For our exhibition, The Serving Library v David Osbaldeston, we have highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up The Serving Library (TSL) collection, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
The exhibition will feature the collection its entirety, with items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a Ouija board. Together, these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to serve as a toolbox for teaching.
“The sleeve was one of those lovely gifts. We wanted a neutral image and I’d done a rough of a big flagpole and a flag and nothing else. We’d done a gig in Plymouth and were walking along the Hoe and there it was. We all dropped to the ground and looked at it. When you lay on the ground there was nothing else to see, apart from the pole against the sky.”
“Equation for a Composite Design (2): Best Of,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #8, 2004
Dear Paul,
I am the daughter of Richard T. Ganyon. Inventor of all Votrax voice synthesizers in the 1970s and 1980s. He was very much a part of your “Detroit as Refrain” lecture given in Detroit in 2010. I would have loved to have been there to listen to what you had to say about Votrax and Detroit music. You are the only person I’ve found to make the connections that you have in the brief description that I read about it, and I don’t know how to thank you for trying. If you want additional information about the Votrax and things you might not know about regarding its use, please email me. I might surprise you with a story or two.
“I am the Daughter of Richard T. Ganyon,” Paul Elliman, Bulletins of The Serving Library #8, 2014
Dear Philomene, As you know, I’d like to reproduce that deceptively modest painting of yours — the one whose primary colors combine to spell out their composite and form their own frame—on the cover of this last Dot Dot Dot.
“A Word on the Cover,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010
This is a RECORD COVER. This writing is the DESIGN upon the record cover. The design is to help SELL the record. We hope to draw your attention to it and encourage you to pick it up. When you have done that maybe you’ll be persuaded to listen to the music — in this case XTC’s Go 2 album. Then we want you to BUY it.
“On Graphic Design, 1979,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #2, 2001
A few years ago a friend of mine said she had just been introduced to Josef Albers. The idea that he was still around was compelling — artists have always tried to keep in historical contact through works from the past. Why not make contact with Albers directly? Adding the words YES and NO to an Albers-designed stencil typeface turned it into a kind of Ouija board, and it’s also an Albers material — his square paintings were made on this board, in 16, 24 and 40 inch sizes.
“A–Z, 0–9, YES/NO,” Paul Elliman, Dot Dot Dot #13, 2006
Is it good enough? Is it even art? I don’t know. It might look like art, it might even look like contemporary art, but I really don’t know if it will be. And to be frank, I don’t mind if it isn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that to me it needs to be done.
“Another Shadow Fight,” Andrew Hunt & David Osbaldeston, Dot Dot Dot #16, 2006
So we were already cutting up our mutual identities and, as we did that, we started to think about why it was so appealing to us. And one of the things that we decided was that we were both at war with binary culture, the idea of male and female, black and white, Christian/Muslim, good/bad — all these different either/ors that you mentioned, which are embedded in most cultures. Again, as Burroughs would say, “Look for the vested interest …”. To control people, to make people behave as stereotypes in order for things to be simple and easy to control. Anarchy and confusion are not necessarily friendly towards control! So, we began to look at that aspect of it. Why be male or female?
“Vested Interest: Mark Beasley in conversation with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,” Dot Dot Dot #16, 2008 / Cover of Dot Dot Dot #17, 2009
Born awkwardly between eras — drawn by hand in order to be better read by machines — the fälschungserschwerende Schrift bears the marks of both 19th-century guild-enshrined handcraft and 20th-century anonymous automation. And like any technology, it is bound by the political determinants of its design: while its original “tamper-proof ” premise may have proved a Macguffin, these weird-looking letters are an early product of our contemporary surveillance state. What reads to us as a clumsy lack of formal continuity is exactly what makes it legible to a computer. It is an alphabet whose defining characteristic is precisely that it has no defining characteristic, other than having no defining characteristic.
“Fälschungserschwerende Schrift,” Benjamin Tiven, Bulletins of The Serving Library #3, 2012
January 17, 2006. As it turns out, today is Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday. Writer, typographer, printer-publisher-politician, inventor, statesman, gentleman, scientist, lover, linguist, librarian and the first Postmaster General of the United States, Franklin was the consummate networker — distributing his ideas far and wide through a dizzying range of practices.
“Post-Master,” David Reinfurt, Dot Dot Dot #12, 2006
For over a decade police forces across the world have been hunting a criminal cartel with a licence to print money. They’ve been distributing the highest quality counterfeit notes ever produced. The forgeries are so realistic that even the experts can’t tell the difference. They’re known as superdollars.
“Superdollars,” David Reinfurt, Dot Dot Dot #14, 2007
Complementing the exhibition The Serving Library v David Osbaldeston, here we present available copies of a family of publications that continue to feed The Serving Library’s archive of objects; each item in the gallery is the source of an illustration that usually triggered an essay in one of the journals on display.
