Apologies for x-posting

Press Release: For Immediate Release

Can’t Operate Properly ‘Til Eyes Refocus

an exhibition by Alan Butler

Location: CAKE CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Curragh Camp, Co. Kildare, Ireland
Preview: 23^rd April 2010 6.30-8.30pm
Exhibition Continues: 24^th April to 19^th May
Open Hours: Monday: 1 – 8pm; Tuesday – Wednesday 1 – 5pm; Thurs – Saturdays by appointment. (Please ring ahead: 086 390 5216)
Press Contact: Cake Contemporary Arts
PLEASE DO NOT AT ANYTIME CONTACT THE ARMY BASE. CAKE IS AN INDEPENDENT ORGANISATION WITHIN THE CURRAGH CAMP.

Web: http://www.cakecontemporaryarts.com
T: 086 390 5216 E-mail: hello@cakecontemporaryarts.com

Cake Contemporary Arts is pleased to present Can’t Operate Properly ‘Til Eyes Refocus (COPTER), a solo exhibition by Alan Butler. Butler’s work challenges the ways in which we experience global culture. Butler makes use of appropriation, remixing cultural artefacts and icons by taking these items that possess specific lineages and combining them with disparate elements to create new ideas and truths. Much of his work is heavily laden with iconoclasms and ubiquitous imagery and artefacts. Cross-referencing, repetition and re-interpretation within the work produce dynamic and evolving meanings.

This solo exhibition of Butler will fill both the main upper gallery space and unrenovated lower gallery at Cake with a large body of interdisciplinary artworks that were created between 2008 and 2010, none of which have been shown in Ireland before. The lower galleries will contain works which contrast greatly with the space, with vibrant handmade graphical landscapes featured throughout the exhibition.

Large-scale ink and adhesive vinyl drawings will feature prominently in the exhibition. For these works, the logos of cultural forces (ranging from ‘Metallica 2’ (2008) to Deepak Chopra’ (2009)) are digitally augmented and transfigured into alternative or farcical versions of the originals. The vinyl logos are fabricated in adhesive and placed in the centre of 200cm x 150cm pieces of paper. Butler then manually highlights the logos, tracing their outlines with brightly coloured inks, leaving the paper entirely covered with reinterpretation after reinterpretation of the original augmented logo’s form. While ultimately the nauseating colours and the laborious handmade process are an attempt to distract from their origins, the bold vinyl logos highlight the impenetrability of these signs.

The dizzying, optical illusionary aesthetic of the drawings is mirrored visually and conceptually through the video works ‘Aggrandize to Downfall’ (2009) and ‘9119’ (2009). The first features appropriated motion picture footage of a space shuttle ‘disaster’, and 3D animated Motion Picture Association of America logos. The logos take the form of debris falling from the wreckage of the space ship, which is suspended in a perpetual looping plummet with no resolve. The video ‘9119’ (2009) is digitally augmented Youtube footage of the second plane hitting the Twin Towers. In ‘9119’, the original document has been carefully, but dramatically manipulated to depict a situation, not as a uniquely closed part of history, but as a looping, recurring and transient event.

In addition to a selection other video and sculptural works, COPTER will also feature three new works created in 2010. An ink/vinyl drawing ‘Spongebob’ is part of the ink/vinyl series, and a new drawing work ‘If you are going to say nothing, say it in rainbows’, is a rendering of a computer-generated colour wheel composed of ‘Lorem Ipsum’ placeholder text (a faux-Latin script used in graphic design to fill areas reserved for text in a preliminary layout). Finally, the absurd video sketch ‘Proposal for a three-minute primetime commercial break’ (lasting 2 min 15 secs).

The exhibition itself takes its name (COPTER) from a suffix to the internet acronym ROFL, ‘ROFLCOPTER’ an absurd, but widely used phrase to express laughter online, which stemmed out of a single event on an online multiplayer game. Although COPTER initially referred to a helicopter, through mimetic evolution, the words ‘Can’t Operate Properly Til Eyes Refocus’ were eventually imposed so that it became an acronym. The title, like the rest of the works in this exhibition interleaves networks and relationships between the mimetic transfer of ideas, art history, socio-political and economic ideologies to create a body of work where specific meanings are redundant. While often humorous, COPTER ultimately aims to suggest that meaning in history and language cannot exist as definite and discreet entities, but are constantly evolving artefacts open to further interpretation, remixing, manipulation and distribution.

