Stephen invited independent, artists and producers from the cultural industries, based in or associated with Birmingham, to appear in the paintings and asked them to choose one of the scenarios.

When he approached team Fused (image above) to take part we scoured the book and opted for this ‘Jab to the Eyes’ pose – we must have been on deadline! We were also allowed to choose the colour. A few photo’s, one sitting later and, we’re sure, painstaking hours of time by Stephen, and the results will be seen as part of Ikon Gallery’s Autumn Almanac from the 17th – 20th November.

Other practitioners featured are Ian and Pippa Francis of 7 Inch Cinema, artist duo Juneau Projects, writer and curator Matt Price (pictured above), artist Tom Ranahan, the Founding Directors of artist-led space Eastside Projects and a self-portrait.

“I approached each of the subjects and asked them to look through the book and choose a particular illustration that they were attracted to. I offered a limited range of colours to choose from and only permitted myself to add white to the body of the chosen colours. These monochrome paintings are transcriptions and re-enactments of the illustrations found in the book”. Explains Stephen. “The book’s role is to inform the reader of how to be self-sufficient in difficult circumstances, an important quality for anyone involved in the cultural industries, a precarious life with no clear career paths or financial certainty”.

Showing Thursday 17 November – Sunday 20 November, 11am – 6pm at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (Second Floor Galleries). Free admission.

There are a series of events taking place for the Autumn Almanac:

Oliver Beer – The Resonance Project: Pay and Display
17-20 November, First Floor Galleries
In June 2010 artist Oliver Beer worked with Ikon and singers from Ex Cathedra to create a sound piece at Pershore Street Car Park in Birmingham.

Ikon Posters
17-20 November, Second Floor Galleries
Specially selected by Ikon’s Director, Jonathan Watkins, these posters assert the breadth of artistic talent featured at Ikon during the last eleven years.

7 Inch Cinema – 17.11.11,
Thursday 17 November, 7-10pm
£3 on the door (Or free if it’s your birthday. Proof required)
An evening of short films and music, taking place on and inspired by the seventeenth of November.

Moseley Folk Festival – Treetop Flyers
Friday 18 November, 7.30pm – 10.30pm
£4 plus booking fee from www.moseleyfolk.co.uk or £6 on the door
. Five-piece Treetop Flyers recently earned themselves a slot at Glastonbury’s prestigious Other Stage after winning the Emerging Talent Competition earlier this year.

Celebrating Sanctuary Birmingham – Crossroad Collision
Saturday 19 November, 2-3pm
Free, Donations welcome
Celebrating Sanctuary Birmingham harnesses the arts to raise awareness of the contributions that refugees make to the UK, and in particular to the city of Birmingham.

Slow Boat Sessions
Saturday 19 November, 7.30-10pm
£5 on the door
In September, Ikon Youth Programme’s (IYP) Slow Boat hosted a series of performances by local musicians, embarking on a journey of sound along Birmingham’s canals.

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Sunday 20 November, 2-4pm
Free
BCMG gives a rare performance of all 34 of Luciano Berio’s Duetti for two violins, with a sprinkling of solo pieces by composers including Howard Skempton and Oliver Knussen.

Capsule present Andrew Moscardo-Parker and the ensemble Ore
Sunday 20 November, 8-11pm
£6 (available via www.theticketsellers.co.uk and on the door)
Andrew Moscardo-Parker performs as Lash Frenzy, exploring the action of playing, turning performances into immersive, participatory events.

Birmingham artist group Companis will be hosting a special event at London’s Barbican Gallery in April. Following on from their Bone Dinner – loosely based on artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s 70s food experiment Bone Meal – they’re continuing the Matta-Clark theme with Anarchidinner, inspired by the guest chef nights at Food, the restaurant co-founded by Matta-Clark and managed and staffed by artists.

Food, with its open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking, turned dining into an event. Serving up such treats on their guest chef nights as a whole sea bass encased in aspic, edible flowers and on one memorable occasion live brine shrimp swimming in broth, Matta-Clark and his fellow artist-chefs made sure that Food represented the ideal collision between art and cuisine.

This is the spirit that Companis will be chanelling for their 21st century version of the Food experience. Anarchidinner will feature artists and performers preparing and serving a sculptural meal with hand and power tools. Tickets (the price includes same-day entry to the exhibition) are on sale now through the Barbican’s website, but spaces are limited, so book early.

Image credits: ‘Bone Dinner’, curated by Companis at Eastside Projects, 5th November 2010. Photos by Chris Keenan. Courtesy Eastside Projects. This project also received support through Fierce Festival’s Arts Council funded ‘Platinum’ artist-practitioner development programme.

Anarchidinner: An Experimental Banquet
Barbican Art Gallery
28 April
£30 online, £35 on the door
7.30pm

Over the past twelve months or so, Companis have been building a steady portfolio of small, intimate events based around the meaning of their name: ‘To break bread with someone.’ A series of low-key, intimate lunch events with a handful of guests, invited from all areas of the Midland’s arts gathering for conversation and to break bread (and cake. And assorted culinary curios).

These events have been building in scope and ambition to include a recent lunch-time event alongside one of Birmingham’s industrial quarter’s canals (and infamous dogging spot). The latest and most ambitious of their events took place on the 5th November at Eastside Projects space. Guests gathered and hovered. For all intents and purposes, the evening looked like any other gallery opening: slightly lost and bewildered folks poised and hoping something was going to happen – the art a mere sideline to the socialising? Maybe that’s one of the things that Companis are consciously responding to when they stage their events? If everyone is only there for the food and drink, what if the food and drink is the event?

The title, Bone Dinner, references Gordon Matta Clark’s Bone Meal art piece from the 1970s. With that as a starting point, Companis have both revisited and expanded on the concept of Clark’s work. Where Clark seemed at times locked within the desire for a static location and focal point for artists and diners to return to, (perhaps a direct substitute of the restaurant for the art gallery), Companis consider themselves more nomadic and, literally, a moveable feast. Clark created several restaurants that existed over time, but Companis envision pop-up dining locations across the country.

Meanwhile, the guests are enjoying the first course of bacon wrapped around a bone and some strong alcoholic drinks to cleanse the palate. Blanch & Shock are here to supply the food. I’ve been lucky enough to work with them myself and they’re excellent and amazing cooks and damn fine folk as well. The first course is quickly consumed and we’re encouraged to lay the bone on a name tag.

Very quickly another starter is handed out. Soon enough everyone is ushered into a large banqueting space and we work through several more courses. I’m no restaurant critic so I won’t try to explain the delicate scents and intricate flavours, but they were all there. The themes and design of the food travel through the body. We lick a chicken flavoured spinal pattern from a tile. We tuck into prawns and leeks shaped like disturbingly accurate bodily elements. The soundtrack to the evening is a mixed and treated soundscape that takes its input from a pile of bones in the centre of the room, as well as a single microphone on the kitchen.

All well and good, but where’s the art?

There’s a strange hybrid with an event like this. At once I think that it’s obviously a performance of sorts. That’s okay: we all understand performance art. It’s usually about the body and we’re encouraged to stand around and stroke our chins while some earnest performers throw shapes across a dirty gallery floor. If we’re really lucky they’ll be naked! And this has performance elements to it, and is fun and all about engaging with people. The word that keeps haunting my mind is immateriality.

Immateriality is the loss of a definable object as the readable text (or even, dare I say it, artifact). That’s a terrible summary but you get the point? It stays with me, because I’m just not sure where the object or focus is or should be. That’s not a criticism at all. It’s part of the challenge of the evening. It exists in many places and like a theatre performance, involves a number of people and skills to realise it.

It might also be fair to delve slightly into the work as a feminist piece. Bone Dinner brings people together: allows barriers to be broken down and makes us engage with our fellow diners. Let us agree for a moment that even in the 21st Century it will most likely fall to a woman in a relationship to be the homemaker. The one who prepares the meal and ensures the house runs as efficiently as any large corporation. It’s not right but it happens more than it should. Companis take this everyday action and challenge us to reconsider the importance of the everyday. The domestic and the quotidian are works of art taking place in the homestead every day. It’s nice to have it front and centre and reconfigured as something to be pondered and enjoyed. Perhaps the difference between Gordon Matta Clark and Companis is that Clark created within a restaurant, (a business environment when all is said and done) and Companis started their events in their own houses. It’s not even worth spelling out further, surely?

Leaving at the end of the evening, we’re handed back our first bone. Scrubbed, dried and drilled, it’s now a delicate piece of jewellery. It’s a memento of the performance, but it’s also the performance itself, isn’t it? Or maybe the performance is when we wear the piece out into our everyday lives again?

Mark Hancock

Click here to view the embedded video.

Does your contemplation of the situation fuck with the flow of circulation? The Glasgow based duo of Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan pose this question to the audience to make us all aware of the concept of art as an exhibition.

They believe the ‘pieces’ are the foundation to an exhibition but the choreography and curation of those pieces is what works to create the experience of seeing the art and they aim to provide the public with a chance to re-analyse how they see art and why they see it as they do. By combining sculpture, painting, architecture, photography, performance, literature, institutional critique and curation the artists work to let the viewer understand their thinking processes, by providing an environment where consciousness of thought process is encouraged.

Eastside Projects, Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham
4 July – 6 September 2009

Image: Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan – Does your contemplation of the situation fuck with the flow of circulation (detail) 2009. Courtesy of Eastside Projects.

Last week (20.2.9) saw the busy launch of the Bloor’s ‘As long as it lasts’ exhibition at the Eastside Projects gallery in Digbeth. It marks Simon and Tom Bloor’s first large scale solo exhibition in the town they call home, and is a chance for us to view their interpretation of modernist sculpture and flawed utopia. The collection, notably surrounded by an indoor grove of Silver Birch trees, details the Bloors’ interest in the concept of failed redevelopment projects and housing estates.

Taking the ‘play sculptures’ of Bryan Blumer (1925-1981) and John Bridgeman (1916 – 2004) commissioned by the City of Birmingham in the 1960’s as inspiration, Simon and Tom explore the artistic nature of failed urban planning.

The show comprises of a series of sculptures, twenty Silver Birch trees, a series of ink drawings on day-glo paper that revive lost public art from 1960’s Birmingham, an exterior billboard and a limited edition print designed by James Langdon.

The show’s title is taken from Lawrence Weiner’s text sculpture of the same title, a bold move seeing that the sculpture is installed as a semi-permanent piece at Eastside Projects and was part of the opening of the gallery. Knowing this to be the case, Simon and Tom challenge us to see how they are using the international status of Weiner and ‘claiming’ the title of his work for their own artistic ends – definitely worth a look.

The exhibition runs until 4th April 2009 and the space is open Thursday’s 12-7pm, Friday and Saturday’s 12-5pm.

Image Credit: Simon & Tom Bloor, Sculpture for the Colonel’s Estate, 2008. Ink on pink day-glo paper, 29.7 x 42 cm.

Words: Jon Watson

In Birmingham’s newly emerging cultural quarter, there is a billboard attached to the front of a building with an intriguing message. Written in Spanish, courtesy of New York based artist Liam Gillick, we are informed that ‘The Doors of the Administration Building are Now Open’. The administration refers to Birmingham’s new artist-led exhibition space Eastside Projects. Headed by Gavin Wade, Eastside Projects is an exciting, innovative and large-scale project space that takes radical exhibition precedents as its starting point. The gallery joins Vivid and Ikon Eastside in the area to form a formidable and extraordinary group of contemporary exhibition spaces never seen in Birmingham on this scale before.

Just walking through the door put you into direct contact with a specially commissioned artwork. Matthew Harrison’s attractive and functional door handle, titled Willkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome. C’mon in. is meticulously fashioned from an impressive list of exotic timbers – transporting you into a highly considered and constructed place to experience art.

Eastside Projects inhabits an industrial building that, whilst still typical to the area, seems to have been purpose built to exhibit art. The space is large and light with an expanse of concrete floor that gives the building the feel that this is a place where work is done and art is created. The industrial history of the area and the building link directly to Wade’s plans to position the gallery as a site of production. The way an environment is constructed and organised provides a framing for what is going on inside it, exhibitions and exhibition making, research, film, events, music and performance. The gallery seems to be positioning itself as a project making machine, with Wade describing the space as an ‘incubator of new ideas and forms for the city of Birmingham and beyond’.

The exhibition is developing gradually over the shows nine week run. This unusual way in which the show will progress from an empty space into a complete and complex gallery show takes its inspiration from three historical exhibitions. Peter Nadin’s continuous exhibition The Work Shown In This Space Is a Response To The Existing Conditions And/Or Work Previously Shown Within This Space (1979-80) contained works by artists such as Peter Fend and Lawrence Weiner (who have also created work for the Eastside show) who directly responded to each others work, developing a cumulative environment. This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things’ title is adapted from This is the Show and the Show is Many Things (1994), an exhibition planned through workshops as a joint enterprise including artist Louise Borgeois and Luc Tuymans. Also providing a model for exhibition making is El Lissitsky’s groundbreaking Abstract Cabinet, 1926/1930. El Lissitsky generated a highly constructed environment for artworks by himself along with Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo.

Covering the 225msq floor of the main gallery is a large white painted map by Berlin based USA artist Peter Fend. Political Economies After Oil: Proposal for Putin and Chavez in October 2008 is partly based on a conversation the artist had with Hugo Chavez in 2002. It also follows on from his collaboration with Jenny Holzer in 1980, Political Economies After Oil. The current work explores alternatives to energy production in a global political context. The floor of the gallery becomes a map identifying and detailing the best positions, or hotspots, to harvest algae for energy production, overseen by two images of Putin and Chavez. Thirty years on Fend’s initial comments on the fact we need to be considering alternative economies to the oil based structures we currently rely on still prove timely and pertinent food for thought 30 years later and position the artist as functional provider for our ecosystems.

Hanging above the main gallery is a second billboard, this time stating in Spanish that ‘The Whatnots of the Administration Are Now Open’, these statements, written by Gillick come across as a tongue in cheek comment on the bewildering and inaccessible ‘speak’of art world bureaucracies. Art and artists can often seem like ‘whatnots’ or thingamajigs to the uninitiated and Gillick seems to position this as a positive asset to market.

Tucked into the corner of the main gallery is a strange and wonderful redwood structure which is both artwork, gallery office and kitchen. Pleasure Island was originally commissioned for the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and created by Heather and Ivan Morison by scaling up a fools gold crystal from Peru. The artists presented a startlingly shocking puppet show called I Love Pleasure Island on the opening night of the gallery which set new standards of depravity based on the classic punch and Judy model. Hopefully there will be more to come in Pleasure Island over the next few years! The piece certainly showcases how fiction, design, organization and architecture are forming an integral part of programming at the gallery and asks questions of how far art can be used within a space like this. Adjacent to Pleasure Island, in the Biennial scale cinema room, Guangzhou based Chen Shaoxiong’s monochromatic animated illustrations as films, Ink City, Ink Things and Ink Diary, bring a magical feel to the prosaic activities captured from the artists routine, punctuated with moments of political and private reverie. The soundtrack for Chen’s films also connect strongly with the evolving sound piece created by electronica duo ISAN for the inaugural exhibition. Sampling sounds collected from Eastside Projects and its surrounding area the musicians are adding an aural architecture which starts with two sound systems adding ‘drone’ and ‘texture’ to the space. One presumes melody, dischord and vocals may follow or perhaps that is the job of the other works in the show?

Upon walking into the large exhibition space I was struck by the apparent lack of recognizable ‘artwork’ and had to remind myself of two things: firstly that the exhibition will grow with new artworks added weekly and secondly, everything that you I can see in the building is an artwork. Or claims to be. From the door handle to the very structures housed within the space. Support Structure, formed by architect Celine Condorelli and Wade himself, have designed internal and external structures that will display and provide space to create work. The show as a whole presents an extraordinary format in which a collaboration of artworks can be collated and presented as one meta-artwork – the exhibition. The way in which this and future shows have been conceived of posits an idea that has been long neglected: that the physical space of the exhibition can produce as well as contain the exhibition.

Due for installation next week is a portaloo that will harvest human waste and generate power for the gallery, conceived of by Mark Titchner this eco-project resonates with ideas for alternative energy production brought up in Fend’s piece.

The show which exhibits nearly thirty artists in all over the nine week period is, at the time of writing this, in its early stages. It felt invigorating to be joining an exhibition as it is being created, as its narrative is being written. This growth process allows a new aspect of exhibition creating to come to the fore, exposing all involved to the fact that no matter how much planning is carried out, no one can really read the final chapter until Eastside Projects has written it.

Words: Fay Khan

Thursday to Saturday 12-5pm
Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Digbeth, Birmingham, B9 4AR
www.eastsideprojects.org