PAST EXHIBITIONS
TURNING AROUND IN A CIRCLE~ February 12th, 2009
Coleman Road is pleased to present Turning Around in a Circle, an exhibition of works by Nicholas Roberts and Phil Thompson.
“In Marx's conception of the capitalist marketplace, money and commodities are continually being redefined in the perception of their buyers and sellers, shifting back and forth between what he calls abstract content and concrete form.”
Nicholas Roberts’ practice derives from the proposition that a 'work of art' can be defined only through its function, and that until it can effectively operate this function, it is valueless.
Under the title of Consolidated Resources, an office established to commission, monitor, research and conduct operations in and relating to the production of 'art', Roberts attempts to meet the work’s functional demands. The nature of this began at art school and has evolved, subject to commissions by different organisations and institutions within the ‘art world’ or greater Arts industrialized complex.
The turning inside-out of the process of development within Robert’s work and the supplying of institutions and organisations’ demands alludes to a reshaping of the omniscience of the artist critique, towards a more basic product of social systems.
Through the issuing of a brief and exchange of correspondence, the work is conceived. titled A Series of Flat Plains, the piece was designed specifically for the condition of the space and was constructed on site.
Under the chapter title The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, the America Anthropologist David Greaber describes social systems as “structures of creative actions and value, as how people measure the importance of their own actions within such structures”
Phil Thompson’s work confronts traditional notions of value by altering then re-inserting objects into forms of circulation to explore ideas of value as a “model for human ‘meaning-making’ which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economic paradigms..”
Thompson cast a series of one pence coins in solid gold at the cost of forty pounds each before painting them bronze and spending them, aware that over time their surface will disappear and the perceived value will alter. The piece exists in territory between multiple value systems and through a singly symbolically charged object, attempts to questions how value, as currency, commodity and art object intertwine.
In an inversion of value, Thompson removed chewing gum from under desks. They were then cast out of solid silver and put back to replace the original.
Thompson writes “ I am particularly interested in the symbology of objects, especially when this overrides the object nature of the real item.”
Through his piece Four Gold Coins Thompson attempts to view money in a more magical form " a talisman that could at will transform itself into any desirable or desired object." [Friedrich Engels ]
In Graeber’s attempt to synthesise the insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, he lists actions that, in the Marxist definition, are neither consumption nor production. From having sex to turning around in a circle.