More Pricks Than Kicks

at DRAF, Great Titchfield Street

12 October–18 December 2010
Roberts Institute of Art
  • Paul Chan
  • George Condo
  • Keren Cytter
  • Simon Denny
  • Patrizio Di Massimo
  • Simon Fujiwara
  • Amy Granat / Cinema Zero
  • Thomas Houseago
  • Bethan Huws
  • Nathaniel Mellors
  • Laure Prouvost
  • Pietro Roccasalva
Roberts Institute of Art

Detail of Paul Chan, Oh Stexts, 2009 and Simon Denny, Empty Vessel 4, 2010.

Courtesy Paul Chan / Courtesy Simon Denny. Photo: Tomas Rydin
Roberts Institute of Art

Installation view of More Pricks Than Kicks, 2010.

Photo: Thomas Rydin

More Pricks Than Kicks is an exhibition curated by artist Patrizio Di Massimo with DRAF featuring works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Exploring motifs such as the dissolution of language, the theatricalised body and the ‘breakdown’ of an image, the project questions how a notion such as ‘exhaustion’ can be formally enacted.

The exhibition is the outcome of twelve-months of dialogue and research between DRAF's Chief Curator Vincent Honoré and artist Patrizio Di Massimo about contemporary practices and curatorial projects. Most of the artists invited in the exhibition had been asked to participate in this conversation by either entering into a collective dialogue, sharing references or sources, proposing new works and interventions.

More Pricks Than Kicks borrows its title from the first book published by Samuel Beckett. This collection of short prose with their witty and dry humour, and the formal qualities of Beckett’s style (as analysed by Gilles Deleuze in his essay ‘The Exhausted’), gives the exhibition its tone. More Pricks Than Kicks intends to create a platform to question creation in its more sinister quality and contemporary time in its less graspable forms. The works displayed are not fixed proposals but active processes: ‘exhausted’ since they are themselves necessary failed attempts to exhaust a form, a medium, a system, a notion. Cultivating accident, the artists in this exhibition accept exhaustion as the paradoxical core of any creative dynamic.

Installation images

Roberts Institute of Art

George Condo, St Jerome, 2007 and Thomas Houseago, Working Title (Striding Figure), 2009.

Courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Photo: Thomas Rydin

Paul Chan

Paul Chan (b. Hong Kong, lives in New York). Paul Chan works with video, drawing, collage, text, installation and collaborative site-specific projects. Engaging such fundamental topics as war, religion, philosophy, and desire, his works include a recent large-scale production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in two neighborhoods of New Orleans.

George Condo

George Condo (b. Concord, USA, lives in New York). George Condo engages with history of art and gives his “abstract-figurative” version out of it. Freely using a ”pre-existing” imagery (Velazquez, David, Picasso, Comics, etc.) with in a non nostalgic way, his paintings and sculptures reinvent what he had called “existential portraits” of contemporary modern subjects. He paints portraits, vanities, still lives, “a whole collection of things”.

Keren Cytter

Keren Cytter (b. Tel Aviv, lives in Berlin). Keren Cytter writes novels and directs plays, but she is mostly known for her videos and films that portray characters entangled in complex relationships, simultaneously connected and alienated from one another. Inspired by direct experiences and observations of her surroundings as well as the films, plays, and novels of such luminaries as Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Roman Polanski, Jack Smith, Jorge Luis Borges, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett and mainstays of popular culture like soap operas and science fiction, her work is carefully scripted and produced while maintaining an immediate sense of spontaneity and unpredictability.

Simon Denny

Simon Denny (b. Auckland, lives in Auckland and Frankfurt). Simon Denny presents his audiences with situations that tend to foreground an engagement with associations of form, purpose and action. Constructions of everyday materials are combined with – and are often comprised of – domestic ready-mades and found imagery. His apparent crude modesty of form belies the poetic intelligence of the works coming-to-be and sculptural conceits. Denny’s art-making is rooted in consumption and presentation; considerations of performance and moments of recapitulation which embed the artist’s activity in his material – objects and images chosen in the first instance for the character and activity they already inhabit.