Founded in 2000 in Amsterdam by graphic designers Peter Bilak, Stuart Bailey, Jurgen X Albrecht and Tom Unverzagt, Dot Dot Dot was published biannually for 20 issues over 10 years, gradually drifting from its founding subject to sprawl across the humanities according to the ebb and flow of its editorial makeup. Albrecht and Unverzagt left after the third issue and David Reinfurt supplanted Bilak in the mid-2000s.
In 2011, Bailey, Reinfurt and Angie Keefer established The Serving Library as a non-profit institution in New York to explore the new possibilities afforded by digital publishing, at which point Dot Dot Dot morphed into the institution’s house journal Bulletins of The Serving Library. The enterprise continues to be powered by www.servinglibrary.org, a website that simultaneously distributes and archives component ‘bulletins’ in distinct online and print formats. These bulletins comprise essays and related contributions, assembled and released each season on common themes such as time, psychedelia, fashion, sports, colour and perspective. For practical and conceptual reasons the last three print editions of Bulletins of The Serving Library shrank to half that of the original format.
Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey joined the editorial team in 2016 and helped set up a physical incarnation of The Serving Library in Liverpool as a base for teaching with a regular public programme of talks and events, then in 2017 the name and format changed once more to yield its current incarnation as Serving Library Annual – a hefty A4 volume now published every autumn. This year’s instalment, hot off the press, speaks to the subject of translation.
Ahead of the exhibition we’ll be highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up The Serving Library collection over on our blog, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
Emily Andersen is a London-based artist and senior lecturer in photography at Nottingham Trent University. Her work has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally for over 25 years.
We’re delighted to host London-based artist Emily Andersen’s latest solo exhibition and accompanying book launch of Portraits: Black & White published by Anomie Publishing in October 2018.
Andersen has built up a remarkable portfolio of photographic work including many high-profile artists, musicians, writers, poets, film directors, actors and architects, with Peter Blake, Derek Jarman, Zaha Hadid, Arthur Miller, Helen Mirren, Michael Nyman and Eduardo Paolozzi among those featured in this publication of black-and-white portraits.
The book features an essay by contemporary art critic Jonathan P. Watts, exploring the lives of some of Andersen’s many sitters, and discusses her practice within the wider critical debates of photography since the late 1980s.
The Portraits: Black & White book launch and Emily Andersen’s solo exhibition preview will take place on Thursday 1 November from 5 pm to 7 pm.
Email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to reserve your free place at this event.
Emily Andersen graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1983. Her work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including The Photographers’ Gallery, London; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai; and China Arts Museum, Shanghai. Her portraits are in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London, and in other public collections including The British Library, London, and The Contemporary Art Society, London. She has won awards including the John Kobal prize for portraiture.
Founded in New York in 2011 and based in Liverpool since 2016, The Serving Library (TSL) is a non-profit organisation that serves as a publishing platform, a seminar room, a collection of framed objects, and an event space. The enterprise is rooted in a journal published biannually as Dot Dot Dot from 2000–10, Bulletins of The Serving Library from 2011–17, and now annually as The Serving Library Annual, released simultaneously online (for free) and in print (for a fee) every autumn.
This autumn Bonington Gallery will showcase TSL’s collection of framed objects; each one the source of an illustration that has appeared in one of the journals. The 100+ collection includes items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a Ouija board. Together, these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to serve as a toolbox for teaching.
The space will be further populated by a new work by occasional Serving Library contributor David Osbaldeston, who – in response to a theme of translation – has produced a new series of images exploring how visual essentials such as black, white and repeating shapes progress through a sequence of depicted forms. As a system of signs that become open to subjective interpretation, each image is assisted by a single word, which could be seen either as an associative descriptor or erratic linguistic type.
Ahead of the exhibition we’ll be highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up TSL collection over on our blog, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
Exhibition photography courtesy of Jules Lister.
Thanks to everyone who came along to yesterday’s double preview event… what a great way to launch our autumn season of exhibitions!
Special thanks to all of the curators and artists involved in putting together both exhibitions –
Both exhibitions are now open until Saturday 27 October. For more information, visit the exhibition pages.
Bonington Gallery curator Tom Godfrey recently caught up with Adam Murray, curator of our September – October exhibition, The Accumulation of Things. Read on to find out more about Adam’s approach to curating and his interest in representations of everyday life – particularly in the north of England – as well as his background in photography and experience as an educator.
