Nick Crowe. CCA Glasgow. 17 March-07

I went around the exhibition prior to the artist's discussion of the work.
Operation Telic. (2005) Are engravings on glass, lit by a light at the edge of the glass pane, which illuminates the etching in green. A fantastic exercise in High Sarcasm. The etchings are all based on genuine images from the MOD website documenting the Iraq war. Some of them take irony to exquisite levels - the etchings of British soldiers teaching Iraqi toddlers how to use rifles is just mind-boggling. Making them etchings made them more effective than simply posting up the photos. The etchings make the images simpler, reduced of clutter, more iconic, and in the simplicity of the the line drawings, more iconic.
The Beheaded. 68 figures - about 10 inches long - in dichroic glass. Each of these represent someone Nick Crowe was able to identify via the web. Where details were vague a figure was not added. The cut-outs hang from string on a revolving wheel.
The first impression is how pretty the piece is. The figures themselves are pretty, but the strong lighting projects the colours onto the background wall. If you stand underneath the piece and look at the different walls, you see the images and colours flowing around the room like:
Tinkerbell lights reflected from chandelier drops
A child's rotating bedroom lamps (my son once had one with sheep that would parade around the room)
High Sarcasm again.
The reflection also reminded me of ghosts.

Three Cynical Objects - Nasdaq FTSE, DOW (2001) Again, beautiful objects. Three sculptures that at first look like skyscrapers. On white maple wooden stands, so that they do indeed look like salesman awards, lit from the below on the edge so that they glow green like a graph on an old green-screen terminal.
They are the graphs of the financial indexes of the year of the dot.com crash. I enjoyed these a lot. Though I would dearly have liked to know which sculpture was which index. Some conflicting thoughts:
I can imagine a stock market actually purchasing these. Partly for for fun, partly cos even some businessmen would enjoy the sarcasm of celebrating a disaster, partly as a warning, partly as a lesson - if these things are managed proerly, does it matter to the larger economy in the long run? - I am not denying that individuals were hit (including my fund for my son's education) and some individuals had worked hard to see things go up in smoke.
I also wondered about this (probably state-funded-academic) taking pot-shots at the people that fund his activities.
Great piece of work.

It will be more economical to include other stuff via the artist's talk below.

Artist's Talk
Nick Crowe:
If you saw his on a train you would assume either:
academic
artist

Very clear, friendly, thoughtful speaker. I was especially impressed at the depth of thought on answering the questions as these ranged over various topics. A lot of thought has gone into his work. (He referred to himself several times as talking like a 'geek'. Usually a sign that someone has properly explored a topic.)

Proposal for the World Wide Web
A copy (in etching) of Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal to get research backing. I saw this as a celebration, a memorial to a significant event. NC loved the crappy computer graphics that dated the piece, and the misspelling of 'refers'. I am often envious of the way fine artists can celebrate things this way. It doesn't seem to be allowed in written media.
Similar with Management Commmitee of the World Wide Web Consortium which I hadn't been too impressed with. (I remember wondering what the people portrayed might think of being made to look so ugly.) NC explained that the portraits were the way they were because they had been drawn from small images from their web site. Which somehow puts a completely different slant on it. Modest. NC pointed out the anonymity of these guys, plus their power. Stuff I should have known but didn't - there used to be a tag called 'blinking tags' which worked on early browsers. Now if you go to a site that uses them they don't blink. Because since them the Committee have ruled them out of the standards. (There is a terrific piece of work about this story to be created.) NC referred to them as 'good guys'. And indeed they are. Heroes really.

The Family Tree of Zainab Duranthrrial Sadik Llthnnnzstil, the First Martian Martyr. (2004)
The programme had got stuff about 'a sense of revulsion for a future we do not know or understand' but I didn't really get that. Martyrdom is a clear enough concept. I spent some time trying to figure out the alien family tree - it looked like the Martians married their children but I couldn't make out much more. I asked NC what it was about. The tree shows that the Martians marry their children, but also take sometimes 3 or more partners to produce a child, and siblings breed - and there is one example of parthenogenesis!
A dilemma with this sort of think - if you explain too much (thereby humanise) it looses it's weirdness. If you don't explain: people miss what it is about.
The piece was commissioned for 'Biennial for the 24th Century'.

The Beheaded (2007)
The wires used to hold up the figures are made of Kevlar! The motor to drive the wheel is a mirror-ball motor. NC talked about the fact that the 68 is a part of the total beheaded in the first 5 years if the 21st Century. The named individuals are a memorial to the 'unknown beheaded. ' NC mentioned the piece reminded him of memorials to the unknown soldiers in cathedrals. Which in my mind related the piece to stained glass.
The pieces were cut out with water jet cutters. They were cut out whole and NC cut off the heads himself. Doing this gave a rough edge to the neck so you get the sparkles of the imperfection (which I had noticed) and makes each one unique. NC talked about technology of violence - partly the reason for the high tech materials.
The glass is described by the manufacturers as 'transmitting' one colour and 'reflecting' another. (Makes sense - one colour is embedded in the glass, another is presumably layered on the surface as a reflective.)