Patrizio Di Massimo

Patrizio Di Massimo (b. Jesi, Italy, lives in Amsterdam and London). Patrizio Di Massimo has used repetition and drift as a strategy in both his drawings (repeating the same motif) and his sound piece The Secret Proceedings in the Trial at Benghazi, 15 September 1931. The work is the registration of the juridical process made by the Italian Government to the leader of the Libyan resistance Omar el-Mukhtar that then brought him to decapitation (It is part of Massimo’s Libya project). “I found the document in English in an Arabic web-site and then I decided to ask an actor for reading it and do the voice-over. What stroke me the most about the document was that the trial was given in a three-fold way. To put it better the same interrogation was written three times in three different ways according to the juridical way of transcribing the proceedings. The three ways are: 1) The interrogation of the prisoner 2) The typewritten of the interrogation of the prisoner 3) The record of the interrogation of the prisoner. It is therefore a play of narrations in which the use of rhetoric, that creates the three different proses, is interweaved with the fact that Law is a branch of rhetoric in itself.” Another work, Untitled (My Father Emulating Me) shows an old photograph of the artist’s father in the 70s, at the same age than the artist when he discovered the photograph (23 years old). They look identical. The work becomes a somewhat cynical reflexion of the lack of originality, creation, difference in contemporary culture, the authorship and paternity, and impossibility to escape repetitions and sources.

Simon Fujiwara

Simon Fujiwara (b. London, lives in Berlin and Mexico City). Encompassing formats including performance-lectures, published fiction, and collections of various articles and artefacts, the recent projects of Berlin-based Simon Fujiwara take shape as if scattered trails of evidence whose parts are more-or-less plausible. Each unearths an implicit myth of human origins and an explicit sexual archeology which together weave narratives that take us from our shared and most distant human past, to up close and personal with Fujiwara and his family history. The son of a British mother and a Japanese father, the artist unfolds a practice that is ostensibly a ‘journey of personal discovery’ about his own origins, or so the cliché goes, into a carefully constructed borderline of ethnology, eroticism, architecture and ancestry. Histories and biographies are written, rewritten – or faked –and gay porno stories hold just as much credence as paleontological treatises. – Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna.

Amy Granat

Amy Granat (b. Saint Louis, USA, lives in New York). The majority of Granat’s work consists of films and photography. Often creating abstract films without a camera, she uses the materials in untraditional ways. The destructive use of color or acid, the scratching and puncturing of the film strip: these manual modifications manifest themselves in a variety of reflections and distortions that, through the process of projection, generate pictorial shapes. Central to Granat’s work is how she experiments with and defamiliarizes her media. Her films have a pictorial feel, while her photographic works are reminiscent of sculptures: scratched lines make up her projected images, and pieces of film strips appear on her photograms and collages […]. For More Pricks Than Kicks, Amy Granat will conceive a Cinema Zero evening, a performative event that will include video screenings and possibly dance.

Thomas Hauseago

Thomas Houseago (b. Leeds, lives in Los Angeles). Thomas Houseago’s work can be questioned as un-original, as a failure of the figure, as the failure of modernism, as failure of materials. They also bring an uncomfortable feeling of authoritarian art (colonialism: cf Patrizio di Massimo). Colonialism (of the materials, of a tradition, of a culture) is not foreign to Houseago’s practice. “It’s always suspect to examine the forgotten ‘primitive’ memory of the figurative in Modernism – to return to Modernism’s repressed, barely formed ‘wild urges’. When such an attempt is filtered through an ironic, neo-expressionist approach, it’s even more difficult for the viewer to locate the philosophical and cultural contexts behind the work. Thomas Houseago’s exhibition forces the viewer to ask whether the work on display transcends its influences or merely references them. Houseago’s sculptures re-work many of the stylistic quirks and formal concerns of Cubism. The objects’ armature is exposed revealing all aspects and surfaces in the final form. Yet, Houseago deals almost exclusively with opposites, turning the object inside out and back to front so construction and form become one. This is not to say that they are not successful in their own right, but you can’t escape the feeling that they are half-realised, begging to be transformed into monumental bronzes, public sculpture that would not look out of place in front of a university library.” Alexander Kennedy. source

