Nick Reading

Art of Change - New Directions from China

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 11:12:41 -0400

Whilst attending Art of Change at the Hayward I had a minor celebrity moment: Luc Tuymans stamping around the exhibition with a small entourage in tow. It was difficult to gauge his reaction to the works on display, especially as I was doing my damnedest to look like I didn’t know who he was, but for someone who has a reputation for being somewhat cantankerous he seemed faintly bemused.

Perhaps this was an excusable reaction from a man often credited with bringing painting back to prominence in the 1990s. Art of Change is conspicuously devoid of oil or canvas but instead brings together performance pieces and participative installations by nine Chinese artists, ranging from the mildly unsettling to the downright wacky. Impermanence and flux are mooted as the unifying themes, which are no doubt intended to be emblematic of the multifarious political and social transformations China has endured over the past half century. The sorts of people who write explanatory literature for exhibitions are always ardently sincere in their proclamations of such allegory, and the soaring rhetoric here is no exception. Call me a pleb, but in this case I personally I found it best to disregard the hyperbole and just enjoy the work at face value.

In one of Yingmei Duan’s pleasingly bonkers pieces, the dishevelled looking artist shuffles about in a forest glade thick with twinkling atmospherics, which you enter through a low archway. She approaches (singing eerily), and offers little twists of paper on which are printed wishes, “for exhibition visitors to enact or accomplish”. I can only liken the experience to being engaged in awkward conversation at a bus stop by a drunken vagrant, however instead of smiling politely and focusing furious attention on a pigeon across the road I actually found the whole thing quite absorbing. In a nearby part of the gallery, I am followed around by a glum looking girl in striped pyjamas. Uneasily suggestive of a kind of parallel “otherness”, she stubbornly avoids meeting my gaze in a way that is rather disquieting, in addition to being totally barmy. I resist the urge to ask whether she is an unpaid intern.

Arranged as a series of rooms, the overall show is an immersive experience that feels more like a fairground haunted house than a gallery exhibition, albeit much less sinister. Occasional shrieks and snatches of audio echo from the rooms ahead, making you wonder what you will find around the next corner. From the woods-y shamanism of Liang Shaoji, which forms a meditative oasis of calm around half way through, to the frenetically surreal table-tennis of Wang Jianwei, public participation plays an important role in many of the pieces. Luc Tuymans seemed to particularly enjoy the remote controlled exercise machines by Xu Zhen, but be warned: at less busy times, not all of the pieces will be in operation so choose your visiting slot carefully. A helpful supplement to the work is a digital archive, accessible from workstations in the gallery, which enables visitors to place the exhibition in a broader context of Chinese art and history. Give it a whirl.

Plog Magazine (May 2012)

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:42:29 -0400

Plog Magazine (May 2012):

David Shrigley review I’ve written for Plog Magazine. The second of an indefinite number of monthly contributions.

“Scenes From Provincial Life” (Unfinished, Working...

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:37:42 -0400

“Scenes From Provincial Life” (Unfinished, Working title)

Acrylic on Canvas, April 2012.

Two canvasses from an abandoned triptych. Part of a projected installation with edited sound recordings.

“One sip from the cup of ambition and I’m...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:21:00 -0400

“One sip from the cup of ambition and I’m shitfaced”

(Acrylic on Canvas, March 2012)

Bad jokes about novelty country and western songs are the future of everything.

More here:

http://plogmagazine.com/archives/3736

“Two Bad Jokes” Acrylic and Marker Pen on Canvas....

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:30:28 -0500

“Two Bad Jokes”

Acrylic and Marker Pen on Canvas. January 2012.

Art and Language

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:35:00 -0500

Bloated Verbosity

Ok, so I pick up the November/December issue of Frieze from my bedroom floor and turn to a random article. Quickly scanning through the first couple of paragraphs I pick out these words: “reticent”, “symposia”, “codify”, “veracity”, “truncated”, “anachronistic”, “redolent”, “crenulated”, “rapacious” and “inchoate”. Most of them I at least vaguely recognise but I know the meanings of only four without having to resort to the dictionary. How many do you understand, honestly? My word processor’s spell checker doesn’t even think that “crenulated” is a real word.

