Phil Collins: the return of the real 6 October – 10 November 2007
The true stories of television betrayal that 2006 Turner nominee Phil Collins has made into art in his exhibition the return of the real.
From the fixed phone–in quiz to the manipulated reality show, from Richard and Judy to A Year with the Queen, it has been a turbulent year for television. Indeed, Jeremy Paxman chose to devote this year’s MacTaggart lecture to a controversial "plea for the soul of television." Many believe this crisis of trust has at last opened the door on the smoke and mirrors world of TV production, which has always relied on an element of artifice and cunning to engineer a sense of reality. In his new and timely exhibition — the return of the real — Phil Collins investigates the post–documentary culture which reality television has come to epitomise, and the accompanying issues of authenticity and illusion, intimacy and inaccuracy, expectation and betrayal.
Popular factual programming has been the central focus of Collins’ multifaceted practice for the last four years. When the artist was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize, he decided to use the world’s highest profile art award to directly engage with the media, and in particular with the talk–show, makeover and reality–show formats which dominate 21st century television. In the galleries at Tate Britain Collins set up shady lane productions, a working office and HQ for his own production company, to create a film in which former participants who feel their lives have been profoundly affected by appearing on reality television came forward to tell their stories — uncensored and unedited.
A year later and Collins is presenting the various outcomes of the project in an exhibition which opens on 6 October at the Victoria Miro Gallery. The culmination of Collins’ Turner Prize show was a press conference organised at the Café Royal and attended by national TV crews and news correspondents, there to hear nine veterans of reality television talk about their experiences. Installed in the ground floor gallery at Victoria Miro, the real–time film of the conference is the pivotal element of the exhibition, in which, along with Collins’ subjects, familiar faces and names from broadcast and print media have the camera turned on them to become part of the art work. Upstairs, a six–screen video installation brings together a selection of one–on–one interviews with the contributors. Former participants from shows as diverse as Wife Swap, Brand New You, and Supernanny, seize the opportunity to openly recount their grievances in unedited conversations with renowned media lawyer Mark Stephens.
“I am troubled by the way in which television has exploited its subjects in the cynical pursuit of commercial gain and infotainment. My interest in this project arises from those concerns and I was pleased to be able to help facilitate the voices of those involved, voices which are so often censored by the media which has already misrepresented them.” Mark Stephens
The exhibition will also include a series of anonymous testimonies from leading industry professionals, revealing some of the hidden tricks and sleights of hand often employed by television in “getting the story.” Presented as scrolling text on teleprompting machines, the works function both as actual studio equipment and pseudo–sculptural objects. A suite of screenprints, based on the portraits of participants by street artists employed by Collins, adds a subjective angle and the trace of the human hand against the mechanical apparatus of studio production.
In the current climate in Britain of questionable ‘trust’ between broadcasters, producers, participants and audiences, the return of the real raises serious questions about the dramatisation employed in the world of television to contrive a sense of ‘reality’.
Relating to performance–based and conceptual approaches to video and photography, the art of Phil Collins employs elements of popular culture, low–budget television and reportage–style documentary to address the camera as an instrument of both truth and deception. Investigating the inherent problems of representation within different media, it repeatedly underlines the complex and unpredictable transferences that occur between reality and its mediation in television, film, or, indeed, art.
Victoria Miro Gallery 16 Wharf Road London N1 7RW
Victoria Miro presents the first UK exhibition by Yayoi Kusama since 2000.
10 October - 17 November 2007
Victoria Miro is pleased to announce a two-part exhibition by revered Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama. Born in 1929, Yayoi Kusama is one of the most influential and widely recognised artists of her generation. A contemporary and peer of Robert Ryman, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, Kusama first came to prominence in the early 1960s while living in New York. Now living and working in Tokyo, Kusama continues to produce a significant body of work more than four decades on. Part One of the exhibition will be presented at Victoria Miro 14 in October 2007 and will include new infinity net paintings, while Part Two will be presented at Victoria Miro 16 in February 2008. Kusama first exhibited with the gallery in 1998 and has not had a solo exhibition in London since the Serpentine Gallery survey in 2000.
Yayoi Kusama's art is preoccupied with two interchangeable motifs which can be traced back to early hallucinations the artist first experienced in childhood - the dense, repetitive patterns she calls 'infinity nets' and multiplying polka dots. This obsessive and condensed vision has shaped her life and work - the net and dot form repeated infinitely and identically, eventually leading to self-obliteration: "I had a desire to prophecy and measure the infinity of the boundless universe from my own position with each dot, with an accumulation of particles which are the negative of the holes in the net".
On exhibition are a number of monochromatic paintings commissioned especially for the vast gallery spaces, including one work over 5m in length, reminiscent of the very first white net paintings Kusama exhibited at Brata Gallery, New York in 1959. Physically and optically arresting in scale, these paintings create a disconcerting sense of depth, the nets seemingly advancing as if to envelop the viewer and the entire space. They are compositions with no defined beginning, middle or end - evoking the 'infinity' of their title and presenting complexity and subtlety within a rigorously worked minimal structure.
Born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929, Kusama now lives and works in Tokyo. In a career that spans more than fifty years, she has also made forays into writing, filmmaking and fashion design. Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and has been the subject of many major international museum exhibitions, including Yayoi Kusama, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan), 2004-2005; Kusamatrix, Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2004; Yayoi Kusama, Le Consortium, contemporary art center, Dijon (touring France, Denmark, Korea), 2001-2002; Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1969, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 1998-99. In 2006 she was awarded the 18th annual Praemium Imperiale Award for painting.
