I have found this the most fruitful, liberating and at times demanding of all the collaborations of this unit. Fruitful as I believe it has forced me to create some of my better work, liberating because there has been a freedom to do what we wanted but also have fun and demanding as it has required me to think deeper than I have with a lot of the other works and also we as a group are keen to keep our identities hidden. Which once this has been seen then the secret's out anyway. Or is it?
There are a small group of us and we all wanted to just go back to some of the fun of the earlier part of our NUA Fine Art experience, to create, have fun and even on some of the more serious issues we were looking to question and raise, to still enjoy the process.
We spent a while deliberating about the name of our collective and felt Alta Ego, which was our initial choice was too obvious but it gave us the start point and the rationale for the sort of work we wanted to create. After much discussion we came up with 240 or twoforty or 2forty as this two hundred and forty is our combined age. After looking at social media names and availability we found that 2_Faulty was available and this we felt suited us much better as the idea of it not being perfect and a little off kilter matched our thinking and our humour. The number 240 is also a semi-perfect number, which not being a maths genius doesn't mean too much to me. If you really want to know here's an explanation:
A pseudoperfect number, sometimes also called a semiperfect number (Benkoski 1972, Butske et al. 1999), is a positive integer such as which is the sum of some (or all) of its proper divisors. Identifying pseudoperfect numbers is therefore equivalent to solving the subset sum problem.
A pseudoperfect number which is the sum of all its proper divisors is called a perfect number.
So as you can see the sum of all its divisors makes sense for us. Name sorted.
We met regularly, all on Teams with a chat on Messenger for updates, mad ideas and inspiring images, support and encouragement. The meetings also gave us a platform for a critical review of the work we were making or were thinking about making. Some of these were very serious and deep, which was very thought provoking and incredibly supportive. There was more than one occasion were the feedback spurred me on personally with a direction, idea or process. It was during these meetings that we would set challenges for the next week and discuss ideas to develop. It varied from create some work to more specific, for instance we all decided to make a mask. This was born from the idea of us working on ideas under the guise of somebody else and the ability to hide behind a veil to keep our identity hidden. The actual masks also sparked off other ideas and supported directions of thinking.
One of the regular things we did at these meetings was to create a Dadaish poem. The Poetry Foundation describes the Dada poems as: The founders of this movement struck upon this essentially nonsense word to embody a simultaneously playful and nihilistic spirit alive among European visual artists and writers during and immediately after World War I. They salvaged a sense of freedom from the cultural and moral instability that followed the war, and embraced both “everything and nothing” in their desire to “sweep, sweep clean,” as Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dadaist Manifesto in 1920. In visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects, as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/dada)
To create our version of these poems we each took a random book, turned to the magic page number of 240 and in turn read out and recorded a line, a phrase, a sentence that were then compiled in the order read to a 10 line piece. There was no pre-arrangement as to what book, what subject, these were whatever was to hand. Initially we thought these were just a bit of fun but soon realised there really was something more significant in them, something that worked. We started to discuss ideas of how to display them. Below is the full set of poems:
Week 1
Dovetailing
Betty, this butter's bitter
This was the birth
the mighty power of the meek
pseudonyms really become characters
labyrinth of fever that runs through the body
He got out of bed and almost fell down
economic value in that wok
The dutiful ant
Mythologizing hand pop
Week 2
African exile abdullah
Not anyone sane.
consumption needed to be sacrificed
Underbody warm buff
zoomorphic head evokes sailors especially animals
A rap means nothing if it tells no story
What about the priory?
needed to know more precisely
young like squeaking gate
The virgin Mary arrived
Week 3
Had another worldliness to them
There is no insecticide
Evolving debates around the identification
it was the perfect climax
Gift of Seymour H. Knox.
Undisturbed in his cabinet
These maggots attack the roots
An Epitaph for Civil Rights
numbered balls came out the bag
Art in the American Grain
Week 4
he sought the qualities of dreams
to take down the can of Cockroach Killer
wearing red coats and bearskins
she left us surrounded by the whole family, stroking her and loving her.
I followed deeper into this impenetrable bush
dream after the mirrors
whooshing noise and a tongue
invisible in a land of dust.
