Well, it’s been an
exceptionally good week following on from last week’s high of visiting the BHAAM
artists; this week has seen free fireworks, free books and free booze topped off
by sharing the above in the company of great friends and watching the stage
version of, ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ (based on the short
story by Sillitoe and what would be one of the top books in my own ‘life
enhancing books of all time’ list) all of which certainly helping towards
keeping my faith in the arts restored where it should be. Wonderful stuff! Completing
this most humbling and momentous week has to be the Volkhardt Muller exhibition
at The Brewhouse.
I’d heard rumours of people paying to have
sections of a woodcut printed as part of a kind-of interactive project at The
Brewhouse and that the idea was that you could pay for different sizes to be
printed and if enough people bought enough pieces it would reveal an even
bigger picture....Curious...I zipped down to the Brew one lunchtime to go have
a look...
Impressive! Three large block woodcuts leaning
against the walls in the gallery each depicting scenes from a high street; shops,
lamp posts, bus stops, litter, babies in pushchairs, people on phones, waiting,
walking, carrying shopping or reading newspapers, it was all very recognisably
familiar stuff. That’s also why I liked it! Each woodcut had areas that had
been marked out, printed and then placed onto a light box directly above it.
Except the images on the light boxes were fragmented and only told parts of the
scene depicted in the woodcut itself. The reason? The rumours I’d heard about
people buying parts of prints was correct making the exhibition an interactive
one based on people paying for an area (and they can choose how big or small)
of their choosing to be printed of which they get a copy to take home and keep
and the same area is printed to add to the light box in the gallery. A lucrative
idea in terms of making money but more importantly also a very poignant and apt
one given the subject matter of the work, the high street. I think the idea of
having an interactive piece that is made up of the fragments of different
people’s decisions and participation is a good echo of the lives of our own high
street as a place of ‘toing and froing’ and interaction; perhaps even more
hauntingly appropriate if you take the idea that people and engagement are
needed in order for the image to exist/be revealed being the same as the real-life
situation many high streets face that without people, without customers they
too may become more fragmented and non-existent. That was my reading into it
anyway, although I preferred visually the more fragmented images than the whole
on the woodcut, perhaps the fragmenting of the image could reflect the constant
changing nature of high streets as public spaces. I don’t really mind, I just
enjoy thinking about work in this multiple meanings sort-of way. I also thought
there was something shop window-like about the illuminated images on their
light boxes reflecting the narratives of familiar scenes some more banal, some
humorous and others bordering on the slightly disturbing or with a threat of menace
in the air. Interesting as well to see what parts of the images people choose
to get printed, mostly all the figures were picked out (the exhibition had been
up since October) and crushed drinks cans, shop signs and dustbins all being
taken (the artist does however, do up to four prints of a given area) all of
which leaving fairly large amounts of areas of pavement and road unclaimed.
Unless someone was to buy a print of the entire block then I’m guessing that
there’ll always be areas like the pavement in the image that are incomplete. This
is again another uncanny metaphor for the concept of people having to invest in
their high streets in order to keep them. I’m reminded of the excellent book, ‘Embracing
the Ordinary’ that I reviewed a while back this year on this blog and the
writer Georges Perec who recorded almost forensically the everyday details
happening on a street in Saint Sulpice, Paris. Muller has obviously spent a lot
of time himself looking at towns and their high streets and a film projected as
part of this exhibition acts as a demonstration of source material recorded to make
the prints in the exhibition. The work was in fact originally commissioned by
Exeter’s Royal Albert Museum and Art Gallery for Exeter High Street. Glad it
has made its way to Taunton and that the interactivity continues with a third
piece in the exhibition made of twenty or so (I didn’t count, ok!) wind-up
children’s TVs, you know the kind that have a screen with an image that goes
around and around whilst playing a nursery rhyme (see image below). Anyway,
these require the viewer to wind them up in order to play the images which have
been replaced with Muller’s prints of high street scenes and are like watching
a very slow animation or mimicking of driving through a town in a car as it
pans across a scene of people queueing at a bus stop or row of shop fronts.
There’s a creepy sort-of nostalgia with this piece that I didn’t get with the
large woodcuts, maybe it’s due to the wind-up plinkety-plink nursery rhyme
music that the boxes emanate as the image goes around or maybe again this is meant
to act as a warning of what fate awaits our high streets should we continue to lose
shops and their identities they have within our towns until all that is left of
them is images in children’s toys and ladybird books. Ha ha, SCARY! On the
other hand, maybe there’s also something quite funny and childlike to it that I’ve
missed (I’ve only offered up my own interpretation of the work). All in all it’s
a great idea to have an exhibition that is dependent on the people who visit it
to both make and contribute to the work as well in a way being the subject
matter for it. I can imagine would have been equally interesting to watch it as
it grew and hope that out of all this participation it just might make people
look at their own high streets a little differently if at the very least feel
that in our own individual ways we have a role to play in animating these
public spaces whether that’s feeding the pigeons, shopping, skating or just
walking through that is the mandate of the honest hardworking people.
‘Since 2010 Volkhardt Müller has been
chronicling public life in British cities through drawing, wood/linocut, print objects
and moving image. Following his solo exhibition at RAMM in Exeter, Müller’s
work in The Brewhouse puts in focus the relationships between the generic and
the locale, often drawing on the British High Street as a petri dish for
observation and a source of ideas.’
Catch Volkhardt
Muller’s exhibition, ‘Mandate from the honest hard working people’ at The
Brewhouse until November 17th:
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