EFFICIENCY GAP

STUART ELLIOT, TOM WOLSELY (ARCHITROPE) and JULIKA GITTNER

Two-part exhibition:

Stuart Elliot and Tom Wolsely, 3rd - 30th June

Julika Gittner, 16th-31st July 2011

Space can be considered to be produced by actions and being. It is organisational and indicates a matrix of relationships.

Proximities and boundaries, specific to location and habitus, have a cause and affect on how we contextualise ourselves within space.

Matrices of distances that relate to personal space, the gravitational field of one to another, are directly influenced by specifics relating to culture, labour and politics.

A dynamic notion of space arises.

As we deal more and more with statistical evidence to inform our decision making, a question of scale arises.

The individual, within the large-scale behavioural pattern.

The human into metric, quantified as information for input into the model, already necessitates a filtering, that cannot help but affect the outcome. Observation is itself a construct contingent upon what we want to see.

Whilst parametrics might suggest that we can deform these seemingly well-defined sets, there could be much at stake (1).

The same pragmatic usefulness of ‘measuring’, underpins the architecture that provides the information glut the web presents us.  

De-centralised and distributed, the information collated, forms a different kind of truth, aggregate by nature.

The railway platform provides an apt location for considerations that develop a criticality of their own with regards to a shared notion of both personal and social space.

STUART ELLIOT AND TOM WOLSELY

3rd - 30th June.

Architrope’s audio work, “In The City, Of The City” disrupts the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the passing trains, as the sound of the train is either simply absent, or pulling in, as the train, which can be seen through the window on the platform, is pulling out. Recorded on site through binaural microphones, the audio work aims at displacing the trusted relationship between visual and aural perception.

The delay inherent in “In The City, Of The City”, disturbs the experience of being ‘present’ within the architecture of sound framed by the rail network. The supplanted soundtrack introduces a sense of a slipped timeframe in the seemingly smooth correlation of visual and aural perception, creating a gap between the listener and their immediate reality.

Being present within an aural experience parallel to the artist’s body, whereby the sound was recorded, untethers our own physiological reception, and draws attention to the heightened spacial dimension of sound.

The work is accompanied by a text written by Architrope, exploring ideas associated with the installation of the work and relationships to the city. Architrope is directed by artist Tom Wolsely.

Stuart Elliot’s paintings work beyond the limits of the frame, connecting partially with previous conceptual models in the far from given or stable history of painting, whilst remaining in an important sense never wholly determined or exhausted by the terms in which they are understood.

In terms of space, Elliot has spoken of painting as an ideal vehicle for thinking through such complexities, in that they are for him “a paradoxical mode of making, with its material recalcitrance yet polymorphous, shape shifting multiplicities and resonances" (2).

The requisit presence of the viewer, emphasised the more so by the installation of related works hung almost too close for comfort, relies on a physiological reception of the works as imperative. The abstract fields of pattern, and segments of geometry necessarily relating to a larger field and a jump in scale, to which they are only a fragment.

The limits of perception illustrated by early studies in eye movements by physicists such as Helmholtz (1856), who drew attention to the “staccato-like stream of perceptual moments that are continuously checked and corrected when constructing the flux of experience” (3) draws attention to the fact that the deficiencies in these perceptions were as vital as the perfections.

The single point of view, historically, became unmoored, and space became a system of mobile grids without a centre:

“Perception was tantamount to facing a field of spacial incertitude - a flux of discrete data elements - with the task of making sense” (4).

The paradox that arose, of “movements that facilitate retinal apprehension also yield optical distortions” (5) was determined by Helmholtz to operate under the same law of probabilities that allow vast quantities of data to be processed with the mathematical probabilities of error-correction.

JULIKA GITTNER

16th-31st July 2011

Recordings of Julika Gittner performance available HERE

Julika Gittner, an artist and architect whose practice engages in materialising the conditions of labour, evokes the ‘total efficiency gap’ (thanks to Julika: title for this group exhibition) recently published in a study by the government’s “Value for Money Rail Review”. The Review estimates this at £3.5bn, and calls for a reform aimed at making the railways more cost effective for the state.

Gittner has often utilised the abstract language of legislation, adequate in scale perhaps on a macro level, whilst at a micro level rendering the worker alienated through jargon and statistics that bear no relevance to everyday life, to inform her performances.

The reciprocity that allows for continuity between the possible and actual level of reality, between articulation and embodiment, seems to be pre-determinedly closed down by the abstracted language of such statistical analysis.

Considering Hackney Downs station as an instrument of labour, ergonomic objects of spurious use-value, as well as sound recordings taken at the site, will be constructed and composed. These objects come about through Gittner’s performance as she attempts to enact the economic conditions that bring about the ‘total efficiency gap’ through rhythm and movement.

(1) Kotnik Toni , and Irland Tim, developed these ideas recently at "Space versus Geometry" talk at the AA research cluster "Concrete Geometries" directed by Marianne Mueller.

(2) ELLIOT Stuart, What If It’s All True? What Then? in What If It’s All True? What Then? Published by Andrew Mummery Projects, to accompany an exhibition of the same title at Mummery + Schnelle, London, 2011.

(3) p174 BENDER John, MARRINAN Michael, The Culture of Diagram, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2010.

(4) p172 ibid

(5) p176 ibid

Talks and events during Efficiency Gap:

ONE TO ONE, ONE TO MANY, Dave Charlesworth.

1st, 2nd July, and 3rd July 2011.

Dave Charlesworth will be holding one to one, individual performative lectures in the project space, which will then extend further to a walk in the Lea Valley with members of the public.

"a series of tangents, false starts, some fragments of family history, the clutter of half finished notes, an archive revisited and re-imagined, numerous journeys through rural, industrial and future Britain".

One to One: 1st, 2nd July, are individual appointments booked in advance with Dave Charlesworth - please email: bannerrepeater147@yahoo.com to book an appointment. 

One to Many: 3rd July, Lea Valley trip, meet 3pm at Banner Repeater.

Julika Gittner artist talk and closing party with music from Pil and Galia Kolectiv.

Recordings of Julia Gittner performance available HERE

Artist Julika Gittner will discuss some of the themes running through her work, with visual material, sited within the project space installation.  Followed by an open Q+A, all welcome, no booking required.