They'll look out of windows and sniff at doors
Familiar whistles and squeals came from the distance
Week 5
greek vases
he resumed his covert political activities
Raised his forefinger to ask for mercy
where those delicacies were vended
Masculinity, 8, 95 - 98; female,57,104
they serve as an introduction
the coup had succeeded
Three bodied giant living in the West
became a very desirable and comfortable prelude
Pleasure, 1,5-6, 12-13,22-23,25-31
We had started to amass a certain amount of work that we felt we should somehow be exhibiting and as spaces were starting to become available for physical shows we booked a space in confidentiality. This also focussed our minds on what we would be showing and how we could develop our work. When it came to the poems we did discuss the idea of putting them up as prints, then felt that may be just too normal for us... another idea was to print them on mugs and for each mug to sit on a plinth, maybe with one with half a cup of tea in it like it had just been left there or maybe even knocked over with tea dripping down the plinth. We eventually decided to use the basic tin can of food and each create labels in our own style, producing x2 sets of each poem. This we could then display as if in a Supermarket as a pyramid stack. The idea to use tin cans can be related back to them signifying the most basic of food types and the idea of preserving items, they become a commodity, whether they are tins of baked beans or tomatoes. Obviously in the art world there are one or two immediate uses of tin cans that spring to mind. Andy Warhol's 'Campbells Soup Cans, (1962) and Piero Manzoni Artist's Shit, (1961).
When I create my set I couldn't resist using my Art Director head and looking at them as actual packaging, even though the most important element was the actual label and not what was inside. I picked x5 random food stuffs that would normally be contained with a can and used found images to give them a common feel, creating them as if the 2_Faulty was a Supermarket or food brand. I wanted them to have a deceptive look to them, almost as if they could contain what was shown, even if I picked a random word from each poem to indicate the contents.
I also wanted to add other useless information, the weight, a barcode and warning. The end result is very much about reverting back to the fun idea and play that we were keen to embrace as a group. Seeing all the cans together in the show was quite a moment.
Words - Sticks and Stones...
As a white middle-aged, straight, middle class (?), male it is often a very difficult to comment on many subjects without coming across as the archetypal dominant and opinionated voice more often than not associated with the 'tribe' of the wmasmcm or whatever label you wish to use, There is too much history, too much historical power, abuse and control. A lot of it still in use today. It's not an easy skin to shed.
So when I wanted to make some comments and words to come from a part of my tribe, hopefully the ones that are sympathetic and understanding of how they can be perceived I wanted to be true to who I am and how I am seen by many. I like to think I am reasonably educated, literate and open to new ideas and different ways of seeing things and not the blinkered view that so many people have. Even writing this is difficult to make sure I come across in the right tone. The written word can always be misunderstood and intentions misinterpreted. So when it came to putting some of my thoughts down about current affairs from my point of view, my stance, I wanted to be honest and really try and put not just my thoughts but all my concerns and fears into the messages. I wasn't sure how best to articulate them, how to display them, how they should be written, set out, put on.... Having discussed the ideas of Jenny Holzer's Truisms in my BA2a 3000 Word essay, alongside Barbara Kruger and Bruce Nauman, I felt the purer the message, the less steering and interpretation offered the more the reader can be open to the way they receive them.
It was only when it came to the show did I start to think about how they could be displayed and read. Ideally I would have hired one or more projectors and had the messages randomly displayed in various parts of the space but this would have been challenging within the current Covid rules on hiring equipment. After much deliberation I decided to print them on acetate and displayed them slightly away from the wall so the messages were also shadows on the wall and with this I was hoping it gave a slightly different reading to the work, one where the transfer of the message and the slightly faded message could signify the strength or not of the message in the reader's mind.
Masks. Revealing.
As mentioned previously we did set tasks every now and again between us and one of them was to make a mask. No real reason, it just seemed like a good idea and each of us created something completely different but also something pertinent to our other work, for some of us it provided a launchpad for further development.
For my mask I took a 'cast' of my face with a wire mesh and one of my wife's with foil as it was easier to shape around her face. It was only when I had done this did I realise the difference in size and in fact my wife's mask could fit inside mine. That potentially had some strange connotations.
