For SWEAT, Susan Collis' second solo exhibition at SEVENTEEN, the intense labour underpinning much of her detailed practice is laid bare before the viewer. In addition, a playful yet considered engagement with two distinct modes of production - the industrial and the hand made - runs throughout the exhibition.
The space will be dominated by the bustle of ongoing productivity, a team of workers sitting at tables produce what appear to be laundry bags, the type of which you find at markets and thrift stores around the world. However, divorced from the type of rapid process that would ordinarily mark the production of such a ubiquitous commercial object, the workers instead pour intensely over sheets of Fabriano paper. With delicate precision, using only pencils and biro pens, they slowly mark out the bag pattern upon the surface of the paper. When fully patterned, the paper will be cut and assembled by the workers in order to form an object that straddles the status of both drawing and sculpture while appearing, on first look at least, to be neither. Standing in front of one of these works, it appears to have the perfect semblance of an everyday, nearly disposable item - only upon further detailed examination does the punitive hand made production value of the object become evident.
For SWEAT Collis has constructed a world in which values according to production are realigned and reconsidered. A world in which the smiling benevolent gallerist is transformed into factory foreman via a portrait commissioned by the artist and which hangs directly over the workers as they go about there good work... A world in which a mundane digital clock that governs the flow of the working day and orders the operations of the workers inside the gallery space is in fact a video composed of individual drawings laboriously unified into a single via stop-frame animation. Indeed, a world in which, with the construction of a pseudo industrial scene of productivity, the idea of artist as virtuoso producer of rarefied objects is rallied against in favour of a more open-ended exploration of artistic praxis.
Collis draws attention to the systems employed to produce her work, so much so that production - it's conditions and multivalent modes - becomes the work itself. Crucially, this renders the object nothing other than the necessary documentation of a greater performance, a performance of on-going creation undertaken by the artist and which, momentarily at least, transcends the idea of the finished work or final object.
PV Thursday 11th September
JOHN SAMSON MORE QUOTED THAN SEEN
John Samson (1946 - 2004) was an extraordinary British filmmaker. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, as a teenager Samson moved to Paisley just outside of Glasgow where he remained for the formative years of his life. Resistant to the constraints of formal education, at 16 Samson left school and took on an apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards learning precision tool making in an engineering firm. Samson quickly became involved as a spokesperson in the first Glasgow apprentices strike, helping organise visits by Glasgow apprentices to other shipyards in England in order to demonstrate solidarity across the British Isles.
Around this time Samson began to engage with the Anarchist movement, joining the Committee of 100 and participating in a number of Nuclear Disarmament protests including Holy Loch in 1961 where he was arrested with 350 others for demonstrating against the presence of a US nuclear submarine. In 1963, upon meeting his wife Linda who was studying painting at Glasgow School of Art at the time, Samson gave up his apprenticeship and fell in with a bohemian circle that included artists, writers and musicians. He taught himself guitar, took up stills photography and by the early 70s began to make films.
These experiences - Samson's working class roots, his passionate interest in radical politics and bohemia - fuelled what would turn out to be a life-long fascination with individuals and groups operating at the margins of society. If it is possible to pick up such a thing as a singular thematic or narrative running throughout Samson's films, then it is exactly this: his subjects are outsiders, people with unusual lives and obsessions, liminal figures who fail to square neatly with the normative models for identity and behaviour propagated by contemporary culture.
Evident from his very first film Charlie (1973), a 10 minute short film on the merit of which he was awarded a scholarship to the National Film School, Samson was an extremely compassionate filmmaker who never sought to exploit his unusual subjects. Instead he would immerse himself in their strange worlds; his keen eye teasing out motivations while never lacking a dry yet gentle good humour which helped him, above all, to make sense of each and every extraordinary existence he encountered.
The exhibition presents three of John Samsons short films from the 1970s.
Tattoo (1975) - 20 mins.
A documentary film based on the art of tattooing, tattoo artists and their clients, with interviews exploring the fascination for, and the reasons behind choosing to be tattooed. The film builds up to long climatic scene, often since replicated in other films on the subject, featuring tattooed bodies displayed as art objects. Typically, Samson had himself tattooed during the making of the film.
Dressing For Pleasure (1977) - 25 mins.
Here the subject of fetishism in clothing - rubber, latex, leather - is explored. The film features Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols at the time at SEX, the boutique he ran with Vivien Westwood on the Kings Road. Central to the film is a magnificent studio set constructed mainly by Samson himself in the shape of the fetishist magazine Atomage with actual turning pages all populated by these amazing characters, dressed in thigh length leather boots and chains. The film was banned at the time by London Weekend Television, and has become one of those rare films more quoted than seen. Again, using revealing interviews on the motivation behind the protagonists; choices, Dressing for Pleasure won Outstanding Film Award at the London Film Festival that year. Recently it has toured the world as part of the Vivienne Westwood exhibition and has been an inspiration for many other films including Julian Temple's The Filth and the Fury (2000).
Arrows (1979) - 33 min.
A film made about Eric Bristow and the world of competitive darts. The often-lonely life of the celebrity sportsman, constantly on the move and always in the public eye fascinated Samson. In Bristow, already successful and totally self-assured in his early 20&'s, Samson finds a compelling figure through which he explores a sport as well as a specific period of British social life and culture.
John Samson - More Quoted Than Seen is the third exhibition at SEVENTEEN's basement exhibition space - curated by Paul Pieroni. The exhibition will return concurrently with Susan Collis's; exhibition SWEAT in the main gallery
