Saturday, 17 March 2012
Friday, 16 March 2012
CUBE, ‘centre for the urban built environment’. This space is very proudly the only centre for art, architecture and design exhibitions in the Northwest. Sleek, white, modern, and functional, its identity is unsurprisingly bound up in this edifice and its location. Fittingly, the current Junebum Park commission currently showing is based on the Korean artist’s personal experiences in Manchester, and also rests on the actual building itself. Yet, contrary to (some) expectations for ‘sleek and modern’, Park seeks to introduce a playful element to something as potentially stern as a city front. Of equal import, CUBELab artists, Julia Münz and Annika Unterburg bring us Seedbank for Treehouse. A blend of architectural prowess and childlike fantasy, the Venn diagram circles of which overlap at obsession. AND you get a party bag to take home, no cake, but a potential treehouse for personal use. The Bauhaus of Manchester, with a sense of humour. You’ll be laughing all the way home.
Junebum Park: To let, 02/09-05/10
CUBELab: Julia Münz and Annika Unterburg, 02/09-05/10
Junebum Park 'To Let' 2011
Manchesters Finest
http://www.manchestersfinest.com/arts/galleries/junebum-park-cube/
Junebum Park is an artist based in Korea. Through a clever shift of perspective, Junebum transforms the most ordinary of environments into extraordinary scenes in which the artist’s hands interfere with the forces and currents in a way that is both comic and timely.
Parks video works have been shown internationally and we are delighted that the artist has accepted a commission for Manchester.
Junebum Park has been commissioned by CUBE to develop new work for an exhibition in its main gallery, opening on the 2nd September and running until the 5th October. This commission will be a world premier.
This project, in collaboration with the Chinese Art centre and the Asia Triennial 2011, will for the first time directly engage with the gallery’s external grade 2 listed architecture. The artist will playfully manipulate the face of the building. This time consuming process will gradually expose and reflect impacts of the current recession.
Next year’s Cultural Olympiad could feature an installation inspired by the works of an Eighteenth century Utopian Socialist, currently on show at a Manchester’s gallery.
‘Ode to Charles Fourier, Towards a Phalanstery for Manchester’ by Nils Norman has been commissioned by the Cube Gallery, on Portland Street.
The main exhibit is a ‘walk and crawl-through climbable sculpture’. It is a work- station divided into three key areas – safe play, standard play and risky play. It includes a trampoline, a tunnel and a mushroom log.
Jane Anderson has been the Creative Director of Cube for five years. She says: “We’ve been interested in working with Nils Norman for a long time. This is the end of a two year conversation with him.”
She explains that the aim is to adapt and make the sculpture safe and for outdoor use in Manchester city centre.
The theme of the North West’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad is ‘We Play’. The exhibit has proved very popular with children. Fourier is likely to have been pleased by this as he believed children were naturally industrious.
A by-product of this month’s Manchester International Festival, Jane says, is a boost in families visiting the gallery.
Nils Norman’s exhibition also includes a grid or timetable which might be suitable for a community occupying one of the Phalanstries which Fourier envisioned.
The grid subdivides the day into a number of activities such as fruit growing, apple picking, water filtration, play design and brainstorming. Participants would rise at 3.30am and go to bed at 10.30pm.
Professor Andrew Vincent is the author of Modern Political Ideologies (Blackwell-Wiley 2009). He explains that Fourier, born in 1772, believed in a society where work would become an aesthetic and sensual pleasure. No roles or tasks would be fixed and production would be for basic well-made goods to satisfy human needs.
AJ feature 2011
Galleries, especially those devoted to the difficult-to-display discipline of architecture, aren’t traditionally the place for boisterous play. But not for long, if Bourriard-loving devotees of play and relational aesthetics have their way (AJ 24.03.11). Oversized parlour games and giant slides in the Tate aside, CUBE has been leading the way and having some fun this summer, with shows by OSA and Nils Norman. OSA’s Merzen invited visitors to contribute to a Kurt Schwitters-inspired construction (AJ 31.03.11) made from recycled building materials.
For Ode to Charles Fourier: Towards a Phalanstery, Nils Norman created a large play structure inspired by the writings of the proto-socialist and seeker of a perfect society, who described in detail the architectural, social and sexual arrangements within his utopia, New Harmony. (He was also the the inventor of ‘phalansterès’, and envisaged a future with seas of lemonade populated by giant, ship-pulling whales). Norman, an artist whose work has riffed on environmentalism, regeneration and the instrumentalisation of public art in the past, created a sort of walk/crawl-through sculpture that doubled up as a potential outdoor play structure for a public space in Manchester.
By the looks of CUBE’s new commission, the Manchester-based archi-gallery shows no sign of letting up the high jinx. Junebum Park’s To Let, in collaboration with the Chinese Art Centre and the Asia Triennial 2011,opened this month. Park is a Korean-based artist known for videos that tinker with scale and perspective, filming everyday events from above, then applying a layer of film showing his own hands apparently manipulating the objects. The plan is to take the art outside and ‘directly engage with the gallery’s Grade II listed exterior, playfully manipulating the face of the building, to expose and reflect impacts of the current recession’.
Junebum Park, 2 September 2011 – 5 October 2011 CUBE, Portland Street, Manchester, www.cube.org.uk
I’m presuming that, while strolling along a street in Shanghai, the artist spotted a cigarette packet damply splayed, and thought, “That looks exactly like the new Tranmere away strip”.
And there you have it. Leo Fitzmaurice is a master of re-presentation; of deconstructing context and heading off on another narrative, or other such art-related nomenclature. I’m presuming that one day, while gazing at the floor of a café in Sao Paulo, or strolling, head-down, along a street in Shanghai, the artist spotted a besmirched cigarette packet damply splayed, and thought, “That looks exactly like the new Tranmere away strip”. And there, or thereabouts, began a new obsession.
It is not long before cigarettes in this country will be sold from under the counter, in identical plain brown packets, be they Camel Lights or Peel Orange Menthol (both of which are collected here).
For better or worse, the tobacco industry is global, so too the game of football. Both have been pulled and pushed about by forces our robustly smoking grandfathers would barely recognise. Leo Fitzmaurice, Liverpool based, much-travelled artist, gathers together far more than street litter in this piece. The Chinese and Japanese ‘room’ is like a trophy cupboard, so gold and silver-embossed is their packaging. Make of that what you will.
To be honest, I didn’t get much of the pleasure of football or tobacco products from the piece. So saying, there’s a certain graphic intensity and a smiling acknowledgement that will follow you around the room. This is whimsy and thoughtfulness at once. And it is another in the line-up that makes Creative Director Jane Anderson’s Cube gallery one of the best in town.
Post Match continues at Cube gallery, Manchester, until Aug 20. cube.org.uk
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Monday, 5 March 2012
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