Arts Council CollectionNew Acquisitions 2003—04

Chair of the Acquisitions CommitteeIsobel Johnstone

The external members of the Acquisitions Committee for 2002–05:Michael Archer Susan CollinsKeith Hartley

Arts Council CollectionNew Acquisitions 2003—04

I Wonder Whether Cows Wonder, 2002Series of 41 photographic EN colour prints mounted on card, each 10 × 15 cm

Keith Arnatt Keith Arnatt’s series of photographs I Wonder Whether Cows Wonder was made in response to the return of cows to the countryside after the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001. He had also just read John Berger’s essay, ‘Why Look at Animals’, in which it is suggested that when we look at animals we do so across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. Arnatt writes: “Searching for cows involved peer ing through hedges and looking over stone walls… When I did encounter cows I always stopped and watched them for a while. I’ve come to regard my looking at cows looking at me along with the photo graphic activity involved, as elements of an ongoing performance – one that is likely to continue unless, of course, I should ever find out whether cows do or do not wonder!”

Martin Boyce The sculpture, Dark Unit and Mask, re plicates the structure of a small Eames Stor age Unit. On top of the unit sits a nickel plated steel display stand holding what appears to be an ashtray and a mask. The mask is constructed from parts of an ‘Ant’ and ‘Series 7’ chair designed in 1951 and 1955 by the Danish designer Arne Jacobsen. I became interested in what happens to the original objects as they shift through history. I sense that there is a desire when transplanting an aesthetic from one time period to another that one can somehow recreate the spirit, the social or cultural politics or the ethos of that period. What happens however is that through its journey the aesthetic collects its own ethos and this is often one based on pe cu niary notions of taste and exclusivity.

Martin BoyceDark Unit and Mask, 2003wood, steel and paint, 169 × 60 × 40 cm

House Rules, 2001circuit board, plastic and battery, 2.3 × 9.4 × 1.7 cm

For House Rules, Rose Finn-Kelcey has produced a miniature illuminated, ani mated sign. A desirable, gem-like object, compact and portable containing an endless stream of words, as she states, “words which appear to come from nowhere and go nowhere”. The effect is hypnotic, intense, provocative and humorous. House Rules uses the LED convention of informing and instructing. It is the public voice – a voice without sound but with apparent intonation, inflection, volume and pitch. The words exist in a unique space somewhere be tween the word on the page and the spoken word. As a stream of prohibitions scroll past, the voice of dissent interjects, “the world of ‘no’ is contested but un stopp able. House Rules can be left running while you get on with your life.”

Rose Finn-Kelcey

Lupita, 2002DVD, 2 minutes 42 seconds

Sarah Beddington In Lupita I made a video of half a dancing couple. Shot from the waist down their legs are engaged in what appears at first glance to be a passionate dance to a Latino rhythm across a dirty tiled floor in a public space. The continuity of the dance and the legs that move backwards and forwards in a camera angle that never changes is all suddenly disrupted when the woman is thrown violently to the ground and seems to suffer further abuse from her partner. The woman is slowly revealed as a life-size mannequin, animated by a man whose identity re mains a secret. The fragmented sense of narrative in this piece, takes place somewhere between a dream and a nightmare.

Sarah Beddington

Stefan Gec’s computer animation Untitled (Apollo-Soyuz Test Project) documents the historical moment in 1975 when two space crafts, Apollo from the US and Soyuz from the USSR, docked in earth orbit together to work on the first ever US-Soviet space mission. Using blue prints, Gec worked with animators to create striking black-and-white images of the vessels’ underlying structures. Shown on two screens, the animation lays bare the beauty and fragility of this historic encounter.

The work was commissioned by the Arts Council, through ‘A Percent for Art’ scheme to mark the opening of Longside Gallery in 2003.

Untitled (Apollo – Soyuz Test Project), 2003continuous computer animation, two screen

I travelled to England when I was seven. The wonder of flight was made more extra ordinary when I glimpsed the middle eastern landscape through the cramped window of the aeroplane. Below was an arid and expansive terrain shot through with seams of silver rivers. Time and the elements defined the ‘picture’ to be seen. The wind and hot sun had baked and eroded the parched earth remaking and constantly altering the landscape. Terrain – 5 is a continua tion of this observation, made portable and too tiny to explore by foot.