Tom Godfrey: The most recent exhibition that you (co-)curated was North: Fashioning Identity that I saw at both the Open Eye Gallery and Somerset House locations. The exhibition took quite a pragmatic and museological approach to presenting a history of fashion (with associated disciplines) connected to a geographical context. The exhibition at Bonington appears to be much looser in concept and suggests a more intuitive approach to putting together an exhibition. I wondered if you could expand a little on these two approaches and what your initial motivations were behind the formation of The Accumulation of Things.
Adam Murray: I agree, the two approaches to the exhibitions, and indeed the exhibitions themselves, are quite different in some ways. However, they are both very much linked by subjects that I have been interested in for many years and I do think that there are similarities, particularly in the way the artists deal with their notion of the familiar.
Since I moved to Preston for university in 2001, the north west of England has been my familiar and the years spent there have been very influential on the work that I have made in the past, for example, Preston is my Paris. This was an ongoing project produced predominantly with Robert Parkinson that dealt with our everyday life in Preston. This then motivated a strong interest in how everyday life and personal experiences inform creative work, as well as a strong interest in representation and identity of the north of England. The latter of which became manifest with the North: Fashioning Identity exhibition that you mention.
With this exhibition at Bonington, I wanted to move away from being so geographically specific and but still engage with work that was clearly about the circumstance, experiences and personal histories of the artists. In my work as a lecturer I also work with and encounter a lot of work by early career practitioners, so I saw the invitation from Bonington as a fantastic opportunity to showcase this. The sourcing of the work has been an intuitive process yes. I encountered all of in the last couple of years at either degree shows, in tutorials or through recommendations by friends. It felt like it came together very naturally.
TG: As evidenced throughout your projects there is a focus and celebration of the so-called ‘regions’ and the practices and associated histories that dwell within them. I wondered whether you could talk about this further, what is it about these geographies that motivates you and the others you work with?
AM: Primarily it is to do with my own experiences and places I have lived. I grew up in Shepshed, a small town not too far from Nottingham, then moved to Preston for university and spent ten years living there. Although I now live in Manchester and partly work in London, I am still active in exploring regional towns and cities. As you mention, this has been a feature of previous projects and exhibitions, I think because I have spent the majority of my life outside of major cities. This has developed my awareness that these places matter. For me, it is not about creating a hierarchy, but it is about encouraging the same exploration of smaller places in a similar way to large urban centres.
As the major ‘creative cities’ are given so much coverage, it is often, not always, but often the work by people from places other than recognised centres, that can offer an alternative and therefore more innovative view on things. I think that is reflected in most of the work in the exhibition. It is also why I am excited to collaborate with Bonington, it is important for these spaces to exist outside of London.
TG: The group exhibitions that interest me always present practices that extend beyond the objects in a room, so the individual contexts, networks and histories represented by the artists protract, conflate and interrupt what might be physically on show. I wondered if you could talk a bit further about how you have brought together this set of practices and what might be represented by the exhibition that we might not see physically in the gallery. The premise that you present at first glance is quite simple, but the array and depth to the practices represented by the exhibition reveals to me something much more complex and nuanced.
AM: All of the artists in the exhibition have produced work whilst being based in Britain for the last few years, so I definitely think that there are a number of narratives and reflections on recent general experiences. However, it was also important for me to work with artists from different backgrounds so that their own personal approach offers a variety of interpretation.
I always try to present work in quite a simple way, without being over theoretical with text etc. It is important for me to create a space that doesn’t feel intimidating and respect that an audience will be able to engage with the work without the need for extensive direction from a curator.
TG: I closely consider Bonington Gallery’s context of being an ‘art school’ gallery when programming and identifying the practices we present. I’m always drawn to people who have a lot of cross-over in their practices, and have done different things and occupied different contexts. I wondered if you could talk about your background, and the different projects you’ve worked on over recent years, and paint a picture of your own relationship to working with/across different artforms.
AM: My background is mainly rooted in photography. I studied photography at university in Preston and as mentioned before, the first major project after this was Preston is my Paris.
Since I was a teenager though I’ve also had a strong interest in fashion photography. This has manifest in different ways but most recently in North: Fashioning Identity which I co-curated with Lou Stoppard. The exhibition included a range of different media and art forms all linked to one subject, the influence of the North of England on Fashion.
I have also worked in Higher Education for 15 years. To begin with it was on the photography course at University of Central Lancashire, then moved on to Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores. Now I’m working on Fashion Art Direction at Manchester School of Art and pathway leader for MA Fashion Image at Central Saint Martins. I find it a real privilege to be working with new creative talent, learning what they are about, what they want to communicate and then responding to that. It also appealed to me that Bonington is part of a university.
The main two things that I think link all of this is collaboration and exploring the relationship between different practices. My work simply wouldn’t exist without this and I think putting exhibitions together is the ideal way for me to engage with an audience.
