Starting Out

Crawley & Ali have invited Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland to write a text based upon ‘Up & Coming’. Their brief was to address the concept and the approach of ‘starting out’. This has been an ongoing email dialogue during the exhibition.

Jaspar Joseph-Lester (JJL)
Up and Coming raises important questions about contemporary art curating and how it is increasingly being subsumed in art practice. The exhibition includes new work by a number of recently graduated Fine Art students in the UK. However, unlike other open submission exhibitions, this project is run by two postgraduate students currently studying at Sheffield Hallam University. In this way the exhibition marks an important platform for artists and curators alike. Not only are they starting out together, they share an interest in taking ownership of how their art is shown. This approach to exhibition making has its origins in the enterprise and self-determination of the Goldsmiths students who in 1988 organised ‘Freeze’ and who similarly by-passed the established order of ‘wait and see’. The difference with Up and Coming is that it seeks to establish itself as a platform for artists starting out every year.

Sharon Kivland (SK)
1988 seems a long time ago now, Jaspar. However, I go back before that and perhaps (actually, of course) that changes my perspective. I have a different history, another story to tell about art and exhibiting and indeed, waiting and seeing, but this is not the place to tell it all. I knew some students who did not showed in ‘Freeze’ and I know some who did. Those who did not were quite cross about the whole thing. I remember the launch party for frieze, too, in 1991. There were no copies of the magazine available as they had not been printed in time. Ian Jeffrey, who wrote an essay for the catalogue for ‘Freeze’, was at the launch party, and he remarked to me that he felt like he worked for Special Branch (middle-aged and in a gabardine raincoat). It is interesting how histories are elided and rewritten and now I too feel like a copper in an unfashionable coat, policing the past, a keeper of art history (lest we forget …). Always I will publicly applaud the energy and determination of young artists. I will say bravo out loud to their enterprise, their initiative. I will introduce them to curators, to critics, to gallerists. Sometimes I will write for them for free, even though I need to earn my living. It is assumed that I will do this, even that it is my duty, and I assume it as well, dutifully. Yet at heart there is another relationship, one that is interwoven so closely in the transference between student and teacher that it may even be the same relation, founded in the family romance, the Oedipal drama. There is a struggle between the present and the past and the past must be undone, just as the father must be killed. What must I do to escape my death?

JJL
As Richard Wentworth once said, ‘there are millions of art worlds’, but does this mean that an artists can move between different art worlds to be always up and coming? Perhaps this is how to avoid your death, to remain in a state of perpetually emergence – not fully developed, somehow half way out of the birthing pool. The artists that did take part in the ‘Freeze’ exhibition (and perhaps some of the cross ones that didn’t) will have benefited from being referred to as ‘young’ (YBA) even when they’re not and this indication of always starting out seems to have secured some interest in their work. So to be starting out for real, as the artists are inUp and Coming, means that there is only the present to deal with and this presentness might itself undo the past, it might threaten to kill a past history or the art that occupied that history. I guess it is our duty to conserve those histories, our histories, to be ready to defend them from those that are starting out. But at the same time there is always the possibility of jumping ship, the possibility of starting out in one of the many different art worlds instead.

SK
You know what jumps a sinking ship and why … do I sound pessimistic? I imagine myself, you too, as rodent-like, we scurry madly from one place (preferably moist) to another, looking for putrid scraps, harbouring diseases and parasites. Is that an image for one of those million of art worlds? I imagine a flickering: an oscillation between visibility and invisibility. There is ‘emerging’, coming out of darkness, from an obscure region of lack of being, lack of recognition, like C. S. Peirce’s description of a signifier, seeking out another signifier, linking to enter the world of signs. Suddenly, names, a name, is everywhere. Emerged? There is ‘up and coming’, and the ‘emerging’ changes to the ascent of ambition, like the title track to Otis Clay’s 1982 album, ‘The Only Way is Up’ . You may not remember the original version, but you may know the version that was a hit single for Yazz and the Plastic Population in 1988, the year of ‘Freeze’, five weeks at Number 1 in the hit parade. Let me remind you of the lyrics:

We’ve been broken down
to the lowest turn
Bein' on the bottom line
sure ain’t no fun

But if we should be evicted
huh, from our homes,
we’ll just move somewhere else
and still carry on

Oh

(hold on) hold on
(hold on) hold on
Ooooh, aah, baby

(hold on) hold on

Commissioned for Up & Coming
Jaspar Joseph Lester - www.jasparjosephlester.com
Sharon Kivland - www.sharonkivland.com