Kabir Hussain

Stefan Gec

Kabir Hussain

Terrain – 5, 2001bronze, 23.5 × 269 × 86 cm

The group exhibition Temple of Bacchus, at Milton Keynes Gallery in 2003, took a humorous approach to reflecting Britain’s bad social habits. Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson, together with Sarah Lucas, transformed the gallery’s pristine spaces so that they resembled a snap shot of London’s pub culture. Featuring gambling, smoking and drunk enness, the exhibition succeeded in exposing the darker side of Britain’s social culture.

Mosquito Larvae II, 2001acrylic on board, 140 × 102 cm

Swallow Seed Menu, 2003wood, paper, plastic, felt and steel, 42.7 × 50 × 6 cm

Michael Kidner

Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson

In earlier work Michael Kidner chose the pentagon as the basic structure be cause, unlike the square, it is constitu tion ally unstable and liable to take you to the brink of visual anarchy. But he also uses it to prefigure organic and sub-organ ic forms that have a place, however lowly and degraded, in the human habitat: dynamic forms such as swimming mos qui to larvae and whirling particles of dust.

Stephen Bann’s catalogue introduction from Michael Kidner, Love is a Virus from Outer Space

awareness of detail, new perceptions emerge. There is time to dwell on the nature of form and gesture, however, Nashashibi is careful to leave the interpretation of these revelations to the viewer.

Rosalind Nashashibi’s Midwest is at once recognisable as the American urban backdrop we see con stantly on television or in movies. Indeed much of the power of her film resides in the familiarity of the landscapes she documents. However, her lingering, med itative shots, filmed during a residency in Omaha in Nebraska, allow us to study that landscape and its com munities in far greater detail. She focuses on workers huddled together in a cafe or congregat ing outside a welfare office, creating a sense of time drifting by. Her sense of composition, the rhythm of her editing and her choice of idle moments begin to describe a more diverse, flawed and complicated reality behind the mythic image. In Midwest, form is a driving force, though in an oblique way. As the rhythm of the work slows down and magnifies our

Rosalind Nashashibi

Midwest, 2002digi-beta tape transferred to DVD projection, 11 minutes

These two photographs are part of Simon Norfolk’s Afghanistan Chronotopia series. Victory Arch was made in Bamiyan after a hard two-day trip. He writes: “The road had destroyed the front axle of the vehicle in which we left Kabul. The rest of the journey was made on the open back of an old truck borrowed from a farmer. The archways have been built all over Afghanistan by the victorious Northern Alliance to celebrate their ‘vic tory’ over the Taliban. The arch is actually at the entrance to the fortress-like com pound of the local warlord. The young soldier was a Hazara of about 15 who said he’d been a soldier for 5 years.”

Simon Norfolk

Victory Arch built by the Northern Alliance at the entrance to a local commander’s HQ in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 2002lambda print on Fujicolor crystal archive paper,101 × 126 cm

The brickworks at Hussain Khil, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, 2002lambda print on Fujicolor crystal archive paper,101 × 126 cm

scores, aerial views of cities, and the new communication networks of the time. The wing-like shapes can also be compared to his sculptures of a similar date, includ ing The Cage, which is also in the Arts Council Collection. The rhythm of marks seem to correspond to the lines and joins in the sculpture, while the wing-like form echoes the structure itself. In A Logical Picture of Facts is a Thought (3) Tractacus

’21-22’ Paolozzi returns to the motif of his earliest collages: the deconstructed and reconstructed head. It also marks a return to the subject of the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Paolozzi identified with Wittgenstein’s feeling of being an outsider, as well as being in trigued by the idea of linking art and philo sophy. The title refers to Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus which Wittgenstein wrote while serving in the Austrian army during the First World War.

