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Lookup NU author(s): Giles BaileyORCiD
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A solo exhibition presenting installed iterations of two performance projects:I Bought a Little City and John and Michael (The Chemical History of a Candle)John and Michael (The Chemical History of a Candle) is a performance which was created at Flat Time House. It takes as its starting point a brief moment in a video shot by Laure Prouvost of John Latham giving a tour through his home when he pauses by a bookcase and extracts a few books. Among these is Michael Faraday’s 1861 book of lectures for young people, The Chemical History of a Candle. Responding to Latham’s unorthodox and sculptural treatment of books, the contents page of this series of six lectures on the chemistry and physics of flames given at the Royal Institution serves as a choreographic score. The work was developed from a performance commissioned by Flat Time House and the video was shot there. Flat Time House (210 Bellenden Rd, London SE15 4BW) was the studio and home of John Latham. In 2003 he declared the house a living sculpture. It has been open to the public since 2008 and will close Summer 2016.I Bought a Little City (2012 and ongoing)This project began while I was participating in a residency in Marfa, Texas during the Summer 2012 and has been show in unfolding iterations at OUTPOST in Norwich and Kunst-Werke, Berlin.Marfa is a remote West Texan town to which the sculpture Donald Judd relocated from New York City in 1972. Over the two decades that followed his move the town grew - thanks to his influence, establishment of the Chinati Foundations and purchase of significant amounts of real estate - into a significant cultural presence with many galleries and venues upon which the global art world certainly has its eye. While in Marfa I happened to read the story by American writer Donald Barthelme (himself a Texan who happened to have moved to New York), published in the New Yorker in 1974, from which this performance takes its title. This short work of fiction is a can be seen as a wry, absurdist indictment of proprietorship and urban regeneration that feels strangely resonant in the context of the town.The peculiar, dissonant collision of these two figures became the beginning for a work that (kind of) takes a format of artist’s talk haunted by history’s apparent authority and awkward, unruly legacies. A collage of short, quasi-fictions performed as monologues and collaboratively produced videos propose wayward negotiations of cities and failed attempts at producing artworks therein.I performed the Barthelme Story in Marfa as a kind of town meeting in the cupola of the Presidio County Courthouse and made a pair of videos (one in Marfa, one in Berlin) that deal with the weight of history or canonical figures on urban spaces. The videos that were made to accompany the Marfa and Berlin iterations of the work were made in collaboration with John White and Adela Yawitz respectively.
Artist(s): Bailey G
Publication type: Exhibition
Publication status: Published
Year: 2015
Number of Pieces: 2
Venue: Centre for Contemporary Art
Location: Glasgow, UK
Media of Output: video, performance and installation
URL: http://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/561d2e887f7182fe02000001
