Guy Bar Amotz, Koen De Decker, Matt Franks, Kevin Francis Gray, Artlab, Sam Basu, Mark Titchner, Keith Wilson, Diann Bauer
1 August - 31 August 2003
In a recently built, 400sqm concrete shell, as part of the City development at the back Spitalfields Market, One in the Other presents its Summer group exhibition.
Matchine Matchine is a sculpture show that looks at the condition of hardware in an age of digital data and electronic signals. Or to put it another way, sculpture in a zeitgeist of hi-tech primitivism. All the artists in the show to varying degrees appropriate the notion of the machine, whether it is in the form of Mark Titchner’s mechanical devices for self analysis and psychological conditioning, or Koen De Decker’s mathematical systems for creating order amongst disparate found objects.
In common with each is the proposition that the machine might have become redundant; but also that the spectre of the ghost in the machine has never gone away. Hence the seemingly archaic nature of much of the work. Sam Basu and Koen De Decker’s work become the objects of their own research, the tools of their own investigation and scrutiny, to the extent that they measure themselves into existence. Guy Bar Amotz manufactures backpack, wearable and plinth-based sound systems from form and function to varying degrees of incongruity. Which, along with Mark Titchner’s quasi-performative sound structure, based on the magnetic, curative resonance of water, also have the potential for rituals of social participation.
Transformation is high on the agenda, not the arty alchemical type of transformation but the transformative process of gross mechanics into net productivity - a transliteration. Keith Wilson’s scale modified, bidding platform conflates minimalism with species of objects and agricultural, modular structures in a relic of postfunctionalism. What remains is the purposive residue of nonutilitarian value. While Matt Franks produces synthetic reworkings of Baroque and Modernist sculpture made from mass produced factory plastics and foam; simultaneously reinventing and abasing their harmonies and narratives. Kevin Francis Gray’s eagle encrusted oil slick openly pays homage to industrialisation.
Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, working together as Artlab, are the ones who deal most formally with the concept of their work as a device, having in the past created structures in which to exhibit other peoples work and constructed seemingly utilitarian installations. Here, in the shape of a remaking of the Gio Ponti office equipment at the Milan Fiat HQ and a serving ramp platform, it is a formalism of design and communal exchange dealt with. Built into the recesses of the space, Diann Bauer’s wall size repainting of 19th Century printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s ‘Uchi Jini No Uchi’ takes the form of a vast, concealed viewing device that circumscribes a spectacle in looking, whilst logically delineating Duchamp’s ‘Etant Donnes’ and a scaled-up camera obscura.
Remaking is significant to all the artists in the show, the origin of the title ‘Matchine Matchine’ is itself a remaking of Kraftwerk’s 1980’s song ‘The Man Machine’ and for each of the pieces in the show there is another in existence outside of the gallery. These objects, however, area’t utopian design products or devices trying to reclaim knowledge about their own use, they are more like experiments that have taken on a totemic or ritual status.
