WHAT WILL WE DO WHEN

An exhibition at The Motorcycle Showroom, May 2011

Curated by Jo Lathwood

Featuring:Joe Evans / Katie Le Feuvre / Emma Jean Kemp / Jo Lathwood / Jugovic / Rob Peaav / Sam Playford-Greenwell / Haywood Slucutt / Toni Van Veelan / Joe Watts

Lighting design: Anna Barrett

A SERIES OF EXIT SIGNS

An exit sign as armchair:[Type: Courier] In 1720 a watermark stained the history of entertainment with the name ‘Robinson Crusoe’. It isn’t a coincidence that the first novel to be written and pub-lished in English was the story of a lone man struggling to come to terms with the unruly world around him, the story of a subject in a world of objects. Although mastery cannot be used to describe this story, but something more akin to compro-mise, for Crusoe has to change, he has to learn - this is not a world the lone master subject/author can build in his image but one in which he must meet the world, he must learn its tides, its species of animal and plant, its seasons, its geography, its material; he must learn how to cure fruit. With each problem he must learn a solution. But I digress, what I want to talk about is escapism. “Oh yeah, I’ll tell you a great holiday book I read the other day, the sort of book where you keep thinking to yourself how great it would be to read this on a beach with the surf lapping at your feet.” TRUE STORY: When I was sixteen I went to Weymouth and after a quick dip in the sea I found a small fish in my swimming trunks.

Fiction gives us a billiard ball, a cause and an effect that our eyes cellotape in a line, one word and then an-other word - pointing over there. Fiction demands forget-ting here. And yet, all ob-jects necessar-ily extend into spheres they don’t physi-cally inhabit, like odours or the aural. All objects travel then.

A n exit sign a s homeaway from home

Blinkers, this much I can’t deny. However, fic-tion can do other things too. It is my world, my memories that populate these payper-backs, BUT these pretty coloured words in turn bare down on my world, incept themselves into my memo-ries, and I must admit that Ballard’s ‘Crash’ genuinely quashed my sexual apetite for a time.T h i s could return us to the Romantic notion of nature where Casper David Friedrich ‘ s lone wander is cast up against the grand, sublime, distinctly non-human nature, the not-me which the me pits itself against in order to affirm it’s own sover-eignty , the efficacy with which it acts, and yett h i s is precisely the point at which Nature as man’s non-human sparing partner is reduced to noth-ing but a mute punching-bag and we see that the boxing ring holds a single lonely char-acter replaying videos of himself to himself to chuckle about that time he did that thing.T h i s romantic notion can be seen in Jugovic’s large square shutter-baord piece. Here, the triumphant industrial sector’s reduction of chaotic nature to a set of geometric principles is presented with the fruits of its labour boarded up and enclosed in on itself, perhaps even awaiting demolition.Taken to extremes we can see Socrates in his cell, on the eve before his death, with escape offered to him on a plate, explaining to his disciples that in fact in death the philosopher could fi-nally expect to attain the sphere of pure meta-physics, that in death he could achieve a far greater escape, that of the mind from the body, an escape he presumed - at heart - we all wish for.

AN EXIT SIGN AS SPECULATIVE FUTURE

AN EXIT SIGN AS FALL-OUT SHELTER

I HIT THE ESCAPE BUTTON ON MY KEYBOARD TO MAKE THE BAD TEXT GO AWAY.

But as with all utopias, a good thing can only

last so long, and disas-ter is never very far behind. Real, genuine

and horrifying disaster; a disaster such that all thought, all semblance of order looks like lit-tle more than naive and embarrasingly misguid-

ed. But then again, in a sense isn’t this exact-ly what the holiday is,

that lauded holy day when we don’t have to piece

things together anymore, when we can gargle Bucky like mouthwash and let

Dionysus reign free, when the blunt and tired pen

scribbling down our grand narratives can be put to rest and we all go swim-

ming, play frisbee, or engage in a playful soci-

etal orgy.

