A series of videos were made looking at walls. Here was the first video I made.
Read MoreGunFingers
The Wysing Gallery commissioned Zinzi Minnott, an artist who works with dance and its relationship to politic, to make a video. Seen through many lenses, race, queer culture, gender and class, dance is, according to Minnott, always political. In her video piece, Gun Fingers and Oblique Bullets (2017), classic jungle music plays and a series of abstract images fade in and out of one another. An image person dancing with ‘gun fingers’ if revisited throughout the video. Following this film, I decided to look into the concept of ‘gun fingers’ in the hope of finding where else it is referenced within music and/or dance culture.
The Urban Dictionary (online….
“to form a gun wid ur fingers, connoting holding a real gun. Used in raves when u think a lyric was hot or a tune, u get out ur gun fingers and shoot for the sky - dats tune was the shit... gun fingers..bap, bap,bap!!"
My research led me to look at gangster rap videos, where ‘gun fingers’ are used to signal a very different message. Instead of exclusively signalling their appreciation of the lyrics and music, rappers and their entourage stare out at the viewer and shoot at them with gun fingers.
There is a shift from appreciation of the music to a threat of violence yet there appears to be some referencing to child’s play, an acting out of scenarios whereby hand gestures and imaginary settings stand in for the real thing.
By freeze-framing the gangster videos and capturing stills I was able to analyse the kinds of gun people were pointing at me and there were as many gun types as there were people. The videos undoubtedly came from the USA where owning a gun is legal so having access to them might have made the simulation of ‘acting as one’ easier. So I thought it might be interesting to see what a British persons pretend gun would look like.
A series of 91 photographs were produced as a result of my standing in the Linea Gallery for the afternoon and stopping people walking past and asking them to show me their best ‘gun fingers’. My findings are as follows. No one refused, (apart from one technician), with many asking me about the project. The types of guns people adopted seemed to run along gender lines too with not one women deciding to be, or have, a machine gun, the only machine guns were from the men. Countless women were worried about chipped nail varnish and dirty hands even though they knew they could not be identified from the photo as I was only photographing hands. One man came back and asked if he could use his ‘gun fingers’ to mark out a peace sign instead.
Everyone had a gun in them.
The fetishization of guns merits further research.
#DicktatorDon's PCP's are made in China Which Amuses Me
I had them made right near the start of the project when the earliest designs for #DicktatorDon were taking shape. They were designed in the UK by a very talented hardware engineer and then I ordered a large number of the PCBs because the cost of repeat orders would have been expensive. I have contacts in Shenzen who can get the parts and the factory to build them at very reasonable prices.
There is an irony with the escalating trade war between China and America that this parody of Donald Trump is at his core Chinese.
Statue Down
Today the dismantling of the statue took place and seeing the statue in parts is giving me ideas on how I might like to exhibit her going forward. She was never intended to be displayed fully built but in various stages of assembly - or disassembly and so it is vital that I get opportunities like this to see what works. The materials though not too heavy as individual pieces get very weighty when pieces are joined together. The taking down of liberty signifies a collapse of ideas of liberty itself but not a collapse over time due to wear and tear - the notion of entropy; this is a willful act, a conscious dismantling. She is decapitated and yet still holding onto her flame - perhaps holding onto some semblance of hope.
With the offer of an exhibition at Northampton University in their new Waterside campus in 2019 it is days like this allow me to play with new ideas and practical ideas around how to physically assemble such a large sculpture. Large, ambitious pieces of art require large crews and lots of planning and time.
Blood on the Wall at SafeHouse 2
Having had a little bit of time to reflect on this exhibition I had a few more thoughts about it and so wanted to share them.
SafeHouse 2 is an interesting exhibition space, part of a larger complex of buildings all used to display art. It is a two up, two down, terraced house that has been stripped to the brick walls, more building site than art gallery.
It is a perfect space for a certain kind of art. Bold, rough or with strong colours to pull itself out from the the background. Lighting also posed a challenge as the provided lighting was non existent to extremely minimal.
