To predict the future you must change the past
dal 16/5/2003 al 1/6/2003
Segnalato da
16/5/2003
To predict the future you must change the past
Beckford's Tower, Bath
This installation exhibited in William Beckford's Tower, built in the early 19th C by the reclusive aesthete and author of Vathek, is by the London-based experimental gallery: the Centre of Attention.
An installation by the Centre of Attention
at Beckford's Tower
Exhibition runs 17 May to 1 June 2003
as part of the Bath Fringe Festival
This installation exhibited in William Beckford's Tower, built in the early 19th C by the reclusive aesthete and author of Vathek, is by the London-based experimental gallery: the Centre of Attention. Snubbed by society because of a sexual scandal which dogged his whole life, Beckford led a secluded existence devoted to art and architecture and surrounded by a exotic retinue of servants including dwarfs and choristers. It was in this Lansdown Tower that he would clip articles from the Times on other people's sexual scandals and paste them into a no doubt elegant scrapbook.
The Centre of Attention project has been 4 fold:
1 Examining ideas around the trace left by a life/performance and how life can only be examined in fragments, which will colour and distort the whole picture.
2 Drawing the audience through a labyrinthine world of art luring them onward to some sort of goal. Achieving the goal would correspond to some summit reaching activity. And once surmounted the work would be revealed (?) This revelation also corresponds with
3 asking what would the art collector Beckford be collecting today. Video art?
4 This installation in a Grade 1 listed building questions our reactions as visitors of Beckford Tower today, and whether we would have had nothing but derision and contempt for the man, had we been contemporaries of his.
Curators' talk about the installation and about the gallery: Gary O'Dwyer in conversation with Pierre Coinde: Saturday 24 May 2003, 5 pm. Free entrance, numbers are limited
Hours: Saturdays, Sundays and Bank holidays from 10.30 am to 5 pm
For more information, interviews and images: Pierre Coinde or Gary O'Dwyer at the Centre of Attention: 020 7729 0699
With our thanks to Steve Henwood at Bath Fringe and Amy at the Bath Preservation Trust who made this exhibition possible.
Beckford's Tower, Lansdown Road, Bath BA1 2LR