'The decade 2010-20'. The museum as hostage to fortune.

This exhibition emerges from the negotiation by artists, designers and editors of existing artworks, texts and models for working.

Printing and publishing are important tools utilized in many of the works: The Middle of Nowhere, pp. 126-127, 2009, is extracted from Will Holder’s serialized rewriting of William Morris’ News from Nowhere, 1890. Holder’s ongoing novel adopts the popular Victorian tradition of serialization and is available as single chapters within various publications, jolting the contemporary reader who is accustomed to everything all the time, with a paced, deliberate unfolding. Presented in full is the back catalogue of London-based The Happy Hypocrite, 2008-, edited by Maria Fusco. It is an experimental journal that embraces precedents in publishing, previously dedicating an entire issue to a reprint of A Great Books Primer, 1955, and framing a 1975 edition of the literary fanzine Bananas within its own pages. Fusco’s strategy of non-linear appropriation is a celebration and acknowledgement of print’s inifinite potential for deferred exchange: words never die.

John Baldessari’s 1972 video work in which he subverts Sol LeWitt’s 35 statements on conceptual art by singing them to various pop tunes serves as historical reference for Baldessari sings LeWitt, 2009, a 40-page song book by Estonian designer Toom Tragel. Printed by Zürich-based Rollo Press using an obsolete RISO GR stencil printer Tragel’s sheet music marks both a tribute and a loss, a retrospective longing for an age when art emerged at a multitude of radical positions.

Bernat Daviu has produced a series of aprons, each attributed to various iconic twentieth century painters. Presented is Mark Rothko’s red-stained apron, inspired by Tate Modern’s Rothko Rooms. Daviu uses the apron as a signifier and imagined document of the artist’s studio, and suggests the garment to have a transformative power: wearing the apron, anywhere can become the studio and part of the process of painting. Birmingham-based designer James Langdon has produced a print using imagery from the 1970s comic strip, ‘X-Ray Specs’, in which a young boy’s glasses enable him to see through solid objects. Langdon has taken the comic’s transcendental moments to assemble a fantasy architecture of nostalgia and revelation.

Engaging with processes used in John Smith’s 1987 film Black Tower, Sophie Dutton has developed a series of photo- and film-works around a condemned estate in Islington, that articulate the site’s atmosphere of anxiety. Bristol-based artist Hannah James has created a screen for The Pigeon Wing that draws on folk art and patternmaking to redefine the space’s meeting room. Simon & Tom Bloor’s print of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Disc With Strings (Moon), 1969, plays with the idea of the vandalism of (public) art as becoming integral to the artwork.

‘‘The decade 2010-2020’. The museum as hostage to fortune.’ is taken from an interview with Art & Language conducted by David Batchelor in 1991. The exhibition stands as issue 12 of An Endless Supply, the Birmingham-based monthly ‘zine self-published by Robin Kirkham and Harry Blackett.

Artists: John Baldessari, Simon & Tom Bloor, Bernat Daviu, Book Works, Sophie Dutton,

The Happy Hypocrite, Will Holder, Hannah James, James Langdon, Jeff Nuttall, Toom Tragel

Curated by Robin Kirkham and Harry Blackett

The Pigeon Wing

The Pigeon Wing is also the AL Featured Space for May, so we strongly recommend you go see this exhibition before it closes on the 14th May.