I was initially very excited by the space I had within SafeHouse 2, it being a long clear wall upstairs that was well lit by natural light from two windows. The wall itself was plastered but heavily pock marked. It looked like someone has been firing guns into the wall and shooting off the plaster where the rounds had hit. This seemed an ideal backdrop for my Ascent of Man piece.
Accent of Man, inspired by work that I have been doing around gun culture and crimes, is a series of individual pieces constructed from laser cut gun pieces that were put together almost like an animal or creature. Each piece got a bit bigger or more involved than its predecessor evolving closer and closer to a gun but never really getting there.
Their original working title was Blood Guns because they were constructed with lasercut acetate and stuck together with a custom made fake blood. This gave them a strangely evocative and haunting effect. But the individual pieces went through several iterations to try and convey the feeling of their evolution or struggle to realize themselves in some way.
When they came to be attached to the wall the lighting quickly became an issue. One could not really appreciate the translucent and haunting effect of the pieces. I found a couple of side illumination halogens were very effective in restoring that feel to them although it would have been better if the lighting was more polished and less harsh.
During the private view it became apparent that, rather than helping to tell their story, the background wall with it's 'pock marks' was hindering peoples ability to really see the pieces and from a distance they were at times missed.
The lesson learnt here was both to think more carefully about the position of pieces, the lighting and to their background, which sadly in this setting distracted from pieces that represented weapons of destruction and death but were themselves rather beautiful.
3d guns Designs legalized in USA
The Independent newpaper today reports that the Administration is allowing the distribution of the designs of 3D printed guns to go ahead.
This directly relates to my work Liberated, which was shown at Safehouse 2. Indeed the plans are of that very gun. The Independent article explains the events behind the publishing of the build plans for the gun.
It seems that the government decided not to try and enforce their export laws to prohibit the export of controlled intellectual property. While the legal arguments may have been complex around the balancing of First Amendment rights to free speech in written form (software being considered writing) against the laws that prohibit the export of controlled items, it is clear that while these designs were accessible on the dark web they will now be far more accessible.
The consequences of this are yet to be understood. While such guns are very hard to trace they represent a real risk to the user of the gun as much as the person fired at. With the very wide availability of normal guns in the US there may not be that much demand for so risky a weapon. However in other countries where obtaining guns is a serious challenge criminals will be much more encouraged to use the designs.
Ironically the gun manufacturers might not be so enthusiastic as the designs will inevitably be improved upon, reducing the risks to the shooter.
Dissemination of work: Chelsea Clinton (+others) receives a #DicktatorDon
Getting anywhere near Chelsea Clinton was hard work. She was surrounded by aids who whisked the #DicktatorDon off her once I presented it to her at the book signing. Not to mention the armed guards that were to the side of her. I gave her an extra #DicktatorDon and asked her to give it to her mum, Hilary Clinton.
Talk: Invited to talk at TECHnique Create Hub, IBM, London.
A few weeks back now, TECHnique Create Hub asked if I would give a talk at IBM’s Head office, Southbank, London about ‘city data’ and how, as an artist, I have used data sets in my work and the importance of involving the public in my work in some way. The talk was focused around an art piece commissioned by Quay Arts gallery on the Isle of Wight earlier this year but is now installed at IMB’s head office of the Southbank. London. If you would like to know more about the piece itself then I wrote something about it here.
Before the talk I met with various members of IBM IX team and we chatted about how artists and the work they produce can often help explain concepts more easily than verbal or written communication can. Hopefully our informal chat will lead to further talks with them. Andy Stanford Clark whom I collaborated with on the project also talked, as too did artist Marcin Ignac. Although the focus of his talk was on the work he did for TFL I was familiar with a work he produced called Tatelets an artwork based on data-sets generated from Tate Modern’s collection project so worth looking at if you want to see some great data visualization.
Clockwise from top left: Samuel Fry, Marcin Ignac, Dd Davies, Andy Stanford-Clark
