The Eighteenth Emergency 

Andrew Bryant, Frauke Dannert, Chas Higginbottom, Daniel Lichtman, Stefan Sulzer and Burcu Yagcioglu

27 AUGUST - 4 SEPTEMBER 2010
Private View: 26 AUGUST 2010: 6.30-8.30pm
Deptford Last Friday: 27 AUGUST 2010; open until 8:30pm
General Opening times: Thurs-Sat 12-5pm, or by appointment
Info@coregallery.co.uk
CoreGallery.co.uk

Core Gallery is delighted to present 'The Eighteenth Emergency', an exhibition that brings together the work of 6 emerging international artists.

The exhibition takes as its prompt Betsy Byers’ short novel ‘The Eighteenth Emergency,’ a text, which sees two boys create a series of action plans for unexpected and exotic ‘emergencies’. Apparently a ‘rights of passage’ book for adolescent boys, in Andrew’s rereading of the text the real emergency reveals itself to be masculinity itself, when one of the boys, whose nickname, significantly, is Mouse, finds himself on the wrong side of school bully Mary Hammerman. According to Andrew the narrative unwittingly reveals the violence at the heart of masculine identity, when in the penultimate scene the two boys literally knock each other into position.

As a counterpoint to Byers’ novel, Andrew draws a lot of inferences from Queer Theory, in particular the work of Judith Butler, who describes masculinity as a nexus of fears about feminisation and homophobia. In a culture of individuals who define themselves through gendered identity and desire, is it possible that this panicked masculinity produces varying intensities of intersubjective violence, which are played out across personal, social, political and even aesthetic boundaries? These are the questions the exhibition attempts to address.

Andrew Bryant, Pale Rider, 2010. Andrew has described Pale Rider variously as a portrait of his father, a self portrait, the actualization of the depression he suffered after the death of his brother, or simply the burden of his own death, something we all carry inside us and which gets heavier as we get older. Far from being merely personal interpretations, these observations point to a masculine identity born of injury. Shadowy, brooding, anonymous, mute, potentially violent and forever departing - this Clint Eastwood cliché represents a particular way of responding to loss or trauma, but is it the only way? According to Judith Butler what connects us all is this very injury. Drawing from Freud and Lacan, Butler asserts the idea that subjectivity emerges through an encounter with the other that leaves us partially opaque too ourselves. This opacity is experienced as loss, or trauma, and it is the way we respond to this trauma at the heart of identity that defines how we unfold as subjects. The implication here is that rather than being the cause for withdrawal, paranoia and aggression – as in the case of the Pale Rider – our shared experience of loss and its resulting self-blindness, can form the basis of an intersubjective connectedness.

Frauke Dannert, Untitled, 2010. transforms the aesthetics of brutalist architecture into the aesthetics of war, thus articulating the latent aggression in the modernist project. Paradoxically, the use of paper collage, with its flatness and insubstantiality, injects the image with a sense of vulnerability, so that the agency and potency acquired by these oppressive concrete structures in the act of taking flight, is simultaneously undermined. However, this vulnerability, this lack, remains invisible to the agent, or rather it is denied, split-off, and thus mastered, but at what cost?

Daniel Lichtman, Untitled, 2010, Dan’s work, a series of texts apparently drawn from the diary of an adolescent boy, poignantly reflects the dissecting action of language when we attempt to put ourselves into words. As the boy tries to make sense of the death of his Grandmother and his early relationships with girls, we become aware of the inadequacies of empirical language when it comes to matters of the soul. But beyond an exploration of the limitations of language, what is alluded to here is the necessity, or the perceived demand, that we must give an account of ourselves, and that only through this ‘accounting for’ will recognition of the self be achieved. That the narrator is a boy is not insignificant, since masculinity, with its structural instabilities, is particularly concerned with recognition and with the apparent certainty empirical language offers.

Stefan Sulzer, You Should See The Other Guy, 2010 Consisting of a double self-portrait in which the artist has bloody knuckles, we immediately construct a narrative of violence – what has happened here? The title You should see the other guy alludes to a fight, but what is significant I think is the form of the address this statement takes: who is speaking here, about whom, and to whom? The speaker, the ‘other guy’ and the listener, all presumably men, have their masculinity defined through their inclusion in this socially coded exchange. The utterance is a kind of shibboleth that reveals the tacit agreement amongst men that masculine identity is born of violence. You should see the other guy most directly reflects Andrew’s interpretation of Betsy Byers’ novel The Eighteenth Emergency.

Chas Higginbottom, Mujer española con una rosa / Hombre española con sombrero, 2010 Paying close attention to detail, this installation weaves cheeky art-historical references in with the cliché’s of sexuality represented in Hollywood movies. He is particularly interested in masculinity and femininity in pre-industrial Mexico and the American West, a time when perhaps gender was more clearly defined. Though the two elements work well separately, when they are brought together their dependency upon one another for recognition becomes delightfully clear: this is the idea that what makes a man a man is a woman and vice versa. But far from using this relationship to accentuate gender difference, an activity that can only result in misrecognition, why not recognise the debt we owe one another and see this as the very thing that binds us together. In short, we all lack, and it is in the place of lack, where we need another to give form to our being, that difference gets broken down.

Burcu Yagcioglu Burcu’s video is the most overtly political work in the show as it points directly to the covering of women in Muslim societies. Here though the woman’s own hair becomes the veil, as she ‘styles’ it to resemble a headscarf. This action articulates Judith Butler’s observation that there is “no I that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence…”. This assertion of Butler’s, and Burcu’s video, both point to the complex relationship between history, power and the gendered subject.

Core Gallery's highly considered and dynamic annual exhibition program explores, excites and stimulates discussion. The Eighteenth Emergency is the latest of a series of successful exhibitions in Deptford, and signals the gallery’s intent to showcase some of the best contemporary work coming out of London and which will travel to a world stage.

www.coregallery.co.uk info@coregallery.co.uk
Core Gallery / Cor Blimey Arts
C101 Faircharm Trading Estate
8-12 Creekside
Deptford, London SE8 3DX

http://www.coregallery.co.uk