Kingston University: Year Three
BA(Hons) Critical Fine Art Practice, London 1993-1996
In the Fall of 1993 I moved to London and began attending Kingston University, enrolling in the Fine Art BA(Hons) course, specializing in sculpture. Mid-way through the first year I changed my course to Critical Fine Art Practice - splitting my time between pure art historical studies and an increasing interest in the emerging field of digital photography as a double honors student.
Over the course of three experimental years I mainly focused on a practice that explored different representations of body, media, art history and cultural appropriation / representation. I was influenced by the then current wave of Young British Artists who were showing in many places across London, as well as emerging New York artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy. However, over time, my interests became more focused on 1970s minimalist practice, culminating in a final dissertation exploring cinematic and artistic representations of time travel. By the end of my time at Kingston, I became increasingly interested in making work in the computer, something i was able to greatly accelerate immediately afterwards at The Jan van Eyck Akademie.
This is the first time I’ve attempted to house all of the work which remains from those three years into a single location, and the exercise of digging into the archives has been wonderful, nostalgic fun. Unfortunately much of the work has been lost to time, especially work which only existed in video or slide form. However, in an attempt to show my development and progression, I’ve organized the work into three distinct years, which reflect three distinct chapters of my work during that time.
My collections of images taken from television continued into my third year at Kingston, and began to mature into making small books collecting them into consistent themes and narratives. The color palette was becoming increasingly saturated, and began to include more musical images, with Britpop at its height and something I was very much swept up in at the time. These were often taken late at night, with a tripod in front of my tiny little portable TV on top of my fridge in my apartment at 64 Cranes Park.
This was one of the first ever pieces I created using the computer, working closely with the photography department’s team to initially capture the images, which were a remake of an original Oakley sunglasses advert (the original of which you can see in the background of some of my studio photographs below), and then isolate the figures and reframe them. The rabbit mask is a tip of the hat to Paul McCarthy and Valeria Marini, both of whom I was absorbed with at the time. The girl’s glasses were my actual prescription glasses at the time, picked up in a vintage Milan market.
My thesis during my third year focused on the cultural and cinematic depictions of Time Travel, and while this was a large focus of mine during that time, the ideas inherent in what I was writing only made themselves into one piece. I’d been fascinated by the idea of bringing back photographs from an event before my birth, and I made a collection of images where I photographed my parents’ wedding in 1971.
At the time I also produced a number of self portraits. I was writing a lot of pieces about the myth of the artist, especially with regard to depictions of studios and working environments, which I’m still curious about today. The lower set of images above are my studio literally transposed into a photography studio, where I recreated several studio portraits originally produced by photographer Hans Namuth.
The rooftop portraits were taken by close friend Crispin Jones on top of the building at 100 Euston Road in central London. I was working there as a gallery assistant for the High Rise exhibition by Space Explorations, and had frequent access to the roof as part of my job. In later years I often used the central image as my headshot, and still think it’s one of the best and most accurate photographs ever taken of me. I miss that leather jacket, which fell to pieces while I lived in Holland.
Of The Flies Of The Marketplace (Performance 1996)
Inspired by Bruce Willis’ sandwich board walk in Die Hard 3, and mixed in with some Nietzsche philosophy from his ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ thoughts, it really is a miracle I didn’t get beaten to a pulp walking down Kingston high street looking like this. I’d borrowed the mod suit from a friend, and made up all the props, designed to give away the 101 Dalmations I’d made.
Produced for a small group video show in Milan, with the constraint of only being allowed to be 1 minute long, I created a short video demonstrating that old ‘I’ve got a hole in my pocket’ gag. Dressed as one of Herge’s Thompson Twins, the video saw me taking the hole out of my pocket, showing it to the audience, and as I jumped, but before I landed, the video ended. All anticipation, all precision, no satisfaction. My fascination with European cartoon characters would surface later during my time at The Jan van Eyck Akademie.
As I began to work increasingly more on the computer, I began to make physical objects that when photographed, looked as if they had been deliberately created digitally. These often included detritus from artists’ studios such as palettes, lightboxes, and even exercise equipment. With a heavy nod to Matthew Barney’s performance objects, these were styled as if designed by Barnett Newman.
