Beaconsfield Vauxhall
Category: Art and Photography
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Beaconsfield Gallery, Vauxhall, London
The video installation Bake'in by artist Tom Estes was shown his on April 11th, 2010, as a special last minute addition to the closing event for RELLA, an event organised as part of Testbed 1 at Beaconsfield. At this event Estes' contribution was a video performance of himself baking a cake while watching the film, The Exorcist.
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RELLA co-curator Michael Curran meets and greets visitors
“The work Bake’in is in part, a reaction to the recent popularity of all things 'Cute' and Kitsch. Cuteness and kitsch have a long history of representation that is particularly popular when times are difficult- and neither is afraid to smile and act happy-go-lucky when all around them, people are worried about the world falling apart. The video is a performance of myself baking a fruit cake while watching the film 'The Exorcist'. For me, the act of baking evokes a child-like or fairytale image of women- a housekeeper, a mother or a wife. I can still remember the stories in books from my early childhood, but it was depictions on television and film came to dominate my visions of the world. When things are depicted as they use to be in real life, we find them quaint, funny and fictional- giving them a kind of mythical status.
I suppose most people are looking for a cosy community, a comfortable practicle environment that is not hyper competitive but clever and creative. For example, some of the most hits on the web are of kittens and babies. It seems to be part of our DNA to react to cute things, and to some degree we can not help ourselves. We instinctively are drawn to and want to nurture any creature that has a cute appearance, while we naturally feel repulsed and want to block out all things genuinely unsettling or disturbing. The cuteness craze represents nostalgia for a lost world. But there is something dark about the power relationship between lovers of cuteness and the objects of their gaze. It is important to understand the notion of dependency inherent in cuteness and how that emerged. And of course there is an element of manipulation, in which things that are naturally 'cute' are often re-presented in a way that highlights and heightens their vulnerability. The desire to show the face of 'cuteness' is a desire to show dependency by presenting public images that are cheerful and plucky.
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Visitors to RELLA enjoyed tea and cake while watching Bake'in by Tom Estes
In recent years the sucess of the internet has meant that the old idea of privacy has started to bleed away into a new desire for a public profile. Fiction on screen has taught us everyting we know from how to fight to how to make love. We know that Gordon Gekko inved brokers gittish behaviour and all around us a young generation employs 'gangsta' speak gleaned from Hip Hop. As acting has become more naturalistic, more Stanislavski, our real life behaviour has become more stylized, more Kabuki. We are for ever taking on a role as our own but unable to resist referencing or copying centuries of actors who played and refined the part. And if you are desperate to be known, a very good strategy is the old evolutionary one of being so cute that you need to be cared for. And of course as viewers we enjoy being caretakers so much that we will create situations in which what is 'cute' needs our care, using things that are 'cute' to serve for our own emotional needs. We may be like those first office workers confined to the sterile anonimity of working from a cubical for eight hours a day and hanging up a kitten hanging from a tree. It may be that we are trying in some pathetic way to imbue our lives with sounds and images that strike at the deepest part of what it means to be human; our desire to be taken care of and in turn to take care of helpless creatures. ”
Tom Estes
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RELLA co-curator Lucy Gunning
Tom Estes' video installation Bakie'in was shown on a loop while the visitors to the exhibition were invited to purchase tea and cake while watching.
Beaconsfield is the central London site dedicated to providing a critical space for creative enquiry.TestBed 1 is produced as part of Beaconsfield’s curatorial mentoring scheme for emerging artist-curators. This event called 'Rella', was curated by Michael Curran and Lucy Gunning’s and marked the culmination of their residency at TestBed 1 at Beaconsfield.
Testbed 1
In the time of YouTube, video cameras and home-editing suites, the creative process has become more democratic, enabling people en masse to become not only viewers but ‘creators’ and the gulf between cinematic and lo-fi film production to reduce. TestBed 1 reflects popular practice by commissioning six new digital screen-based works, to be made through readily available modes of production but supported in the context of a spacious, professional art space. From March to late July commissioned artists will use Beaconsfield as a creative base in a series of residencies.
RELLA
An ongoing conversation brings Michael Curran and Lucy Gunning together for their first collaboration. RELLA is a hook, a mode of play, hazarding, shuffling time zones, past present future vibrate as one. The term is a fracturing of the myth Barbarella in which the weight of the name takes flight by dropping its elephantine prefix. The artists are working from zero – seeing what can happen in the space through experimental and investigative studio practice.
"RELLA is emerging tentatively and cumulatively, it is a process navigating the peculiarities of Time. During this period the artists spent the first week creating an environment in the Upper Gallery – making props, provisional sculpture – while alongside they run material of different registers, YouTube edits, simultaneous screenings of films, moving image and audio loops which generate resonances and ruptures. Roger Vadim’s cult film Barbarella lies within, as a corpse waiting to be reborn by moving beyond its limits. The artists see all moving image as time travel and are interested in what it means to reclaim or retrieve something – how many things arrive from the past, somehow ahead of now. They look for a hybrid form. Visitors were welcome to view the artists at work and later invited to participate in RELLA".
The event, 'Rella', curated by Michael Curran and Lucy Gunning, marked the culmination of their residency in TestBed 1 at Beaconsfield. Estes video installation Bake'in was shown at this closing event on April 11th, 2010. Estes' contribution was a video performance of himself baking a cake while watching the film, The Exorcist. The visitors to the exhibition were invited to purchase tea and cake while watching.
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Co-curator Lucy Gunning enjoys tea and cake with visitors
Later in the evening, the upstairs gallery hosted performances, music and manifestations.
Some of the material produced and moving image work screened at the TestBed 1 showcase will be on display again during Open House weekend, 18-19 September 2010.
Location: Vauxhall, London
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/testes2/blog#ixzz12XlFKVlz
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