AN EXIT SIGN AS A BOTTLE OF BUCKYIn book 3 of The Republic, Plato creates a divisional line between diegesis and mimesis,thus creating a hierarchy of order between the narration of a story where the storyteller retains their auhorial iden-tity by simply telling of the story (al-lowing themselves a degree of distance), whilst in mimesis the method of the actor who inhabits their role tricks the audi-ence into losing themselves in the flow of the performance, falling head over heels for the illusion presented to them. In diegesis the narrator sits at one remove, retaining their composure throughout, with the audience thus following suit; where-

AN EXIT SIGN AS A BOTTLE OF BUCKYas in mimesis everyone is prone, and in fact encouraged,to forget themselves, thus opening up their reason and decorum to all sundry of depraved acts. In one we are en-couraged to be aware of the artifice, in the other that infamous fourth wall engulfingly expands outwards to the exit signs result-ing in total epistemic failure. I agree with Plato that this is an interesting distinction, but as far as I can make out the author speaking in his own voice is not of some higher order of representation but simply another mode of representation, yet another mask with which to hide beneath, or entangle one’s self amongst.

Thomas McEvilley, as much as I enjoy his writings on contemporary art and thinking and its relation to ancient precedents (admitting a definite de-gree of influence), I take issue with his analysis that Duchamp’s legacy and heritage for conceptual art is it’s presentation of the object as object, the object as a tautological represenation of itself. For, as is stated in the fa-mous second issue of The Blind Man, Duchamp’s Fountain was put forward in a certain sense as a speculatory proposition to be placed before the question of art, the only answer of which we can glean being the trium-phant: “a pacific Perhaps!”Potential, then is what we find as the well-spring of Fountain; not in fact a tautological presentation of pure plumbing, but a chal-lenge to thought, an exercise, a theoretical excursion.

AN EXIT SIGN AS AN EXIT SIGN

These reflections on fiction ultimate-ly do not amount to much, but neither do I intend them to; I merely put them forward as a kind of speculative backdrop, but one single piece of this mass of movable scenery that makes up the mise-en-scene of What Will We Do When. The heterogenous fictions that this exhibition places before you are themselves a series of responses to Jo Lathwood’s initial proposi-tion, itself embedded in the title of the show, where the question: “When what?” comes to the foreground. From cheap package holidays to a yellow brick road that leads nowhere, from sublime nature to an abandoned caravan, from that congealing virus like detritus of culture to the rigidity of our means of time-keeping, and from the simple gestures of bodily movement to the multi-sensorial spectacle of the the-

atre; a few hundred hum-ble pallets form the basis of the path you now stand, crawl, climb and survey from. A final note: the ocean is now ruined for me due to a bundle of latex and rudimentary robotics that made up the shark in Jaws, an object that, so legend has it, sank on its first water test.

THANKS, LINKS AND CREDITSWhat will we do when a project curated by Jo Lathwood

Artists:Joe Evans / Emma Jean Kemp / Katie Le Feuvre / Jo Lathwood / Jugovic / Rob Peaav / Sam Playford-Greenwell / Haywood Slucutt / Toni Van Veelan / Joe WattsLighting design: Anna Barrett

http://www.annabarrett.co.uk/

http://www.emmajeankemp.com/

http://www.jolathwood.co.uk/

http://jugovic.co.uk/

http://www.wix.com/katielefeuvre/katie-le-feuvre#!

http://samplayfordgreenwell.wordpress.com/

What will we do when has been supported by The Motorcycle Show-room.The Motorcycle Showroom is a new studio and gallery space in Bristol, dedicated to the support and development of emerging practices in the arts.

For further information contact whatwillwedowhen@gmail.com.

Text and catalogue layout: Sam Playford-GreenwellDesign Consultant: http://www.nicky-stewart.com/

This is a stage light, but it looks like a gong from this angle, a gong to sound the beginning and the end of the performance.

EXEUNT