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Saturday 19/02/2012
CLOSING EVENT
7-11PM
> FEATURING <
swarfega - film screening
Gut Club
The Drag, Peckham - film screening
Adam Christensen - live performance
Tweekay Max - dj set
Edwin Burdis - dj set
...
“WE’RE DESIGNED FOR LIFE IN PREHISTORIC TIMES” Juan Luis Arsuga
The exhibition Mesolithic Pop brings together three UK based artists who all share an interest in the primal act of art making and the basic nature of creativity. The idea of “pre language” and man’s desire to communicate with whatever material is at hand is paramount to these artists’ practice. Physical contact with the environment and a quest for understanding through making objects is what drives the works in this exhibition to be made. These artists revel in traditional production methods, shunning the digital world. Joel Gray’s work concentrates on stone carving with all its historic implications. He carves everyday consumerist products such as iPhones and luxury sun glasses into stone forms of varying scale. The materials used are a reaction to the mass produced, disposable nature of so many of the objects that surround us. Francis Thorburn’s practice similarly investigates D.I.Y production. Under the title of Minister of Alternative Transport he has been developing a series of processional performances, which use large scale sculptural devices (vehicles) to head the procession. For Mesolithic Pop he will show a new series of photographs and films that document his recent performances. Cedar Lewisohn’s work transforms drawings into woodcarvings and large scale hand pressed prints. Many of his images have tribal and primitive associations. The images he depicts range from Zulus and aliens to fetish clubs and pure abstraction.
Mesolithic Pop is the first in a series of exhibitions that the artists will stage in 2012 under the title The New Primitives. The exhibition will feature a newly commissioned text by author and psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose on the subject of masculinity. The project is kindly supported by The Workspace Group.
Joel Gray has recently exhibited at The Bun House in London, and the Folkestone Triennial fringe, and is currently artist in residence at Grande Disco, Portugal. He is a founding member of the performance group The Gut Club and works as a master stone carver for Anish Kapoor.
Francis Thorburn works with performance and sculpture. He has recently done projects at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, and The Folkestone Triennial. Recent group shows include The Grundy Gallery Blackpool, Focal Point Gallery, Southend and The New Art Gallery, Walsaw.
Cedar Lewisohn is an artist and curator. He has recently been in group exhibitions including The Hayward Gallery’s touring show “Outrageous Fortune”, Alptraum/Nightmare at Cell Project Space London. He has had solo exhibitions at Five Years Gallery, London and Institute Andrew Gilbert, Berlin.
For further information please contact — Mr. J Brown 07810 034739
Come to the Bun House at 5pm promptly (20/01/12) if you would like to see this happen on the streets of South London. Let The New Primitives lead you to the opening of Mesolithic Pop.
Funny Men by Anouchka Grose
What’s the difference between a man and a woman? If it sounds like the first half of a joke, that’s because it is! With the whole of human history as the punchline. It seems to be an inexhaustible question. It has, of course, been noticed that men have penises and that women pop babies out, but once you get past those bits it all starts getting messy. We can only wonder what Mesolithic people, without magnified images of chromosomes, brain scans, and his ’n’ hers copies of The Game and The Rules, made of such a mystery. Still, it seems they may have made quite a big deal of it, and that we are the living consequence.
The Mesolithic period was conceived in the mid-nineteenth century to describe the blurry millennia between Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers. Loosely speaking, at the beginning of it, a human being could just hang about, grabbing whatever plant or animal promised to keep him or her alive. But by the end of it you had to have a job. The birth of agriculture meant the beginnings of the division of labour. If a woman had a baby on her tit, then maybe she should stay behind and hoe the garden while the men went out hunting. It was only when work arrived that the man/woman divide could kick properly into action. (Of course the Paleolithics may have had very interesting ideas about gender, they were just less systematic about it. Analysis of cave paintings suggests they had no problem with women artists.) Once you’d persuaded one lot to stay in and the other lot to go out, you could really start extrapolating. Suddenly the world went Flintstones: “Wilma! Where’s my bison burger?”
Joel Gray, Cedar Lewisohn and Francis Thorburn are all men. You may have seen them wearing loincloths, looking hairy and scary. Gray makes modern, technological items: iPhones, sunglasses - out of beautifully-crafted stone. Lewisohn produces brashly naïve woodcuts on themes of sex and nature. Thorburn makes amazing wooden machines, powered by men in pants. They do all this in a post-industrial, post-feminist world, hence they seem ridiculous and serious at the same time. The ridiculousness maybe comes in part from their allusion to an older, more unashamedly aggressive type of masculinity. (Women have often found that the best way to undermine men’s power is to laugh at them. This strategy appears to have worked so well that now any demonstration of hyper-masculinity is liable to seem kitsch.) The seriousness perhaps comes from a harking back to a time before alienation, before we started cultivating not only the land but more fixed ideas about each other.
If a thread runs from mixed-up Mesolithic people to troubled modern man, en route it’s become very knotty. Of the many who have tried to help us untangle it, John Gray - author of the global smash hit Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus - stands out. He performs a brutal historical snip, cutting the thread at the beginning of the Neolithic period and declaring that all men want to hunt, and all women want to hang about the house chatting. Nothing, apparently, can change this.
Perhaps, by pointing to the Mesolithics, this group of artists evokes a time when more rigid systems of relating were just coming into play. Behind this may be a reminder that there was a time before men were men and women were women and everyone went off to their respective forms of work. It must have been an extremely difficult time, hence everyone’s insistence on inventing and slogging their way out of it. But there would surely have been great things about it too. For a start, Paleolithic people apparently had more time to mess about and do their own thing than any other humans since.
Maybe now that technology promises to deliver us from labour, and science and queer theory show us that gender is a big, confusing mess, we could be said to find ourselves in something like a new Early Stone Age. But how might we choose to navigate our way around it this time? Let’s hope the New Primitives can help...
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