The patterns of dots and dashes in Insects’ Wings, which Paolozzi used in many of his prints and textile designs in the early 1950s, have been compared to musical

Insects’ Wings, 1951collage, 66 × 96 cm

A Logical Picture of Facts is a Thought (3) Tractacus ‘21-22’, 1994, collage, 48.5 × 34.1 cm

Eduardo Paolozzi

This installation features bricks from a row of houses that fell off the white cliffs of Dover. Found by the artist on a remote shoreline between Folkestone and Dover, the bricks had been shaped by the crash ing waves over many years. Parker was fascinated by the drama, describing the process as a ‘perfect cartoon death’. She suspended the bricks on wires from the gallery ceiling to form a house shape. It is difficult to tell if the artist has repre sented the house mid-fall, or if she has undertaken a process of resurrection. Unlike Parker’s work Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, which involved the sus-pension of charred remnants of a garden shed that had been blown up, at her re quest, by the army; the bricks that make up Neither From Nor Towards have been shaped over years, not seconds.

Alex Pollard has written that his work is concerned with “the possibilities and limitations created by studio-based working practice rather than the dead ends which result from the slavish illustration of theory. It is, however, informed by extensive research into argots, alternative publications and marginalised artistic groups.” Brontë Truck shows a small wooden truck that was constructed by the artist and then wrapped in a reproduction of a watercolour by the nineteenth-century writer Emily Brontë. It was one of a number of works Pollard made exploring ideas about English Romanticism. 

Cornelia Parker

Neither From Nor Towards, 1992bricks and wire, 250 × 250 × 400 cm

Alex Pollard

Brontë Truck, 2003 oil on board, 21 × 29.5 cm

This project is concerned with the pro duction of artworks using mathe mati cal data, which have been translated to become 20 images and 3D objects. There is a re newed interest in the notion of

‘detail’, and a sense of the sublime, having its equivalent in cyber space due to our increasing familiarity with fractal images and the consequent debate about the aestheticising implications of chaos theory. This has been given added em phasis as a consequence of cyberspace being frequently hyped as an unexplored, unconquered and unknown realm of the digital world of electronic signals, net works and remote human presence. The first two images in The ‘Blot’ Series were made in response to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection of British watercolours.

Jane Prophet

In the film Dwelling computer animation has been used to mini aturise a fleet of aeroplanes to the extent that the average house provides sufficient airspace. The jets glide effort lessly around the resi dence, launching and landing from any available surface; the gentle hum of the engines adds to this hallucinatory spec tacle. The significance of Dwelling lies partly in the introduction of motion to the process of miniaturisation – movement gives the world of fantasy a greater sense of reality, as if a computer game has come to life. Dwelling also illuminates the relationship between scale and distance, evoking the childhood game whereby mas sive objects in the distance are measured between forefinger and thumb. Dwelling reminds us that our everyday experience of

Jane Prophet

The Blot Series 1. Lafarge Exshaw Plant, Lac des Arcs Dawn, 2003photographic print, 76 × 228 cm

The Blot Series 2. Lafarge Exshaw Plant, Lac des Arcs Night Time, 2003photographic print, 76 × 228 cm

Dwelling, 2002DVD projection, 9 minutes 20 seconds

Hiraki Sawaaeroplanes is not of their gargantuan proportions, but rather of their distant miniaturisation: tiny specks in the sky no bigger than birds.

Although unabashedly decorative, Line Painting is far from mere décor. Like many of Yinka Shonibare’s works, it is made up of an array of small canvases, with Dutch wax fabric prints for support. Popular in West Africa since the 1960s when their vibrant colours captured post-independ ence verve, the fabrics actually originated in Indonesia. The batik tech ni ques were later industrialised by Dutch colonisers and manufactured in Holland. The British soon copied, then monopo lis ed the process with factories in Manchester employing Asian workers and English de signers to produce goods for export to West African markets. The use of Dutch wax prints invests Shonibare’s paintings with historical, cultural and commercial information, in addition to their surprising visual qualities.

Estelle Thompson originally gained a reputation for lyrical, romantic paintings evoking traditional landscapes. She began painting in the geometric, abstract style found in Whiteishwhiteishness in the late 1990s. By using a muted pallet and mini mal forms in the work, Thompson draws attention to the subtleties found in seemingly blank areas of a painting. In Whiteishwhiteishness, as the title sug gests, Thompson plays with expanses of white paint, set off with light grey rectan gles and primary colours, inviting the viewer to explore the painterly nature and tonality of the work.