More information about Alan Butler can be found at http://www.alanbutler.info/

An exhibition trailer can be found here: http://alanbutler.blip.tv/file/3445038/

LOCATION

· In Curragh Camp coming from Newbridge, take left turn by post office.

· Cake is first yellow building after small grey church on your right.

· Parking available in front of building.

Find CAKE CONTEMPORARY ARTS on Google Maps: http://is.gd/bj6D3

TRANSPORT

· By car take exit 12 off M7 motorway. At round about take 2nd exit to Curragh Camp. Continue past church on your left. Take a left at post office. We are on the right.

· 126 Bus Eireann from the Ha’penny Bridge to Kildare, drops off at Curragh Post office.

· Kildare train station, short taxi ride from there to Cake.

· Taxi rank outside Cake.

If you are lucky enough to avoid the thousands of bored idiots/perverts/idiot-perverts on http://www.chatroulette.com, you might stumble across this video (scroll to bottom) which I made a couple of years ago. I thought I had put this video into hibernation, but the arrival of a tool like Chat Roulette seemed like a good reason to dig it out again. It will be displayed intermittently every day for the next few weeks. and there is no way you can be guaranteed to see it, but that’s part of the fun isn’t it. FYI Chat Roulette is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. If I come up with specific times to do screenings I’ll post them here, otherwise it’s whenever I am around to press play. Have fun!

Exhibition Opens: Friday, 12 February 2010, 18:00-21:00
Exhibition continues until 21st February 2010.

Location: Galeries d’exposition de l’Ecole, 13 quai Malaquais, 75006 Paris, France

“Le Weekend de Sept Jours invokes the utopian possibilities of art and points towards 20th century ideas about a future leisure society in which the only purpose of life would be the pursuit of unlicensed pleasure and play. Some of the works in the exhibition reflect this past idea of the future in the reality now lived by those whose lives are defined by the freedom to travel and indulge creativity. Others challenge the notion by exposing the structures and processes which keep men and women locked in (a seven-day week) regime of repetitive labour that limits the expression of individual identity. Just as the notion of a seven-day weekend overturns conventional conceptions of time, its articulation as le weekend de sept jours challenges the idea of language as a signifier of culture and nation. Le Weekend de Sept Jours is the nexus through which time, space and art are reconceived as something we were always ready for, and can now look forward to more than ever “.

Clare Carolin, curator of the exhibition

Exhibition from February the 13th until February the 21st.

Artists :
Guillaume Aubry, Alan Butler, Jean-Baptiste Akim Calistru, Frederico Camara, Justin Coombes, Crionha Costello, Nadine Feinson, Benjamin Hochart, Chia-En Jao, Lucas Jodogne, Sarah Jones, Siulan Ko, Claire Makhlouf Carter, Hektor Mamet, Susan Olij, Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, Hephzibad Rendle-Short, Sima Salehi, Patrick Storey, Charwei Tsai

Somewhere in the synapse…

by Alan Butler & Lola Rayne Booth

In a recent essay, the artist Paul Chan describes his memory of the 1990-91 recession in the United States. He describes how everything around him changed, causing various things to happen; adjustments to society were made and then unmade, as life began to go back to ‘normal’. Comparing our ideological belief in capitalism with the Spiritual, he reminds us that the term ‘recession’ also possesses Religious associations. A ‘recessional’ being “the time after church service when the clergy departs and the people who make up the congregation are left to themselves…. The end of the service announces the beginning of another kind of time: no more commands for sacrifice and expressions of faith; no more sermons from the book of Progress”.ⁱ This is a satisfying comparison, because it suggests that a recession can offer us a positive moment; a time for reflection and consideration to where we have been and what we have seen and done, before we prepare ourselves for the inevitable violent attempt to progress our cultures forward once more.

