Murmuration Exaltation, notes on recent practice.

Mrs. Bundy: The gulls went after your fish.

Mr. Sholes: Really - let's be logical about this.

1 . The Birds,1 963.

1 /5 Encounter: 1 2 Apri l 201 3: Participating artists: Samuel Cook, Ryan

Curtis, Jean-Phil ippe Dordolo and Sophie Victoria Ell iott. Venue: The Wig 55

Great Tindal Street, Birmingham, B1 6 8DR

The sight of birds dashing, hovering and fleeting beneath the clouds remain

for us a spectacle, something that appears as a construct so alien that it

l ingers as an enchantment. How we envy the birds in fl ight, as they

circumnavigate our laborious routes taken by foot and wheel. The seagull

that hovers effortlessly on a rising air current; the lone heron that looms over

the canal; the cheerful ly chirping bush fi l led with darting sparrows; the

railway lines colonised by a loping murder of crows and the feral pigeons

loitering under the arches. We observe their flocking and witness models of

behaviour that we can recollect in aspects of our own activities, transmitting

patterns that we identify and systems of logic that we adapt to suit our

purposes. We find commonalities with birds and the ways in which they

uti l ise the universal architecture of our urban spaces.

Pigeons take part in the various orderings of the city world.

2. Hinchl iffe, Steve. ,s 2000. p1 81 .

2/5 (re)code #1 : 26 Apri l 201 3, Participating artist: Ryan Curtis, Venue: Stryx

Unit 1 3 Minerva Works, Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5RS

Some avian behaviours are more particular, they startle in their

audaciousness. Watch starl ings murmurate in packs; as a flock of

thousands dance they blacken the dusk sky as iron fi l l ings under a magnet.

As one bird turns they all turn, the movement of one directly forces the

movement of it’s neighbours. Mesmeric to the gaze of a falcon, as it is to

ourselves, we are hypnotical ly lost in their fleet as they speed to a point and

then immediately dissipate darting to an opposite tangent with mercurial

accuracy. Murmuration is a situation in which information is exchanged;

food, roosting and location are updated. While patterns of fl ight become

clumsy metaphors in our language, mumuration and our powerlessness to

affect its direction, for the curator this carries an unconscious echo that

points elsewhere.

3/5 (re)code # 3: 1 0 May 201 3, Participating artist: Samuel Cook, Venue:

Edible Eastside 1 22 Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5RS

As in our popular culture curation is mutating into a term for ordering stuff

that we the expert “l ike”. A mass of special ist press articles bemoan our

tendency to Instagram our meals into a portfol io of l ived experiences,

repetitively reorder a playl ist into inanity or imbibe a careful ly auteured set of

cocktai ls that uti l ise locally sourced ingredients. Yet a fundamental aspect of

the realities of curation is oblivious from this play with a subject. The detai l is

not in the order, it is in embracing the chaos of not knowing, in looking past

what is apparent at something that has yet to form itself into any conceivably

recognisable thing or experience that the engagement l ies. In other words,

the curator (or the artist curator) watches the murmuration of artists.

Witnessing the ways in which artists are drawn to a set of

concepts/techniques/outputs and then observing as they drop them,

abandon them and evolve them through exchange, debate and making. The

time scale of exhibitions exists outside the continuum of an artist's practice.

In the duration of a touring show new works wil l seek input into what

appears to be a static form. This is a model that Daniel Buran identifies as

one in which the:

Art critic, the exhibition organizer, or the museum director or curator may

calmly choose among the works presented by the artist whose to be

included in this or that exhibition, this or that col lection, this or that gal lery.

The studio is thus a convenience for the organizer: he may compose his

exhibition according to his own desire. 3. Buren, Daniel. , 1 979, p. 52

This desire is to see curation as an impulse that fixes a work firmly (forever

and forever) in aspic. However, the banal received knowledge of curatorial

decisions as a statement of ownership, merely flattens and fixes an artist's

practice. The donning of somebody else’s jacket; the appropriation of an

artist's work for another purpose; the renaming of things – all of these acts

are demonstrations of power to adapt ideas and principles at wil l . This sense

of setting the work into context, affirming the debate, seeing how time, space

and hindsight act on a work are ongoing principles in the cannon of art; yet

who orders the art as it discovers its legs and while it is l ive? Here the artist-

run space becomes more than a testing ground or seedbed, it becomes the

generator for a deeper understanding of new practices as they flex and shift

in real time. So let us be generous here and remember that the primary

reason for collation is done out of sheer enthusiasm for a subject and that

we know that the object of our focus is never static; that it shifts and alters

as its author comes to terms with its implications.

One observes everywhere alteration, sometimes slight, in a course of action.

Might we not have been born, not men, but a flock of birds?

4. Cage, John. , 1 968. p1 1 6.

4/5 (re)code #4, 24 May 201 3: Participating artist: Sophie Victoria Ell iott,

Venue: Stryx Unit 1 3 Minerva Works, Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5RS

After establishing Vinyl in 201 0, an artist-led curatorial project supporting,

mentoring and collaborating with the practices of emergent career

artists from his front room in Moseley, Andre de Jong felt an urgency to

expand and question how he, the artists he worked with, and the audience

operated with the space. Whilst evaluating this he undertook discussions to

embark on a month long residency with the Meter Room in Coventry.

Entitled: Floor Plan for an Institution: The Auditorium, this project sought to

de-code the practices held by the group of artists selected to join de Jong

through extensive workshops in which new work by an individual was

deconstructed and deauthored by the group to produce hybrid works with

collective ownerships. This residency took one of the most fundamental

artistic concerns, the uniqueness of an individual practice, and reshaped it

col lectively. The resulting works were speculative and in some cases

combative since reshaping another’s practice is no easy task. Here the

process of transforming the work was the outcome; ephemeral objects for

documentation, works created by Mumuration, not isolated labour.

5/5 (re)code #5: 7 June 201 3: Participating artist: Jean-Phil ippe Dordolo,

Venue: Edible Eastside 1 22 Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5RS

This year Vinyl became a nomadic project within the city of Birmingham. I t

sought to explore new routes into settl ing temporari ly within the existing

available artist run spaces of The Wig, Stryx and Edible Eastside, to further

develop and rework the concerns that had begun with Floor Plan for an

Institution: The Auditorium into a disjointed engagement with the city that

would further test and distort the practices held by contemporary artists.

These ideas emerged as the curatorial project The Second law of

Thermodynamics or: How I Learned to stop worrying and love The

Chaos, where between Apri l and June 201 3 the practices of Samuel Cook,

Ryan Curtis, Jean-Phil ippe Dordolo and Sophie Victoria Ell iott, were

introduced together, and then collectively redistributed and reworked over

the five events l isted in this text. This destabil isation of work by artists

created new models for practice in which after an initial meeting at The Wig

the first preparatory works were left with one artist total ly amended and then

shown over four occasions at Stryx and Edible Eastside. The pace of the

resulting works and chaotic col l isions of approach and media resulted in

moments in which individual works were created from jokes, floated down

the Thames, transformed beyond recognition. To create such an open

system for practice recognises the integral need that an artist's work has for

intervention and critique. I t is one in which the haphazard nature of chance

and encounter set up moments of realisation that wil l become of central

importance to the future work of the protagonists.

Cathy Wade, October, 201 3.

References.

1 . The Birds,1 963 [Film] Directed by Hitchcock, Alfred, . USA: Universal

Pictures.

2. Hinchl iffe, Steve. , 2000. Pigeons. In Pile, Steve. , & Thrift, Nigel. , City A-Z,

London: Routledge. p1 81 .

3. Buren, Daniel. , (Autumn, 1 979), The Function of the Studio, October, Vol.

1 0, Translated by Repensek, Thomas. p. 52

4. Cage, John. , 1 968. Lecture on Commitment, In Cage, John. , A Year from

Monday, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. p1 1 6.

vinylartspace.com

@vinylartspace