Bethan Huws

Bethan Huws (b. Bangor, Wales, lives in Paris and Berlin). Huws’ series of Word Vitrines began in 1999: office display boards on which she affixes discursive snippets, or some decontextualised words, in white plastic lettering. The process of translation in the work of Bethan Huws has been highlighted. Translation responds to a movement of displacement (from one language to another) and reframing (from one culture to another). At its best, translation undergoes a return to origins in order to express a text or concept in another language. It is not translation per say that structures the work of Bethan Huws, rather it is the investigation of procedures of displacement and the search for origins in language that has led to her interest in translation as one of clearest ways of making them manifest (procedures of displacement and the search for origins are also found in her installations, in Scraped Floor, and in her readymades, watercolours, and films). By opposing different modes of enunciation (narratives, discourse, writing, speech), language games (dominant/dominated languages, Welsh/English, poetry or philosophy/bureaucracy, spoken language), and word games, she makes of language a tool of deconstructive critique. Words are readymades (Untitled [Love Letter], 2001): displaced, they reinform the contexts of enunciation and demonstrate the complexity of all discourses.

Nathaniel Mellors

Nathaniel Mellors (b. Doncaster, lives in London and Rotterdam). There is a technique in comedy that builds up not to necessarily knock you down, but to disintegrate gently before reaching a climax. Such undermining of expectations was the perennial comic ploy of Tommy Cooper in his bad magician bungles, for instance. Nathaniel Mellors conducts similar moments of dissolution in many registers: over time sense collapses, a mood darkens or narrative falls apart; physically, too, everything seems poised to clatter to the ground. It is as though the chaos from which things have been formed permanently threatened to regain (lack of) control. – Sally O’Reilly.

Laure Provost

Laure Prouvost (b. Croix-Lille, France, lives in London). One of the watchwords in contemporary video and photography during the past decade or so has been ‘narrative’, the candid, the documentary and the aesthetic have been sidelined somewhat by the pull of the narrative image whether it be moving or still. Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Sophy Rickett, Hannah Starkey and Bill Viola and are just some artists who have forefronted the idea of the narrative image. In her compact, raw-edged video pieces, Laure Prouvost provides narratives that seem to parody the whole genre from which they spring, with their wall-to-wall hyperbole and whimsical fantasy they charm and disturb at the same time. […] Self-deprecating illusions thrust us in and out of a bizarre fantasy world, which is both richly imaginative and outrageously implausible. The raw and flawed, artless, aesthetic of Prouvost’s visuals echo the motto of Prouvost & Sons Ltd., which is, ‘we promote imperfection’ and bring to mind a statement by the critic and commentator, Pavel Buchler in his book ‘Ghost Stories’ where he writes, “to produce a blurred photograph has come to be seen as the exclusive right of the professional, even a sure sign of the professional mandate, whereas the same blurred image taken by the lay photographer implies a ‘human error’.” Here he is thinking of the work of such photographers as Uta Barth or Bill Jacobson, while Prouvost’s aesthetic fits neatly into this mould, her make believe company, ‘Prouvost & Sons Ltd.’ should certainly hold back from listing themselves on the Stock Exchange.

Pietro Roccasalva

Pietro Roccasalva (born 1970 Modica, Italy, based in Milan). Escaping from any kind of linearity, Pietro Roccasalva’s creative process always has its coinciding beginning and end in a painting. To discern the diverse moments of its trajectory, the artist opens the doors of what he defines as a “worksite”. There, together with all the phases of the graphic creation—objects, furniture, audiovisuals, actions and tableaux vivant—there are visions and obsessions filled with philosophical, historical and artistic instances mixed with events, circumstances and coincidences by which the artificer likes to be surprised. In this way, every image always determines another one, and every work carries a trace of something that has preceded it in a constant back-and-forth of iconographies, which repeat themselves in variety and generate new situations.

Collection Postcard
Simon Fujiwara, The Unwritten Erotic Saga of the Fujiwara Family (1st Edition), 2010

A white egg sits propped between the front cover of a black leather bound book, holding the cover open. This book is stacked on top two similar volumes. On the visible spine it reads 'Simon Fujiwara - Welcome to the Hotel Mumber'

Keren Cytter, Der Spiegel, 2007

Roberts Institute of Art