Maybe it’s only a personal grievance but the unnecessary pomposity of the language in the majority of art literature is something which continually irks me. Rather than enabling superior descriptive power, subtlety or poetic evocation with which to add weight or nuance to the subjects being discussed, the choice of many of the words seems to be nothing but a mechanism by which the writer can assert their (apparent) intellectual superiority, be it done consciously or otherwise. In this attempt to look big and clever, however, the endless stream of empty verbiage inevitably only hinders or worse stifles the point of what are often good arguments. I’m the first person to champion the merits of a wide vocabulary but I believe it should be used with taste and appropriately to the situation, not gratuitously slathered over everything in the way supermarkets use a glut of mayonnaise to try and disguise their mediocre sandwiches. I despair at the over-zealous use of turgid, meandering and empty elaboration by art writers where clearer and simpler lexical choices would be not only a more effective vehicle for their subject matter, but would also make for a more enjoyable reading experience for the rest of us. This is a difficult matter in that I’m sure there is a broad range of opinion, but somewhere we have to agree on a place to draw the line between powerful, intelligent, precise language and pretentious, over-dressed old guff.

Partly to blame in my opinion are received notions and expectations artists and writers have which are encouraged by the wider culture of the “art world”. The majority of us write in this way simply because it is a stylised convention and we don’t think to do otherwise. In addition to wilful obscurantism, articles are typically littered with those more common clichés we have come to recognise and are all guilty of using. Fashionable adjectives like “visceral”, “filmic” and “ethereal” which at one time were probably tools for genuine descriptive originality, but having now appeared in every press release, magazine article, exhibition pamphlet and undergraduate essay from here to Hoxton Square seem a tad generic. We know what they mean, it’s just that they’re boring. Why is no one writing anything original? It seems that many of us believe that the extent of being original is simply winning the competition to see who can dream up the most opaque language (the worst example being that never ceasing habit of casually dropping in french phrases [“mélange”?!] which positively reeks of inflated intellectual smugness) to describe their latest wonderful project/show/grand concept. The “art world” continues to cultivate this style I suppose to foster a sense of intellectual exclusivity, which fits nicely alongside the frequently astonishing displays of price exclusivity we are all familiar with, ultimately to make sure that the uncultured, ignorant proles are kept out of our nice little club. In short: “WE UNDERSTAND THIS BECAUSE WE ARE INTELLECTUALS AND YOU DON’T BECAUSE YOU ARE STUPID, HA HA HA!”.

In an excellent essay from 1969 titled “The logic of nonstandard English”, the Sociolinguist William Labov explains how we have been conditioned to think of formal vernacular as “superior [to informal vernacular] in every respect… more abstract, and necessarily somewhat more flexible, detailed and subtle”, and that by default we unconsciously assume that if something is written in this style then it has value, and people speaking or writing in this style are more “intelligent”. He argues that having a wide vocabulary certainly means someone is educated, but is no proof of their capabilities when it comes to logic, reasoning or capacity for abstract thought etc, qualities that I would loosely categorise under the umbrella of “intelligence”. Through recorded interviews with residents of varying social backgrounds in South-Central Harlem, Labov demonstrates that the particular stylistic devices or code people use to speak or write may bear no relation to the quality of their ideas, thinking skills or indeed whether they have anything worthwhile to say at all. He goes on to explain: “All too often, standard English is represented by a style that is simultaneously over-particular and vague. The accumulating flow of words buries rather than strikes the target”. In other words, over the top language codes by no means always indicate that the ideas they carry are good ones and vice-versa, and that good ideas can easily be swallowed by an over-complicated code.

No one is saying that art writers shouldn’t aspire to the best quality of language that they can. What this means though isn’t simply showing off your wide vocabulary. Rather the true marker of good writing in my opinion is the ability to sum up complex arguments or abstract concepts in a clear, succinct and most importantly, enjoyable manner. Diversity of language should be used to add precision, weight or emphasis and poetic or humourous evocation as necessary, not just as window dressing. All writing should be accessible, and deliberately opaque art literature is nothing but self- congratulating twaddle. Making art is the most basic human reflex and has the capacity to be enjoyed by everyone, but due to the elitism caused by the deliberate creation of exclusivity barriers, “art” is not recognisably seperate from the “art world” in the eyes of most people. They disregard it as something “not for them”. How are people supposed to enjoy art if they are intimidated by the bewildering, vacuous rubbish that surrounds it?! It is this rubbish that feeds the public perception that all contemporary art is a load of wank. We are all guilty of perpetuating this to some degree or another. I like reading Frieze and they have many good articles, but I’d rather not have to be reaching for the dictionary every ten lines as I needlessly muddle through a mystifying, wordy wilderness. Oh, and by the way; my dictionary defines “crenulated” as: “[of plant leaves] finely or irregularly notched or serrated”. So wouldn’t “leafy and fragile” have sufficed in the first place?!