The Class Portrait (1996)
I was increasingly getting interested in the idea of what it meant to digitally manipulate something. Similar to the 101 Dalmations piece I’d done earlier in the year, here I cast and painted a whole school year, and arranged them into a wide-format class photo. Later in the year I was invited to participate in an exhibition at my original Infants’ school back in Somerton, so I simply faxed them this as one long fax, and had them hang it on the wall.
Portraits (1996)
I wish I’d done more with these, or at least kept the toys, which are long gone now. During my travels back and forth to Holland for the Jan van Eyck Akademie interviews, I picked up a number of small plastic toys from European cartoon books, and created portraits of them. When I spoke at the Atlassian Summit in Barcelona, I came across a comic book store that had some of the Tintin figures, which I finally reclaimed. These are often on my wishlist in eBay. The gangster with his head turned around is from the local Kingston Disney store.
My Darling Cicciolina (Group Exhibition 1995)
134 Curtain Road, London
BANK, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Matthew Shadbolt Jane Simpson, Bob & Roberta Smith, Jessica Voorsanger
I was invited to be part of a group exhibition in the then very-up-and-coming Shoreditch neighborhood in a disused space on Curtain Road. I knew I was punching above my weight at the time, something confirmed much later when I saw some of these folks get nominated for The Turner Prize, but it was a great experience and a great set of company to be in, especially while I was still at University. My friend Jim and I spent a week painting the old dusty pipes around the space pink and blue, and I managed to convince the local printers in Kingston to make me up a giant print of Valeria to use.
I remember chatting with Norman Rosenthal on one of the weekends the show was open, and asking him what he thought of my work. I distinctly recall him saying “I like big art in small spaces, not small art in big spaces” - quite the burn I guess.
There was also a ‘meet the artists’ set of lectures one afternoon, where I remember Jeremy Deller going through a carousel of slides of Gazza and not saying a word.
I wish I still had these pieces, as they’d be on the walls of my house. I gave them away to Italian gallerist Luciano Inga-Pin, which I always regretted. I’d become increasingly interested in the notion of ‘Stupidity and Mediocrity as Art’ and had been heavily influenced by Joshua Decter’s ‘Stupidity as Destiny: American Idiot Culture’ article in the October 1994 edition of Flash Art. So much so that my initial proposal for time at The Jan van Eyck Akademie proposed a two year exploration into the topic. Bugsy and Mugsy were gangsters from a 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon, and a direct line to Barnett Newman’s infamous line “There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.”
This was the installation view of my end-of-year show at Kingston University. The Bugsy and Mugsy pieces, and a freestanding sculpture billboard depicting the dictionary definition of the word mediocre. It had been an incredible 3 years of learning and maturing, especially in the work I’d done as part of the Art History components of my degree, and I was really beginning to grow in confidence in what it was that motivated me to make work. I knew my future lay with the computer, and I was excited to go to The Jan van Eyck Akademie in Holland and take the next step.
Found Film Stills (1994-1996)
During my time at Kingston, I worked the summers at the local movie theater and nightclub ‘Options’. The hours were long and boring, but you got to see all the latest movies for free, the other ushers were fun to hang around with, it was all-you can eat popcorn, and the pay was easy. One time we all left the building and went across the street to pay laser tag instead of being at work. When we came back in, the manager was waiting for us all in the lobby, and gave us all a sharp dressing-down. I made friends with the projectionist, Graham, who used to cut individual frames out of the movies they showed, and keep them as mementos. When I left he let me rummage through his box of frames clippings, and take some of the ones I liked. I often wonder what happened to him.
Starting To Travel…
During my third year at Kingston, I was starting to experience what it was like to travel professionally, with trips to Maastricht (for my interview at The Jan van Eyck Akademie), Milan (for a solo exhibition at the Luciano Inga-Pin Gallery) and New York (for New Year’s vacation with my parents). All of these, of course, would sow the seeds for eventually moving to America for good only a few years later. After crossing the graduation stage at The Royal Albert Hall a year later, the head of the sculpture department shook my hand and asked “Did you fly in just for this?”.
Odds & Ends