Yinka Shonibare

Whiteishwhiteishness, 2003oil on board, 50 × 40 cm

Estelle Thompson

Line Painting, 2003emulsion and acrylic on textile, diameter 312 cm

appearing like cinematic inter-titles when viewed in combination with all the other compo nents. The result is a coherent yet evocative combination of elements that produce an endlessly mutating edition of low-tech mini-movies that we call, Template Cinema.

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead

Short Films about Flying #1 is a net work ed installation in which an open edition of unique cinematic works is automatically generated in the gallery, and in real-time from existing live data found on the world-wide web. Each ‘movie’ (replete with opening titles and end credits) com bines a live video feed from Logan Airport in Boston with randomly loaded net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world. As this relatively good quality video stream is taken from an existing commercial web site where its visitors are able to control the camera, each ‘movie’ is

‘shot’ and ‘paced’ by its own (albeit unsuspect ing) camera person. Additionally, text grabbed from a variety of on-line mes sage boards is periodically inserted,

Triggerhappy, 1998computer game

Short Films about Flying #1, 2002computer game

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead

Drawing on landscape sources, from everyday postcards and tourist souvenirs to masterpieces of German Romantic painting and Japanese art, Graeme Todd combines meticulously drawn fragments with abstract blocks of colour and layers of translucent glazes of poured varnish, overlaid with strings of free-floating fine ink lines. Although his paintings are not landscapes in any traditional sense, many of his works have been inspired by experi encing dramatic landscapes. After a visit to the Klontel Valley in Switzerland in 2001, Todd drew inspiration from the sublime landscapes of peaks and valleys in the region. The starting point for Mushroom was a field of wild mushrooms.

Graeme Todd

Mushroom, 2003paint, ink and varnish on MDF, 105 × 122 cm

Lines Made by Walking (after Richard Long), 2003looped sequence of 80 transparencies, slide projection

I am a Revolutionary, 2001DVD, 4 minutes 8 seconds Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella in association with John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

In A Line Made by Walking (after Richard Long) Carey Young restages Richard Long’s seminal work A Line Made by Walking, 1967. As opposed to Long’s line made in a grassy meadow, Young remakes the work by walking back and forth amongst a busy crowd of commut ers in Central London. Her act of drawing a line in the crowd appears to mirror the daily journey of the commuters, but at a faster speed, as if displaced. Dressed like those around her in business clothes, Young strives for an identity and space among the crowds, with her struggle and determination becoming a deadpan parallel for artistic ‘struggle’.

Carey Young

Richard Wright

↗ Untitled 13.02.03, 2003gouache on paper, 38.7 × 57.2 cm

Untitled 09.02.03, 2003gouache on paper, 38.7 × 57.2 cm

Working predominately with paint and gold leaf applied directly to walls, Richard Wright’s paintings are often short-lived, only surviving the length of the exhibition; they are painted over at the end of the show. Knowing that the work may not be viewable again, in any other place, at any other time, the viewer’s senses are heightened. Wright’s oeuvre also includes a wide range of works on paper, including prints on poster paper and elaborate large-scale works that can include thous ands of hand-drawn and painted marks.

Cerith Wyn Evans

“Diary: How to Improve the world (you will only make matters worse) continued 1968 (revised)” from ‘M’ writings ‘67-’72 by John Cage, 2003chandelier, flat screen monitor, morse code unit, computer, dimensions variable

This installation pays homage to a work by John Cage. A crystal chandelier flashes on and off to convey a Morse code trans lation of Cage’s writings. The code is converted back into text on a nearby computer screen. A chandelier denotes a certain grandeur and extravagance, and in using it, Wyn Evans sets the stage for a theatrical occasion. Whereas a chandelier conveys the idea of excess, Morse code relies on a system of re duction, from words and letters to dots and dashes. Both forms reference the past, with Morse code proving particularly redundant in the wake of satellite com mu nication systems.

The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.For further information about the Arts Council Collection please visitwww.artscouncilcollection.org.ukLoans from the Collection are generally free of charge. Where exceptional curatorial or technical support is required a small fee may be charged to cover administration, preparation and installation costs.To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk

Images © the artist or estate of the artist except Eduardo

Paolozzi images © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation,

Licensed by DACS 2011.

Cover: Yinka ShonibareLine Painting, 2003 (detail)

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