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2/9/2011

Nathaniel Mellors & Chris Bloor

Smart Project Space, Amsterdam

Join us at SMART Project Space for an uncompromising exhibition by the Netherlands based artist Nathaniel Mellors, its imaginative density and ominous ire pushing the shifting relationship between artwork and audience into an uneasy space. The exhibition is part of the ongoing Statement Series at SMART Project Space and is in collaboration with Chris Bloor.

The exhibition uses the interior journey through the body as a narrative framework – each space corresponding to a specific body part - the left eye, right eye, mouth, knee, genitals, intestines, foot, creating a hybrid architecture and mythic creature. Installed in the brain room is the new film commission Ourhouse Episode 3 ‘The Cure of Folly’ / ‘Het Keisnider’, produced by SMART Project Space and NOMAD, written and director by Mellors. The house is under attack from a carnivalesque medieval procession; a group of revelers are dragging a haywain through the grounds. This occurrence is the result of The Object’s ingestion of a book on Flemish painting – specifically two paintings by Hieronymus Bosch - The Haywain Triptych (1490) and Cutting the Stone or Extraction of the Stone of Madness (1494), as well as various etchings after Bosch on the same theme, such as De Keisnijder or de heks van Mallegem by Pieter van der Heyden. The script invokes ‘pre-linguistic’, non- verbal communication and visual absurdism and returns to Mellors recurrent theme of power and control through the administration of language.

A substantial portion of the exhibition is devoted to the dynamic exchange that Mellors shares with artistic contemporaries such as and Vito Acconci, Mick Peters, Brian Catling, as well as with a younger generation of artists: including Tala Madani, Linda Quinlan and Timmy Van Zoelen —all of whom, like Mellors, developed deliberately coarse styles and make liberal use of satire and caricatural line to speak of broad social inequities and expose more specifically the ineptness of power relations. With specific inclusion of James Ensor, in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century avantgarde circles, the subversion of the authority of artistic tradition through the cultivation of one’s individual style was understood as a powerful weapon for social change.

As with many of his earlier works, Mellors draws upon a broad range of artistic, literary, film, and philosophical sources, from a sharp send-up of authoritarian hubris - the etching "Doctrinal Nourishment" (1889/95) is one of Belgian artist James Ensor's most politically scathing works in which bloated, self-satisfied, bare-bottomed public officials excrete a foul diet literally to be swallowed by the masses - and Acconci video work Face-Off (1972) is an ironic collusion of private and public, of exposure and masking, a tense ritual wherein Acconci divulges and then censors his self-revelations, to Basil Wolverton’s series of Stomach drawings. Beyond their own particular sources, what these varied works share is a common political context: an immersion into violent and absurd imagery through which to expose the incompetence of unchecked authority and indicts a society in crisis.

This exhibition has been made possible with the assistance of the Dutch Film Fonds, The Funds for Performing Arts, The Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam fund for the Arts.

(Image: Still from Giantbum, 2009, duration 30 min)

Opening 3 September 2011, 19 hrs

SMART Project Space
Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 12-22, Sun 14-22

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