I then decided to cover them both in paper maché to create a base to work with. I had an idea what I wanted to do with them and had been going through publications cutting out significant words for this and the prints I put together. Words that taken out of context could have a different meaning to that intended in the publication.
Once I had them layered up enough I decided to paint them white. Again, questions, questions, why white? Yes we're both white. Yes classical statues are depicted as white, even though they weren't necessarily originally. I decided to keep with the white as I intended to cover at least one with messages anyway. I wanted the female head to be covered in words and phrases that showed the vulnerability and often terror that women in just going about their lives and how they can feel in broad daylight, let alone at night in a male dominated world and in particular in light of the Sarah Everard case (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56384600) I wanted to put on the mask words of the victim, thoughts that I believe they would be having when feeling vulnerable. I have a 25 year old daughter and we have discussed this and how she feels and what she felt about what I was trying to portray. My wife works at a local six form college so all this seemed very right. I took the words from primarily two newspapers. The Sun and The Daily Mail. Two extremely popular daily newspapers but in searching through them for headlines it struck me just how toxic they both were, how hypocritical and sensationalist they both are. Frightening. And these are bought and read by millions every day. Shocking.
For the male mask I wanted to try and use words and phrases that were from an innocent, supportive, un-threatening male perspective. This was hard, after scouring piles of newspapers I wouldn't have had enough to cover the surface. Telling. I therefore decided to leave it blank, empty, and let the viewer see how that looked and what they could read into it, especially when hung with the female one and I was also wanting to put the male one looking down from above over the female one.
Prints. When opposites attract.
As an extension to my thinking with the words and masks I had been playing with printing images from magazines and then taking headlines and from other magazines and see how they would work together and in many cases not but raise questions.
For this I was using a Gelliplate, something that can transfer images from magazines, using acrylic paint it takes a negative and then be transferred to paper. It is full of jeopardy as not all magazines work, some are too shiny, some not shiny enough, sometimes the paint is wrong or the application. You can find the perfect image and it will not print or even worse get a good print of an image and then find a perfect combination of words to sit with it and then ruin the image in try to get the letters transferred....
What was interesting with this process was how you can turn a seemingly innocent image into something far more questionable with the application of the right words. The way the technique strips back a lot of information but still leaves enough to indicate the subject matter is fascinating and opens new directions. This isn't what the Gellipad is supposed to be used for, it's much more of a 'craft' tool for creating transferable images of plants and images but I have found it quite far better to achieve this ambiguous combinations.
What was an interesting side product of this was all the pieces left, the images I had used to print, the ones that didn't work, the images covered in paint. I have kept these, I don't know why yet, but feel there is something I can do with them.
Our Manifesto. Rules, What Rules?
As a group we decided we ought to have some sort of manifesto. In fact it was more a selection of thoughts, it could also be considered a reconfirmation of our beliefs. The common strata holding it all together. To make it more fun and again to play we decided to each write out a few thoughts and then put them all together in an envelope and just randomly draw them out and decide if they hit the mark or were they to go in the jar of possibilities. We also didn't want to get all fancy and make up a full on poster, designed and laid out so we just stuck the statements on a board as they had been written. Plain. Simple.
The work in progress is quite significant as we are just beginning and have a lot more to create together, whether we will still remain anonymous remains to be seen or rather not seen... we have plans, we have ideas, we have the summer... Watch this space or on fact any space as you never know where we may turn up.
Showtime. Revealing.
To be able to actually exhibit our work was a great opportunity, it would have been nicer to have been seen by a wider audience as we were still coming out of lockdown and access to the uni was limited, it also coincided with a study week. We did however manage to put it all up without anyone knowing who we were and who knows whether anyone has twigged, even with an Instagram page that we will continue to populate. For the show we had an initial meeting in the space to work out what could go where and then literally turned up after most students had gone home and got about our devious work. Below are a few pics of the finished piece. I am so proud of what we achieved and the work that was created. We had a great deal of fun and also managed to create work that wasn't necessarily in line with our current thinking but it was playful, serious and hopefully thought provoking.
