Exile Street / High
Ealing Project, London
14 March – 28 April 2024
Justine Daf, Mark Dean, Nooshin Farhid, Peter Fillingham, Makiko Nagaya, Mark Dean Quinn, Giorgio Sadotti, Suzanne Thomas, Elizabeth Wright
exhibited works:
gallery information:
The project Exile Street / High presents an exhibition of celebrated artists who make work in a variety of media, including painting, video, performance, video/audio, dance, and filmmaking. The exhibition returns to Ealing’s recent popular yet submerged histories – its place in the story of British Art and the evolution of a counterculture in rock music, exiled from collective memory. The Rolling Stones, unknown in 1962 when the band was formed, first performed here, like many other musicians at the Ealing Club, housed below street level on Ealing Broadway. The music scene quickly grew from its origins in the clubs at the same time also emerging at Ealing Art School, later to materialise as punk.
A new generation grew out of Ealing’s underground art and music scenes, influenced in a large part by the radical work of Ealing Art School, in the early 1960s to the 1970s, specifically by Gustav Metzger’s ‘auto-destructive’* performances.
Auto-destructive art is a term invented by the artist Gustav Metzger in the early 1960s to describe radical artworks made by himself and others, in which destruction was part of the process of creating the work.
Roy Ascott’s inter-disciplinary ‘Groundcourse’ at Ealing in visual art was inspired by advancing an idea of live action like Metzger’s to go beyond what is to be fabricated in the constructive act of making something unfamiliar as art or music and thereby challenge pre-conceptions about its construction. These experimental approaches opened new sensations through live action in art and music practices.
Exile Street / High will be hosted at Ealing Project during March and April. The project aims to celebrate a jumpy, fragmentary, skewed, and self-negating art form, undermining its own authority every chance it gets. Visitors will encounter artworks brought together which extend the auto-destructive experiments for a more contemporary context today, hosted in a public space, exemplary at Ealing Project.
* “Metzger released two manifestos clarifying the term ‘Auto-destruction’. The key principles are as follows: Time – The work must, within the course of 20 years, return to its original state of nothingness. Self-completion – Metzger emphasised the importance of the process continuing once the artist sets it off, avoiding any sense of ownership over the development of the piece. Participation –This movement is centred around public participation. Although the artist can set off the process, it must happen in a public space.” [quote from Art Terms, Tate Gallery]
Exhibiting Artists
Nooshin Farhid’s multimedia installations use a wide range of materials and sources engaging a complex of sources and subjects. The work displays – according to Olivia Usher – ‘(…) a connecting thread, a certain kind of agitation, a restlessness, a sense of things not being right’. Farhid, who came to the UK from Iran in the 1980s, was, the artist / critic Peter Suchin writes, ‘(…) a refugee fleeing for her life, and as such was forced to find liveable meaning through the practical reassertion of selfhood in a society and language not originally her own’. Her working method, as a kind of ceaseless sifting through fragments culled from film, television and the internet, combines with her own original imagery, where individual works reveal themselves to assemble a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Farhid’s film of an explosion complements the fragments of energy depicted in Derek Ogbourne’s largescale, ominous, and strange landscapes. Ogbourne’s paintings are counterpoint to his cinematic video, often following a protagonist in the process of an elusive struggle, of physical and spiritual endurance.
Justine Daf archives her automatist drawings from 1970s displayed in a hundred frames collected from local charity shops in Ealing High Street. A giant sheet of newspapers is to be glued together floor to ceiling. The news is painted out in deep cadmium red. A performance by Daf simultaneously extracts dialogue from the words of Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, inviting performers from the audience, who, by wearing hoods will remain anonymous.
Mark Dean presents a dance-based, colourful video projected into the space. A song plays in the final minutes of the film’s 33-minute duration. It provides a break in the choreography before returning the dancers’ movements to the envelope of time of the loop. Dean began looping appropriated film in the late 1970s, and in 1980s extended this technique into music; These techniques eventually combined. Music has remained an integral part of Dean’s art practice, with looped and layered sound samples often providing the structural basis for video works. This treatment of music as primary material is paralleled by a consistent use of film as objet trouvé; however, Dean’s use of appropriation differs by a technique of ‘self-emptying’; a practice grounded in the lived experience of trauma.
Makiko Nagaya makes paintings that are perishable objects. Often performed live before an audience, the artist sets off an auto-destructive process. Nagaya uses polythene sheets rolled out and knotted awkwardly to resemble materialised thoughts hanging from the walls. Words taken from R. D. Laing’s book ‘Knots’ of dialogue-scenarios, are written out to tie the emotional bonds of sculpture to concepts of dependency, uncertainty, exile, and love.
Mark Dean Quinn returns from Edinburgh as the ‘disastrous’ stand-up comedian to perform at Ealing Project on the opening night of Exile Street / High. Quinn’s highly original show sits between performance art and comedy. But while that might sound pretentious, the stand-up allows disruption to leave the door wide open to invite a tragic sense. ‘A fascinating, poignant and extremely entertaining study in deadpan tragicomedy’ (Exeunt Magazine.com). ‘Brilliantly deadpan’ (Chortle.co.uk). ‘Unlike anything else’ (thereviewshub,com)
Peter Fillingham, Giorgio Sadotti, Elizabeth Wright and Suzanne Thomas will produce audio and visual responses in a range of media including music, installation, painting and performance to complement the themes of Exile Street / High.
Robert Frank pictured ‘Exile on Main St’ in his messy and singular vision of street culture of 1972. The photographs originally commissioned for the Rolling Stones’ album cover were rejected, as was Frank’s famously gritty documentary of their American Tour. The ‘exile’ in the title portrayed the precursors of rock -n – roll as outsider, freak, and rebel. Today there is no such heroic role of outsider. The myth of exile on the street is safely held at a distance. However, exile is real, witnessed in the flight of the refugee from barbarism.
Ealing, located at the end of the Central line delimits the boundary of West London’s urban population at the edge of suburban sprawl, floating two dissonant concepts in the exhibition, one picturing the exile as a subject tolerated by society, only if displaced, at the end of the line; the other, ingratiated in the repeated experiments of the historical avant-gardes, whose nostalgic remakes seek to re-animate a worn-out fiction. Exile is acceptable once reconciled to art’s non-place, detached from social life.
Exile Street / High extends over two months – in April a new generation will bring renewal to the exhibition
‘Auto-destructive art is a comprehensive theory for action in the field of the plastic arts in the post-second world war period. The action is not limited to theory of art and the production of art works. It includes social action.’ Gustav Metzger, from the Auto-Destructive Art Manifestos
‘… there is no doubt that the courses in Ealing Art School made their mark, and it is curious that, while renowned at the time, they have not been more widely acknowledged in British art history.’ Emily Pethwick, Frieze 2006