The Accumulation of Things opens with a preview on Thursday 27 September, alongside Bonington Vitrines #8: House of Wisdom.
All images courtesy of Adam Murray.
Elijah’s talk will address the interrelations between visual art and music culture, as well as plotting his own experience of working in grime and the history of grime. He will also discuss the importance of inquisitiveness and creativity in work and explore how applying organisational skills learnt in the arts and culture sector could be used in music programming, and vice versa.
Elijah’s lecture will be followed by a Q+A, hosted by Jonathan P. Watts, visiting lecturer in BA (Hons) Photography.
Elijah is a DJ and promoter, and along with Skilliam, co-founder of the grime record label Butterz. In these various roles Elijah has travelled the world and shared stages with some of grime’s biggest names. For six years he hosted his own grime show on Rinse FM. Over the past year Elijah has been Associate Artistic Director at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton, an arts and culture agency producing, supporting and presenting new art, film, music, design and games. Supported by Arts Council England, this initiative promotes diversity in the arts, of which, in the UK, only a small percent of artistic directors are black and minority ethnic.
In 2014, grime began to dominate popular music. In 2015, the Tottenham-based MC Skepta beat both David Bowie and Radiohead to the Mercury Prize. When Stormzy re-recorded the single “Shut Up”, originally a viral YouTube video, it entered the 2015 Christmas UK Singles Chart at number eighteen. Since then, grime has sound-tracked the so-called ‘youthquake’ that, among other things, has been credited with blocking Theresa May and the Conservatives’ hoped-for landslide in last year’s general election. Grime is the music of a generation.
Ashley Holmes’ film Everybody’s Hustling will be played on loop all day on Tuesday 15 May, from 10 am to 5 pm, then played once at the start of this event. View the complete listings for the Video Days: Week Five screenings.
For 25 days, our gallery space will be transformed into an open cinema. Video Days presents a different film or series of short films every day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes; most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
Video Days takes its title from the 90s skateboard video by Blind Skateboards. Produced in 1991 by American skateboarder and filmmaker Spike Jonze, the iconic video depicts street and park skating in the US, and is considered one of the most influential skate videos of its time.
Participants who feature in this exhibition include independent research agency Forensic Architecture whose film 77sqm_9:26min documents their counter investigation into evidence relating to the murder of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat in Kassel, Germany. Halit was the ninth of ten racist murders performed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) across Germany between 2000 and 2007.
Video Days also features Paris-based filmmaker Eric Baudelaire, whose 2017 film Also Known As Jihadi traces a young man’s journey to radicalisation. Other films include contributions from photographer and filmmaker Dick Jewell and artists Karen Cunningham and Simon Martin.
Video Days Preview
Thursday 19 April, 4 pm – 7 pm
Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.
In conjunction with local, not-for-profit community group Skate Nottingham, we’ll be exploring skateboarding’s potential to drive cultural and social change, particularly through the re-engagement of young skateboarders with education and employment by supporting individual creative and cultural interests.
This event will reflect Nottingham’s lively intergenerational skate community, and identify a set of themes that link the local and international significance of skateboarding to the objectives of the open cinema we are creating in the gallery, and the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.
We launch this exhibition with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.
Read the full programme for the preview event and confirm your attendance.
For our latest Bonington Vitrines exhibition we’ve invited contributions from the public, staff and students to share their memories of the Bonington building (past and present), in the form of photographs, newspaper clippings, plans, stories, anecdotes and general collectables.
The Bonington building was opened in 1969 by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent. A labyrinth by design, the three-story building offers extensive and state-of-the-art facilities in the support of art and design education in Nottingham. At the heart of the building is a purpose built exhibition space, Bonington Gallery – one of the oldest art galleries in Nottingham.
Join us on Saturday 17 March for a guided tour of Nottingham Trent University’s (NTU) Lace Archive. Please arrive at Bonington Gallery ten minutes prior to your tour departure time.
The archive is comprised of approximately 75,000 lace items, bequeathed to the University by local companies and the Nottingham Lace Federation. It includes single pieces of lace, manufacturers’ sample books, portfolios of photography and design, prize-winning examples from international lace competitions, as well as books on lace history and teaching aids used throughout the archive’s life.
As part of the tour, visitors will have special access to view:
The collection is considered to be of local, national and international importance and exists as a unique resource for research, design education and teaching practice.
These tours are in association with Bonington Gallery’s Lace Unarchived exhibition, which is open to the public from Friday 23 February to Thursday 29 March 2018.
All tours will last approximately 40 minutes.
Due to the capacity of the Lace Archive, numbers are capped at six people per tour. Places will be allocated on first come first served basis. The tours are open to the public and free to attend.
Reserve your free place.