Remarks: Eastside Projects
Gavin Wade, curator of Eastside Projects, which opened in Birmingham end 2008, talks about collaborative work with artists.
“Eastside Projects is a new artist-run space developing new models for the production and presentation of art. Previous exhibitions already initiated examination of the potential of cumulative artworks: artists are invited to make works that become part of the existing conditions of the gallery, operating at different speeds to other works. Matthew Harrison, Lawrence Weiner and Peter Fend made long-term works in September 2008 affecting exhibitions in various ways. Weiner’s work, ‘As Long As It Lasts’, 2008, was used by Simon & Tom Bloor as the title of their solo show in February 2009; the Bloor work now feeds into the current exhibition, Sculpture Show .
Sculpture Show is intended as a moment of revelry in ideas and forms and includes a range of international artists including Scott Myles, Lothar Hempel, Sue Tompkins, Athanasios Argianas, Susan Collis and Torsten Lauschman. A number of historical works by Mel Bochner, Franz West, David Medalla and Art & Language are included as contemporary provocations.
One of Bochner’s works revisits ‘Measurement: Plant’, 1969, owned by Robert Rauschenburg. A house plant was placed in front of a gaffer tape measurement grid and left to grow. The new version incorporates three of Simon & Tom Bloor’s 7 metre tall silver birch trees as an extension of the space’s continuing exploration of cumulative art processes. The other 17 trees will be planted as part of an Eastside project for Birnmingham’s new City Park, with individual tree sponsors.“Sculpture Show, curated by Ruth Claxton and Gavin Wade, 2 May-13 June
