On the Threshold of a Dream
Written by Matt B · first published 05/09/2008
Yesterday my sister (previous mentioned here), my daughter and I popped along to he Turner Contemporary Project Space to look at the art there. My sister needed to take in a contemporary exhibit in order to write an essay for here art cause and I fancied getting out a bit more (I'm well known for being a bit shy and withdrawn in real life). The art was good the exit was not.
Shortly before we left a small gang of youths entered and were clearly both interested and baffled by the exhibit and the tiny staff failed to engage with the boys in a way that opened the art up to them and they left. My little girl (4 years old), my sister and me were treated to a peppering of stones by the lads who clearly recognised us from seeing us in the exhibit.
On reflection this was simply a reaction to cover the embarrassment of a cultural blockage that divides so many from the world of art. Were it not for some early and fanciful A level choices in my life I too might have found this exhibit incomprehensible. This review, therefore, is written in the hope that it will open things up for those of us in Thanet that might not otherwise understand or be able to get something out of contemporary art.
On the Threshold of a Dream by Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich is an exhibit at the Turner Contemporary Project Space in Margate Highstreet (where M&S used to be). The exhibit consists largely of very large inflatable items, the use of lighting and some film projections and sound. The background of the work takes in such themes as war, peace, dreaming, space, change and pirate radio and presents a cohesive whole with a underlying message.
The exhibit as a whole looks at blurring the boundaries between one thing and another and this theme recours throughout the exhibit. Think of that moment between sleeping and waking up when the dream that you were having meets with your awakening mind or that point at dusk when it is not quite day anymore but not quite night. Perhaps you might like to think about that point when you are drinking when you are no longer sober but you are not drunk - that stage between stages if you like when there is no black and white to things.
As you enter the space you will find to your right a welcome table and if you approach the table and say hello you will be greeted and handed a guide to the art work. You may be asked not to touch the art work. This too is part of the experience so take note.
Should you choose to look right you will see an area where you can use post it notes to write down you thoughts and feelings on what you have seen. As you have not seen anything yet turn left and walk past the inflatable mountains.
You will soon come to a pillar with an A4 text on it which talks about the work. They are a good seven foot or more tall and have tiny trees along the seem where the green levels meet. Cascading down from the mountains are escape slides as you might see in a downed jet liner. This work is called "Friendly Frontier No 1" and it is deliberately weird.
This work is deliberately "playfull" which is a way of saying that it is not trying to be too serious and that the artist was having a little fun with some ideas. That doesn't make it any the less significant but is our doorway into understanding the work. What we see are mountains that make us seem like giants with slides on them and this image expresses an ideal.
The artists here have embodied what they call the Friendly Frontiers Manifesto into a physical thing. The Friendly Frontiers Manifest hopes that one day there will not be a them and us just an us. The hope that one day the divide between nations, races, creeds, cultures, genders, towns and in fact between any group of people might be blurred. I am still me and you are still you, Margate is not Ramsgate and East is not West (who we are as a people remains) but at the same time a person in one place might travel to another and be welcomed as friend. This is the friendly frontier.
The art work in this case is trying to talk about this with images only. The most prominent divider of one group and another is a physical boundary such as a mountain range, river or sea. The inclusion of the escape slides turns the normal upside down and brings us to a place we might only realy see when we are asleep and our imaginations are unchained (as they are every night even if we don't remember in the morning). The slides are our escape from ridged boundaries but you can not touch them because like the dream they are too fragile to be used.
The truth is that even sub cultures from Ramsgate or Margate are at war - so too are the greater forces of nation states that while not always physically fighting are often aggressive and defensive towards each other. So as we move from the mountains to a giant pink inflatable tank we slip further into unreality but remembering the truth of borders between people. War and death - yet look at the tank - it is surreal and of a colour you will not see on the field of war.
This peace is called "Siege Weapons of Love" and everything about it screams in images of a conflict between hope and reality. The artists have juxtaposed (placed side by side often for comparison) the desire for peace and the image of war. The gun of the pink tank does not fire to kill but has a flower blooming from the turret.
Any of us younger than about 40 or 50 is unlikely to have first hand experience of the 1960s. The era of "flower power" but this work optimistically if playfully expresses the hope that we could stop to smell the flowers rather than strive to kill each other. If you have not watched it I would suggest watching The Beatles film "Yellow Submarine" which is a cultural artifact of that era and will give an increased frame of reference from which to appreciate the art work in question.
You should be near another pillar by now and can read more about "Seige Weapons of Love" and some of the artists ideals behind it. In your own time move on and walk through the valley formed by "Friendly Frontier No 1" and perhaps breifly reconsider the work in light of your thoughts from "Siege Weapons of Love" as you move though the sounds from further in the room will get louder and the room will get darker.
You are now moving though the boundary between light and dark, day and night and it is a blurred boundary.
