British Art Show – The curators decide (1)

The British Art Show is in full swing. It is coming to the end of its run in Edinburgh, having already done a stint in Leeds and will move on to Norwich and Southampton. The Open College of the Arts is giving its students plenty of opportunities to engage with this important quinquennial event. As part of that I will be writing a series of blogs about aspects of the show, although really these will just be expanded signposts to the BAS website itself which is encyclopaedic and highly recommended.
The British Art Show is conceived by guest curators every 5 years. This year, Lydia Yee and Anna Collin were invited to do the job. Anna Collin is an associate curator at Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris and has worked at the Whitechapel, the V&A and Gasworks. Lydia Yee is curator at the Barbican and was previously a senior curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. They are then both London based and in the thick of the art establishment, but Anna Collin is also a director of the experimental Open School East which seeks to challenge some of the barriers to artistic development which are more about money than anything intrinsic to the discipline and I do feel as if this show has a welcome and intellectually rewarding openness to it with some relative newcomers alongside more established names.
The curatorial premise for this year’s BAS is an exploration of the way artists use materials and engage with the material world “at a time of increasing convergence between the real and virtual worlds”. There is no doubt that Bruno Latour and his notion of object agency features in the melting pot of ideas as the pair have considered “the meaning and manifestation of objects in a dematerialised world” but it is James Bridle’s concept of the new aesthetic that I think runs through the spine of this show.
In a milieu where being first and new really counts, I feel I was ahead of the curve with this, although I did not make particular use of it, as I clearly remember the moment a decade ago when my daughter called to me from her potty in response to my enquiry – “it’s still downloading”. This casual blending of the digital and the all too material from the mouth of a toddler really brought home to me just how interchangeable those two worlds would be to her growing up.
The New Aesthetic has grown from Bridle’s original blog about real world design and objects which mimic or utilise aspects of the virtual world; a pixellated effect on an office block for example. The development of our digital lives has been rife with skeuomorphism and so it is only logical that the tide would begin to flow both ways eventually.
I find James Bridle an interesting man. He is no academic, but his casual and honest writing uses the tropes of the blog and tweet in a way which makes total sense for his project. He even says that he wishes he had never coined the term ‘new aesthetics’ and did so partly because he had little idea what aesthetics really meant at the time. He feels like so many of the high achieving students I have had over the years at OCA – not mired in the artifice and trappings of academia, but passionate and excited by his own vision which he is working away to uncover and make extant for the rest of us. An academic recently said to me – ‘research is all about molehills, not mountains’. I do understand the validity of that but I warm to these wild frontierspeople and their mountain building. Bridle says himself:
“the New Aesthetic project is undertaken within its own medium: it is an attempt to “write” critically about the network in the vernacular of the network itself: in a tumblr, in blog posts, in YouTube videos of lectures, tweeted reports and messages, reblogs, likes, and comments. In this sense, from my perspective, it is as much work as criticism: it does not conform to the formal shapes – manifesto, essay, book – expected by critics and academics. As a result, it remains largely illegible to them, despite frequent public statements of the present kind.”
In subsequent blogs I will showcase artists who have been selected to populate this exhibition and between them build this landscape of virtually inspired materiality. I hope to see a few of you at the study days in Edinburgh and Southampton which I am doing myself.
Image:Rachel Maclean, Feed Me (film still), 2015 © Rachel Maclean 2015.