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11/10/2013

Two exhibitions

Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham

Asco
No Movies

Asco were formed in the early 1970s by four Chicano artists - Harry Gamboa Jr, Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III and Patssi Valdez - who met in high school in East LA, the centre of Los Angeles’s Mexican American community.
They emerged from the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 60s and early 70s, which fought labour exploitation, the Vietnam draft, police brutality, and other forms of discrimination and deprivation.

Their name means disgust or nausea in Spanish, and their work had a low budget look reflecting their circumstances – Gronk called it aesthetics of poverty. In the 70s, a Chicano artist was expected to paint murals
– the Chicano Movement borrowed from the Mexican political mural tradition of the early 20th century. While sharing the Movement’s opposition to racial discrimination, Asco were also determined to free themselves from the straightjacket of muralism. They sometimes did this by parodying it. Walking Mural and Instant Mural were outrageous street performances rather than paintings on walls.

Asco’s performances in and around East LA resembled scenes from movies that were never made – or fashion shoots, or promotional images of rock bands. They called some of these No Movies. Made in the shadow of Hollywood, yet in a community ghettoised from the wider metropolis, Harry Gamboa Jr’s photographs of Asco’s performances anticipate the staged photography of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Walls and other major figures in postmodern art working with photography. The imagery they used was linked to fantasy and fiction, Asco retained a dangerous political edge. Their actions were made without notice or permission in a public sphere fraught with political tension and police curfews. Some were made at sites where a violent incident had taken place the previous day – the site of a gang conflict or the fatal shooting of demonstrators by the Los Angeles Police Department.

This exhibition builds on Asco’s acclaimed retrospective, Elite of the Obscure, at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Williams College Museum of Art in 2011-12, curated by Rita Gonzalez and Ondine Chavoya. It travels to de Appel in Amsterdam and CAPC in Bordeaux.

For this exhibition Patssi Valdez is making new costumes and a performance installation inspired by Asco’s Paper Fashion Show (1980) and Walking Mural (1972), with fashion students from Nottingham Trent University.

The opening week features a series of events with exhibiting artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez and Geoffrey Farmer. Other Public Programme highlights include the interdisciplinary symposium "Shimmering, Shining, Vomiting, Glitter, The Poetics & Politics of Disgust." Please visit the Talks and Film section of the website for full details.

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Geoffrey Farmer
Let’s Make the Water Turn Black

Geoffrey Farmer is a unique and disconcerting voice in Canadian art. Borrowing elements from conceptual and installation art, he combines poetry and social commentary with specific cultural histories and memories. He presents these findings in a new and unfamiliar light, creating playful and visually entrancing works.

Let’s Make the Water Turn Black is his most technically ambitious installation to date. Over 70 sculptures have been constructed from found materials, salvaged movie props and discarded theatre sets which he presents as an ensemble on a large platform. Animated by computer, in an environment of changing coloured light, the population of characters are choreographed into a mechanical performance. They move slowly in response to musical compositions.

Echoing a 1968 composition by Frank Zappa of the same name, Farmer’s Let’s Make the Water Turn Black presents an improvised chronology of the six decades of the American musician’s life. Farmer sees the vast sculptural structure as a single instrument.

The soundtrack is composed from field recordings relating to places Zappa recorded and played his music. Farmer uses a “cut up” approach to the soundtrack that is related to William S Burrough’s way of writing literature, and to Zappa’s own compositional technique. It also references musique concrete, kinetic art, and the counter- culture music scene in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The computer algorithms that control the work reflect the idiosyncratic compositional forms Zappa used, making each day unique and unpredictable.

Let’s Make the Water Turn Black is a co-production by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Nottingham Contemporary, Hamburg Kunstverein and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

During the first week of the exhibition visitors will be able to see technical run throughs and rehearsals as the artist and crew choreograph the sculpture to the new musical compositions created especially for the Nottingham Contemporary exhibition.


Image: Asco, Walking Mural, 1972 © Harry Gamboa Jr

Press contact:
Lynn Hanna - Head of Marketing and Development 0115 948 9762 lynn@nottinghamcontemporary.org

Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross Nottingham NG1 2GB
Hours:
Tue - Fri, 10:00 - 19:00
Sat, 10:00 - 18:00
Sun, 11:00 - 17:00

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