The lights in last two thirds of the building are not switched on and so as the journey from the outside world continues you have been drawn slowly from the real to the unreal across a blurred boundary. I did warn you that this theme was a strong one.
You will arrive at a pair of works. the nearest is a film projection accompanied by sounds that leave you feeling a little dream like and perhaps somewhat disoriented. In the film we see one of the artists as an astronaut in the surreal experience of playing with the moon by the sea. Again there are texts to help you understand what they are trying to communicate with the images. Look past the film projection and you see the other half of the pair - the moon itself - the only apparent source of light in the space you have moved into is reflected from the moon.
Behind the moon and you (if you are now facing the projector and the moon) are a few places to sit and look at another projected film. The stools are a clue that the artists would like you to consider this second film with more attention. So sit if you wish and look at the film.
Personally I found the sound track to be less than clear and coherent so I have to take it on trust as to the content of the film. The film is looking at the themes of pirate radio. Some older readers may remember Radio Caroline and may even be aware that one or two of the DJs from KMFM (107.2 FM) got started on that boat.
This film looks at the project called Celestial Radio which uses the glittering, mirror tile covered yacht (The Celeste) to transmit on 87.7 FM. This radio station blends point of view, belief and music (especially progressive rock) from the hight of pirate radio in the 1970s. This again is our link back to "Siege Weapons of Love" via the idealism of the times as expressed in music and art. It is not hard to link this idealism with the hope of love over evil found in Yellow Submarine.
So now we drift back around towards the welcome table past a CD player with some headphones where you can learn more about the Celestial Radio project before you return to consider if you want to use the post it notes to leave a comment or just read what other people have left.
Then you step blinking back out into the real world a slightly different person to the one that went in a short while ago. A person now that has expanded their mind to consider ideas and strange images and in doing so has perhaps confronted personal assumptions and while not having any new answers perhaps now has some more interesting questions.
The appreciation of art need not be left to the "nobby few" as it is not a difficult skill to master. It requires only that you allow you imagination to join in the tour and in the same way that a degree of free association is used in therapy techniques we allow ourselves to think less in straight lines but sideways. Art is about communicating ideas in the language of dreams and hopes - images and sounds.
I hope that I have opened a door for one or two fellow Thanet dwellers and maybe awakened a desire to explore things differently. As I said at the start there is a boundary that the art work fails to blur and that is the boundary between those who find art accessible and those who are baffled by it. In that one aspect the exhibit truly fails in its aims but is that the fault of the artists or the socioty?
On the Threshold of a Dream runs until the 14th of September 2008. The website has one image which is all that is going to be available due tot he the no cameras rule. I recommend everyone get along there to experience it.
Shortly before we left a small gang of youths entered and were clearly both interested and baffled by the exhibit and the tiny staff failed to engage with the boys in a way that opened the art up to them and they left. My little girl (4 years old), my sister and me were treated to a peppering of stones by the lads who clearly recognised us from seeing us in the exhibit.
On reflection this was simply a reaction to cover the embarrassment of a cultural blockage that divides so many from the world of art. Were it not for some early and fanciful A level choices in my life I too might have found this exhibit incomprehensible. This review, therefore, is written in the hope that it will open things up for those of us in Thanet that might not otherwise understand or be able to get something out of contemporary art.
On the Threshold of a Dream by Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich is an exhibit at the Turner Contemporary Project Space in Margate Highstreet (where M&S used to be). The exhibit consists largely of very large inflatable items, the use of lighting and some film projections and sound. The background of the work takes in such themes as war, peace, dreaming, space, change and pirate radio and presents a cohesive whole with a underlying message.
The exhibit as a whole looks at blurring the boundaries between one thing and another and this theme recours throughout the exhibit. Think of that moment between sleeping and waking up when the dream that you were having meets with your awakening mind or that point at dusk when it is not quite day anymore but not quite night. Perhaps you might like to think about that point when you are drinking when you are no longer sober but you are not drunk - that stage between stages if you like when there is no black and white to things.
As you enter the space you will find to your right a welcome table and if you approach the table and say hello you will be greeted and handed a guide to the art work. You may be asked not to touch the art work. This too is part of the experience so take note.
Should you choose to look right you will see an area where you can use post it notes to write down you thoughts and feelings on what you have seen. As you have not seen anything yet turn left and walk past the inflatable mountains.
You will soon come to a pillar with an A4 text on it which talks about the work. They are a good seven foot or more tall and have tiny trees along the seem where the green levels meet. Cascading down from the mountains are escape slides as you might see in a downed jet liner. This work is called "Friendly Frontier No 1" and it is deliberately weird.
This work is deliberately "playfull" which is a way of saying that it is not trying to be too serious and that the artist was having a little fun with some ideas. That doesn't make it any the less significant but is our doorway into understanding the work. What we see are mountains that make us seem like giants with slides on them and this image expresses an ideal.