Three Cynical Objects - Nasdaq FTSE, DOW (2001)
NC talked very morally about the stock exchanges. (Personally I can't quite see what is so immoral about the exchanges per se. They make money but then so do lots of people, including some very wealthy artists. Fortunately the work carries the best of NC's thought and leaves behind any simplicities)
What was amusing was NC pointed out that despite the other exchanges crashing and burning the FTSE actually went up again in Feb just before the complete collapse in March! The triumph of hope/ greed/ wishful thinking. (Easy to say with hindsight.)

Operation Telic.
'Telic' means 'objective'. So Operation Telic = Operation Objective. Which NC saw as demonstrating that they had no objective cos they couldn't name it.
NC pointed out very interesting things:
At the start of the war 'liberation of women' was one of its aims (Hence the photos of soldiers with women.) Course the opposite has happened. Not an aim referred to much now.

The pieces were intended to be displayed in a rough and ready unplanned manner (to mirror the war itself). Personally, this aspect completely escaped me when I looked at the piece. Would anyone get this without being primed by the catalogue?
Anyway, because the wires under the shelves were not covered in two pieces of plastic they contravened UK H&S so a white line had to be placed on the floor which the viewer was not allowed to cross. This regulation is not applied in any of the other countries where it has been exhibited.
NC pointed out the exhibition is about the death of 1000s due a war that was less than ill-thought out, illegal and immoral - at least in execution - but UK Govt won't let you go within a metre of the exhibit just in case you go mad and grad a wire, and somehow pierce the plastic and somehow manage to get enough of a shock to hurt yourself.

Some of the early MOD photos of the soldiers in Iraq were in soft focus!


The Campaign for Rural England (2006)
A bus shelter made of English Oak rather than steel. The toughened windows have been shattered in such a way that the outer layers have fractured but the inside is still complete and holds the others in place. The pattern if the broken glass was rather beautiful.
NC explained:
The type of bus shelter is one not provided free by the advertising company because there is no point in advertising in these areas.
In Manchester the broken glass is called 'Preston Diamonds.'
The glass is specially manufactured to break in this manner for safety reasons. So although the act is destructive it is bringing out the design of the glass. (In an Aristotelian manner of showing the object's purpose (my gloss).)
In Berlin, the glass used on the phone boxes have a plastic laminate inside, so the vandals have learned how to break the glass and curl them into classical scrolls.
That awkward thing where he didn't want to defend vandalism (need of laws) but on the other hand one has to admire the signs of life in the transgressors.

I asked about copyright. Mainly prompted by 27 Damaged Windscreens where the images were collected via Google. I thought he put it well:
It is not that copyright law is wrong - it is just unsophisticated
Copyright law was brought in to protest individual creators, but now it is only used by big business in a spirit contrary to the original intention
With the new media it has to be accepted that an object/ image has a life outside of the original context of copyright law.
If I don't want someone to use an image I wouldn't put it on the web
If someone were to complain about an image I would remove it and just use something else.

NC On political works. The most successful political work leaves room to negotiate. Operation Telic shouts the message at you. The Beheaded sort of negotiates.


NC was a bit narked that the lighting for the Common Occurances had moved since he was there last so you couldn't actually see the etchings.

*
What I liked about the show was that unlike some conception art the pieces themselves had interest even if you didn't know the full context. (esp Operation Telic, Beheaded, Cynical Objects etc. ) I know you can't expect an artist to point to all the references within the work itself. - And part of the fun is finding extra depths but having something there that will grab 'the chap who happens to be walking by' is obviously an advantage. Hence I thought less of Campaign for Rural England, which I thought was bound up in knowing the type of bus shelter it was. (Information which I am a bit light on.)
But this is a bit of a whinge about a really powerful exhibition.

http://www.nickcrowe.net/

Steampunk Magazine

Great new magazine. Better to have the printed version of course but I can make do with the free pdf download for now.
Fascinating articles on the Pyrophone and Armonica. Interesting primer on Anarchism as well (a much maligned group).

Really outstanding story: 'Mother of the Dispossessed' by Anon. Great to have some politically aware stuff, something that actually digs a response. Something to make you uncomfortable. A blessed relief from nostalgia. And very entertaining. I really liked the bizarre moral coda which ignores all the proceeding horror and savagery to derive something suitable for the audience of Last of the Summer Wine or All Creatures Great and Small.
I haven't been so excited about a short story since the last time - no - a poor joke. This is definitely something special.

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