F L E X I B I L I S M,
Curated by Edel O' Reilly Catalyst Arts, Belfast Northern Ireland. Opening 02.06.2016 LIAM SLEVIN | MARK BUCKERIDGE - ALL CHOIR | CLAWSON + WARD This project fosters practices concerned with the conditions for production, labour, autonomism, desire and decision. FLEXIBILISM is the appraisal of four artists who have been invited to develop and reconfigure a previously made or designed work in relation to explicit, esoteric and existential aspects of Catalyst Arts and its site in Belfast as a public space. These reproductions, rehearsals and repetitions interrupt the field of perception associated with a gallery space, resisting the familiarity of selected works in a groups show and instead espouse to re-configure civic, social and cultural frameworks for considering our role in public, as artists, citizens, communities and creative labourers. The project draws its title from post-fordist theories of flexible specialisation which propositioned that flexibility and skill in labor is more profitable than the previous mass-production, factory format which informed Henry Ford and Albert Khan’s seminal architectural designs for industrial assembly lines, famously flexible to the changing modes of production. These theories propagate ‘flexibility’ as a benefit to workers, often alluding to the potential increase in personal agency and inferred time for leisure when in reality they only serve to remove the conditions of security and increase the need for competition. The dysfunction of this proposition is explicitly evident in the current, pervasive infrastructure of visual art practice and misperceptions of the value of culture as an instrument for harvesting social or financial dividends under the guise of desire and decision. Through disparate means of production, each artists’ work engage the almost invisible yet omnipotently perceived, instructive nature of civic structures and social order, reclaiming cultural sites for their own means and offering processes which can be utilised to interrupt or subvert these systems by its users and inhabitants. Each of the artists involved in the project have practices which further agitate conventional notions of the autonomous artist and provide a contextual framework for examining how collectives and artist-led initiatives balance creative output with sustainability, often cultivating spaces and situations for audiences and peer artists to come meet, live and practice. |
Slevin's FLEXIBILISM commission develops a long-term project utilizing feedback loops as a disciplinary structure in live composition and how their ontological aspects are recontextualised when transitioned from noise club nights to a gallery environment. The work is situated at the intersection of sound, performance and audience participation, influenced by instrumentalisation of the built environment and its users.
Technically the work uses the standing waves of the built environment in a feedback loop. Two boundary mics are places opposite sides of a large reverberating space. Each mic faces a speaker and they begin to feedback. With a compressor connected to both mics it controls the feedback and cuts it off before total feedback immersion happens. From the time the compressor turns off the sound, the building is filled with the last reverberating sound. |