The artists here have embodied what they call the Friendly Frontiers Manifesto into a physical thing. The Friendly Frontiers Manifest hopes that one day there will not be a them and us just an us. The hope that one day the divide between nations, races, creeds, cultures, genders, towns and in fact between any group of people might be blurred. I am still me and you are still you, Margate is not Ramsgate and East is not West (who we are as a people remains) but at the same time a person in one place might travel to another and be welcomed as friend. This is the friendly frontier.
The art work in this case is trying to talk about this with images only. The most prominent divider of one group and another is a physical boundary such as a mountain range, river or sea. The inclusion of the escape slides turns the normal upside down and brings us to a place we might only realy see when we are asleep and our imaginations are unchained (as they are every night even if we don't remember in the morning). The slides are our escape from ridged boundaries but you can not touch them because like the dream they are too fragile to be used.
The truth is that even sub cultures from Ramsgate or Margate are at war - so too are the greater forces of nation states that while not always physically fighting are often aggressive and defensive towards each other. So as we move from the mountains to a giant pink inflatable tank we slip further into unreality but remembering the truth of borders between people. War and death - yet look at the tank - it is surreal and of a colour you will not see on the field of war.
This peace is called "Siege Weapons of Love" and everything about it screams in images of a conflict between hope and reality. The artists have juxtaposed (placed side by side often for comparison) the desire for peace and the image of war. The gun of the pink tank does not fire to kill but has a flower blooming from the turret.
Any of us younger than about 40 or 50 is unlikely to have first hand experience of the 1960s. The era of "flower power" but this work optimistically if playfully expresses the hope that we could stop to smell the flowers rather than strive to kill each other. If you have not watched it I would suggest watching The Beatles film "Yellow Submarine" which is a cultural artifact of that era and will give an increased frame of reference from which to appreciate the art work in question.
You should be near another pillar by now and can read more about "Seige Weapons of Love" and some of the artists ideals behind it. In your own time move on and walk through the valley formed by "Friendly Frontier No 1" and perhaps breifly reconsider the work in light of your thoughts from "Siege Weapons of Love" as you move though the sounds from further in the room will get louder and the room will get darker.
You are now moving though the boundary between light and dark, day and night and it is a blurred boundary.
The lights in last two thirds of the building are not switched on and so as the journey from the outside world continues you have been drawn slowly from the real to the unreal across a blurred boundary. I did warn you that this theme was a strong one.
You will arrive at a pair of works. the nearest is a film projection accompanied by sounds that leave you feeling a little dream like and perhaps somewhat disoriented. In the film we see one of the artists as an astronaut in the surreal experience of playing with the moon by the sea. Again there are texts to help you understand what they are trying to communicate with the images. Look past the film projection and you see the other half of the pair - the moon itself - the only apparent source of light in the space you have moved into is reflected from the moon.
Behind the moon and you (if you are now facing the projector and the moon) are a few places to sit and look at another projected film. The stools are a clue that the artists would like you to consider this second film with more attention. So sit if you wish and look at the film.
Personally I found the sound track to be less than clear and coherent so I have to take it on trust as to the content of the film. The film is looking at the themes of pirate radio. Some older readers may remember Radio Caroline and may even be aware that one or two of the DJs from KMFM (107.2 FM) got started on that boat.
This film looks at the project called Celestial Radio which uses the glittering, mirror tile covered yacht (The Celeste) to transmit on 87.7 FM. This radio station blends point of view, belief and music (especially progressive rock) from the hight of pirate radio in the 1970s. This again is our link back to "Siege Weapons of Love" via the idealism of the times as expressed in music and art. It is not hard to link this idealism with the hope of love over evil found in Yellow Submarine.
So now we drift back around towards the welcome table past a CD player with some headphones where you can learn more about the Celestial Radio project before you return to consider if you want to use the post it notes to leave a comment or just read what other people have left.
Then you step blinking back out into the real world a slightly different person to the one that went in a short while ago. A person now that has expanded their mind to consider ideas and strange images and in doing so has perhaps confronted personal assumptions and while not having any new answers perhaps now has some more interesting questions.
The appreciation of art need not be left to the "nobby few" as it is not a difficult skill to master. It requires only that you allow you imagination to join in the tour and in the same way that a degree of free association is used in therapy techniques we allow ourselves to think less in straight lines but sideways. Art is about communicating ideas in the language of dreams and hopes - images and sounds.
I hope that I have opened a door for one or two fellow Thanet dwellers and maybe awakened a desire to explore things differently. As I said at the start there is a boundary that the art work fails to blur and that is the boundary between those who find art accessible and those who are baffled by it. In that one aspect the exhibit truly fails in its aims but is that the fault of the artists or the socioty?
On the Threshold of a Dream runs until the 14th of September 2008. The website has one image which is all that is going to be available due tot he the no cameras rule. I recommend everyone get along there to experience it.
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Rick wrote:
And I thought I was pushing the boundary by decoding the Constable Oath to the Parable of Talents ...
Respect Matt.