5th January 2012

Nick Reading is an artist and musician currently based in Oxford. He exhibits regularly in London and the South as part of CATSHOP Collective, a loose conglomerate of former Winchester School of Art students.

nickreading.tumblr.com bigcatshop.wordpress.com

“One Hundred Famous Views of Oxford” (Acrylic on...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:11:00 -0500

“One Hundred Famous Views of Oxford” (Acrylic on Canvas, 2011)

Recent painting unveiled on 15th December 2011 at the Gallery On The Corner, 155 Battersea Park Road as part of BIGCATSHOP, the first exhibition curated by myself with the rest of CATSHOP Collective.

http://bigcatshop.wordpress.com

Exhibition literature designed by me for BIGCATSHOP. One week to...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:45:32 -0500

Exhibition literature designed by me for BIGCATSHOP. One week to go…

Sketchbooks etc. December 2011.

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:38:54 -0500

Sketchbooks etc. December 2011.

Sketchbook. September 2011.

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:32:51 -0400

Sketchbook.

September 2011.

Untitled, September 2011.

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 07:28:20 -0400

Untitled, September 2011.

Variations On A Theme, no.s 14 & 15. A continuing sequence...

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:25:27 -0400

Variations On A Theme, no.s 14 & 15.

A continuing sequence of drawings.

Mixed Media on Graph Paper, August 2011.

CATSHOP Collective volume. 1

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:49:29 -0400

The first CATSHOP collective exhibition is now confirmed for the 15th -20th of December 2011 at the Gallery on the Corner, 155 Battersea Park Road, London, SW8 4BU.

Tentatively titled “BIGCATSHOP” The featured artists will allegedly be Tarnia Gracie, Edward Lawrenson, Nick Reading, Natalie Rose Hutton, Ben Carrick, Martin McNally and Sam Good. Amid the current scenes of financial elites running riot and panic on the streets of English cities, the show will interrogate and dissect the ever-changing role of felines within our crumbling western society by juxtaposing a harsh sense of gritty urban realism with lots of nice fluffy ears. The featured work will be a broad range of contemporary Painting and New Media installations, unified by liberal use of empty rhetoric and lazy semantics (“I blame those bloody tories” etc etc).

A poster and details of the Private View will follow shortly.

A second exhibition, the equally imaginatively titled “BIGELEPHANTSHOP” is already in the early planning stages and is set to take place at an artist-run space in East Oxford in the new year. In other news our blog is now up and running and can be viewed at:

http://bigcatshop.wordpress.com/

Thank you and Goodnight.

Things I Can Fit Into My Lunch-Box. Acrylic & Paint Marker...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:53:00 -0400

Things I Can Fit Into My Lunch-Box.

Acrylic & Paint Marker on Canvas with Tail-Pipe.

This is a work in progress (?) for a group show in Battersea, South London in November curated by the mighty Cat Shop Collective.

Variations on a Theme No.1 July 2011.

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:24:00 -0400

Variations on a Theme No.1

July 2011.

Richard, Acrylic on Canvas, 2008(?)

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:28:58 -0500

Richard, Acrylic on Canvas, 2008(?)

Acrylic, Collage and Army Surplus Paint on Canvas with Sign,...

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:24:00 -0400

Acrylic, Collage and Army Surplus Paint on Canvas with Sign, Speakers, Oil Drum and Lightbox. 2010.

Acrylic on Canvas with Fabric, Oil Cans and Car Tyre....

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:19:18 -0400

Acrylic on Canvas with Fabric, Oil Cans and Car Tyre. March/April 2010.

studio

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:26:31 -0400

studio

Acrylic on Canvas with Sheet, Wood, Plaster, Tin and Coke Cans....

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:28:00 -0500

Acrylic on Canvas with Sheet, Wood, Plaster, Tin and Coke Cans. March 2010.