Art Talks & Tea: Four

4. 25/04/13

Andrew Bick

'Against cultural amnesia'

Andrew Bick, Savage School Window Gallery, Vyner St, London 2010

A war against cultural amnesia…

At a recent CAS conference on curating and commissioning Ingrid Swenson, director of Peer projects in London expressed frustration, towards the end of the day in that she was ‘bored with hearing about young and emerging artists. Young and emerging is all very well, but I’m more interested in old and submerged artists these days”. The report on the conference goes on to describe “a palpable surge of approval” for this statement. I was not an attendee, [I picked up the report later on twitter], but am very much there with Swenson’s argument. In particular, I have been engaged with the work of British Construction and Systems artists over the past few years…

Such an influence, submerged, like Swenson's analogy, and therefore less easy to identify, is nevertheless, in my opinion, a vital component of any analytical debate concerning what drives abstraction now as much as what drives my own experimentation. Exploring the implications of Construction and Systems in relation to my own practice as well as that of artists in my own and younger generations, whose connection to them is sometimes even less direct, has become a war against cultural amnesia. Naming it this way indicates a level of discomfort for any of the protagonists, older or younger. This short talk is a partial account of some of the resulting experiments…

Andrew Bick, April 2013.

The talk brought to light a much neglected period in British Art and introduced us all to a number of exciting artworks, interesting texts and exhibitions.

Here's a sample of some of the things that came up.

The exhibition Construction and Its Shadow, curated by Andrew Bick, 2011 at Leeds Art Gallery.
http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/collections/collections-displays1/previous-displays1/construction-and-its-shadow

Pier + Ocean: Construction in European and American Art of the Seventies, the Hayward Gallery's 1980 exhibition.

The 2012 exhibition Concrete Parallels/ Concretos Paralelos at Laurent Delaye Gallery. Here's Abstract Critical's article on it:

http://abstractcritical.com/note/concrete-parallels-concretos-paralelos/

Artworks by Achill Redo (Anthony Hill's pseudonym)