It is this ‘recessional’ space, which is an interesting factor in Magnhild Opdøl’s work. Much of her past creations operated through détournement, sampling pop culture and the equally inspirational and oppressive force that is art history, to create new original works. It can be said that successful appropriations treat all cultures (and their produce) as information and part of an ever-evolving, pre-existing language. In appropriating, the artist does not necessarily need to subvert the original materials (in fact many appropriations perpetuate the nature of their sources), but sometimes the act of sampling is like stepping out of the realm of the maker and reflecting upon the meanings and supposed ‘truths’ which are given to us by history. Sampling could be seen as a ‘recessional’ space, free from authority and cultural dogma. The process of sampling – the re-appropriation of what came before- is analytical before it is creative and constructs a nebulous distinction between producer and consumer. Similarly, a time of crisis becomes a time of opportunity.

In her new exhibition, Opdøl’s works continue to echo the past. The past is a starting point, which once analysed and considered by the artist, is built upon and exploited to create new works. A series of small pencil studies of insects are the result of an investigation into pathology. Opdøl’s recurring theme of the cycle of life and death, lead her to create dozens of intricate pencil studies of insects of which can live in human corpses. The list of insects somewhat ‘appropriated’ from the practice of pathology, reveal information about the corpse itself. The pathologist can tell how long the host body has been dead judging from how many generations of egg/insect cycles have taken place. Opdøl’s investigations consider pre-existing information and knowledge, which are themselves an analytical process using pre-existing information and knowledge. This feedback cycle created by Opdøl’s choice of subject/process echoes not only the cycles of the insects, but the cycles which take place when appropriating ideas and applying new meanings or purposes upon them. It is not just in the act of sampling – or applying that sample to a remix – that her art exists, perhaps also there is that tiny synapse between the loops and cycles where Opdøl’s creativity occurs. This synapse contains the artist’s decisions – her creativity – and cements together the physical and the conceptual; a recessional space, which is hidden between subject matter and form.

The cycle also exists in her work ‘The Great Escape’. This taxidermy piece consists of a mouse and Opdøl’s (ex-)pet cat, which has spent the last few years posthumously ‘living’ in the artist’s freezer in Norway. Thawed out and taken to the taxidermy studio, the two animals now playfully co-exist in assiduous stasis. In an uncannily outré moment, the work depicts a mouse, post-gastric, yet unscathed, escaping from the cats anus. Ready to consume once more, the rotation of the startled cat’s head greets the mouse on his rebirth as if to repeat the event once again. It is that recessional moment, mirroring Opdøl’s appropriation in her process. ‘The Great Escape’ depicts that split moment, which is neither the beginning nor end of a cycle – not life nor death, that moment that simply bridges together the two and is just part of their recurring nature. In this way, the artists who work in the area of appropriation can be seen as coprophagic, where the used, found or discarded materials, within the recessional space, become food for thought. Once appropriated, they re-enter the domain for potential remix – part of a cycle where nothing can have definite meaning and is a breeding-ground for ambiguity. Her series of exquisite pencil drawings, which accompany the sculpture, investigate a moment where a cat is tearing apart a mouse, which may or may not be dead, re-iterate this.

The work in Opdøl’s new exhibition, moves away from ubiquitous appropriations and enters meta-physical realms. These works are exercises in exploring systems and cycles of life and death and consequently allow the viewer peer into that gap between the concept and the form where her creative decisions exist. Once these decisions made, they will cause various things to happen, such as ‘meaning’ to be formulated. Regardless of what ‘meaning’ you as a viewer discover, what is revealed in the artist’s process and produce is the relentlessness of these life/death cycles. They are merely part of nature. The artist will continue to appropriate the physical and meta-physical, a life in a sort of recessional stasis; a perpetual state of crisis or opportunity, depending which way you want to look at it.

There’s an article about my favourite subject on the Candy Collective website news today.

Check it out here.

As promised…

Three new video works:

9119 (2009)

Aggrandize to Downfall (2009)

Before and After Shelley (2009)

Pictures/video documentation added for my installation, ‘Can’t You Smell the Smoke in the Breeze‘, currently running at the ICA, Singapore until June 19th, 2009. The 3 new videos, which feature in the show, will be posted up shortly also.

Wrapping up the MA in Singapore in th coming weeks. I have a load of my work from the last year installed in this show. will post pics soon, in the mean time, here’s the show info: