disposes of the image alltogether and examines two texts which reference an account of belonging, travellling and existance in the first part and then a critical theoretical language of the mass-media, surveillance and dissaffection.
Hilliard’s time as a sculpture student at St. Martin’s School of Art exposed him to a new pedagogy that favoured the idea over the object. Students were asked to document all stages of their work, creating a visual overview of their artistic process, a project that influenced the trajectory of his career. Hilliard began by making site-specific installations in 1966, always documenting the installation with a photograph, eventually displacing the installation with the photograph itself. First exhibited in 1969 at the Camden Arts Centre these works have come to form the backbone of his practice. Through his career he has continued to question the reliability of the photograph to represent the object or subject photographed. Hilliard has explored this through a recurring call to abstraction, allowing the camera to distort and affect what it sees through selective cropping, focus and exposure. He has displaced the perceived subject with expanses of monochrome comprising available objects – studio backdrops, walls, and projector screens.
Alexandre Lavet’s work at POPPOSITIONS in 2015, Vides (2011-ongoing) with the gallery Durst Britt Mayhew, presented a series of 21 images taken from the internet and altered. The photographs depict exhibition spaces that have had the artwork digitally removed. In a text by Martial Deflacieux about Lavet’s work he writes “Despite their inclination to disappear and to be as invisible as possible, exhibition spaces are marked by certain characteristics. Under their apparent neutrality lies an equipment for standardization and configuration.” Lavet’s Vides highlights the hegemonised ‘gallery’ view that has become the staple for the display and optimal representation of art relayed in slick photo records for the archive.
Rome (circa 1853), James Anderson was producing souvenir albums of photographs displaying sculptures from the Vatican museum and scenes of the city. These toned albumen prints were compiled into albums and sold to wealthy travellers. Lacon’s position is that they depict an unrealistic experience of three-dimensional objects, in this case sculpture. Photographers like Anderson would paint parts of the glass opaque, so as to separate and visually divorce the sculptures from their surroundings. The result, whilst showing the sculptures in great detail, creates a distinct two-dimensional experience that feels removed from life, they distance the viewer from the experience of understanding the sculptures in their original context. Sculpture has been a focal point of photographic activity since the invention of photography in 1839. Today, as in 1853, there remains a disjuncture between display and experience, and photographic representation of sculptural objects. The works are an attempt to reintroduce sculptural qualities of weight, material and surface that are so often lost in the process of documentation.